5.The Terror - Duncan McGibbon (book club books txt) 📗

Contents


Passages

Passages 3
At Llanwrst 6
During Sleep 7
The Meadow Mill, Holywell 9
Holywell, Night 16
Near Clayton West, Hymnus 18
At Robin’s Orchard, Kingsbridge 23
At Aira Force, Ullswater 26
Charmouth Beach 31
At Chingford 34
Salt Grass, Lymington Spit 37
At Annascaul 40
Wicklow, The Sally Gap 46
Gaillimnh 48
Arran 52
At Castle Minard 53


Nuptial

Nuptial 56
Communicantes 58
A Ballad of My Lady in the Light 64
A Ballad of the Thief 68
A Chanson of the House 72
A Chanson of Her Pleasure 75
A Chanson of the Flower 76
A Chanson of Her Blessing 78
Stupra 81
Confessio Amantis 84
Biographia Literaria 86
Site 89

The Terror

The Terror 98
Song of the Ascents 102
Doxology 104
To a Sister in Tonacatepeque 106
In Care 108
The Garden in November 110
The Caretakers118
Encounter Day 124
The Gift 125
Lyndhurst Avenue 126
Prayer Before Yesterday 129
Castle Fundament 132

Fuga Ligata

Exposition (‘Cello Valenti; the drawing in Nova 198?) 137
Free part (Sean Smith and the musicians of the Fleadh Ceoil, August 1979,
Listowel) 139
Middle Entry (Lakshmi Shankar Raga, Maiha Garana, March 28th 1980) 142
Stretto (Noriko Ohara, ‘Girl’ in Second Dance to Japanese Music. Scottish Ballet June 15th 1980) 144
Coda (Sergiu Chelebidache LSO, April 18th 1980, Debussy;Iberia.) 147


Passages


Passages

Together with me remember
the sky at Thoissey.
We gathered light,
where vines had been pruned
to sleeping wrists
and the Count bargained for our vision.
We lost
and paid him our eyes.
At night,
we found St Bénigne
who had haggled back our sight.

With me recall
the cornfield in Orkney,
which parted as the Summer wind
surged from the moor.
There we found field voles
which walked across our fingers
and the Earl parlayed for our feel.
We lost
and paid him our hands.
At night,
we found the Selkie
who had cheated back our touch.

Together with me remember
the road to Aclare
where the winter gushed
from pumps under living elms.
There we guddled hearts
from the stream that ran through our room.
And the Bailiff played us for our words.
We lost
and paid with our tongues.
At night,
we met the Sidhe
who had stolen back our speech.

Together with me forget
the tarmac streets
where we queue for growth.
The clerk files away our lives.
We win
and take his coins.
At night,
we walk the arc-lit yards.
Blind, we feel each other.
Dumb, we feel each other.
Numb, we feel for each other,
waiting for giants
who will not come.

At Lanwrst

It is too late now.
In white, astride her hunter
a girl has cantered from the hills.
Autumn seeps downstream.
Edgily, the year’s axe
cuts the air.

It is late now,
yet light still hallows the hill range.
We look up.
The girl has bound poppies
to her crupper.
The season doubts our sleep.

It is too late now.
The girl rides down the streets
to a darkened house,
while we trail sleeping feet
up wooded valleys
whose rotten boles
dull our steps.


During Sleep

Snows thicken
on breasted hills
to pile a dross
that weighs on
sleepers’ breath
and hides pathways
worn into loss.
At dawn the tracks
are difficult.
As heaven once lay
within slack sheets;
unread, unfathomed.
Too near at hand
to state their absence,
which is the cost
of the God-man’s love.
Too far away
to be reached alone,
which is the gift
of the Father’s strength.
The wakened will
trade in sunlight
and speak unheard
until hearts melt within
to leave the crest untouched
while the snow beneath
has vanished.


The Meadow Mill, Holywell.

This was the last
place left
for the mill-girl to move in,

as just at times,
the man who stands
knows it and stops his search

for the stride he
needs to
balance his own, for he lets her

float past him,
bored to whiteness,
a hard, shrivelled root,

which Brownian
movements
can shift every limb of, as
she was so light,
closing
her empty mouth on work which

her drowned hands still
reach for
to fill a taste, a hunger

for a warm coin
sought from
fathering wheelpits, which roll

the powdered years
where water
cannot lap and spume breaks down

now that the wind
lessens
to still the entire surface

and spread out a
sheet
of green, matronal deepness, which

promised the man
that some
sense would be grasped here, but the
carp spits out
cold coin
and leaves it to sink, traceless.

save for glazed mud-
bubbles
and purplish weed-mats, seething

where he cannot
touch it
again, as never speaking
the peering man
will not
follow the edge, where, bloodless,

her eyes whitened
in the
pitch-black race which swirled her form

now that she had nudged
or brushed
against weightless death, now, such

depossession
had crushed
her flooded, hollow lungs

which lay far down
below
the rusted sluice, whose iron

turned her skin cold
before
it left her nothing to say

when she wanted
to sing
her history, the standing

man waits for,
for her
day-shift to begin, for the

space on her truck-
docket
to fill with her mark, yet he

leaves this place now
and goes
as everyone would do

in his place, as
finding
her sense would leave so little left.


Holywell, Night

Demolition sites, ripped bare
from the rock-face.
A man and a woman
were waiting to regain the road.
They tried to remember the track
that ran through vanished back-yards
to the fields.
Snow, ice, night-time and striplings
met them, charred by clearances,
as they followed the old tramway.
They climb up now
the neighbourhood has sunk back
to its natured frame.
Spent minings, a spring, pumping
a glut of fast water downhill.
Their going became effortless
Now the thaw allowed it,
Yet the higher ground was deadly.
They slid on uneven stones.
A fox’s cough, unsettled them,
harder to understand now,
and the way back harder still .
Only a hard freeze, or a new map
could have helped them.
Then, stubborn Heart,
You let Your hostages go.


Near Clayton West, Hymnus

A splintered sense has chilled
Your enunciate word.
We have caught You
in lungs of ice, where
the air has hardened fiats
on wintering birches,
where the catch of breath
has wreathed alveolate twigs
with spoken rime.
Deeper, now and deeper,
the snows of speech pile
silence on hidden throats.
In white tetany,
Your litany is sealed
along honeycombed
coppices, crystal paths
and hoar-haired hedgerows.
You have laid heavy hands
on an actless land.
Bronchiolate branches
bear up dull trophies of mass and silence.

Numbed in leaden rigour,
a dead fox stiffens,
where You found it again
to bless it in whiteness
and followed Your search
where the pool’s pelt is
smashed by a vole’s entrance.
You wait for life’s return.
Death is a surface tenure.
It is earth’s affair,
which opens onto You.
You give winter its trespass
to surpass the bounds
which hold our mortal blood.
It makes an end to the defeated,
sown in salt, to initiate longing
in the texture of bread.
New lambs lick loam and chide
the land’s frozen teats.
The leas are dense in frozen
stilllness that speaks
for their formal being.

When the land’s hearth
forces a tear in the hard earth,
the whitened body
that images Yours
will bleed moisture,
swelling grief, whose coal
will melt Your Word.
The wild grass will thrust
through crusted lips of soil
Then we shall have lost You
Speech cannot take the earth
as its mediate path.
Nor can air part a way.
The land will relax
into an exacter loss.
We will have lost You
and will have remembered
what we sought, sensing
the dignity of the gull
in an empty sky
and the vole’s last limp
to its nest and fear
the passions that vanish
with snows and the year.


At Robin’s Orchard, Kingsbridge.

Estuary birds,
you have stolen children’s voices,
to warn us
this place is not ours.

Your call is not deep.
It is easy to lounge elsewhere.
Our voices are not high.
It is easy to be mute.

Under the sun, it is fine to lounge,
in skins of light with eyes of day,
where the holly flakes
and the apple trees are still unripe.

You cry.
We lie
in the spaces
in the light,
where it is easy to live.

At night, you cannot steal the silence.
At night, there is nowhere to fly.
You cower.
We sleep.

At night our skins are sore.
You sleep and we lie awake.

Estuary birds,
you trim the scales against us
to warn us we cannot stay.

Were we not grown,
we could turn into birds;
our claws tear at linen,
breathe hot air uneasily,
itchy with covert feathers,
spreading on our shoulder blades
and live on in this place.
It is not day.
At night it is harder to lounge.

Were you not lost,
it would be fine to lounge on.
You could steal our shapes,
grow proud, soulless limbs
thicken crops into rib-bones,
stumble heavy from branches
unheeding the famine of the holly,
or the fullness of the apple.

Day and night it is hard to lounge.
You flutter.
We stir.

At Aira-Force, Ullswater

1.
You, the wild,
moor-wandering wind,
the scarps have lifted you off
to slacken your hold
on chisels that stripped the sun
and quickened this tense pool.
Still the place smoulders
where we dug, each into each.
Still the diggings weigh heavier than us
It is a fearcloud. We did not see it.
Eddies and wavelets go under the dark.


2.
Drifting wrecks, the derelict clouds,
you clot the sunlight
to stem its flow to the lake.
Still her eyes glisten, where you thought
to be blind.
Still the brook chatters where we wanted
the Word unsaid.
It is a tear. It needed the light.
Unseen ripples prompt the wave.


3.
You the stonied,
massed tower of rage,
the silent, hard-browed self.
Empty air has opened the frame
and you shatter
gleaming hinges wrought in peace.
Still the fragments stir
where they clung to stay.
Still they heal in the place,
they wanted to wound.
It is a minute. It reaches to suckle our fingers.
Currents and whirlpools scour the thinning shade.

4.
Body