If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song
Louis MacNeice
© Graham Bowers 2019
All rights reserved
Warmest thanks to artist Mina Geisler for permission to use her drawing of the Nikolaikirche with the poem 'Train to Hamburg'
Published by BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, Stockholm, Sweden Printed by BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt, Germany
ISBN: 9789178516032
When we were children on our summer holidays
we'd go down to the River Tees
to scramble on the rocks, scoop for minnows
and bullheads in home-made nets,
and skim stones, trying to get them over
from our side – Durham – into Yorkshire.
The rear-view-mirroring strangeness of being
so much older now: eyeing, though front to back,
the disparate pieces tiled into the mosaic,
and the crumbling cracks between which separate and fix.
Some stones simply broke the surface and dropped without grace,
swallowed at once by the gurgle, drag and flow.
Some were well-enough chosen, well-enough thrown,
to skim and skip, looking like joy
heading for freedom, to skate and lift before being lost
to view. And now I'm on the other side
of all the years – of all they've held
and all they haven't
held,
and I wonder, did I get myself across.
I was staring at this piece of paper,
and the piece of paper was staring back,
going, "Here I am, white and empty,
so go on, show me the colour of your black."
But I looked at it in a spirit of refusal;
if nothing needed saying, why then write?
The whiteness kept on trying to taunt me,
and I kept trying to keep out of the fight.
You might think in the end the paper won
when it forced these graphite scratchings into sight.
But all those quiet gaps between the shapes
and round the edges, where it's still: the black
is often just encroachment on the white.
We similarly think life's what gets done,
and view the non-doing lacunae as fallow space.
But our senses are beguiled by fuss and facts
and footprints are a flat and narrow trace:
what someone is is in between the acts.
Bellwether, touchstone:
I hereby summon you.
Yardstick, wishbone:
help me to come true.
Pole star, milestone:
let me find a way.
Dice cup, knucklebones:
what has fate to say?
Arrow-head, tally-stone,
score of blood and tithe,
dowsing rod, backbone,
gravity and tide.
Linchpin, flint-stone:
hold me with a flame,
Rune stone, carved bone:
bring me an old name.
Ridgepole, keystone:
grip the brick and beam.
Plumb line, whetstone:
keep me straight and keen.
Ratchet wheel and millstone
dole the mete of time.
Shadow thrown and crossbones
guard the final line.
Autumn,
season of renewal, growth,
root-feed, reconnection,
in being a move away, or rather in,
from distraction, from easy warmth
and pleasing lap and dapple, towards
the harder-edged rule of the intrinsic.
Wind-snap, leaf-drop, colour-slip attune us
to the truer shape of trunk and limb.
Winter,
season of renewal, growth,
focus, reconnection
with the unadorned mechanisms of time,
a move down and in to the world
where words reassume their weight,
an anchoring, a submission
to the unflattering elements
from which all constituting begins.
Spring,
season of fission, fracture,
a foaming pull that
dislocates, disconnects,
with its dizzying promises
(buds cracking, leaves spitting into sight),
distraction from kernel and skeleton,
moorings loosening,
as surface and event move in.
Summer,
season of dazzle and disconnect,
of sating stasis clad as motion
infiltrating artery and lung,
overdosing the moment with promises
of sunbeam and wave
that unfocus and unanchor, unpicking
separate stillness and fusing everything
in sweep and surge and skin.
When one and one was two,
and two was me and you,
it felt so easy to be and do
everything.
Now one times one is one,
today, tomorrow, alone,
the fact you're gone and gone
undoes everything.
My definition of people who are successful,
she said, is those who have developed the skill
of living themselves like a kite:
knowing when to pay themselves out
so they can rise and dip with the currents, swerve on the winds,
strain, range loose, take what takes them, loop and swing,
free-form geometry, all lines latent curves,