Events Out of Time
"...there is properly no history;
only biography".
- Emerson
The sound of rain falling
outside
& the death of
Caesar
- two events pinned
on this paper like two
butterflies on a board.
Today, 15th July 1975, I found a few scraps of paper, pages from someone's diary:
28th November 1970: (5.12pm) Something tipped into a dish
19th January 1971: A reflection skids across the wall
26th December 1972: Wind lifts the rhodedendron leaves
28th May 1973: Three of us in a cave, under a blanket, rain pinching our legs, mist settling like a soft white swan
17th June 1974: On the train I sat opposite an old lady who'd been to her brother's funeral: "There were eight of us, now there are six, and one's dying. They're all fading away". All through the journey she spoke slowly against nature and the arbitrary fate of growing old instead of dying.
Where are those days now? What happens to the years? Are they piled & stacked somewhere? Are they kept clean & tidy, or do they grow fat with layers of dust? Does the dust fall on them now, as I write, or does it fall on them then in their own time?
Was it yesterday that disappeared? Or today?
Or does nothing disappear - everything at every moment being re-absorbed by what is?
"Nothing disappears. We're
never limited by time, only
by our understanding"
- Heinrich Wohl
Sentimental Incidents at the Turning of the Year
051172
Things happen that way. You go through a thicket. You get
cut. Your skin shreds. Your bones exposed white as the
thigh they inhabit.
But skin heals. Scars slowly move. Bones hide. Thighs
open & are again inhabited.
071172
Don't blame the hawk laying eggs on clouds.
Mist merged fused. We aren't. We've lost track. Parts
break loose. Looking at ourselves from our Self. One of us
stops spinning. Other spins alone, looks out, fragment,
scrap. Dreams alone for two, thinks up problems for two, is
a problem for two. Limb. Splinter. Gone. Lost. Trace. No
reply. Grey all over dream. Desert. Deserted.
Cold heart, cold fire, slow passage through empty rooms.
261272
Looking up!
AM firefern
molehills, molehills, molehills
dogyap out of sight
wind lifts darkgreen rhodedendron leaves -
lightgreen virgins underneath
room creaks, Keith brushes his teeth
thinking of her miles away in every way
cauterised with fleshsmoke, fleshspoke: "piss on
them all, who cares which way we fall
knobs of bracken, the odd loose leaf
all paths lead everywhere
sit under a tree, try to forget
281272
AM looking up the garden
more molehills!
7.30PM motorway petroleum city
Botticelli hair - Venus - Spring Coils & curls
11.30PM dogs howling canine chorus
mild, even warm, night - some wind, not much
clothes half out of case, christmas cards on table,
toothbrush,
boxes of paper
after more than the rudimentary mechanics -
listening fingering
caress
now yelping out there, a puppy perhaps? I wonder
if they get scared
of the dark? monsters? giant collars with false
teeth?
291272
AM peering through condensation into fog, brown tangled
ferns, jutting pines, geese next door
think I'll take a walk over the hill or go shopping
tuft of hair spiked on barbed wire jewelled with
dew
mist in the quarry - bottomless immeasurable
overflowing empty
now shopping - stiff new dungarees!
301272
AM plastic Christmas tree - real FIR - white smoke
TICKing clock
big white sun through silver branches
dice on the table ONE FOUR
FOUR
FIVE SIX
wearing new dungarees, water dripping from old
jeans on the line
a time to soak, a time to hang & dry
sun so bright on wet road I can't look
shouts at the dog
almost midday
and on the same table:
two bowls with green hyacinths in each, three-piece
stainless steel condiment set, rack of table mats,
ashtray, Swiss chocolate liqueurs, box of dates,
one crisp dead leaf, bottle of liqueur, large vase
of tulips & friesias, photo of a dog, souvenir tray,
mammoth birthday card from someone sweet to someone dear,
medium-sized birthday card, cigarette lighter, two
Christmas cards, a small card with holly & candles,
a pile of Christmas cards,
azelia in a wooden bowl, chlorophytum capense
variegatum & poisettia & begonia rex &
tradescantia in a hollywood bowl, fatshedera in a
pot
& it's a quarter past midday, time to eat
010173
12.45am. clean my teeth, get to bed, New Year's Day already!
Midday empty bowl, tap on, tap off, bowl overflowing
1.00pm. one flapping black leaf on a heavily pruned bush
Keith on his motorbike chased by four dogs round
& round the lawn
Charnwood Forest, once
Watching a bee enter the mouth of a foxglove, lips, shivering wings
Wind touches gravel peak, tips of beeches, strokes
the lawn, turns the head of a daisy, enters the beak
of a sparrow, curls under the eaves, vibrates around
the singing robin & glidesover my skin like the
breath of a sleeping dragon
Place Sense of being at home Abode Nest
No paths lead here A hole in the forest
Rocks coming to rest, granite slabs balanced against each other.
Rotting blanket tied to sticks covering openings of cave mouth, like
a loose wrinkled lip. Toothless grotto. Earth womb. Spiders. Half-
digested leaves. Communal industry
To make a den, somewhere to sit & be anything, play ghosts, have
fears, go bear, cry, howl, tremble at the tilt of sunlight through
cobwebs & flies' wings
Quarry, no quarry
Trees reclaiming sheer rockfaces. Cracked dusty
belly
Nature dissolves, excavations in rain, seeds, gorse, birch, mosses,
grass, heather, broom, fern
Skin burning, trees hissing, water bubbling in the stomach of this
house
Vertigo
Thursday evening
& the rain falls into Friday
morning, just like snow falls into spring sunshine
or again
as fish falls into fishing
so this falls
headfirst
into
more than just
meaning
Charnwood Forest, again
Bare feet through hillocks of grass, on rock, in birchbark ash, small
fire, sun through windy banches.
Last few hours of this stay - no end to change, transformations,
variations of leaf and light - soon roofs, walls, cracks in concrete
only a few years old, will be dug up and relaid with fresh mix.
How does broom get its yellow
from grey rock, dusty soil?
Ghosts rise. Splintered logs. Owls nest in my ears, they gaze
both ways across night spaces between tree and tree. Shrews
parting blades of grass like oak churchdoors.
No rest between clouds of yellow smoke and blueless hills
sweating in dusk. Flies with no loss of horizon's speech.
So to the quarry's edge, stars twinkling across its throat.
Rusty old cars, bikes, tin cans, comics flaking every few weeks,
mass decreasing, giving themselves to the earth which takes like
it'd never eaten or been kissed before.
And ghosts of suicide rocks have no wings, lie low, spin roots into
other worlds to trip you, catch you falling nowhere, never saying
anything save a leaf floating on the moon in a shallow pool.
*
Memories & imaginings: distant train, voice, vehicles, memories of
friends, students, running in the park, waking up and not getting out
of bed, sweat, long meetings in a circle slowly traversed by
sunlight, and here now the closing door, steel buckle, sheaves of
notes, stooks of fairytales in a field of daydreams, milkmaids
hitching up cream to their knees, running too fast for anything but
imagination, nodding head, floating hand, eyes like lighthouses.
Infinity stretches inwards as well as outwards, no centre as well as
no rim, only turning itself quite still and perfect.
The Dark
"Man is his own star, his own
compass, navigating through his
own shadow, our fatal shadows
that walk by us still."
- Beaumont & Fletcher, Epilogue
to Honest Man's Fortune
"I'm afraid of the dark. The dark is more than darkness, it is as if it were some THING that cast a shadow but was itself a shadow. I've had nightmares all my life. I used to wake up screaming, now I manage to control my fear a little. Going out to the forest I meet the Dark. I walk into him. His shadow is myself. The various parts of his body are the various parts of my response to him. Near his heart the sound of my blood pounding and roaring deafens us both. When I tread on his spine my backbone trembles. At one moment he is a bush, at another he's a biting wind. Sometimes he digs a hole right under me and I fall, at other times he brushes his fingers across my forehead. Sometimes, even in the middle of the day, he visits me - he imitates my mother's voice and calls me when she's not there, he barks like a dog, he runs across the corner of my eye but disappears when I turn to look at him."
Natural Cycle
At the root of it all there's still the whispering crumb of soil, which, flowering, becomes last days of Pompeii, or genius, dead right out of itself, blooms into another Shakespeare. |
