9.Map of Storms, Duncan McGibbon [free novel 24 .txt] 📗

/> Two were killed and two wounded
for the Japanese.
That evening she asked Tanaka eating.
if she were worthy enough to marry him.

Then next day the girl
found a dockside meeting in progress
led by Tanaka urging them to ask
for an expedition force to invade China
and protect them… They never attacked us!
Tanaka and the girl attacked our own men.

I ignored his disloyal ravings. Some of my colleagues had worked in Muckden.

Later I went over to the shell of the university to find out what had happened to my son. We found the lecture hall. Some mounds of human ashes were piled before the seats in the auditorium. There was scrap of blue serge student’s uniform lying on the floor. We knew it was his.

I cannot remember how many bodies we burned that night.


Isoline3: Irreplaceable Stem


Lines Written After Stendhal.

The branch, wrenched from the tree
is nondescript only from the violence
met out to it. Tears seep from the
mine duct.
Mourning justifies the mourner
not the mourned.
"Crystallnacht" meansonly one thing,
even in Salzburg.
How lovable in memory
the irreplaceable stem
from the God-called root.
that has passed
so entirely away.


Isobar: Taken as Read


Counterfeit

Alceo Dossena's
stone cliché was classic,
till experts proved how slick
the sleight behind it was.

An age of prurience
allowed an Attic nude
her place beside the prude.
Such fond indulgence!

We know a truth more sly.
It was our discovery
laid bare his forgery,
that naked skins can lie.


Legend

The Reich of Forsythia
has tumbled the suburb.
Tawdry saffron affronts
its ordered hallway.

The brilliant coins ring down
on the hard, clean counters.
The ticket-clerks did not see
in the mustard rush-hour gas

It threatens red almond tress
with a shower of sulphur.
Potted oblivion tempts
its peace-trading, bankrupts

Housewives snap elastic waists
but the grooms have gone
and downstairs their deaf aupairs
rinse empty vases.

The scrawled desks thunder down
on the chatter of children,
but the teacher did not wait.
The young colour their deserts.

Filling cabinets close sheer
on the yellow law scripts,
but were judged as read
when flowers decked the dock.

The glinting coffin lids snap tight
on divine formalities,
but the race was never fair
Wreaths thud on the just unseen.


On The District Line

Smoke from an autumn bonfire,
so grey it chalks the night
with its soft attention,
its prayer of aged love.
It rises like puja wisps
above ash-white tapers,
from the house-mandeer.
Resinous, it burns, incensed,
from a polished brazier.
It is a slide, pointed, to the crown,
drowning in leaden seas.
A brassy badge from the past,
setting as the sun, alone so still
through the racing window.
Thurifer of routine office
worker secretary, tired,
dormant on the seat
you extinguish to grey
your thurifer head
to dare a white brittle line
against the unsaving night,
while the carriage
sways on through suburbs lights.


Isobar:
Against the Martyrs


1. Porch (The Fall)

For Leona Medlin

In the image of violence made,
We ate fear daily, died enthralled
by its nurturing urge, obeyed
our death to the real dreams called.

We left, unbargaining, while Medias swayed
for our bartered loveliness. It stalled
once love tasted limits, left bells unpaid
of passion, an issueless ecstasy, mauled

by an earth that numbers its darkness.
A tiring climax paces its torpor
As a child in pre-growth cannot guess
at dispossessing stupor.

Found, love looks for random ecstasy.
Sought, it grasps a surer fantasy.


2. Baptistry (Cain and Abel)

For Hugh Epstein

A rough, strange child who never spoke
still shadowed him, after the hissing fruits...
and a midden of ashes on his hands...woodsmoke
in the air, stinging, searing the eye's roots.

Yet the child followed him to dote
upon his trail in the valley of brutes
He would see him with the ribs of a goat
playing, or eating its raw meat, but mute.

In torment, at last he turned on the wain
Why eat of your cousins? You too are beast.
and slapped the child that it feel the pain

and see the raw flush of blood. He ceased
and never moved again, lay plain
on unnatural earth. The other fled, released.


3. Nave (Judith)

For Carol Gaudion

A woman followed by a blade of light.
She sleeps alone, believing in her strength.
Often she lay still at quiet midnight
and hunched over, uncovered her bare length

She fears that flash of foreign sword, (so slight
a stroke that severed mentality's index)
to confer an unknown purpose on her sight.
Pain took over flight.She loved its power to annexe

a transformation where the treachery of children
could not go; where the chattering ceased
no longer to betray her, hour by infantile hour when

the volley sounded finally, she was released,
an echo in the trees no longer mocking
along the river's bright borders to the King.


4. Chancel (Hell)

For James Lindesay

The law nad order men have had their day.
This fixed display of criminal deserts
unfolds its symmetry of penal hurts,
while the moved, unhoping move away.

The faces of the damned show no dismay.
Gymnasts of fear they have unbalanced dread.
Acrobats of shame, they state their case instead
and lessen the law's hold upon their day.

Seen again, their faces are familiar.
Those emblems of deterrence make too free,
with demons of theological decree.
by breaking the law the dead get it easier.

They are the just, keeping their purity,
witnessing a fixed humanity.


5. East Window (Death of Saul)

For Elizabeth Holmes

Those meticulous descriptions from memory,
each sequenced charitable,carfully recounted.
The note thought over, terse, declamatory.
Then they went right over the top, undoubted.

Often in bed, sometimes a chair, usually
an overdose, some prefer to be more quickly dead.
It is our unique ceremony,
our culture's little devotion, no more said.

Death retreats from the clinics, in the wards
and we worship its antique form.
In awesome silence risk nothing on words.

Friends become adult, children ride the storm
for this noble killing is at large
to make them orphans in a local charge.


6. North Transept (St Sebastian)

For David Winzer

Bare, swooning forms are glued to static highs.
Gluttons for atonement, their bonded goods
are exposed to worshippers in pious hoods
hidden among low naves to hide their sighs.

Stripped alterers, their sacrament of thighs
for universal exultation broods
to lure the Lord of vengeance from his moods.
with a captivating hue of naked lies.

Thralled in their perfect mirrors, they seek
an inviolate ecstasy removed
from sacrifice, yet on revenge's peak.

They have legalised self-love, reproved
dear voices of transformation that speak
in silence now of punishment proved.


7. North Aisle. (The Massacre of the Innocents)

For Elizabeth James

How helpless are the good. They loll under knives,
ease themselves between drawn swords
and under massed hatchets, or under boards,
are crushed like toothpaste before angels arrive.

How earnest are the bad! A woodsman strives
with industrial rhythm. Killers struggle to their arts
with mystic contemplation in their hearts,
while soldiers pause to speak to earnest wives.

To the celebration of vacuity they come all rapt
to pray for vacillation and ineptitude.
They are weak, too weak for beatitude.

All urging, wanting, whimpering is not apt
enough for those little worms so odd
to woo down to earth a weakened God


8. Bell Tower (Sodom And Gomorrah)

To Cahal Dallat

The ice-seared grape-skin yields a dry fire
to the throat, full-bodied and perfect.
The marketed impersonal fetches a heady mire.
The betrayal issues in a solid object.

but you ask about sanctions. Where is the spire
where jouissance, now the surpliced hands reject
the organic nostalgia of the mire
and slacken on the bolts that lose effect?

You seek a husbandry and a filling crop,
actual emotion to address the word,
the drams of the real, motivated awe to stop

rebellion on the very grounds that hold the herd.
Live for fear you need an exorcism and never drop
the urgency, the thrall of freedom, now become absurd.


Isobar:

Movie


1.Transcript

"Suppose one of them were let loose?”
Plato.

Crime

“There's nothing in it, that is really nothing and perhaps absolutely nothing.” Dostoevsky

The floor was strewn with the detritus of faith
and the Republic's citizens' fixed stance.
Only one void, the others still in place.
Yet by a frenzied hunch, Corporal Substance

knew all was not as it should be, grimaced
and threw aside his Private, Doubt's insistent
for the fire would have to be replaced
behind the curtain wall. "Some accident!"

he bellowed up the road. Brutish stone and wood
came up against fellows unable to lecture.
Out from the cave came laughter in the mood
of students without shadows. More obscure

than before, enjoying their detention
at one of the ends of civilisation.

Suspect

"Did you not put to death Socrates the sophist, fellow citizens, because he was shown to have been the teacher of Critias, one of the Thirty who overthrew the democracy?"Aeschines

Round. High. Dark. Oval. Hominid.
Slight. Normal. Chronic. Mesomorph.
Utilitarian. Flaccid.
White. Narrow. Fit. Non Dwarf.

None so far. Unknown. Normal.
Well-ballanced. Rhesus plus. Devout.
Yes. Long. Average. Several.
Two. Early. Only child. Without.

Lied when asked about human destiny..
Non-verbal. Sane. No alibi.
Fixed. None. Bright. Alternates.

Inconsistent view, but shy
or scared of body/mind debates
Dry. fallen.Never known to cry.


Arrest

"No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I am now going to shut it." Kafka

An open space, resembling a metaphor, or so
for loneliness, despair, absent mindedness and so on.
A man wearing a huge, grey coat comes out and so
throws a large rock onto the ground and so on.

Walks round it impatiently and departs and so
a man wearing a huge grey coat comes out and so on,
throws another rock at the ground and so
throws the last large rock onto the pile and yet

Private Act, accompanied by General Potency perhapes
rummage slowly, pull out a hand and yet,
place a handcuff round the wrist, the other on Act, perhaps.

Potence becons Act to pull and yet,
Act cannot move nad a man wearing, perhapes
a huge grey coat and takes and so on...


Trial

"If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any." Lewis Carroll

Lord Justice O'Pine called the accused in rem
The vicious Regress once brought up, somehow
by Privates Act and Attribute solved the problem
and posed the problem as a solution any how.
The charge by state theorists maintained.
was of theft of theory from our culture.
A scuffle ensued within sound judicature;
The defence in good will was to plead
that Regress being abstract never did the deed.
The plaintiff made his case conversely
to show the ruination