5.The Terror - Duncan McGibbon (book club books txt) 📗

assuaged.

Your hand grips the leafage of silence.
Your awestruck eyes will never be covered,
while sunlit executioners
master the language they teach to the skies.


In Care

It is a silence you give;
the tongue tautened on broken edges ,
which you wrap white in the minutes.
You need a nervous door,
closed tight,
tight as the skin of a fist over knuckles,
or a muscled wall
that grips the stomach back
from the prayer of the rib cage.

It is a thin strip we wind
round a raw wound that flinches
at each stuttered hour you grasp.
You need fear’s cunning
to cut,
to cut out those who run from door to door,
or an impulse of severed hands to pull
on the shoulders, cancelling flight.
It is a blanket of fault
we issue you, while autumn forages
a far, blue sky from the hedgerows,
which you pelt with pebbles
to sow,
to sow torn spaces in a sky of stares.
You need a cold stone,
or a shell of eyelids
to give for the fugitive eye.

It is the night you wait for,
which you dig at and dig at with a blade of air,
scar upon scar to dislodge the sap.
You need a graft of pride
on a stem,
a stem of violence we have planted,
or a blind verderer to lend it growth
and show to a place where
wintering animals grow restless in sleep.


The Garden in November

1.
After heavy
fruit has fallen,
their bruises
brown
and soften
in the warmth.
Before putrescence
sears them,
hoard.
Leave none to
fester and to
end
its fall.

2.
Slugs attend,
yet are not seen to.
Hearts weigh out
frailty,
yet do not
restore.
This is no
month for defences.
Your vindications
have
exhausted
all.

3.
This season
is no time
to burn witch-
hazel.
Pricked
wax forms inflict
more culpable
identity.
Guilt fosters
its slimy
safety.
Slugs slide towards
its
luscious juice
from the garden wall.


4.
Seek out those
who mock you.
Leave plans
undone
for prejudice to work on.
Their wrecks exhort
the intent
and
not the act.
The open wound
balks
acquittal’s gall.


5.
Store your pages
in the dry.
Presumptious
moisture
will soon drown,
a despair of sunlight
soon
fracture
the loam.
Unwatered soils
will prosper
under the
solstice stall.


6.
Death is guilt
made visible
and life
is fault
bartered on
markets of time.
Empty this month
and stockpile its fruit
for redemption
in Him
whose life can
still redden
a last leaf, unbrushed
by our efforts,
left at
the threshold
of humility’s thrall.

7.
Only a lawn
picked clean
of strength
can hold
to last laws,
can keep the last tear shed
for an empty
trans-
action.
Before the
air-frosts’
braggart hoars
chill
the loitering sun
of Martinmas
and blur its last call.

The Caretakers

We screwed the whole thing up.
They say it’s because we sought only rationality
and loafed around sharpening conceptual tools
in the bicycle-sheds, having only
the tattered, messy edges of our speech to share.

Right from the start,
they told us we’d wasted our chances.
In First Year, Herr Geist
had pleaded with us
that the key to the Absolute
was there to be filched
from the laboratory technician,
even if it meant going the whole way
to GBH and we were placed bottom of the class
for the irrational defence of ownership rights.

History was slowly revised
in the Second to allow the school
a major part in all the civilisations
and we were nagged by the Year Master
for lacking competitiveness,
having been observed watching
the hopeful Amazons of the Third
more for the delicacy of their legs,
than counting the distance
they could throw their deadly javelins.

The study of Literature
was identified with life,
which, as books were easier to store,
was taken from the shelf.
A Victorian syllabus
claimed the emotional lives
of our clever girlfriends
and we lost them to the ATC.

Obedient we watched
the Social Studies Department
wrest us as vulnerable offspring
from our failing parents
and sign us over to the mother care Fifth,
increasing the ranks that
swelled already from the test tubes in the Bio Labs.

The A Level Geography set
kept us on as extras, as they were
constructing a map
more accurate than the real neighbourhood
and needed ground work
on such co-ordinates as the smell of fags,
the incidence of heartbreak
and the frequency of bus stops.

We weren’t invited to Speech Day
and never saw the Social Contract
signed by the Head between the forces of order
and those of excellence,
which relieved us, as we
were under counselling on the question
of traditional sovereignty.
having reported the Victrix Ludorum
for taking drugs.
In handcuffs, she was led away before the whole school, by a young
constable to whom we had slipped Hume’s Essay
on the dubiousness of original contract,
after her winning dive
at the swimming gala.

While the Head, unseen, scrambled his wits
looking for a model answer
in Constitutional History to get her back.
The crisis worsened, leaving the Education Officer
levitated in ecstasy above the Town Hall
while the Leavers’ Year renounced
the sexual wilderness
and were translated miraculously
with Rococo cherubs
to simultaneous provincial universities.

We screwed the whole thing up,
while the Careers Master gave us a helpful tip,
by shooting himself during our simulated dole interview.
Now we keep the old buildings warm,
as the Authority still has to decide
whether the fine for their demolition would be
offset by the green belt grant, or the ribbon development
seen as a cover up tied in with the airport apron.


To help them, we get a licensed high every day
on the custards of the past,
wishing ourselves back to the beginning
teaching our masters
how to leave our speech just as it was
when we first brought it to them.

Encounter Day
To Geoffrey Rayner

A skylark launched itself into its pulsing swim-feed
and tadpoles trembled through weed-bright streams.
On the brittle sea-front,
we had spent a weekend
among the sullen, urban wounded.

In the nights, those children, asleep, would dip a deep brush
into the spattered jam-jars of their pride
to daub a still page,
yet kept crouching ears
outside with the grassy wind.

Maybe their shorelines lacked a ghoul, or an ogre,
we’d read them and they wanted either in,
shadowless or soughing,
that it might stir the lumber of their sight,
and put us out, that they remake the world.

The Gift
A singular magpie, seen through a door ajar,
scuds back from the sap-wet bough
to the hand that issued it.

In the hollow of a charge
that has emptied its live hour,
His dove overcomes the omen.

He issued us a dumb life.
Our tongues will not interrupt,
the silence of its sign.

He opens a door. He shuts it.
Each day issued anew.
We shall speak of it no more.

Lyndhurst Avenue

Your children, a coeval
foursome of eyes
are unmuddied, brown as the river
runs over a settled bed,
overhung by brows
of ripening ash.
We have come in
to their den of smiles.

We hear how our scattered
generation
unsettles its exile.

The time plant has not yet blossomed
and for its coming,
you keep a tousled garden,
as if for departure.

Cut down the weeds in there.
Don’t close the uncertain page
on an unstarted season.
Not yet,
our grafts will take time
and their tips reach out in the dark
to the minuted one,
within in you, minute,
a mute co-equal.
Don’t throw away the stocks
you have no need of,
prayer-casting one.

We reach out in the dark
for a child’s peace and new will,
housewife of the hourly, untouched snows.
You.


Prayer Before Yesterday

Hidden one, no,
you cannot test our closeness.
You lie under another’s cradlehood,
hearing our words as inarticulate thunder.
Here you have only reasoned discomfort to wait for
and if you dream, may it be unskilled
that the voice you somehow crave
may call you home.

Still one, no,
you cannot speak by touch.
You lie in a mist of sights and smells,
walled in another’s ribs.
We cannot heal the broken country you wait for
and if you hope, may it be an open one
that even a harsh word
may call you home.

Lost one, no,
you cannot find
your hidden heart, out of sight
under the battens of another’s strength.
Here we cannot speak your case
and if you pray may it be awkward
that the voice of friendship
will call you home.

Silent one, no,
you are safer here
despite the gate of risk
that guards your moulding,
under another’s skin.
Here we only have a cluttered home
and if you smile, may it be firm
that even cold hindrances will call you home.

Strange one,
you cannot know us,
though another flinches to your kick.
You lie in a pond of growth
and if you love may you fumble
towards its unjust gifts
that the havoc you wait to wrestle with
will call you home.


Castle Fundament

Need its stones tell any more?
The heights, those dry, drained
Department of Ontology ramparts,
where all has been found and is in place,
is in time for being as it was.
And is found well-placed to assuage
the low suspicion
that once it was not so.
New earths have been dug,
to satisfy a doubt that it never was.

Hence the advisory silence;
pass by, conforming graduate mind,
the cromlech assumptions, standing stone arguments,
rollright conventions, judgements upstanding
need only the briefest word
to keep the informed at bay.
The height, too, is understood
to reflect the lesser dimensions of the past.


The games of the tongue have been played
and the specialist field defined.
The quantifiers have bounded
each variable cry.
The enclosure has been cleared
of existential vermin
by snares whih snap shut
with a universal gleam of syntax.
Sir Mens has inherited his grounds;
those qualified attend
and are graded in feudal silence.

He holds a shop-girl in a
shallower enchantment,
wishing a roof in being
that is no longer there.
A couple, attentive, cannot
teach their child the words for fire,
holding bare palms to a hearth
that cannot burn.
The unemployed in this place
fear its inactive silence,
pulling on doors that neither open nor close.
Camping children still in their Slumberdown
blankets, stand sleep-entranced
by a cordoned bed.
A miner’s widow judges the beams
with eyes of fear and cannot draw
the pension for resignation.
Schoolgirls, under the matching glamour
of Jean Machine blue,
follow the stair case that leads into a wall.
Only the homeless who cannot afford
to live in this textbook of chiselled stone
are out of reach to his reason


Fuga Ligata


Fuga Ligata

1. Exposition

(‘Cello Valenti; the drawing in Nova 198?)

An absence slides upon
a surface which you leave frosted, blank.
You scuff her edges into measured sight
to carry her shape into a vernacular room.

A surface glides upon forgetfulness,
an absence, which you free her from.
You stroke a charring rain
to catch life on a mesh.

Now her room is shaped into discovery.
Unaware, she would fade again.
Yet aroused by a knowing hand,