Nine silences for a friend

I
Please listen carefully
I speak quietly
Of very small things
which could not change my life
or heal my soul. But which
Twist and soar in their own joy,
large enough to share some
at the rest of us, such as:
How I knew I was at rest at last
and not danger, how I recognised
my past and was suddenly so
not at war with truth but admit
the pierce of sunlight into dusty
book-room.

Please tread softly and slowly
For this moment is scared of sudden
movement and should not have its spell
broken. Listen to this stilled air
of perfect knowing ourselves, because
our clumsy voices are finally listening
as loud as speech; that said,
Here is the symbol and the end of
understanding, here is lazy ease,
thick and heavy as bone should be
to be the final symbol.

I have had weight inside
and know that life’s completion:
this small voice asks
very happily
not for revolution or
New Mystical Knowledge Of The Ancients
but instead says,
these were some small things
that got thought by me
and that I have now told you
and that can’t make anything
better but can quietly be themselves
and with you.

II
Here we are again
In my small safe space.
I wanted to invite you to
have one for yourself.

You can see the speech
hang in the white air, here
and be accustomed to your own ideal
and stillness can allow weak

bluster to seep away alongside
snide pretence born, we know it,
of fear, and for me I am no longer
anything I need worry for.

I see you live on the world and
with and for it and under it
and I hurt when you stumble
and rage when you hurt.

All this is simple. But some of it
is possibly true and possibility can
be kind to us sometimes if
we can bring ourselves to let it.

III
I have no muse or useful
psycho-illogical back-flip
powering the writing forward but….

I have made every false
start before and maybe again
all because of the urgency of
rain and the kindness of strangers
stapling my soul into a
crumpled sheaf, an extraneous leaf
who’d feel better in a textbook than
in Mills & Boon or Irvine Welsh
but falls like a page of Python
in a world of pain

But then I open.

IV
So the work is, what,
an indifference? Rather everything else
that doesn’t not care but from
maybe this illusory altitude and
very still where the winds of change
have not been grouped together

we have allowed the sun to rise on
an agreement, celestial Canutes,
knowing our powerlessness and so proving
ourselves in harmony in some way
as yet unknown to Gossip Science
or that vague beery clarity when it
is as simple as a fist to solve things.

I cannot bear that I have had to
come away in this direction so far
from so many of you. And I cannot
bear to return and then leave once more
to be again alone. But when I walk
away I do so knowing love & affection
to be truth and my need for them also
leads me away from those others who were
never self-confidence or extraversion
or capacity or any of the other things
(which were not so very other)
that I tried to make them be.

Hopeless naming names or describing colours.
I would rather hold you dazedly as
this stormy sea brings in joy & fear
and I would still rather help you out
very timidly but the voyage is not mine to take.

V
This poem will not try to be anything
which it is not.

VI
I have wandered around the house
looking for this poem.
I could not find these words.

(If these are the words I could not find,
around whose house did I wander?)

VII
I have never estimated
the value of precision or
the shying away from the
precipice. I have made a
virtue of navigation and so
I know I will go off well
desert-isolated and not hurt you.
Now these roads are well-worn
as am I
and I am granted a spring of the
soul to draw light forth from the
dappled branches and see the mirror
from a different angle. Where I
should be, stands someone else. I am
unfamiliar and hatchling. I am not
ever very far beyond this.

So onwards and inwards is the
difficult mission to make
and to return having learnt
the value of stopping, or How
Not To Fear Imperfection.

VIII
Sullen silences are not those
at peace with themselves
but they happen more:

the pause between the question and
the answer
for calculation

the silence between the lightning and
the thunder
in which the explosion gathers itself
blanketing other sound
sealing it up, soaking it up
to finally form itself.

or the instant response to the
news of his death
… what? (lost.)

IX
Rare silences flower and
cannot be examples but
must be moments trapped
in the mind’s rose-tinted amber.

So this perhaps florid recommendation
is just that, not wanting nor able to be an exemplar.

And these very careful words
very carefully
want you to follow them
to where for a split
second it is quiet and safe
and you can think.

Paleface maiden is Miss Popov
Known to us as Mighty Sneezer.
She may sneeze and blow your top off –
Treat her gently, do not tease her.

To this day, I can’t find the link between teasing and sneezing. Oh, hang on.

Anyway, had a nostalgic sniffle around IMDB and Wikipedia and found out that Michael Stanniforth (write the theme tune, sing the theme tune….) who also played Mr. Claypole, very sadly passed away in ’87. That’s made me quite glum: I attribute much of my present sense of humour to the low camp of Rentaghost, of which he was a splendid, appropriately mugging exponent. Hmph.

I, no more real than evil in my roof
Speak at the bliss I pass I can endure
Crowding the glen my lintel marks,
Speak in this room this traffic builds
About my chair and table for my nature.
I feel the glass collide with light and day.

Outside this lull is happening the young
Who cough their stories in the curving siding.
I, no more real than my enclosure
Devise my eye to irrigate my love
For where the slates slew down my roof
The sky tilts back its shingle with no sign.

From inward through my window’s needle eye
Children cartwheel from prison in procession
And stage their fear on mulls of rock
And build boundaries with ochre bricks.
Thunder falls round the fieldmice and the house.
Through all the suburbs children trundle cries.

I, no more real than when my hill of head
Finds evil in my dredged up heart,
Press down my padding question on the floor.
What things the young will take for song or grief.
The flagstone under sky is canopy
For other air where other thunder falls.

I work all day and hardly drink at all.
I can reach down and feel if I’m depressed.
I adore the Creator because I made myself
and a few times a week a wire jags in my chest.

Tutto il giorno lavoro e non bevo mai
se tocco terra so che sono depresso.
Il Creatore adoro perché ho fatto me stesso
e alcune volte la settimana un filo elettrico mi corre nel petto.

The Italian rendering backtranslates (roughly) as

All day I work and never drink
If I touch earth I know that I’m depressed
The Creator I adore because I made myself
And a few times a week an electric wire runs in my chest

The rhyme-scheme is swapped, which I’ll survive, because I don’t know enough about the formal qualities of Italian poetry to say whether it’s a good idea or a bad one; but I dislike the second line. In Murray’s words, he is, first, able to reach down and feel; then he plays on “if” as a synonym for “whether”, giving at least two readings: “If I am depressed, I am able to reach down and feel”, “I am able to reach down and [thereby] feel whether I am depressed [or not]“. In the Italian, unless I’m just making this up, which I suppose is possible, the first clause is subordinated to the second which becomes the principle effect of the line (“I know that I’m depressed, if I touch earth”).

And (this evening, I shall be parataxis boy) “e tu non puoi fare niente” in the tenth stanza would be to my mind better rendered by “e niente che puoi fare”, not only because it preserves the grammatical ambiguity in the English (“It is life roaring and racing and nothing you can do” rather than “It is life that roars and that races and you can’t do anything”) but also because, at least to my foreigner’s ear, it scans better. In my attempt, the meaning also builds along the line in the same way: you reach that point when you’ve read “It is life roaring and racing and nothing”, which, given the poem (has he read it?) sounds like a fair enough assessment. Choosing “you” rather than “nothing” seems negligent by virtue of its own non-nihilism. (Retires from high horse, admits he’s beyond his depth.)

All of this of course is an excuse for my hideous, embarrassing, dare-I-say “rather A-Level” failing to notice the deviant quotation from East Coker in, er, well, um, Mop Mop Georgette, the Denise Riley Slim Vol containing the poem for which this blog is named. ( “The poetry does not matter” says Eliot; Riley replies: “Who anyone is or I am is nothing to the work.” “the mind is conscious, but conscious of nothing” under ether, Eliot notes, and Riley responds that “no that’s not me, it’s just | my motor running”. Eliot writes East Coker, Riley cried for shame: “O great classic cadences of English poetry | We blush to hear thee lie | Above thy dark and dreamless.”)

I’m beginning to think I should have stayed in bed this morning.