travelling // arrival

Tags

2016, 9*, arrival, attention, awkward, black, blue, breathing, calves, Carol, clouds, co-ordinate, ears, eye, fields, groundlessness, hedge, horizon, identity, karma, leaves, letting go, notice, passing, sky, smell, teeth, thread, time, travelling, white, wind, wind turbines

                travelling – no theme

                when the wind blows
                leaves turn and follow like
                dislocated jazz-hands

                everything is parting
                and passing all around
                … me (is that the theme?)

                I can’t find what to
                think or notice; in the
                corner of my eye a

                small black creature
                keeps pace, stretched in
                leap over field, through

                hedge, unspite, imhindered,
                depossibly, gathering
                everything in disregard;

                bit between molars (for
                weeks, for days?) wedging
                teeth slightly awkward

                has just worked loose;
                there are skies, there,
                certainly, high, silky

                and whipped, and then
                blue-coagulated drifting
                like a fleet, like calves

                crossing fields ears
                waving, as wind blades
                heave beyond hill horizon

                I conjeal            myself
                in notice, relieved with a
                thread and co-ordinate

                where for to breathe
                again but having lost
                so much more that I

                never had; Carol shuts
                the Kindle and leans; I
                smell her warm head

                for miles – arrival

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

attention wormhole: before any writing
black & blue wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
breathing & groundlessness wormhole: is this it // all the time
Carol & clouds & sky wormhole: Christmas 2015
hedge wormhole: free
horizon & white wormhole: looking ahead
identity wormhole: without any buffet at all
leaves wormhole: Batgirl –
letting go wormhole: “I need help”
passing wormhole: I am not yet ready
smell wormhole: St. Edmund’s / Parish Church / Castleton
time wormhole: looking / ridiculous
travelling wormhole: Tara mantras
wind wormhole: after all

 

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looking ahead

Tags

2015, 20th century, 8*, age, attention, cypress, dark, daughter, dress, duty, eyes, facade, father, field, fields, green, hair, horizon, house, jaw, land, left, lifetimes, medals, mouth, portrait, Remembrance, sienna, sky, smile, standing, war, white, youth

                                                looking ahead

                at 18 he peered frightened and gentle –
                the high forehead and round jaw of all
                his youth, but that his mouth held duty

                faintly pursed on the left, in reserve and
                to attention, although the epaulettes were
                (the wings of a choirboy) – at the strips

                and strips of field and fields of umber
                and sienna and the deepest darkest green,
                as high as the land was wide, and it was

                wide, to the white-washed house perched
                on the higher horizon flanked by European
                cypresses, at home in the fields; at three

                she looked above the horizon, hair in all
                direction to the sky, the purse to the left,
                in attention and wan smile from above

                the ruffled dress (soon to be outgrown with
                every crumple-ene); the medals were worn
                on the left side, the eyes up to the right;

                they stood together to attention, in profile
                before the wet facades of eleventh hour,
                eyes forward, eyes down, pursed and still

 

three photographs in the house of an old friend: her father when newly enrolled in the army shortly before World War II – he served in Africa; herself in her then-best dress in the very early 1960s; father and daughter standing on a wet street collecting for Remembrance Day …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
attention & smile wormhole: dear Lucy
daughter wormhole: mother and daughter
eyes wormhole: addictive
father & lifetimes wormhole: granny
field wormhole: walk from Castleton to Hope
green & white wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
hair wormhole: immeasurable love
horizon wormhole: Bexhill 140215
house wormhole: slightly / uphill
mouth wormhole: over-pink cagoule
sky wormhole: low afternoon
war wormhole: memorial

 

Bexhill 140215

Tags

1920s, 1935, 2015, 5*, ageing, balcony, Bexhill, de la Warr Pavilion, eating, grey, horizon, line, looking, model, photographer, poem, portrait, promenade, red, sea, sun, waiting, wife

                                Bexhill 140215

                                sugar blues necksweat
                                I need to manage what I eat
                                as I age
                sitting in the de la Warr Pavilion café est. 1935

                                looking for a poem
                                between the clean lines on the balcony,
                                … waiting
                for his wife, trying the zoom lens onto the promenade

                                of a photographer
                                trying positions of his model
                                in fashion-red
                hooded coat and flower heads on her hat from the 1920s

                                on the sun-grey sea
                                with wide horizon

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

grey & sun wormhole: Cocktails in 1951
horizon wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
looking wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
promenade wormhole: London Hearts – poewieview #4
red wormhole: leaves
sea wormhole: concordance
waiting wormhole: just

 

‘God, who am I …?’

Tags

2014, 20th century, 7*, distance, faces, girls, history, horizon, identity, library, lost, madness, motion, Nightmare, presence, progress, reading, sitting, sun, sunlight, Sylvia Plath, talking to myself, TH Huxley, thought

picked over, cajoled, placed this way and that, gazed at the upper corner of the room, and eventually written from entry 33. of The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962; Plath wrote this, I merely … Plath wrote this, but the failure is mine, all mine, I tellsya!

                God, who am I?
                I sit in the library tonight
                the lights whirring
                girls everywhere
                reading books
                faces

                And I sit here without identity
                There is history to comprehend
                before I sleep

                Yet back at the house
                there is my room
                full of my presence
                There is my date this weekend:
                believes I am human –
                only indication that I am whole
                not merely a knot
                without identity –

                I’m lost!
                Huxley would have laughed
                What a conditioning this is!
                Hundreds of faces
                beating time along the edge of thought

                a nightmare
                no sun
                only continual motion
                If I rest inward
                I go mad

                There is so much
                in different directions
                pulled thin
                against horizons too distant to reach

                To stop with the German tribes
                and rest awhile: but no!
                On, on, on, through ages of empires
                ceaseless pace
                Will I never rest in sunlight again?

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: 20th century
faces wormhole: jump start
history wormhole: tragic and archival
horizon wormhole: twilight / and parasols down / within minutes
identity wormhole: between
reading wormhole: reating & wriding
sitting wormhole: all the sandstone / reflections in the / marble-blue troughs
sun & Sylvia Plath wormhole: concordance
talking to myself wormhole: a nice grey woollen picnic blanket
thought wormhole: divergent // direction

 

twilight / and parasols down / within minutes

Tags

2014, 4*, beach, book, Carol, Gran Canaria, hands, head, horizon, knees, leg, lime, parasols, portrait, red, skin, strawberry, twilight, yogurt

                              twilight
                and parasols down
                   within minutes

                Carol lays on the lime mat
                head to the horizon one hand

                scurfing the other holding
                the book open leg out

                straight one knee up perfectly
                skin-red like fraise yogurt

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

beach wormhole: the evening
Carol wormhole: I turn to wake up
hands wormhole: woman / has worked in the gym / got a build
horizon wormhole: Infantino / district of Gotham
lime wormhole: 1968
red wormhole: walk from Castleton to Hope
twilight wormhole: writing: // in turn

 

Infantino / district of Gotham

Tags

1960s, 2013, 5*, Batman, city, despair, Gotham City, horizon, Infantino, issue, light, patio, perspective, pose, rooftops, sky, society

                when issue mounts to despair
                people stand in theatre-pose

                                              on wide open patio with
                                              receding perspective

                                high above the city
                                amid rooftop and skylight

                                                              but then there is always
                                                              uptown on the horizon

in the Infantino
district of Gotham

 

in 1964 Carmine Infantino was brought in to give the Batman character a new look and Gotham became a city you could sit at a cafe terrace in – what, you mean …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

Batman wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
city wormhole: lost and city ground
horizon wormhole: do I
Infantino wormhole: the warp and the plumbing
light wormhole: where else
rooftops wormhole: Luton // couldn’t make a poem out of it
sky wormhole: prelude: // travel
society wormhole: Virginia

 

do I

Tags

2013, 5*, attention, being, branches, breathing, breeze, fish, horizon, leaning, living, pigeon, questioning, seagull, shock, waves

 

                                                                    do I

                                              cast
                                              eye
                                              and heart  –   wide o’er
                                   the bob and trough
                                   the waft and wave
                                   the horizontal lean
                                   the shock and the approach
                              and then do I breathe a weave through it all like a fish,
                                              like a seagull,

                              do I?

                     do I
                                ride a breeze
                turn my feathers
                and alight a-bob on a branch to survey:
is that how I do it?

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

attention & breathing wormhole: too greedy
being & living & waves wormhole: step
branches wormhole: municipal garden
breeze wormhole: where else
horizon wormhole: ‘avenue of wraggled gorse tops …’
seagull wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – … as the new town marches in

 

‘avenue of wraggled gorse tops …’

Tags

'scape, 2013, 3*, Ashdown Forest, avenue, clouds, gorse, grey, horizon, silhouette, walking

 

                                   avenue of wraggled gorse tops
                silhouetted before grey-serried ranks of cloud
                     stood to attention on the horizon

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

Ashdown Forest wormhole: ssreet chak-chak
clouds wormhole: morning sun
grey & walking wormhole: landscape of cloud over London / with differing depths of grey
horizon wormhole: south horizon
silhouette wormhole: garden

 

south horizon

Tags

1959, 1967, 1979, 1993, 1999, 2011, 2012, 7*, abandonment, anger, Bowie, childhood, Dad, discovery, divorce, drum, evening, experience, horizon, light, London, Margaret Thatcher, memory, Mum, Nan, pain, parents, perspective, purple, rhythm, river, saxophone, shift, Shooters Hill, south, texture, Thames, travelling, words, world

                south horizon

                out on the river
                the purple is shifting

                but in the evening-bulb light
                the world-shaping words

                of grown ups
                is shifting uncontrollably

                but,          no; it’s OK          look
                there is rhythm, there is

                a saxophone, a hi-hat – shflpt –
                in the crack there

                where words sift
                where worlds shift

 

I submitted this to an online magazine; they didn’t want it; I’ll publish it here again with the copy that supported it:

about the poem: on my eighth birthday (in 1967) my Dad arrived home late from work; my parents had one of their last arguments; my Dad left home that night; I couldn’t remember much of what happened that night – what was said, how much I heard, how much I understood – but I realised that worlds could change quite quickly that night; years later, in 1993, David Bowie recorded ‘south horizon’ on his ‘Buddha of Suburbia’ album, but I didn’t really get to know the piece until 2011; hearing it etched that experience back into my memory – bevelled it up, almost – but it also supplied textures and chord changes to the memory that allowed me a perspective that held me from being just angry or hurt; (‘the river’ is the river Thames; we lived on Shooters Hill in SE London from where we could hear and breathe the river)

author bio: Mark Redford was born in 1959 and grew up in South East London until he bolted to university (like a bat out of hell) in 1979, hot from Margaret Thatcher’s election victory; London was never the same every time he returned back; his mother, who had brought him up with her mother (his Grandmother), died in 1999; since then he has travelled back to London frequently to find the previous 40 years, but only seems to find them when he writes down what he saw; you can see what he sees (possibly better than he can) at: https://mlewisredford.wordpress.com/; if you bump into him there, give him some directions would you?

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

abandonment wormhole: monument to vainglory
Bowie wormhole: new-found love – poewieview #36
childhood & Thames wormhole: that comicbookshop … // … in dreams
Dad & divorce & texture wormhole: beepbeep
evening wormhole: alighted
horozon wormhole: 1966
light wormhole: so pleased to see you again
London wormhole: 1967
Mum wormhole: 1967
Nan wormhole: work
purple & river wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
travelling wormhole: traffic lights and broad avenue
words wormhole: breathing out
world wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – agricultural show

 

1966

Tags

1966, 2014, 5*, breathing, Burt Bacharach, city, contemplation, death, Dionne Warwick, hills, horizon, life, mist, relief

                1966

                                up in the hills
                contemplating the cold guide rail directing-back-to-safety horizon
                                of mist over the wide wide city –
                                                I’m alright
                                                yes I’m alright

 

several stepped in-takes through I just don’t know what to do with myself by Dionne Warwick & Burt Bacharach and one languid outbreath, each time …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

breathing & life wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – intemperance
Burt Bacharach & Dionne Warwick wormhole: 1967
city wormhole: pen and ruler
death & hills wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Snow
horizon wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
mist wormhole: be