9.Map of Storms - Duncan McGibbon (13 inch ebook reader txt) 📗

stood on end
in a vast dim room with the blinds down.
If you don't believe me, think I'm mad,
ask the huntress, fate, what curse she has imposed
upon the Semites or on Rome
when she tied up all the allies
Chamberlain, Daladier, appeasers all,
in Portsmouth, the Nore, Spithead nad St Nazaire.
Yes, I am that same Bobo,
I will tell you, you can never hear fate.
when I was at school.
I told the head teacher of Bushey…
The rumour goes that Farv., No. Uncle Churchill
cursing us for not keeping in line.
struggled through turnips, and tough stubble
until his foot disturbed a hare; 'Loo! After it'
Lurcher and whippet were slipped in the winter frost
and sped after the doubling, twisting hare.
That day it was caught,
shrieking in the impaling mouths,
its legs quivering in agony.
He gave it to me to carry and he swore.
"Wasn't that a beautiful sight!" he said and leaned
on his thumbstick while his hounds drew breath.

Wherefore the daughter of necessity,
...Sorry... Yes
in fell wrath stayed the army
that in quittance for the hare
my father should slay his own child
at the altar in the English Park,
'Decca, Diana á l'autel conduisez la victime.'
That day I held myself high,
fired a shot into the grass
and another in my right temple.
Bony of brain as the bullet proved.
Fate snatched me from death
I felt only pain, hoist like my pet,
tethered outside the church at Swinbrook,
goatlike, on the stone fountain.
My best clothes wrapped around me
to keep me from doing worse.
It meant leaving him to Eva Braun,
no, Eriphile...No...I love her fate, her place.
Berlin shall be her prize.
Churchill got a poisoned dog
in place of me. I am stone-heart.
My poor Rebel. "Wherefore with pain
and much constraint and sore urging
of his backward will,"
Hardly! Farv yeilded. I was brought
on a stretcher to the Munich hospital,
where the priestesses cursed me
for the mortal sin of suicide.
Think of what happened in Munich.
The S.S. and The Luftwaffe sent cards
and in the pain I was my father standing
beside some black-robed nuns who told me
I was sinner, a Defier of Hubris.
Again and again they questioned,
those Nazi nuns. Did you think it a sin
to die by your own hand?
All the spectators, standing by
crying or taking photographs, or,
like, the little boy and his mother
who held me kneeling abjectly on the floor.
It didn't do me any good
with the blood still flowing from my temple.
I didn't realise my father's arm
not to my wedding but to a political incest,
struck down by a father who did not understand
the need of a race to realise its identity.
you aren't one of those who would
be cruel are you? Yes, I am that same Bobo.
To this small extent we must be
masters of your destinies.
At least I think I am the one
who must believe this
We did not ask to be born. If our lives
become tragic or unbearable,
we have the right to die.
Heinz who was national defence discovered
his mother's parents were both Jewish
and wanted to shoot himself and should have done.
All Farv and Churchill wanted
was to get the war started.
Their army chaplains and priests turn aside
the purpose of your life and call it fear.
What I loved were heroes,
great judgements like Hieronymous Bosch.
I worship Diana and her life "vudz"

I went on to Berne, through the channel's
bright air, to this Taurean country,
a low lying island off Attlee's Crimea.
Rain glistens in the grass, falls from the bracken
and oats stir, restless, in the home field,
where the ruined chapel stands. No... Sorry... Yes
Out of the wreck which was
my father's house, rusting trophies.
The house, Inchkenneth. No! Inchkenneth,
the cottage and a statue of Diana,
the huntress, the rest is only unfriendly horses
in the green meadow between the garden wall
and the fringing trees.
On the beach the dark tide floods
through the cliffs.

He is coming now,
my sisters, on the night train to Oban
where he will catch the steamer to Mull.
He has Sarpedon's portrait signed.
Brought to my realm of grey and black
red limestone basalt and mackerel granite.
Once I dreamed in Burma... Tom... No Orestes... Yes?
was not dead... I am become a worshipper here,
a planner of funerals, a singer of hymns,
"Mummy, am I mad?" "Why of course, stone heart."
My memory is weak, out of respect for necessity
Here where socialists win runner's victories
for the speed of bureaucratic bungling,
ruling a barbaric people by false custom.
I wait I could kill those who wanted me dead
but I dream...

Yes, I am that Bobo,
My private school religion made for blasphemy.
"A garden plot. God wot rot!"
I spurned Confirmation, think of the church
down the road at Swinford with all our
animals. When I was young Murv used to let me play
outside on my own, but brought me in
in time for 'God save the King'
then I would run out again, especially
if Joan had come to stay. No... No.
I am Boud, great grand-daughter of Atreus.
My God was always my country, the farmlands, parks
Though even then it was a disrespectful patriotism.
My familiar, who always did the mischief
I was blamed for, was Madam with a long face
and heavy lidded eyes. Now she has the form of fate.
Under the shadows of high wind-tossed trees
in the age-old leafage of this consecrated dale
it is as if I cross the doorway to her church.

Yes, I am that same Bobo,
As in Gulliver's Travels, my country has been
broken down by people chattering the talking
around its giant limbs. Moral courage is my ideal, simple,
un-Christian, uncomplicated by chastity
or marriage and to maintian the values of my set.
Never go beyond the bounds of your fate.
I revisited the school to tell them the same,
but first I had to remove my party badge;
my Swastika signed with his name.
Now beside the unfriendly sea
out of the ruin that was my father's house.
My mother's goats, the horses of Hellas,
crop the green meadows between the garden wall
and the fringe of trees. Now I am here
and my father elsewhere, where the dark
tide floods under the rocks.
no I am stone-heart. No... sorry... Bobo's sorry

We will take the night train to Oban
and stay over with the trophies of fate,
my badge, his photograph, the picture of Hannibal.
I shall return with Orestes.
"Tom...Tom...No. I'm coming..."


Isobar:
A Map of Storms
Massebielle

Out of the rain's deliberation
the town's hills huddle in devotion.
Their silence will will outlast
the cautious night, will hold fast
against the river's rising pitch.
This pilgrim storm keeps the rich
at package prayer, as flash-bulbs brighten
on the wheelchair-bound, whose faces tighten.
They file past the glassed-off source
past rocks worn plastic-smooth by the course
of pleading hands, or lips that kiss.
Massed candles flicker and hiss.

Tearful, screwed up cherubim
are making the wicks grow dim.
Here prayerful hands woo anger
from youth's energy and danger.
Smoke-blackened, the tallow is scarred.
Great clouds billow as barred
rainfall queries the echoing precincts,
yields in silence on the hillside and sinks.
The river cuts into the basilicas’
cold house crushed by its mass,
varnished by the misty glow
of neon-lights intensified to show
the great soaked carapace homes
of toil-hardened, gnarled copper domes
The skit-Jew statues on the calvary of pleas
witness to atrocities
that hang before our time
as praying men and women stand in line
to enter baths, lit by a blue lamp,
that force an image of another camp

Do not go there little one.
in whose eyes such gladness shone.
Do not go there, for you are brave
down to the pagan cave,
to the litters of the typhoid dead.
Do not leave your father to die by an empty bed
Mosaic popes stare
in an empty piety where
the piped stream's tetany
weeps a brass litany.
Why stray by the river, little one,
when your mother sought clothes to put upon
your tiny shape to drive out cold.
Run to your father to have you to hold.
The kiosks are ablaze with currencies,
the pale white lustre of brittle rosaries
and the chrome mirroring cloudy heavens, nacreous.
The cheap is made to replicate the precious
and is made a liar as medals are made to entice
and counterfeit a deathless price.

Why lead us to this place, little dove
why leave your jail of love?
Thunder bellows in the air
at you and those for whom you care.
Come back from the riverside, little one
Lead us to the hungry room and to God's Son
come back from the river, back from the mire
with tinder and bone to light the evening's fire,
where your tough pure face can smile
on a cunning cleric's hardened guile.
The town is scattered now, that stills
a wound, the muscle of the darkened hills.


The Oyster Parks, Cancale

We arrived at slack tide water
witnessing the tide's turn
and the sellers going home.
Only the grey clutches of young
in the wire baskets
told of the local trade,
row after row, developed as far as
potential allowed and then left
to acquire a taste for the sea and survival
Unnoticed at first, the tide began
to swell, filling the concrete beds
one after another. Each spillage of brine
a sudden annulment
along a level course.
The tides flowed in until
each oblong pond was covered
then it vanished from sight
under the flat sea.
Slowly the tides are turning on us.
Each minute splashes its shiver of oblivion
into the day's concern
The second's drop into the pool of the hour
with perfect circularity, rolling out to take in
families and take away
generations from their culture-beds.
Season after season each achievement
is separately annuled, each hunted down
to vanish for ever from natural light
under the straight timelessness.

We left to go and try our luck
with primitives in tow
among the tourist front's Creperies
As the flow filled inwards
to the cliff's edge to bring the offering of
nothingness
to the open arms of Christ,
a statue on the hill.


At Saint Seine Sur Vingeanne.
i.m.Maurice Blondel (1861-1949)

His purple dragonflies still shimmer
along the river's reed-charged bed.
Now he is dead and yet his house is still astir,
to hunters, dogs and his cultured tread.

No more that deft motion of his kid-skin glove,
sealing letters to poets and divines
and those that warmed his apprehensive wife to love.
They are all now stamped with lettered spines.

He was the only one to die.
Others lingered in their blaze of printed fires,
or sang their fantasies until the lie
grew brilliant and duped its liars.

All else still lives on, is strong;
Nazis still smash his bureau open
to seize the names of those to whom,
he sent his book that proved might wrong.

A blind man at his death.
He lit up his own darkness,
on an injured God's last breath;
limits grasped, we surely possess.

A dirt track leads away to Teize