8 Winderby's Last Case - Duncan McGibbon (read book txt) 📗

we got back to Earmley.
Only to find we could not
get out again The Athanor
is burning red hot.
The police are blocking the door.
and some funny balls are
bouncing in a pair of scales
Scorpions are crawling
all over the walls.


46 Timed Exercises in Self-Immolation, or Winderby Pulls it Off

A Minute for Minute to the Ministers of the Unreal

Out there, away from our skies,
the Silent ones, Blake’s great eternals,
scud across the void,
back to the heavens of spiritual hypothesis.

Perhaps the enemy all along
was the great adversary,
a Moriarty on a Barbary Island
in the Northern universe.
And I had slipped into the role
of the quest romance hero
with a surfeit of rescued women
“Some twist in the plot enabled
the hero to have his will.”

Now he is no more than a relation
between non-absent particles .
I, Winderby have sent
the great enemy home
reduced to a phonetic system,
to catch the explosion of the allophones.

It was I who walked with the women
to the Palazzo’s ruin.
I broke into the tombs
and found the eight statues,
Giulia vanished into the dark.
I found her later, even the wrinkles
on her forehead written into stone.
The Harding sisters were immutably
transformed, petrified into stiffness.
I held onto Polyxena, her cute
American madness
of sentiment and violence
allured and kept her with me.
Even though she struggled.
As if anticipating consummation
the tombs began to glow
waiting for Tracy to climb to the heights,
to the top plinth, missed by
Peake’s excavation.
Yet Tracy has gone now,
back to her shattered house.
And I offered you, Attwater, instead
as an anti -sacrificial tactic.
to hang on the old Baudelaire gibbet.
Do not think your drunken ship
will hold in this translation.
When they will come for you,
the universal silence of Harpocrates
will be shadowed by half again of
Angeronas’copied quietude,
which will be followed
by a quarter of Silentia’s
followed on by an eighth
of Calcagnini’s hush,
after which Tacita’s peace
will take half again.
Porphyry’s hymn of muteness
shall split the unit of absence again,
carrying the numbed relations
into the infinitesimal subdivisions
of silent time
generating fraction
to the smaller pieces of the
and the primitive propositions.
will put their fingers
to their eternal mouths.


47. Dispatch From Cythera, Concerning
the Disappearance of Frederick Attwater

Dear Sirs,
We do not ask to know what end
made you steal us into this arid place.
An estate had yielded new sculptures,
which had been sent to you.
Out of duty to the lure of the glassy sea,
we watched the splendid ship part
the hard meniscus over depths
so empty we kept the guess pure.
Then it steered windward
and blasted into, pungent, awful flame.
We watched as hair-line fires
threaded the sundered forms.
The thunder of the ship found us
by the quay among naked pearl fishers.
Strong light fading had annealed
the men and women’s wearied skins,
whose lassitude gave them a casual sexuality.
They make a game of their trade,
watch the fugitive ship burn out
while the harbour booms to edicts
in praise of chance events whose style
lies at the whim of some disgraced ordainer.
Such is the fate of your agent, who
was travelling with the ennead of statues.
The local vicious are honoured here
as holy men; their instincts inspire us;
We cherish their rule for consistency.
The investigation continues its spectacle of show trials
and their dramas or holy rage force a sense on
the public mind; the rituals of humiliation
are become entertainments. The gibbets
are eternal for the sake of social theory.
In concrete suspicion we await the anthropologists
to declare our M.G.M volcano redundant,
in which we stirred and faked our being.
Our tears are frozen to the curves of Victorian sinks
while nightly our tapers are extinguished
in a gust of wings, dragging the strings
of flensed Pleyels in the killing-yard.
Naturally no culprit will be found.

48.Notes On the Twofold Origins of the Self

The innocent subjects return
to the native pastoral.
Here is the modern floor.
To come back to my self,
I come back myself.
and back myself.
Here is the future door.
For yourself, my love,
to return herself,
she herself returns
and backs herself
and we, ourselves, arrive.
In Earmley itself, there is a dulling
of the mechanism itself,
where live feet walked in.
Itself a detonator,
not self-detonating,
it falls to the pavement
itself and the former door
swings itself open to reveal
a frightened couple,
themselves disheveled,
staring, emaciated,
re-imprisoned by themselves.
Here, they once sat in chairs
smiling into the oven
while they who held them,
judged them higher and higher.
They rush our selves, embrace us,
stumble onwards
into the selfsame Wates’ sunlight.

“How can we bring ourselves to help you?”
“Don’t trouble yourselves, you’ve done enough.”
“We believe ourselves able to help.”
The friends support themselves and each other.
“We’ll make ourselves available to the local services .”
Like children in a dream,
Norman will find his self himself.
Trace found her self, herself.
They look away.
They make their selves themselves,
themselves,
leaving the house itself empty.
Hollowed and thin,
in self-exchange for Attwater’s Reliques,
my unseen-self , a dream
and now we look away.

49. Deeds of Redemption

1.Ext. A Housing Estate. Day

Norman and Tracy's social worker
pushed the door of the phone-box ajar,
tilted himself on one foot
and shouted, "It's alright."
"They're sending a transit van."

Tired of the week's alarms,
he was, despite this, unsettled
that the end should be
a matter of such calm.

The haggard couple
stood by the gate of the house,
surrounded by the clutter
of rescued belongings.
The van would come and that
would be the end of his case.
The Department had been round
the night before to make it clear
the house was uninhabitable
and that they had to get out.

The Social worker liked apotheoses,
climaxes, codas to Romantic symphonies
the dictatorship of the proletariat,
coming on the Last Judgment, and great stirrings
of hard-fought victories
That the plane trees moved less
in the breezeless sky than ever before
and that the surburban development
had to find itself some work to do
to-day the same as any other
unnerved him.

"It's not our fault," came a (blind) murmur.
He was heard in silence,
even by the man who held his wife’s hand.
The women scanned the street
for prying eyes
"I wonder what the new place will be like,"
she chirped.
"I know, Norman, I know, but you can't go on
eating nuts and berries, flat out in the dust.
How do you know what It'll really be like
until you really see it, face to face I mean"

("It's coming," muttered the SocialWorker)
"Are you sure we've got everything?" / asked
Mrs Cley
"We can't go back, the bus is coming,"
said the man
"How do you know, them Symbolists
haven’t been given the nod by someone"
jibed his wife.
"Here it comes. I'll take some of the bags"
All turned in expectation
they shuffled towards the blue Morris
as it braked outside the gateposts.
"Remember to phone my clerk
if there are any snags"
"Yes of course, love, and thanks"
"Goodbye."
"Goodbye"
“I suppose it's better than being carried out,”
Norman muttered.
The driver shut the side-door
stepped into the seat, started his van
and drove off, soon hidden by the bend in the Grange


2. Ext. The Housing Estate. Evening.

The Social worker slouched away
towards the post-modern town
surveilling a cheap breakfast
and considering the implications
of a lightened work-load.


3.Int. The City. The Stairway of the House. Night

In the top flat at the front
lived Herr Gedanke and Frau Herz.
Him of obscure instinctive connections
She a sprightly being from the
Halloway road.
Beneath dwelt old señor Voluntad,
single, but never alone.
Blind, but always with
a young hand to lead him.
And then that fruitful couple
the Mémoires who possessed
the view across the rear garden
which since Norm had paved over
had become a dumping ground
which only winter frost
and wild midsummer grass obscured.

Then there was Mrs Alma Geist
who does not enter the story
Though her implied exit
led out to the end.
Their judgement, though erratic
was collective what one
measured fussily for
another would guess well.
Their security too
was a joint one.
The Gedanken, great conversers
spoke of the day when she
and her sister Pam
stood tiptoe by the great home
and never guessed
the luxury they peered at
would be tenanted by her one day.
They needed to be together
for the harassment never stopped
Mornings would dry out
the pipe that watered the whole house.
Though moisture was abundant
either from below
or above, where a leak
ran streamlets to erode
Victorian paintwork.
Light too was fading.
A day time raid
in the hallway phone-box
plunged their lives
in darkness.
None stepped out after sunset
for fear of the steps
or into the cellar drop beneath them.


48 Int. The Lower Staircase. Night
The old house is empty.
Each strategy of thought
has been confounded
by the usage of too many souls.
Each nail has been loosened
Each defence has been
refuted by the passage
of plural experience.
Grime glazes its windows.
Each argument against
violence lies rusted.
Its steps are unsteady
Worn flags are cracked and
gape to the cellar drop.
The lethargy of guilt
will show letters
from yellowed parentage
hidden from the eyes
of an adopted child.
The gutters have been stripped
and walls stand naked
in rooms that are empty
The listed stucco hangs
mortal from the eves.
Smashed light bulbs dangle

their lowered pendulums
to tell of their lost sight
to the dark, now that the hall
has let on to the wallpaper
ears which flap in the wind.
The veins of time and confusion
has decimated the mental day
The guilt of commission
looks into the unfinished repairs.
Each design has been splintered
by the tempted heart.
The frames are rooted.
Each effort has foundered
and each attempt has left
its refrain of failure
Steel pins hold a gable
dislodged by Zeppelins
and the front roof
is braced by blistered nails
whose strain alone
shores up like blitzkrieg blast
Rust seeps through the piping.
Red pools that appear
or disappear overnight.
Silent damp saturates
the soil-stained foundations

The death's watch has ravaged
the joists and chopped wires
trail from the plaster which chokes
the passage-ways and piles up
against the framework joints
In the rooms here carpet scraps
Here, a doll, books, meters,
pipes, a pram's wheels,
curtain cloth, a woman's shoes
and boxes of clothes, flex
an old overcoat,
three rusted umbrellas
and yellow newspapers
It has left its debris
everywhere, the tenant heart
that paid a penniless wealth
to resist the siege.
Conversions never took away
the stubborn shape of the place.
Glutted and spewed,
they fall on the floor,
the glued and the fattened.
A stuck door delivers
a past age of households,
a pasturage of postage,
pasted and dried

the dark cellar is fettered
with its past.
Yet whatever the letters
required was due.
The Council had published
its oracles.
Messages from the month
Dry tongues held in the
passageway of torpor
and an unclean thing:-
a compost