From From A View To A Death

My children, I have to announce a hiatus

Though sure shan't be long, nor sharply adhered to;

Yet several concepts convene on a gap -

You'll need a wee Prelude, or yet antiPrelude,

So I'll trace it from pretext to fact.

When I came to Oxford - came again to Oxford -

(not as if you'd ever been so far away,

you might say - well fair Slough is an hour and a half)

For some reason I thought that poems must be witty

Like Pope, or beautiful like Byron, but not serious

With sturgeon-like light novelled glory.

And when I resorted to them, it was due

To rejection, by my own journalistic face,

My prose weight, and then, smarting, by you,

Fairest readers to come. How such a lot came

From an appeasing sonnet from Balliol Bar...

And I cannot leave out my one true lover's role,

Who urged me on in envy, more striding than sorrow,

The captain and catcher of dreams - find him here:

www.sammyamjay.blogspot.com

For I felt, sure, he catches them, but then he's puzzled.

He allows them to float about flustered in cages,

And watches, ands loses the scientist's thrill,

Lets experiment drop, and puts it down to nature -

But I want to wright them and would shine them wrought

If my Thorspastic iron hands could only pin 'em.

But the catcher's last dream caught him up good and proper,

And he never now handles that butterfly net.

The centre, the vortex of shaping art guilt

Is now he who was here, I think:

www.ollyrowse.blogspot.com

 - that's not important -

the thing is, that splendid tyke's written a Play

And for sheer Love and Horror I'll crank out one too.

Those form one real reason - now time for some fake ones -

I can't ride with Guido! I'm not in the 'Sphere

I wield no power, not spitfire tins,

But Victorian railings spitespiked and fast rusting.

Well, back to the truth - the BBC offer

Twenty thousand pounds to a short story handler;

And if dreams elude me, maybe I can do coins,

And similar beasties. I shot off some prizes,

Antonio's argosies, then said goodbye

To Melpomene, Thalia, maybe not Clio

(Clio looks like you, Kirsty;

Becky, Euterpe's got your job, but the track record

Of Urania's better, and closer, with Sidney,

Mary Wrath, etc.)

Goodbye to the less than nine scholarly muses:

The anecdote chorus line, damsels sure met

In the forest wide, lucklessly tracked -

For I dreamt a comical story last night,

post too much Northanger:

not brilliant in itself, it folded these lines:

"Have you children?" "Stewart,

I'm a virgin." "So sorry.

Must be awful for them."

Six-Part Madrigal

1

The library at Gesualdo

Encased a cardinal’s cavilling Greek,

Which traced the first states, took issue with Mill

In defining tyranny, where tyrants go,

And who put them there – not vultures, but meek

Citizenry, the championed, men who aspired

To grow behind trellises, happily hired –

Splicing freedom and aphids in one freshened kill

They blooded their soil, to water their dill.

And their champ looks on from his window-ledge.

He’s aware, with a shiver, of that wafer wedge.

2

The prince makes his next choice:

Shopping at Venosa, relishing the line

That was led out to meet him, straightforwardly, twelve,

And of them eight tall, but three fair.

He wears out a man in livery’s high voice,

Separating from men boys, from their kin kine,

Whose task lies beyond barks to stack and to shelve –

They will reign in his country, once shod –

Who champions tyrants? The hand at the rod.

Four will stand, staged, gradated, deployed on the stair,

Oubliette’s lock fastened to a pair,

And that Dolomite club, brackish prevalent tool,

Becomes (vide Starkey) the Groom of the Stole.

3

His confessor froze in alarm

At how little the melody succumbed to calm.

A change was expected – a requiem mass

Nearly paid for, by proxy, at least, come to pass…

But those seculars only got longer and lusher,

Just as whores, branded, will step up their blusher.

Changed in other ways,

The prince keeps far from Naples, within the curt nave

Where he’ll become stone when he dies,

His long handbones crossed at groin, girt.

Nervy credit consents to cut out court farce;

Newly when stained with new panels, he pays.

Guilt fired the fools lodestars crave,

The crucifix slides and the devil’s dam fries,

Though not via hairshirt.

4

The thoughts of defenders, laid on:

What sort of a despot keeps quite a wide farm,

Confines dealings to quavers not caused by decrees,

But by spinets and lutes?

We could personalise fantasy on his tongue:

If a prince and a count is born free,

How can his mane suffer such bourgeois rom-com

As a wife after ‘fulfilment’, a ‘lonely’ rival?

Is this music a great man’s mind’s pelted muck?

Donna Maria, we posit, broke rules

Of Christian wife’s place, of high merit’s desert

With her flirty yoke. Cleave down, recur, blade,

Cleave to repetitiousness of true republics,

Reflower tyrant woman in that mortal hymen,

And wrap duke in juicy democratised princess.

5

Strokes are naïve as brutal:

And people like you always love a red story;

Attracted by horror, you yet spray it white,

‘Till Josef’s a raconteur, Cromwell a card.

But Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa,

And Count of Conza, is pungent for a poet;

His power so petty, his title so pure,

His sphere of action puts fat Harry to shame:

And sensitive too: his use of chromatics

Unknown ‘till his famous admirer, Igor.

Soaring art from repentance bought through little blood,

By Renaissance standards, you’ll aver. But would

You have heard of Gesualdo, were he twice as good

If he’d not sliced Maria and Fabrice so sure?

The artists have fêted the voice for the act,

We’re inclined to suspect. So let’s hear from three.

“This great, if disequilibrated, composer”,

Said Igor; and Aldous afterwards perceived

“That fantastic character out of a Webster

Melodrama” – at least he was honestly in it

For gore.

6

I saw Gesualdo weep,

One night at Ferarra, his new princess

Still, readied for his leap,

Her face too cautious for distress.

Believe me, the damned man wept from his heart,

And I knew now that princes could stab their own art.

The unmoved donna shone,

With such beauty as passion could only distort,

The unruptured mask more befitting the don,

Stern disregard, of a tyrant’s sort.

But when he fell silent and drew himself high

She arranged her young mouth in a sought after sigh.

They say he slew his child,

Testing its lineage on Gesualdo’s stone.

Don’t accuse me of delight in rumour so wild –

This is true reportage in a madrigal’s tone.

Four years ago Carlo killed wife, rival, son,

And so swears your true English lutenist, John.

Washing through

I just want, I lied, to be clean,
Clean beyond stay or delay, clear browed,
Tilting back my sweetened locks to catch the breeze’s curls,
Soft with coldness’s linen imprint, armed with dustless thoughts.

Ideally, thenceforth, I would take the good
Encompassed in my pair of reboots, and I would
Lighten my touch, open my hand, let I be We,
Short-circuit this bedraggled Them as She.

I would like to move by choice,
I desire the freedom to give
Away desires. I want to please the minds I like,
I’d like to like the minds I don’t.

You’d launch me through country air into a pool,
A splash, all-inclusive, an ordering rule,
And my renewed step would be as true, as straight
And crisp as a cheque with our names and the date.

The Chronicles of Narnia, by CS Eliot

It is a combination, and a mixture
Of ways they might have never met, while stumbling
My deeper sense of commandment, and going past,
So going past, nodding at the beige tower, past.
The face of all obedience in Jadis's spire
Might, going past again, compel a passage, much like
Fumigation of the one's old common-room pipe smoke,
The other's butts.


I The Burial of the Dead

A harsh thaw they made of it, melting
Boundaries in spring, in summertime lives,
So sagt mir wo die blumen sind? A coin,
With its mortal majestic composition.
A Lion. And a Unicorn. But the wreathing of those leaves,
I'll tell you, leak their way to there.
Le canevas banal, the wardrobe unparadis'd.


II A Game of Chess

The Chair he sat in, like a burnished cage
Was dimmed by asphalt wrought on lava-glass,
And worked around his wrists in gentle vines,
Soberly looked on by green Puddleglum,
The Marshwiggle of Magdalen's Common Rooms.
Troubled beside the verdant kirtle's shade.
Unguent incense burnt to Lamia's change.

III The Fire Sermon

A gentle prince is pricking on the plain,
The loitering heir, presumptive Caspian,
Musing upon the prince his cousin's birth.
The horse, tired out, recalls another mounting.
Eugenides's spurs, lei lei lei, lei lei lei.
With automatic neck now cranes the boy,
Bold as Lord Leicester, pecks Miss Popplewell.

IV Death by Water

The Talking Mouse Reepicheep sort of drowned
But forgot nothing, brought up liquid, sugared
Civility. The Seven Lords plot
Was rent up in some hasty paragraphs. Enchantment, though,
Reformed elsewhere. Gentile or (Messianic) Jew,
Leave Reep aside; think Eustace Clarence Scrubb,
See what characterization, then, can do.

V What the Thunder Said

The older world's blood sun shows up their blushes
And old fountains with old griffins cannot spew even dust.
There are so many pools; some dry up.
Charn, Felinda, Sorlois, Jerusalem,
London to be as dust when brandy rains down too - so -
Tolosa dolosa - dying Egypt - burst guinea-pigs while ye may -
DA. And I say the sooner the better, as the toffee-tree sprouts page.

Imitation of Propertius XVI

BLUE BOAR GATE

Don’t sneer at me: I’m used for conferences,
Have hosted Conrad famed for horrorshows.
Extended theses stapled fast shot out,
Through my bar-code, dewed with postgraduate sweat.
But now each night the frivolous deface me,
With snow, song, stagnation: thus I cry out,
But my voice falters at Rebecca's keen,
And hacks at butts cast from her chilly palms.
I can’t allay her dreams, nor tame her steps,
Nor pry her from close perturbation,
But nor can she deny her doubt’s ingrowth,
As deadlines deaden passing evenings down.
My code repeated red, announces him,
The long-haul, scrabbling raider, sans supplies.
No more than he unlocks me can I him,
His whine holds real hurt inside its dross.


MINOO

I hate the scuffed old fob and bright metal,
I hate you: where’s your right to slam me back?
How dare such architecture limit me?
Don’t you once recognise redemption’s chance?
Oh, won’t a refuge one night warmly cave
In to my coming, sparing Iffley routs?
Old Tom’s is bought, avuncular as fat,
Harley, Hermes, Kilcanon watched me pass -
But this misnomered annexe spurns me yet,
Abstract, and ugly, lacking statured soul.
If my wrong guesses, triggering their bleeps
Might chirp their mulling on her inner phone,
Though evasive as meaning, light as wit,
Weary as spans, and indistinct as ink,
She’d yet start open barely slept in eyes,
And over all dismay, would laugh, at least.
And sure therewith Katya and Amy mount
Their mirthing fortress; I type to the wind.
Mundane code, only obstacle: well, sole
One that is visible, not in myself.
You chose an obtuse target to frustrate,
Earnest as erring; I could have raised you
To Parnassus of architecture; why
Did you decide to force me to this siege?
I have already beautied you in mind,
Egregious Boar: as an Arne Jacobsen,
A Catzian wonder, I’ve oded you out!


BLUE BOAR GATE

Mannered like that, checking his references,
He turns and leaves to give Mia the next.
This muse is untouched because unaware:
But he’s upset. The boy gone mad, I swear.

Propertius carmen XVI draft 2

'Once I was cast open for massy triumphs,
Like the door of Tarpeia, so famously chaste.
Those gold-inlaid cars thundered right past my porch,
Mildewed with the streams from prisoners’ tears.
Now each night I’m scarred up by the wasters’ scraping,
As their base knuckles hammer, I always complain,
My voice close to choking through putrid love-garlands,
Or sputtering torches, whose bearers she’s quenched.

'I can’t bear, nor yet bar, her bordello soirees,
Those wits on her guestlist who smirk at my frame,
But nor can she pretend a frail shred of honour,
For in foulness she can keep in step with the times.
Penned ‘twixt truth and truth that lead moan pins me down,
A sadder blocked suitor – long queuing, long lost.

'I can never unwind, hinges neither, by him,
For his words are as bitter as (I confess) sweet.

'"So, door, crueller door, at bottom, than she,
Why to me are you dumb, granite-hard, slammed clam-tight?
Why not loosen your latch and requite my amours?
Don’t you know what to do when you’re slipped a good word?
Won’t this appeal of mine be ceased, ever,
By any grant, except a stony, rough rest?
I lie in night's caress, I know the stars’ grasp,
I’m grieved by cold daybreak, coldly grieving for me -
You alone keep inhuman, never lean to man’s comfort,
Unfazed, ever kind as a Trappist confessor...

'"O, if only my whimper, thrust through some covert leak,
Might strike first at her lobe, hammer, anvil, and drum!
Allow then for the chance that rock Sicily's softlier,
That she puts to scrap iron, obsolesces steel,
She could not yet manage to dim those bright eyes,
Her heart would lurch up in raped sighs and wrenched tears.

'"But softly now – soft she is draped on his shoulder,
And my words whip up only a slight nightly breeze.
If you’re not my sole block, you are yet the nearest,
As you’ll never be conquered by my tributes, door.

I’m not like the others – for I never mocked you
In a lampoon – no poet so honoured dull wood;
So why do you freeze me out, rasping and pleading,
As I keep up my regular back-alley vigils?
I’ve made, you should know, you such ground-breaking poems,
Stooped down, I have kissed your worn step’s every inch,
I’ve brought you prized offerings, with low devotion!"

'Stuff like that, known by rote to all you lovestruck wretches,
He gasps out when he’s finished me to puzzled larks.
So what with her teasing, and the lover ever
Soaking cheek, step and air, I foresee no end.'

Rider's Fable

One slap on his slab of a broad slovened back
Barged him onto a saddle and back into glee.
He stared round the King's Horse, and the King's Horse's horses -
Bright rumtinted men, coursers' limpid grave eyes -

"Wilt thou ride?" said the Colonel to tall Williamson,
"Ay, perhaps." "Well, but take him too." "Ay..."
"Yes, we'll ride," said the rider,
That rider to be.

And Williamson, taller than he, laughed less loud,
And as they walked back through prompt, apt winter cloud,
Muttered "Damn you! The Devil! What made you say ride?"
"The joy of the hour - take heart", rider cried.

And walked rider stoutly across mundane marsh,
And he rammed on the oakhold and yelled "Woman" out,
"I'd have now your pasty, I'd take now your pleasure,
And fain would I steer you, curved from a harsh dawn."

"The pasty is cold, for I don't take your meaning."
"Then tip me some liquor and I'll make that clear."
"What clear and what liquor?"
"The ichor of parting -
Sold high with my Colonel
Tomorrow I'll ride."

"That you won't," smarted lady.
Rider: "Am." Lady: "Aren't".
Rider - "Bread up my saddle"
Lady - "Saddle? God knows
It's a bridle thou'rlt keen for before even sits."

Rider belted the lady,
And reddened himself,
Kicked Williamson, buckled his edged life-preserver,

And watered, provisioned and marched
To the public house - ever "I'll ride!"
For he'd pluck the most hardened prayermen from their stooling
For the joy of the bawling "Dost thou hate me? I ride!"

But before even sat, limped single to woman:
"'Tis fear lone can salvage the flailings of pride."