15 Master Virgil's Deceyte - Duncan McGibbon (best book club books of all time txt) 📗

Spain’s daughter.
comes to visit with a hollow womb.
while dumbfounded love
witnesses a meeting
that has done with words
for the pain
of a leaping, kicking child.


Bass

The kicking leaping trout
Walton pulls from the Black Potts.
“Playted over with silver”
your image floats
by the next barge
“that comythe
from Reding to London.”
Then he fussed over mules and carts
spending more than was needed
She has all she needs,
the fruit inseason
and the sun’s rays
the twelve fierce stars
tamed under
a Renaissance canvas.
Her milk has shown, liebfrau,
as she will be seen
all over Europe ,
She has the face of as women
given to them,
that only in the poverty
of sight should there be vision.
In wood, you burn,
with the relics of piety,
before the Smithfield crowds.

CantusPlanus

Children of fear,
the monks of Notley
have signed her over
to John London
who “also pulled down
the place she stode in
with all other ceremonyes
as lightes, shrowdes, crowchys
and images of wax.”
The victims are the only suspects.
“I have commended unto
your good lordship
ascertaining the same
that I have pulled down
the image of our lady
of Caversham.”
and staid Victorian houses
from shadows to shows
from whispers to spectres,
on the bridge of breath.
Bled through chalk karst
risking subsistence .
the innocent have a day
to themselves in the hills,
in the hill country
among slender girls,
lamenting she knew no man
and yet one Lord treasured within.

Copula

The empty spaces
will explode with life
over the clay flood plain
and the chalk mines,
scaffolding for ‘semis’
rules the skies next to the
terraces in the lows
and villas on the “heights.”
the incendiary bomb sites
once drifting with smoke
from the cork works,
filled in with homes.
Cochran’s land
became a place for a church,
where children’s voices sing.
The waters, bleeding
through chalk
will separate.
A new life will tumble
into the world
to cry and to suck,
its caul already
a shawl of safety.
an ionosphere of hope.
The world orbits
on the expectation
of her word.
Nothing is finished
that was started,
except the Word,
its founder and their
proceeding
endlessly waiting
on her word,
the Word in her.
The infinite holds its breath.

Melismata

In the image of love,
a golden crown, created joy,
friendship of opposites,.
Creation is held up
by God and given over.
The friends of Joseph carouse.
and Mary dances,
Almah, her heels in the dust.
a rift and a healing,
at Joseph’s right hand
in clothes of gold.

Contrafacta

A rift and a healing,
in the heavens,
supernovae, or conjunction
visible perhaps from
Somalia,or Iran,or China,
the Silk road extended to Rome’
Siurely they do everything
as if they believe it?
Some light too small to notice
becomes a flare
of guiding intensity.
They are astute,
to ways of Kingcraft
the Plantagenets,
the Le Dispensers,
making their way
upstream from Windsor.,
that icon of Regum.
Darwin, Newton
and Eddington
agreeing
like all who meet
with angels
that a return can be
by any route.

Plagalis

Two doves with
their wings fluttering,
in the still air.
At home in this
holy cirty,
she waits outside
in the courtyard
and priests go out to her.
She soothes the birds
not needing their burden
and the old couple
look at her silently
wonder as tears spread
noiselessly in all eyes.

Clausula Vera.

My youngling, my yearling, cry, my infantine:
my fawn, my warble, my whelp, my kitten,
chit, my lamb, my lambkin, ewelamb, kid , my calf,
my pup, my chicken, chuckle, cub ,my chick
my gabble, my fledgeling, my eyas, squab and fry.
Sing my mite, my girl, my lad, my laddie
spat, spawn, my kit, my firstling.

Your squat paw reaches out in dimpled love
for my grown finger and grips in joy.
Your smiling head homes on the palm of my hand,
your pulsing feet push
against the muscles of my arm.
I look into your lyric eyes
and hear my soul in song,
outside its time.

Words for A Word

The infant
moves his head
forward and
tilts up his
face, but with-
out breaking
gaze, as if
he is try
ing to lift
his head and
face towards
the person
who eli
cited the
smile…

At the same
time body
tension will
noticeab-
ly increase,
as may limb
movement, which
may include
a poorly
co-ordin
ated eff
ort to reach
tpwards the
person with
his arms… 


Man of Copper 
Getting Inside

Premonitions.

The sunlight draws thin
as the day with children
ends its pitch.
The last child departs
from my detention.
Twenty years ago
I closed a classroom door,
just as I will do today.
I had headed off across
the dank,yellow drifts
of a withering tradition
to a teacher’s meeting,
preoccupied with some
casual unfairness
about the uprooting
of yet another school.

It was not on the agenda.
Someone asked Blair Peach
“Are you going to Southall?”
and I could not make out
his long, stuttered reply.
I knew I would not there.
On Monday he was dead.
A light was seen to burn all night
at Barnes police station.
“Goodnight, Sir.” “Goodnight”
I wait before tossing
careworn lines in the bin.

2.Drawing the Line

I sit attentive in the 747pig-run
over a frosted Atlantic sky,
signing my boarding card:

Do you have a communicable disease,
mental,or physical disorder:
or are you an abuser of drugs?

No

Have you ever been arrested,
or convicted of a crime
involving moral turpitude?

No

Are you seeking entry to engage
in immoral activities or crime?

No

Have you ever been,
or are you involved
with espionage,or sabotage?

No

Have you ever asserted
immunity from prosecution?

No

Are you alive?

3. Borders

Leif embarked when it suited him
and his problems once at sea.
At last he came upona coastline
he had never known before:
wild wheat meadows,
grapevines and maple-trees.

I leave the Saga
and go aft in carnival
to seek my extra hospitality drink,
while pockets of turpitude
rock my Jumbo,
ascending in twirls
of Rococo fluff.

Clutching brandies and a coke,
I slide through packed seats,
hoping the attedndant
won’t cut into the Adagio
of Kleiber’s noisy Fifth.
to announce the weather,
the time in England,
or imminent disaster.

Back in Greenland
Thjodhild refused to live with Eirek
after she chose to follow Christ
and this made Leif’s father very angry
All winter long at Brattahild
the men debated a further
search for Vinland
where it was rumoured
fertile soil coild be found.

In the seat next to mine,
a girl from Southall
talks about her friends in Queens.
Clare props up her plastered foot.
Her pink toes are a coxcomb’s
taunt from the accidental life.

After two days
they sighted land again.
It was unwooded
and had no harbour.
The beaches were wide and sandy

My daughter Aisling listens
doggedly to pop groups,
while my son reads Milton.

That winter they stayed there,
though it chanced to be acold one.
and the food ran low.Thorhall, the huntsman rose and spoke
“Thor has done more than your Christ
when I wrote verses for him,
he gave me a reward.”
Then there was abreak in the weather
and they wnet fishing,
for there was no want of food.

I peer forward to see
the American day
our scaft advances on,
getting inside the light.
They are shutting
the pastic portholes,
out of one,
at a distance from me,
I see the setting sun
above the margining wing.

4. Landfall

Below, I see Newfoundland
Its street lights are children’s
games of giant marbles
abandoned in an ontological
playground of dark,
matttered, silence.
The woman next to me
is reading New Age
bible-therapy
“Change your life
in six easy steps.” 
We agree the tented shape
of Long Island,
while the plane banks
and throws the roads confetti
in sea-darkness and cloud.
the ladders of Manhatten,
inertly ice-cold,
vanish and appear
from contrary diretcions,
as the plane stacks,
suppresses gruff enrgy
and lands its vessel
a JFK,
Vinland.

5. Landing Cards

The immigration officer
with her knee-led, Bronx waddle
keeps our quartet
under a restless eye:
the clarinet of a tall.
shy boy with a wool hat,
hoved down on long,
light-brown hair,
a vibrant tennager’s fiddle
tuned to a Walkman,
a bearded , bulging cello
of a man in a faded jacket
and my wife, alert
at her wheelchair keyboard. 
“Why did you come here to-day,
for some pleasure?”

“Yes, we’re tourists,
if that’s what you mean.”
6. Thirty Five Dollar Fare Plus Tolls
On the car radio
soft voices narrate a killing,
Amadou Diallo dead
under a rain of fortyone shots.
A Guinean, he tensed up
and went for his pocket.
When the smoke cleared
nothing could be heard
except sobbing officers.
the tight-lipped Bengali
taxi-driver accelerates
over Triboro Bridge
into Harlem to be halted
by traffic lights
alongside an empty
high school playground.

Lorca’s rumor still mingles
with Dylan Thomas’sneer
to the rumble of slaughter wagons.
From the chrome loudspeakers
“Mayor Guiliani has
ordered hollow bullets
they’re safer.”

A preacher’s breathy rhetoric
rattles a plastic cup on the TV
in our East 88th Street room.
“They say he looked suspicious at night.
I’d look suspicious at night
How come a mayor
wouldn’t look suspicious at night!
How come? Yoy know how come!”

we squabble over rights
and rummage with boxy drawers.

A polished announcer claims
“Some shots can penetrate
and leave the body
without stopping a man at all..
Hollow bullets burst in the body,
Police Plaza say they’re safer for the force.”


7. East Riverside, Dawn

From the other window
a New Jersey skyline settles
a seepage of visibility
on the mud-tide night.

A War Memorial
looms over civil peace.

Below, a wispy mapl 

is having its winter
and dying of it too.
While sunlight rises,
as efficient asan Otis lift,
and just enough to drop
a little light upon its leaf.
which would be a tear
if the leaf were
a tattered flag,
or a blessing
from the streetlight’s
aspergellum:
Whitman’s Miracle,
a new species
I have decided to find.
the city of now:
hotels and residencies
throw carton oiutlines
more emphatically,
now the daylight’s here.
You cannot build
wothout a cast of shadows.


8.First Landscape

The girl in the bagel shop
gives me a quizzical look:

“Wadz happened?
Yuh wanted
a black coffee?”

She beckons at the
offending item
with a flick
of her manicured hand.

My son peers
into the fish tank counters
at the modality
of breakfast
amid romping pastries,
while the girl smiles
at his English
indecision…

stepping the legend
of his youth
into the room.

9. Ordinary Time

Tiffany’s is shut
as tight as a tabernacle.
The diamonds are Trump’s.
The toffee-marble
is melting in the mouths of ‘Babes.’

The Archdiocesan Office
is sponsoring
World Marriage Mass.
I manhandle the wheelchair 

up the Cathedral Steps,
escaping the cold gusts
of the ramp access
to the amusement
of faithful Philadelphians.