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

prints,of urshins,
Bawson's cubs, Salamis Aethiops,
picking my jackets,
drooling pale spittles of pink
about the bedclothes.
I woke, wished him gone,
loved him and he became
the axe that split me in here,
at the snap of his half-hunter
in the hall as past my dizzy
brothers, I was led out,
while servants were bringing lamps
to the drawing room.
I have no memory, a shadow faded
into the pattern of wood.
Only the cries of birds
now centuries outside, still thrill
the winter silence of my stay.
Yet pain still breathes its day and night.
Hourly the spiricles perspire confinement,
the thrust that summoned every spasm
of my guilty frame in flooding gulps;
my splintered sleep and the pity, ebbing
for my heavy one, whose helpless cries
they bricked off from my touch.
Into the fleece of timber
my carnal shape is flattened
and weft by the batterings
which seasoned me,
winnowed to a solid safety.
Yet, within, I am greatened
by the heartwood mass,
my jaws prized open
in a captive howl.
Yet this place is never still.
Water, or the choaking press
of boughs tell me of animals
nibbling my wounds.
My brain cells breed
with a spanning girth,
my legs with a heavy strength,
grown dense with the hardening rind of age
No-one comes by here
long enough to know
my breasts are suckled ceaselessly
by the biting, silent bole
Forty times and forty times again, my hair
has swaddled my compost child,
for whom my arms are poised in blackness.
Until the day I moisten, crumble,
empty the circle of my arms and fall.
For I am cleased, my stay no longer stales
and I wait for arms to pull me up
and Papa tender for my smile.


A Devonshire House Idyll 1799 :
Still From An Untitled Fiction


"If we are to have a prevailing religion,
let us have one that is cool and indifferent..."
William Lamb to his mother, Lady Melbourne.c.1800


Lady Elizabeth Forster in her silken boudoir,
softened in late winter by the shine of candles
pauses to skim a letter from Lady Melbourne's lad.
“There is nothing to be heard of in this house
but study though there is much idleness.
we did lessons ten hours the first day
nine hours from a lumbering philosopher
a silly stupid Mathematician who tumbles
me out of bed at eight.
Millar himself is a little, jolly dog
and the fellow as sharp as ever I saw.
During the whole of the day we are seldom
out of the house more than one hour.
…All the ladies here are poxed with an itch
for philosophy. William quotes poetry to
them all day, but do not think
he has made an impression.”
The murmering of evening
guests at cards came
from the library in the still air,
“One fellow who had been in France
since the revolution thinks himself
were Plato and Aristotle together.”
William answered the supercilious man
that the fellow knows nothing and thinks
that nobody knows anything anywhere else.”
She turned on her belly
and pulled her legs towards her
to concentrate and muttered. Is that all?
what about these ideas that
the social classes should not mix?
Recalling occasions when
William Lamb had courted her,
followed her, flattered her
and made love to her here.
She took out a paper spill
from her copy of La Nouvelle Heloise.
with the letter addressed to Coppet
on the nonsense of that man, Godwin
about being guided by reason alone.
and began to stratch a note.
There was a knock at the door.

She dashed from the sofa to the consol table
her still vigorous body, youthful,
still pretty in the candlelight
She sat up, the chiffon night-gown
falling from her arms,
her brown hair uncoiling from its pins,
to pull the inverted ‘v’-shape into a ‘u’.
a servant annonced that
William and Frederick
had arrived back from Glasgow.

The woman dressed alone.
Then she sat, her fine features
under shifting light of diamonds,
like a swarm of fireflies.
then, ahead, the brass handle
turned.

Would he stay?

Millars and Godwins,
refuted not on on paper,
but between the sheets.


Home Park
1.
You can imagine it, some sixth-day tapestry,
where a Renaissance Adam nominates creation,
shamelessly, for wild wolves bound at his side,
become a man, a lord, a knight who rides his lands
his liveried servants in embroidered doublets
bark orders to rougher locals who move offpage in tribes,
led by the Saxon dead into the forest margins.

While to the sound of viols a circular dance
kicks off in the ballroom and the sound of dice
rattles from the polished floor of the chapel gallery.
The old palings breached by foul peasants,
the sound of hammer-blows across the fog-bound heath
waken the babies of farm-labourers, or their freehold peers,
while worm-eaten monks process them into the mists.

And the palisade is erected to a clamour of violence.
The oak-beams are jointed and pulleyed to the skies.
Deft architectes, whom the people take for clergymen
deem the walls shall run with a Neo-Classic rectitude.
The way that ways that were habitual history fell into disuse
was not commented on. The court had come to the see the diggers.
shift the Taplow-gravel, draining the springs into the clay,
and the old pumps had run dry and rusted by the years’ end..

By day the smoke of fires had slowed down bird- nesting.
Accustomed to a king's hunt as a feudal grudge,
but not to icy winters without kindle wood,.
Knight’s Templars climbed out of the river
and told them there was fuel in the black marshes.
At night the revelling ladies stopped by the great bed,
threw flowers, the posset was drunk and the sealing
hand shadowed in relief the alabaster map of life
and the estate trembled at new tillage, a legal seeding
driven against dry soil to carry on succession.

In summer under hazy clouds the scaffolding was raised
to sink great posts on to a lockable gate that servants
would share closed and adorned with
the wires of elegant Tissou-fronded swans,
after the dispossessing bustle of carriages upon a grand drive
Though even Monarchs had to wait for the gnarled gardeners
to turn the cold keys on their gate.

This first day was with the school, my guts replete,
with Tizer, damp sandwiches and sherbet fountains.
After awesome corridors of unchanged linen,
we were shown round by weeping Tudor girl-ghosts,
whom we promised we would save.
After the glint of serviced musketry
in corridors of manic,starey portraits,
of whom the cleaner were more dead,
we ran off with the corded ware kids
into the gardens to look at the park
and the clumsy, ancient carp
that could vanish like text-book zeppelins.
A child could feel their force,
as statued adults sensed a dying.

2.
It is morning and a Stuart prince tightens the sash
to state a case for ownership, that the freeholders in
the narrow riverside lanes might breathe on to the panes,
despite the help of threadbare cardinals singing catalogues.
His manicured hand, expensive with knotted rings
strokes the haunches of his bride; this time
to the alloyed clamour of horns and the trained
innocence of Henry Lawe’s choristers.
A produce, a harvest is listed,
owned, preferred and detailed in a secretary’s script.

Cromwell stares out across the deer park
weary with theology, reading Milton
and the need for greater cover.

The great house is lacerated, ditched, be-headed.
Wren talks hurriedly to builders in the Hampton
pub and reaches for a full tankard.
Then pulling on his shoulder takes the carriage
to London, while the courtyards and garden walls
become elaborate and unscaleable, perfect
in proportion, while the knot-garden withers and is
re-planted by an empiricist hand. The palace hunches on
the land and guards the river-a pill-box, primed.

The wet nurses squabble in the fetid bedrooms.
The buxom flowerbeds and orchards blush their colour,
are fenced off again to the loss of a history
of access, which only hanged armies know.
The fearful king cups his hands in farewell
on a Catholic wife who disapproves and crosses herself.
Van Dyke coughs awaiting the king to resume his posture
Bradshaw refuses to allow the king to speak.
The waters are closed in strict circulation,
dangerous new rivers creep to flood unlicensed life,
choking the springs from the land.

A Georgian king leaves his carriage
and addresses a oak tree which
at last says its mind. The palings
have rotted in this damp, alluvial river-bed.
Shoemakers in Hampton
were unwilling to leave the world worse
than they found it in Evelyn or Pepys
and invest in semi-detached suburban houses.

The shoemakers open the passage
for visitors in crowds on Chestnut Sunday,
the Bank holiday special from Upton Park.
Tubercular dads, giddy children
and swaddled nuns, the dispossession is complete.

The group photograph freezes at
the long silence after the V2 purr has stopped.
Even the fishes stop, gudgeon, pope, perch,
roach and tench are still in the tense current:
the old smell death, the young sense power.
While my English teacher discourses loudly
on Petrarch and human destiny
to me and my first girlfriend,
even the painted want to know
where the end will fall.


Isobar

The House On The Island


1.The Road to the Bridge

The sea lay ribbed and chopped by a gusting wind.
The grey furrows planed off by a breeze,
leaving seaspit shavings tossed into the channel currents
and sucked into the under tow.

Over the silent, turf-clad mountains, the cloud banks
glided against the sun, to throw boulder-
shadows onto the moors, that crept slowly across the bay,
casting a dial from old, roundstone houses.

On the shore, shoals of needle mullet fry
sped under bladder-wrack.
A crab scuttled from a crack in the sea bed
to vanish back with its prey,
leaving a cloud of muddy sand
at the clear high-tide.


2. A Call to the Hospital

Scattered across the afternoon sky,
the summer stars were
set to be clear and complete.
A wind had come up from the sea,
that stood to move the clouds.

Maire had gone once into the hospital
in Dublin, her leg with the gangrene.
Joe had gone to phone them:
"Could you send on the leg?"
This was all done far from Bray Head.

Sean drove down to the bridge,
then across to the mainland
He drove up the road to Kilmare;
where the parcel should be found.

A Commer van skidded on the gritty surface.
Eamon O'Boyle rubbed his eyes deep with his
finger and thumb. He never heard the crash.


3. The Quayside.

The sea lay smooth; weed choaked bays
mirrored Betelgeuse, or Bootes
beside moored dingies and yachts.

Dew was gathering in the hair
of the girls going home from the Disco

In the port on the eastern shore,
a trawler lay rotting. Its bridge
and bows, no more than a skeleton,
hulk, the gashes
flashed eerie lights, revealing
the dark glitter of the sea
through their sides.

Ned Blake remembered the rowers
in the seine-boat regatta, leaving the mark
after the shot from the shore.

Six by six the seine boats
once plied their way across the bay.
The crowds had once been big.