13. At Puyloubier - Duncan McGibbon (bts book recommendations TXT) 📗

said
the final word? The garden is hollowed
in the dark . The scent of bushes
too unusual to name and roses mingles
despite the warm breeze.The air is alive with
a sensuous excitement. The strange,
locked room is darkened above the courtyard.
Two stars hang in this night sky,
itself a loft, suspended from the beam
of St Victoire which lies soaring
behind us; the first is Betelgeuse
and the second,Rigel.
Where have you gone?
To lie naked in the heat of our little bedroom?
I do not know what you are looking for in me
You cannot take His church,
His priests, His epoch- rejected words.
There is a way of knowing the world
and keeping a faith so personal
that reason can make no entry.
It is better to be an atheist
of one's own illusions than the believer
of one's own ruin, but who has the strength ?
Hence love is only at war with love,
a cliche of this place.This rock of the wolves,
huddled in hilltop defence of rival Christs.


6.
And yet how these stars blaze on.
Despite the Zola dams, the drug
laboratories and the intelligence parks.
I have discovered the greatest meaning
is to accept a purposelessness,
to be as uselessas the latest embryo
dug out to bleed in the white, ceramic
purity of the surgeon's tray
and to be despised the more because
I appear to be more. This place does not tell
of a secret in the world but of secret
that calls us inevitably from it,
that because it calls us from the world calls
us to it.
These little farms crowded
on a hillside round a dank citadel
over the oratory mountain from
Vauvenargue’s chateau where Picasso
lived publicly and publicly died.
The houses below the oratory
mountain and the Pic des Mouches.
The recent growth of brush and pine
once almost melted into the rock
by the heat of the blaze that destroyed
Cezanne's mountain, a vision always
both objective and true to the personal eye,
natural rather than subservient to the moment
the dusty road that winds down to Trets,
or the craggy pass to les Puits de Rians.


7.

Christ is the master-artist revealing
the familiar in an unseen light
of a love more timeless than this wind
We have become unsighted critics
in a gallery of landscapes satisfied
we have seen enough in abstract
or Renaissance monarchs relying on
cunning portraiture to estimate
a partner's looks An intellectual
mimicry of love is the worst betrayal
because intelligence is so exact
it has the precision the fine, stunning
play on the heart but not the life ,
the clumsy life. We awe at the fine
without its life because we can preserve it
even the fly in aspic was a fake
and not a paradigm of eras The branches
of this cypress tree that sways in the garden
when they are pleasing show a balance
sombre, raucous or ecstatic.
The finished draws us on where we would sooner
not be seen to go. not like the oarsmen
on the Pequod obsessed at Ahab's dead
hand water has drowned still waving them on.
Like us, who know the sense of being here
we cannot be elsewhere yet take reference
like a triangulation,from our being here.
And yet it is only in this fearing
uncertainty beyond employment,
beyond talent, beyond prospects,
beyond practicality that I begin
to feel myself a man who makes response.
to a call that is beyond me and in me,
beyond the scope of competence.
I am becoming the words of his call
speaking through myself in sounds alone
I can understand and yet shaken
by the wind the Bougainvillea,
lures dumbfounded moths
to become creatures of the shadows.

To keep this fixed light only he who is
stretched on that cross can heal,
because through his Father, He annulled
more than himself, a Godhead died.
Too often I make a superstition
of my circumstances, a fateful
addiction to the vagaries of living
something meant to carry fame
or pay for my response, yet feel these stars
in their massive numbers to have sympathy
for the universe in its vast vulnerability
an antidote to selfishness
like a playground in the rain, freedom,
a function of being called away.


8.

Make me a child who can carry love
once the world begins to answer its maker.
It is as if He never acted ,yet he always acts.
All blood has come through his heart at some time
even the driest stain on that insulting
crown once flowed in warmth and passion
deep within Him.What shall we do now we have time
to gather and words to speak and all
is not that habit of brokenness,
which is the self-sufficiency
of natural love-making.
We must do nothing. Look at his love.
We must always act: to love, it is enough
to look to have the alacrity
to accept the instant's sacrament
A momentous precision
that climbing limestone mountains
teaches us yesterday I climbed
Mont St Victoire with my little son
in rage with everyone,with the calculus
of practicalities and breathed in
the world of this myth -gouged valley
upon which Marius murdered a pristine
population, a hill of disasters
full of stars and lethal rocks.
Nothing can win against this motiveless
murderer, who shadows us through life
history is a master from the schoolroom
leading us to retake a failed exam.
All positives despair if death is your limit.


9.

It is not the great height or the giddy edge
but the laborious undertow of scree.
treacherous and deadly because
it is so close to the level ground
and to fall is to risk a clownish
somersault and that old cerebral break
which is the cost of a return
to what always should have been.
We cannot meet here any more
for our dreams have reported us
They want us to be their witmesses
to see what the sun can lay bare
They want us to be spirtual now
to give their fictional thrills such life
They want us to take over and give
their fantasies some room here.
They want us to thrill under a closed night.
They want us to make a skill out
of our thirsts,not a foolishness,
for the dream looks only for professionals.
Yet I will see you outside of this
plague of imaginings that has shut us
in this hill of clamouring iron.
The pattern of the lampshade falls on your
sleeping skin, a pelt of inverted stars.
maked in the airless bedroom.
I am becoming the voice
that speaks to me out of my tribal,
cairn-thick mind’ the effort to understand
the stars is better in my own tongue.

10.

Poets, my parents, my children,when
shall I see you again.I am becoming
consecrated and whole in his healing death.
To live forsaken, consenting
for him is a perfect choice to be,
unfathomable as the bed of
a dried out river that has become a torrent.
I am growing into the depths of the past
and the height of the future and the breadth
of the present to vanish into the point
of his cold, chiselled death,of his starry heart
to be weak for the one who is loved
like a tired father too fond to be impatient
my answer will still resonate,
as the cicadas do, echoing the word
an answer made to a silent other
in a lost place. The heart was always
the centre of things and those who could not know
him see him now a conversation of sight
whose leaves will not fall in a room
whose closure has completed the house
in daylight that expands from this crevice.
I am growing into the the mountain's broken past
and the vertigo height of its future
and the earthen roadways on route-lamps.
I am grown into human, death and his heart
whose weakness circulates his blood
throughtnhe red shift of all the nebulas
His to be weak for ; the one who is loved
My answer will still resonate
as the cicadas do, echoing the word.
Green light spills in from Grasse or Bandol
Blue light laps from Aix en Provence.
Soon it will be dawn, the shapes break shadow.
We will resume our games of being two
under the species of ambiguity.
The garden stirs with stealthy thrushes
come to clamour the temporal worms
in the sleeping yard. The ghosts of almond,
and lotus are laid by the iron hours.
Unspeaking, I climb the simple staircase
towards your single sensitivity.
Love that cannot be and yet still, must be,
wait until our site has no built church
Imprint

Publication Date: 11-12-2010

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
To Clare McGibbon