Fluid

FLUID

The riverside

manor we reached by a wet morning's ride.

They lent us towels as we went inside.

The moistened scene 

of 50s children's stories that had been

more in Clare's childhood than mine, the dark green

leaves sheltering 

our locked bikes from the low sky watering

July, most of the trip, even that thing

when the day cleared

briefly, the undrained bike path by a weird

reflection momentarily appeared

swimmer-deep under-sun waterway-blue;

not bike then but canal boat or canoe.

'Fluid' was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's book 52: write a poem a week.Start now.  Keep going (Rugby: Nine Arches Press, 2015); the prompt in question was to write a poem about water.

The riverside manor is the old house at Hemingford Grey that was the setting for Lucy Boston's book The children of Green Knowe.  The undrained bike path is the bridleway alongside Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, and the visit is one that wife Clare and I paid to Hemingford Manor by that route in July 2011.

I posted 'Fluid' to the Places of Poetry map in October 2019.  Places of Poetry I strongly recommend to passengers or walkers who are finding a long journey tedious.  Look on PofP and see what poems have been inspired by places you pass through!

Illegal deposits

THE SEARCH

dare spend night condemned flat.  Online I found
no July game of public schoolboys scaling
a tower block's Heras fence, grazed to the ground,
hot on the concrete steps, higher each railing;

no afterwards: not ninepenny rainbow,
not weeping for the darkness in man's heart;
no record of the night -- what aged them so,
a great adventure from or at the start?

No bad deposits made in lack of water,
no newspaper, eerie from being old,
no noises for the night not getting shorter,
no one they met, and nothing they were told.

So probable, this tale, not mine to break.
Do you remember it? What is your take?

UNFESTIVE

The phrase "a lot of food"
means more food in the sentence
"We've laid in a lot of food for Christmas"
than in "He'd spilt a lot of food down his jersey."
Poignant the difference in tense.

A SPURIOUS CRIME

Ears pinch "e-legal", and the users know
libraryspeak's not theirs to understand,
when copyright means something else.  They go
and make do with the beige-flagged contraband.

CURIOUS

Deposit -- deposition -- kings invite
put-down, counter-claim.  Did your sudden flight
involve such terrors?  Had someone had sight
of things you'd done that didn't match your fight?
What came?  Visit, phone, email, small-hours fright?
Still mystery, twelve years on -- day of night.

The above poems are my contributions to Illegal deposits, a small anthology of writing by staff at libraries within Cambridge University and the colleges.  The anthology was the brainchild of Simon Halliday and features cover artwork by Clare Trowell. It includes a contribution by Adam Crothers, whose debut volume Several deer (Carcanet, 2016) won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. 

To get your copy of Illegal deposits, contact Simon Halliday on snjh2[at]cam.ac.uk.

Choice of words

CHOICE OF WORDS

‘Working’ is shorter,

saves syllables, characters.

‘Working’ as gerund/

participle/adjective

does ‘profession’ plus most things.

Is ‘professional’

training? taking payment? class?

viring between those?

Oh, the viring. Slippery.

Weasel word, professional.

I plan to retire

and be a working poet.

Working works, say I.

Mind, that’s aspirational.

I am not talking class here.

The above poem made it to the 'Highly commended' list in the 2019 Hastings Litfest competition.

I hope to blog more frequently over the next few weeks, having posted several works to the 'Places of poetry' online map and thus made them ineligible for further entry in competitions.  Watch this space.

Four haiku and a tanka

GLUM HAIKU 

Doubly sad to see
long-buried hatchets dug up
with such clumsy haste.

LIBRARY GRIEF 

Sno-pake whites out "Ice"
in the index to one class
of the Bliss schedule.

LIFE-PROCESSING BUGS 

Wrong ends, touchiness,
perverse mutability,
and amnesia.

MUSICAL ALLUSION 

"Those farewell chords are
from Strauss' Alpine symphony"
 -- your note, twelve years back.

COUNTING BATS

Dusk in the garden;
the house like a photograph
of murders or ghosts.
Dimly grouped amid midges
we murmur, thirty-three, -four...

Today, according to the hashtag, is Haiku Poetry Day.  The haiku above were written in an access of them in the autumn of 1995, and published in Cou-cous 10.  Follow the label for others from the same batch.

The "farewell chords" referred to are the mountain theme of Richard Strauss' Alpine symphony. What I, synaesthetically, see through them is a red sun, probably rising not setting, over a very steep city -- Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds -- and a small group of people mourning a visionary who has just died. 

Another hashtag tells me today is Bat Appreciation Day.  The tanka 'Counting bats' is of the same vintage as the haiku.  A kinsman had at that time a great enthusiasm for bats, and gathered a number of us in the garden to count them as they flew out from the roof at nightfall.  Murders and ghosts, I'm happy to say, were completely lacking from this event, and their presence in the tanka is excused solely by poetic licence.  Remembered dusk is two spaces for the imagination.

Than to arrive

THAN TO ARRIVE

It's partly true.  Arriving at

the bed and breakfast hours too soon,

unsweating, unached, unexhausted,

unthirsty -- that's a lot of un.

But post-concert bike home through snow,

cashless, phoneless, with frozen brakes,

and feet swollen in new shoes,

call-boxes that nobody makes 

for, nobody makes good, the first

dark and stripped of tech, half a mile

with feet and bike to the next (in light --

will it work?).  Reverse charge push-dial

instructions in Australian voice.

Did you, or I, not hear the sound

of the other speaking? Try again.

We had at least one further round

before somehow my phone box got 

your mobile with all this striving.

We fixed to meet at a spot nearby.  

You hung up and started driving.

Let me say and be senten-

tious that arrival had it then.

This is the first poem I've blogged from the output stimulated by my following Jo Bell's book 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  I succeeded in writing 52 poems from the prompts in the book!  I took sixteen months, so this was a poem every 11 days, not one a week, but that represents a tripling of the output rate I'd had before.  I don't expect to keep it up.

The 52 prompts in the book are a most varied yearful.  'Than to arrive' was written in response to prompt 29, for a poem relating to a proverb.  The adventure in the poem took place in England, which is why the  Australian voice in the automated instructions was more or less unexpected.

Long-time readers of this blog will know my fairly strict rule of not putting poems on it unless they have already been published elsewhere.  'Than to arrive' is in The possibility of living: poems from Poetry Space Competition 2018.  Buy it.  I find myself in very good company.

Delius and Gershwin

A CONCERT

Yes –

putting Sea drift with Porgy and Bess

worked like an unexpected rhyme.

Loss, self-deceit, eastern seaboard

made their shared chord.

The above was written in 2004, after a Cambridge Philharmonic Society concert featuring the two works mentioned.  It earns its place in this blog, let me admit, by virtue of self-publication.  I fielded it using the #losslit hashtag on Twitter.  It did well compared with my tweets in general, if not compared with other people's #losslit tweets, so I offer it now.

I have found a seam of creativity by following the book 52: write a poem a week.  Start now.  Keep going by Jo Bell. My rate of production hasn't come to one a week -- after nearly a year I've only just got on to number 37 -- but the book's prompts include published poetry that has opened several new planets to explore.

How I learned to ride a bike

THE WALL AND THE STABLE DRIVE AND THE LANE AND THE NEXT VILLAGE

I learned biking late, and later still

heard how aged six, not understanding brakes,

I'd crashed against a wall. Eleven years,

while that unlearn eluded memory,

cycling balance eluded me too, made

bicycles a phobia. But –

"Rode Hugh's moped" is in my diary.

Not why, or who came up with that idea.

A stable drive was long enough for me,

longer than any pushbike I could fear.

For months, I risked no balancing on wheels.

Urged to a Christmas job some roads away,

too far for bus or walk, and to these skills,

I tried my sister's bike on Boxing Day.

The moped ride had not been fluke or fake.

I whizzed to the next village down the lane.

Uphill I found was harder. It would take

longer and the straight line was extra strain.

My ageing feet now say "Walk bad, bike good."

The prequel crash continues to elude.

The above was my contribution to the 26 Memory Maps project.  The map I drew for it is this:

The 26 Memory Maps project was the brainchild of Neil Baker (no relation).  Taking part in it did me a lot of good as I convalesced from a knot of health problems in the summer of 2017.  At the time of blogging, cycle journeys are again out of bounds for reasons of convalescence.  I have been putting this time to good use by following another creative project.  Work produced under that other project will be blogged, according to my usual rule, as and when it gets published.

Meanwhile, take a look at 26 Memory Maps.  50 contributions besides mine!