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

future collusion.
Yours signified...”

The signatures were illegible,
Tracy said she could make out
‘Buddleia’ and ‘Vermin’.
The secretary had scribbled an apology.

“Sorry I am new language.”

It was three weeks
before another letter
came from
Hiérophants et Cie
in Kythera
claiming to
pay their
mortgage
so long
as the Athanor was built.
(Back shot)
Tracy remembers
the morning
when the door chimed
and two quick men
came in for the piano.
Then weeks later
the parts arrived,
(Vertical access, speeded up )
Pipes, stone lintels
and converters of prima materia
to aqua permanens.

They
sent them back.
Only for bills
and summonses
to flood the porch
along with redundancy notices
(Vertical access speeded up)
Casually
they would scan notes of
postings.
(Archive)
The Eysenck Job Centre
assessed only
one corporal
humour out of
the full four
in the personality test.

An offer came
at nighttime
when Norman hung drowsy
by the crackling
new receiver
(Sound added a French voice
droll and effete)
"Look after your dreams,
The media cannot
tune into them,”
(Close up)
The house is still still .
Each buff tile straight.
The copper pipes are taut
and the wiring exposed
against the now-stripped staircase
panels and walls of the house.
The Athanor fills the bare living-room.

Tracy feels for the electronic
toy on her ankle, but
at least the house is safe.
But the tests of the new technology
sent them shocks
which a only seemed to end when
they volunteered
to go to French Poetry classes,
in her case
and for Norman to give in
his notice at the
agricultural factory.
Every nine pieces installed,
began the good life again.
(Reverse shot)


2. The Second Reality. Continuous Ratio

(From Thorndyke’s unpublished
laboratory notes)
Next day came
a schedule for
food and happy appetites
every time they were working.
They considered other
vocations, wrote
to those in charge.
Frightened, they made
an appointment
at the time
to be told only those with
fictional
prospects would be
the ones worth
looking into
for staff-training.
(From Hull’s notes)
Sleep too
could be
regulated
by a memory
re-cycler,
placed under
the left
nipple.
Rhythms
became crossed
and they were restless.
Syncopated love
missed the offbeat,
offed the misbeat.


3.The Third Reality :Fixed interval

From Norman’s non-empty
“I went to the
abbatoir following the rumours
of Tracy’s piano.
At night as we hid
behind a plastic curtain
we saw the arch-silencer
at work with his researchers,
cutting the clear chords,
and carving clean notes
to cook the sound-boards
and wash what looked
like pink tears from a sink full of sounds
they’d gathered from the strings.
Those maids, my old girlfriends,
resented their hunger
they moaned as they
squeezed milk from the keys.
They closed doors on
Tracy’s old boy-friends
in cupboards glutted
with mouldered tunes.
Hull, the Vice-Silencer -
worked on into dead night
he chopped and he chopped
at the wooden-corpses.
His dreaming servants
laid silence in the refuse of music.
He collected and hacked at the frames
too big for the oven, clearing and paring
the language at the limits of deceit.
At dawn he brought silence
in a covered jars
to sting the still hammers
into deeper sleep
and threw them
into ovens of mould.

We came back
to find our frosted hearts
stood side by side
on the kitchen table
melting on a tray
And I woke andr ealized
I dreamed and ran to
the window to see if the old
man was still by the station
talking to himself.

The technicians come to fix the
adrenalin in our phials.
We could only sign up
for one emotional
reassurance per day.
And none without
work on the Great Opus.
The pieces are not enough
to build an Athanor.
And our first work
brings us no means.
Only our dreams are
beyond the pulse
of the security tag.


4. The Fourth Reality Variable Ratio

From Norman’s Bose-Einstein, Non-Solid files.
Tracy told me her dream:
“We became white stone,
shattered ,white stone.
Feet, hands, knuckle-bones
a forehead, all scattered
on the living-room floor.
As we tried to touch,
we found we had talons
instead of finger-nails,
feathers instead of skin.
Major and minor scales
grew over our feet.

We grew colder
at each arousal.
I went out for fuel in a field
where every bush and tree
on the field of your skin
had been chopped to cut branches.
by Graves ,Frazer. and Co.
I left oak-bark to mark my
pathways from the shudder
of our coming,
trodden through the reeds
along a river of empty space.
and a want that
urged me to swear.
When I returned
you had turned
into a mound of flutes.
Your skin as clean as silver:
your mouth, a definition of song;
your breathing was an orchestra.
Mice were stirring in the night.
I warmed your chrome
into the tune of stones,
hidden in white mud.
Scattered hair, eyes, flanks,
hearts bobbed to the surface.
Your branch dowsed itself in me
and we clung to our smoke.

I went out for more wood,
this time to the great Raine orchard.
Scattered in the reeds
the white stones again,
a broken kiss
and eyes and flanks,
like fruit covered in mosses.

The silences
have blossomed.
I hear the rumour
that shocked vines bled
in fimbrial soil and caught their breath.
It is hard to accept
and it is time
to go back.

This time I
cannot find you.
Though my peaches
have flowered.
They bled and fed me.
Spiders scattered
across the floorboards,
across eyes, flowers,
hair and a breast.

I find a letter
telling me that
your cherries too
have flowered;
fruited and fallen,
though the sense
of this escapes me.

Over the ground
they sway in clusters.
In the dawn,
swans were flying
through the golden handcuffs
of the sun, while,
crows pecked
at unshelled snails
plunged in the mud.

And then my chance
to wake came up.


5.The 5th Reality: Open Reiforcement: the desire for flight

From Norman’s Non-Real Papers of Non-Trivial Imaginings.

That day we were trees,
and practiced
every part of our limbs.
We were moved
by winds
and by the fear of winds.

We found our branches
lighter than air.
We grew old and crumbled,
but were blown into the stone.
Songs from the stripped stair
were caught by the silence.
Steel members,
we gripped you
and shook you.
We rattled
our mesh of tongues
to state you,
to deny you,
our, deacon-silencer,
Thorndyke.
In our cage
of daylight
we sought you
and said
that our care
was elsewhere,
not in these hairs
not in these eyes,
our bodyshape.
Who can contain our shoulders?
Who can prove our roses?
Who thirsts against us here,
beyond apartness?


11.Winderby Alone
(Emerging from backshot,
Turns to colour, Closeup, lips moving.)

Forgetting my deathfulness,
I think I wake. If you can hear this,
then you can believe in ghosts again.
The voice on the country path
puzzled me to an obedience
I did not want. Poets are ordinary demons.
This country lane on which I walk;
balmy, with the buzzing of winged beetles,
and growths of dogwood, hawthorn
and woodspurge, witnessed
the return of Browning.
Hopkins drew it in his notebook.
Hardy could be crouched on the gateway
and Houseman slept outside the Pub.
While Thomas walked to his last engagement
against Heym, Trakl, or Stadler ,
who in turn, could have gunned down
Gurney, or Appollinaire.
Benn or Junger could have hunted
Keith Douglas, Sydney Keyes or Victor West
the logical possibility of reciprocal extermination
lies in the buried blood-stained pages.
It is poets send out poets to die
from the camps of peace,
survivors, such as Masefield walked
back down the same road.
De la Mare would have cycled
on this path and Auden would have walked
and chattered under its leaves,
past Eliot, leaning on the verge
while Graves rode by dreaming
of a bedded muse and Betjeman stood
and believed his own handbook.
Poets who escaped the war
did not know the fighting stopped.
The new apocalypse never ended.
The movement still fought on,
reformed the group, led the revival
and extracted confessions from deserters.
Still if I go along with his nonsense,
there could be a chance
I may go free, as Esse leaves Posse,
Mime, leaves Alberich,
cause departs from effect,
Puck, from Oberon
and Ariel, Prospero and I need
no longer flicker on the edge
of this earthen mire
like a satellite commanding
worlds, yet kicked by a micro-pulse,
or a Laurel by a Hardy.
Attwater has not grasped the full
terror of his intuitions.
This is no national threat
to books and scores,
maquettes and ballet shoes.
A terror is slowing the earth
and freezing it into night.
I saw the Arch -Silencer
once, myself, a comfortable evil,
a creature only of relations,
as we are only numbers to him.
He comes from a place
where there is no call to love
and is jealous of human purpose
in its frail and rich reality.
All creation thirsts to be called.
The enemy will steal our call from us.
Now it gets to be like this.
What have we got of ourselves,
but stones , in the end?
Each so called civilisation
speaks to us in stone,
warms us with stone,
and we recollect its stones.
If we are born wholly to die,
then the final outcome will be
some inhuman drift,
and what we have done will
be only numbers.
The index of murder,
the rate of ecstasies,
the ratio of despair to oblivion,
of new ideas to indifference,
of words read to words unread.
Even the lovers, here, in that house
whose light has just gone out
Even the cost of their pain
will be no more than a coefficient
of futility in a time capsule
rolled over an entropic soup
which we briefly understood
and which it will never read
throughout the autopsy
of existence that is eternity.
Imagine some jealous entity
wanted our illusions for himself.
How easy it would be to speed up
our passing into the immortality
of pure number”!
Even now I cannot understand
why so many now want only
the certainty of personal extinction.
Will I get through to the people he wants?
I will go to Kythira,
though Atttwater forbids
the nine freedoms of air flight.
Now, let me go down the double hedgerows,
past the great horse chestnut,
to reach the station
with Sir Charles Fox’s girder bridge.
Let me spell you the perfume,
Dodder, Abraham, Flax Dodder,
Isaac, Jacob, Hound’s Tongue
Lamb’s Ear, Field Woundwort,
Cut-Leaved Deadnettle,
Lesser Skullcap, Twispur
and Honeysuckle. Yes let them all be there.
This used to be the South Eastern and Chatham railway
in this parish, the Reading and Reigate branch,
and the London and the
South Western Railway Company
had running powers on this line
from Wokingham to Reading,
a tradition lost because
it was thought about, not imitated.
For me it must be past to be.
I will invent a train of logical deduction,
links, copulas, couplets and concatenations
I will call it Leviathan and Hobbes will drive it,
with his consequence or train of thoughts.
If the rolling stock is old, it will