The stuff of dreams......

We have met wolves twice; no, three times.


One warm and silent, August night,
The windows open and the fly screens fastened against the unseasonal summer bugs,
I woke, as older men sometimes do.

But not, this time,
with prostate spectre haunting a padding darkness
to rattling porcelain and a wakened spouse

No,

I woke to the keenest, keening, sense of a change; A new word in the old house’s lexicon.


How far away, how audibly very close, confidently,
almost confrontationally,
From the deep, purple spring of night-time
a bubbling,
A curdling,
a songful scream of indefinable,
un-tellable sound.

The UFO of sounds,

The fingernails down the blackboard
(but far more beautiful)
Hair on the back of the neck,
Lyrical,
lustful,
liquid,
most haunting of sounds.


And the waterfalls and boulder-strewn rivulets of that coloratura filled sense
and stomach
and blinded sight
in that noisy, velvet darkness.


Breathing, (that forgotten skill), we stood, enraptured and enfolded in each other
and in the glory of that sound;
Perfectly safe and yet intensely dangerous in each.


And then an end;
no fanfare, no rumble of drums;
no crimson curtain to absorb the cries of encore and bravo.


But the darkness has for ever changed,
made regal,
and less comfortable,
and more noble by that sound.



And, by that nobility, an old man senses blood quickened,
and sinew stiffened,
and land absorbed into flesh in some ill-defined, honouring way.





Oh! And the other times?

Once, in Parc and snow, we tingled to the sight of sky-line silhouettes that flitted, wraith-like between fenced and silver trees.

And once we paid our Loons that bought our silence behind those gentler wolves that are not,
that lie all year at tether, awaiting the liberating mute of trace and sled.

But that’s another poem.


Copyright 2010

Three men in Hamilton

Following a prompt from a dear friend. I have tried to satisfy an earlier invocation and to write somewhat of people;

My Grandfather, Mervyn - who emigrated to Canada for one year in 1920 - and my meeting with his shade at the Westinghouse factory in Hamilton;

One wet March night, At Westinghouse, in old and shuttered pillars,
My King-magician greets me once again,

I - who am named for that older magik - Myrddyn (the claims that he was a madman and prophet are scurrilously untrue!), by others Mervyn.

I swore allegiance then and give thanks that until now,
His has been my King, and I his errant knight


And our son - of a similar, magical name, who now visits there almost once a month

So nowadays, in wheeling exultation, magician again,
that grandson rises,
frozen in concentration,
in monthly joy to ride the city’s ledges.


And the echoes to other ditties are, of course, completely unintentional ;-)


So - here's hoping it might gently divert, if not amuse....


Three men in Hamilton, Ontario.

One Yorkshire autumn afternoon in late sun,
Wandering in a binding wheelchair that’s pushed between reality and invention,
Mervyn,
one-time seer to fabled Arthur,
and for whom I am named,
fixed me with a blue and liquid eye.
anciently pale ringed, the sun that presages snow,
Winter’s herald.

His hand on mine; “Keep the faith,” he said,
And nothing more.

So far gone he was in rambling and manipulation,
that no-one credits this;
“It can’t be so”.

But with heart-stop certainty, a goose's creaking call, heading south,
I heard; the true voice of Winter, his King, hurrying on;
“Keep the faith”.

The words sting welcome even now
like that first knifing of North at Fall’s break.
Longed for and regretted
And I have tried to do so;
I swore allegiance then and give thanks that until now,
His has been my King, and I his errant knight
and despite all, I have followed his path;
my honour and my delight.

Great sculptors say they free the statue from the rock;
That it was always there, their only job, a liberation.

One wet March night, at Westinghouse, in old and shuttered pillars,
my King-magician greets me once again,
through the memory of stone;
my hand on his now, together down the years,
as if I touch an icon,
a window to another place,
and might at any moment, plunge deep inside to greet the young man there before me.

Hand on stone, speech to stone, life in stone;

And the silent sympathy of stone, old before recorded time,
seemingly accepts the warmth of flesh and - nods in watchfulness?

As if acknowledging this presence; acknowledging this transience?



I am my grandfather’s re-maker in this memory;
he who in part made me,
in this memorial now springs to life.


And on this sodden, touching night,
new returned from my own son’s wedding,
the circle closes around me and my grandfather.
and, choristers, our song is nothing more than continuity,
of years vanished,
of optimism and hope and the endless line that may be ours.

So nowadays, in wheeling exultation, magician again,
that grandson rises,
frozen in concentration,
in monthly joy to ride the city’s ledges.
And our shades delight!



At three points in our line, a city has touched lives;
And has not known.






Copyright 2010

Of things that last

I have always loved rocks.

As a child I used to holiday in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where the geology is incredibly complex, old and folded; and in Devon, England, where the Jurassic coast is no less remarkable.

The old, granite rocks of the Canadian Shield on which we sit were once under 3 kilometres of ice. It is glacial terrain, which leads to our lakes and tumbled boulder-fields, and is mostly but not exclusively enveloped in forest. The extraction of gravels is a local (20 miles away – that’s local in Canadian terms!) industry.

Adjacent to the bands of moraine that form the gravel deposits, some of those old rocks are left exposed even now, in huge and beautifully smoothed outcrops, many meters high in places.

Geologists call them “whale-backs”.

But then, this poem is only partially about rocks!








On childhood’s coasts,
the coiling scars of frozen adolescence
show fears and ecstasies aslant
snapped tight in cline and anticline,
And are struck open, vulnerable,

yet here, in older, shielding land,
the very forms and bulgings of the thew and mouldings of the venerated frame
are by a deeper chill now calm and tenderly laid bare
in whale-back breasting through the silent wood.


Old fires are long suppressed;
The earth hath yet its bones and sinews, variously o’er mantled with a fair and passing flesh.


When you and I are gone, my love,
shall time the slip and fault of our unruly youth reveal?
or shall our quieted bosom then display the vestige of our metal,
our small steadfastness,
our adult permanence to view?





© 2010

Visitors

One Fall afternoon,
with every hillside dressed in Venetian silks,
the sun came to visit our maples.
The little grove on a broken hillock just inside the boundary
stirred
and then fell still.

And the sun spread, all at once, through every leaf and twig and burnished branch until the air itself was filled with honeyed,
liquid,
Sauterne light;
palpable.

And sated Summer declared “There, that is the very best I have to offer you”.


I stood inside a cathedral; speaking to Summer gone and Fall present and gave both thanks.



An hour later, less perhaps, great Winter came to call,
resplendent in imperial purple cloud and tattered biting wind;
heralded by trumpet skein of swans and wild, eerie loons.
“Behold, The North!”

The snare drum of sudden rain and rattled windows made no easy announcement; skysails and topgallants of great trees were torn down in moments,
the air was thick with white and gold,
whirling together.

“I am come!”


And,
with respite and return
over the next days,

King Winter came to rule amongst the leaves.







Copyright 2010

Things you've always wanted to do.......

There are just some things that you've always wanted to do; no reason, but just always wanted to. Ever since I just scraped through "fire-lighting" in Scouts all those years ago, I've always wanted to build a fire properly, and make a hot drink over it.

And the very best test would be to build it in the snow with no matches.

So that's what we did!