Wednesday 3 March 2010

4. Passing the Quiet Word

I found Josephine in Candleford.
She said
-The weather was sweeter, that day,
in the episode with the radical-dress run-away
wife, just before michaelmas.
goose
conkers
-ain’t life a chesnut.

Tenacity is one thing but there are plenty things in the world - I have several lined up like on my oak-panelled ikea bureau: a velvet flannelette, sent me by Paul; a flint, of course from Eastwood’s

collection of rare rocks & mountain artefacts.

-Do you know any arty facts? Susie quietly asked, -I’m only asking.
I didn’t like to reply. I could recount a story about a Mondrian, told me by a Dutch poet. It hung on the wall of a collector. His friends didn’t understand; they replaced the painting with a fake. He never mentioned it. They discussed the painting during dinner. He said he had gone off it. It could never have impressed Susie. Instead I smiled and -Sure.

Subtle glances

lines

primary: colours / instincts / resources.co.uk

We bumped into each other occasionally; michaelmas, the market. I babysat for her one year. She never lost her eyes

‘til she did, one day
and even then she still had it.

-I’d like to look at that Mondrian now, she whispered as she passed me at the cheese stall.

Then in the rain we stood.
The soaked earth
when the helicopter came
turning leaves

fettuccine
farfalle
fusilli
ruote.

we survived the Bremner Pass.

That night you wore your xylophone nightdress

I almost choked on the staircase.

We both agreed the breakfast was poor.

It put us off playing tennis.

Some events from 1546

The Spanish conquer the Yucatan.
Peace is declared between England and France.
Trinity College, Cambridge and Christ Church, Oxford are founded by Henry VIII of England.
Katharina von Bora flees to Magdeburg.

Veronika was in the wings
of love and jealousy

but it is a false ending because it appears they haven’t yet started.

It was all a punch & judy show to some
the ones who had education
those who could read the signs
they who knew these things.

Otto went grey over night that week.

How they laughed at the supermarket
over the names of coffee.

I’m seven feet tall and seven now.

Father is getting concerned

because I haven’t been to confession for such a long time. Possibly years.

I blame it on the windmill fire. The scarcity of wheat.

we watched the two men in the field.

maybe they are discussing tractors.

otto doesn’t love veronika, he loves how her songs remind him of silent cinema. veronika intends a sculptural attitude towards otto; she refers him to taxonomic processes. otto can’t retrieve the password. he stumbles with a door key, his legs gone from above him. veronika runs ahead of herself; there is something in today’s news which recalls to otto’s minds next century’s gang warfare.

this is the hard part. they take him out to the orchard behind the factory & punch him 199 times in the belly. he keeps laughing, they implore him to stop but he doesn’t. he intuited many blows ago he is a construction: of satin corsets, failed nation states, of IMF rescue packages, transcripts of glossolalias. they continue begging him to kiss them.

VERONIKA IS WEARY. HER TEA HAS GONE COLD, HER TEARS HAVE GONE GOLD.

next day’s a day where the sky dripped heavy across the fields that moaned [the] past seen from a railway carriage. couldn’t get the rhyme out of its head. i’m going to tell you something i’ve told you before. I stood beside the Thames & tore your letter into fragrancies & ribbons of toxic sky. then i let myself fall.

But these are musings of a hack muse, if I am to be honest. I am stupidly proud of my love affairs, stupidly proud of having sung g minor as if I had invented it. The truth is that we are at the end of so much and will be until the fade complete. I think of that opera singer who ended up in the castle in Scotland singing to the bats in the rafters. Why didn’t I ever think of that? But where was there to go? I’ve never had money. My ambition was to have my own witches’ cottage and I had it. I had an apartment at the edge of the Park, candlesticks and shells everywhere. All elements accounted for. But I gave it up having dreamed about the polar ice cap melting right there. The last place on earth- I don’t have that kind of courage to huddle around the last Sterno can and paper up the windows. And after all, things were falling out of the sky. It felt as if this might be the last place.
So I moved to my Eastern German style digs with the green glow of the Courthouse behind me

cloud . ancient stone. casino.

We walk the mile long beach.

The voice of Harry Godwin can be heard within this text, as it can here http://hjgodwin.blogspot.com/

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