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

/> My lips articulate their silent plight.
While passivity strengthens your case,
I smooth the breathing contour of your height.
A pre-dawn gust has stirred your slack embrace,
strokes the down on your bare lips, so slight.

A stronger dawn brings back the songbird,
day and hope in an earth that's deeper stirred.


A Treatise on Light 10

To-day our heroes choak on fictions.
Unsure of our lore, Don Juan wakes to find
he's spurned for being of the doubting kind.
Tristan and partner take safe precautions.

Eloise and Abelard hold joint positions
in a smart city parish, putting out of mind
old celibate vows and bid the chaste unwind.
Jocasta moves in while no-one signs petitions

in a healthy neighbourhood, before her
began, was aborted without obstacle.
Ashamed and clothed, we await admonishing.


A Treasise on Light 11.

I too hate what you fear most,
yet I lie by you unwishing its concealment.
I love that private room, the lost
east wing to which the mind is bidden.

Here the imaged affliction can boast
its worth in tragic entanglements
with the Beast's other self, that ghost
now unhaunting a fictive inheritance.

It pays fees to violence whose host
is love, no guest, but fear's sub-tenant.
You fear the game of dominance

the swearing fists in dream
having as their vow a provenance
of all we have, yet do not own and crave, oblivious.


A Treatise on Light 12.

We sold cheap honesty in hearty sales,
glibly confessed in those easy markets
how our failures were taken up, while gales
of honour greeted our blaring trumpets.

We must have had our depths if all else failed.
We crave the truth to cover where we faked it.
Alone in darkness we wooed the Lord with wails
"Here we are God, come and save us . We deserve it."

Then shame came true and left us breathless
cast into self-regard that gave no face
to face and unguessed hollow, a speciousness.
What dragged us into this floodlit place?

What did You touch that something false should cease,
that love should have so sure, such small increase?


Treatise on Light 13.

We blind ourselves with vision, yet starve esteem.
As famine can be worse for storing grain.
Despair sits out our proper love. We drain,
ourselves down, as drought by a bore-hole scheme,
might be assuaged. Should we plumb depths that seem
to promise moisture ? So why do we refrain
from tender talk of our love's past domain?
Time should feed our hunger, flesh the dream.

Love looks for ecstasy and, remembered,
keeps its focus, but stacked hours still bleed grief.
History is a snailshell kept afterward
to show pain stolen by a timeshare thief.
Truth connects truth, even though dismembered,
as dry beds quicken under rain's relief.


Treatise on Light 14


A word is within us awaiting entrance
yet, we make love better unaccomplished,
snow-blind to our features. So abolished,
we grasp theory, as unknown ghosts entrance
our taste for pleasure, still, blinding our chance.
What the hour left of suddeness, finished
in the heart, the quick eye has demolished.
Asleep we pass each other by in trance;
until first light filters through flapping lace
and heroes choke on fiction's subtle boast
I too hate that routine thrill you fear most.
We sell cheap honesty in hearty solace
and blind ourselves out, till its deafening ,
yet a new word is within us, awaiting.


Isobar
Music for Cocteau's Belle et la Bête


1.Overture; The archery contest.

The muscled arm bends to tauten
the scope of a sinew, to release
the power of naked skin aroused again
that the bolt find its lease and yet the force
is yielded to tenderness, is deflected
from the loved one. Those whose care
ease the passage of a message,
though wordless, to its hearer.
The message lives the truth
of ecstasies. She, beauty,
always more precise,
her reactions quicker to match,
or steal, the lover’s restlessness,
seizes him and keep him from sleep.


2. The Sisters Go to the Concert. Fugue

The house is staked out. Its ghosts are rumbled
by agent intellects whose fanatic
hearts would convert phantoms to a humbled
light.With invites in hand the sisters walk the antique
maze and tear out unblessed thought. Now jumbled
fear blinds their hearts and frosts their climacteric.
The tender dance-cards chill and the crumbled
hour evaporates in work's hissed static.
The brothers of birth wear health-care crutches,
led out to vans by Hitchcock-maddened birds
and subconscious chimaeras fled from hutches.
Their procreation blown, beauty stumbles outwards
to the echo of flashbulbs, fine touches,
showing the world's last lovers to the nerds.

3. The Merchant’s Visit, the Beast dreams of Beauty: passacaglia.

You tell me what I am. I dream you.
Image of ravaged loveliness, my blasphemy.
You ask who I am. I hate you.
Overrun, abolished, or stored in alchemy,
that abstract sense is still retrieved anew
to love: plastic, one, sublime and holy
while crossly I lumber in, to view
fanatic shrines of awesome veniality.

Half a lifetime's consent, sharing in dreams
training hourly on love’s rhetoric
has limbered me up for schemes
of such dynamics, studied, lethargic,
that I cannot be distinguished more
Chaos is my habit and love, my lore.


4. First Fruits.The Merchant in the Dark Forest, Adagio

Lethe-wards, time’s plucked fruits,
we cannot live up to each other
on our own, as a favour that suits.
We cannot breathe as one. Shan’t bother
to hold each other’s personhood aloft.
Age carries, skin to skin, like rot.
Times sweet odours make us soft.
It’s better to be lost than be forgot.


5. The Castle at Night: largo

The house is rancous with left-overs:
spent sticker-backs and torn toy-boxes,
with out-lived roles as classroom movers;
those delicate toys, snapped Goldilockses
crushed under adult shoes, blind in the dark.
Junked dust-jackets give mute assent
to titles lost, or stolen, since the ark,
spineless images and the opulent,
chrome cages of birthday creatures
dead, escaped or otherwise dispatched.
Our messy livelihood will yet endure
like a thrilling record-cover detached,
from memory’s dust, that like manure,
wedges dully in grooves, deep scratched..

6. The Statues, minuet: Ante Lucem

Daylight breathes in the dusty warehouse
of our bedroom while we keep this
secret hour before the seizure of
our private lives by stupid business.
There is so little time, save for rough
tactics, such as, when whole towns are flooded,
the undrowned, cherish random household items,
and carry them up to higher, dryer ground,
while unremembered valuables are soaked,
currency mashed up and cash-tills soaped
to flush in the flash tides.
What have we brought
for pleasure, now dawn seeps in on peace we hoard?
Have we time to sort the rubbish from what counts?
You sleep so deliberately, it seems
to cancel the lessening of our lives that
minutes witness to and opportunity ducks down.
Where could we have gone? What could we have done?
What husk was ours that we should end up here,
strangers to our own credentials, pure forgers
of our lives? We are hardened to hard routines.
To see our own futility disgraces
self-esteem, that traitor confidence
we need to conduct our own trial
before the bonehead tribunal of work.
Were they so wrong, those grave dissenters,
who closed down concerts and the theatre,
like statued hands pulling curtains
from the stage to intimidate the crowd?
Images drug our craving to be real,
but elsewhere, always a cruel front-line,
stops us reaching idiot, raw reality
which all our fictions serve to stimulate.
Even the body’s pleasure stings,
with random, sensual flotsam,
rescued from the drowning hour
until daylight rises, in which we make to live.

7. The Merchant Returns, Gavotte.

You only hope, or sleep.
The cost of your futures
yields no concrete return.
Visits to expensive houses,
that intimate closeness
to the wealth sensation,
can still provoke pain:
our own children playing
on the long, slow, green lawns,
clattering through summer
corridors of empty
mansions and the estate
agent impatient to
leave, having learnt our place
in the well-known world. is
unsellable. Or the
sale of glossy tourist
highs, where we found ourselves
starvelings in a big, strong
picture-book world shining
of the high places’ cult.
Where had we been? Elsewhere
Is not that smiling, play?
Where we found it ourselves.
Sometimes is the tenor
of heart. I place my hand
on fleeting certainties;
your slept head, half-hidden
in the pillowed darkness
of this warm night, where, lost,
we lose hold, gaining loss.

8. Family Quarrel, Nativity: Badinage

Lying in on holiday, we listen
for alarms to prove our comfort to-day.
Distant observers, but unbeholden,
we look for frostlight to preview love's stay.
Inattentive, we hoard imperfection.
To come round takes account of past replay:
the gravity of pleasure's disproportion,
unequal to its task. It is Christmas Day.
This time the fragile feast of new-creating
comes by again, without a passionate snow,
or stable-scenes to discount heart-searching.
The house lurches with friends, who will not go.
We rise, rowdy with a peace that re-enacts
through Him, our prefixed, unaffected climax.

9. A Dawn Ride to the Castle. Landler,

First light filters through the trailing lace,
in front of the window frame's fixed pallor
through vibratile curtains winds twist
before the day’s fixed white.
Somewhere a bird auditions for some list
and, uncalled, stops and furls again for night.

Beside me, you sleep in summer-nakedness.
My wakefulness becomes King Winter,
to your cute slumber.
My lips articulate an empty thrall,
while passiveness has stilled
the high leafage of your squall,
a pre-dawn gust
shakes the slack veil,
stirs the down on your midriff,
and rougueish, you move
to the full fanfares.
Blackbird and the muted sunlight
tighten your grasp
on my less-cold
hand, to assert its hold,
and pluck a snow drop
for your flower-laced heart.


10.Beauty’s Entry to the Beast’s Palace: duet

Our bodies lie in naked silence,
that meditation of the skin.
Light, a historical novelist,
warms us, then in near-sleep,
gives in to autobiography.
Your absence clothes me,
as the past has clothed me.

I am a razor-sharp Titto Gobbi.
Shocks from the real will reveal
us in the sudden coma,
to each curer, or carer.
Your voice is Rosa Ponselle
“Vocal gold, with luscious
lower and middle tones
dark, rich and ductile.”
and Callas “brilliant in
the upper register.”
I think of you as Norma,
or the time when you liked to run,
or swim, that unheld effort
with others there too,
despite its being only you.
La Traviata, your graphic image,
that modelled silence,
or La Gioconda,
in juristic shame
all hubris, strip-searched:
a vagrant, you now arrive,
cleaned up.

I will be silent now.
Speech is a second-hand clothing
nakedness, a natural chaos.
Singing the Don, Elvira,
my hands pace outside.
as Ernani, I kiss you
and force you to wake,
Arturo unites us,
taking the best of the roses
without encore.

11. The Mirror: Fugue

The blunt dart, that hisses from stopped rage
on the