• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
    • William Carlos Williams
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • wormholes

mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: rust

in turgid reflection

19 Sunday May 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1838, 2019, blood, blue, claim, ghosts, government, grandeur, happening, horizon, industry, pillars, politics, power, reflection, retrospect, river, rust, sky, sound, sunset, Turner

                the clank and graunch of distant industry
                and government brushed pillared and ghostly

                across the known horizon, blue and sullied
                through un-attributable disclaiment;

                nothing has happened until it has stopped
                and only then is there fiery grandeur of

                retrospect; you can hold the power
                the higher you mast and defy all

                settled relation, but the sun will always set
                with rust in the sky like dried blood and

                in turgid reflection

 


woven within and despite The Fighting ‘Teméraire’ tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 by William Turner

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

blue wormhole: threshold to behold
ghosts wormhole: so, how long is, a piece of string?
horizon wormhole: Puerto del Carmen
politics wormhole: 10/28 ‘On hot days …’ by William Carlos Williams
power wormhole: the old man;
reflection wormhole: The Atlantic City Convention: 1. THE WAITRESS by William Carlos Williams
river wormhole: on facing the Have
sky wormhole: A Corner of the Garden at the Hermitage, 1877
sound wormhole: abandoned sound mirrors

 

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The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees

18 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in announcements

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1967, alder, almond, amethyst, apple, armchair, beech, blossom, branches, breeze, cattle, change, cherry, children, chimney stacks, church, clock, common, cottage, economics, elm, enclosure, Essex, evening, eyes, fields, fir, fire, flame, forest, garden, gate, grass, green, hedge, Henry VIII, history, knowledge, landscape, lanes, laughter, leaves, London, Michael J Redford, mind, noise, oak, orchard, passing, past, pink, pollen, poplars, progress, red, rust, shadow, ships, silence, sitting, sky, smoke, society, speech, Spring, summer, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, tiles, time, trees, village, walls, war, white, winter, woodland, writing, yellow

Trees

Spring’s tonic has risen within the trees and hazel catkins have swollen in greeting to the first warm days of the year.   Elm and alder are soon to follow heralding beech and oak and in a month or so the firs will show their new cones, green and full of juice, and their catkins will dust the ground yellow with pollen.   Throughout the villages cottage gardens will soon be filled with almond blossom and orchards will froth over with cherry white and apple pink spilling an aperitif to summer upon the living fields.   The hedgerows and woodlands become en-veiled by the diaphanous greenery of a million tiny leaves, an amethyst haze so tender and tenuous that I fear for its safety lest it be borne away upon the passing breeze.   I become aware of a restlessness within me that calls with increasing persistence to forego my writing and step out beneath the cavernous spring sky.   The pageant of the trees has begun.   Field and lane alike become heavy with leaf and only a section of red tile or a chimney stack, like flakes of old rust within the foliage, betray the presence of human habitation.   The blanket of summer affords us a privacy and seclusion that is unattainable in naked winter when one’s every move can be discerned by the neighbour’s critical eye, but here in the depths of summer, we can take our thoughts into the quiet of a woodland glade, we can be silent and be within silence for a little while and rest your eyes upon the shadows of the dancing leaves above.   And how restful the colour green, and how restful to the eye and through the eye to the mind that blossoms forth green thoughts.

This spring evening upon which I write is a decidedly chilly one even though the day itself has been full of warmth.   Thus I am to be found sitting in an armchair, putting my thoughts on paper, gazing between sentences into the dusty red glow of a log fire.   It is a funeral pyre really, the cremation of the last remains of an old local cottage that has long died, having fallen prey through disuse, to the vagaries of our climate and the onslaught of the village urchins.   I gaze with half closed eyes at the sawn up piece of beam that was once part of the skeleton of the old house, and see it burn with clear flame and little smoke.   In accompaniment to the ticking of the clock upon the mantle shelf I hear the old log’s tinsel murmurings that sound like a piece of screwed up silver paper, tossed aside and left slowly to expand, and as the pure white ash falls without sound, I feel myself drawn into the distant past and fancy I hear the laughter of children as they play beneath the boughs of a tree which this dead piece of wood was once a living part.   Whose children are these?   From what age do they come?   Perhaps they are the offspring of Henry VIII’s generation, the irresponsible youth of the day who cared nothing about the great cultural and religious upheaval taking place about them as they played handball between the northernmost buttresses of the old church wall.

It was at about this time when the monasteries had just been dissolved that the first enlightening book on agriculture by Fitzherbert of Norbury had just been published.   Was this historic pioneer of fertility indirectly responsible for the downfall of this old tree?   For the seas of knowledge flooded the land and split the forests into arboreal islands and many fine examples of the medieval forests became the battered flotsam of progress.

Certainly this old piece of wood never witnessed an act of enclosure, for the open field system was predominant right up until the late eighteenth century, when round and about the great open fields sprawled the commons, the scrubland and marshes, creating through their wastefulness and their infertility, a barrier to agricultural and therefore economic progress.   Although enclosure was a costly business, required finances could be supplemented by felling timber which, during the Napoleonic wars commanded a high price.   Also, in order to fence off enclosures, what was more natural than to plant more timber which, unlike normal fencing that needed constant and costly repair, increased in value as time went by.   The first choice of timber was naturally that which was most valuable such as ash and oak.   But the oak was slow in maturing, and where the ash spread its roots, no crops or grass would grow and no cattle would graze.   It was thus that the stately elm made its appearance and stamped the English hedgerow with a character all its own.   Being able to grow, and grow quickly in all types of soil, made it a very desirable timber to grow.   Also, the elm allowed grazing beneath its boughs and, due to its durability in water, it was at this time much sought after by the Navy Board for its ships.   Water mills, lock gates and drain pipes were of elm, and at the turn of the century, London alone still had over four hundred miles of mains constructed from its timbers.

Caught upon the ebb flow of time, I see the trees’ ancestral giants, the calamites, that reared two hundred feet into the sky.   They heard no child’s laughter, neither did they hear the buzz of insects nor the songs of birds, for they existed in the dim distant dawn of the carboniferous age millions of years before the birth of man, when even the birth of the first blade of grass was aeons in the offing.

They grew long, long before man, mute sentinels surveying the changing landscape, witnessing scenes that no mortal has ever gazed upon.   Then when man came, they furnished him with food, shelter and fuel; they gave to him the means of traversing the oceans.   They have been instruments of both war and peace and have featured in mans’ writing, music and art.   They have been made gods and devils and have bought good luck and bad.   Man’s long and close association with trees is evident from his desire to wander beneath the green boughs when time and toil permit, and from picnic parties who would sooner travel an extra mile to spread their chequered cloths within their shadows.   Perhaps it is because a tree expresses continuity, a security that mankind through all the ages and searched and worked for.

Although not a native of Essex, this ancient county endears itself to me more and more as time rolls slowly by, and time does pass slowly in Essex, for to plumb its highways and byways is to plumb history itself.   It has been slow to change through the centuries and there are numerous back lane hamlets which, even to this day, have experienced virtually no change for many, many years.   One lively youngster or eighty five who lives on the borders of Chignal Smealy and Chignal St. James (what delightful names are these), told me that the only difference he could see in his village was the height of the poplars at the end of his garden which, when he was only “knee high to a goose-pimple” were only a “stack an’ ‘alf ‘igh”, even the cottage gate that was propped open on one rusty hinge was the very same one his grandfather had made.

Having been one of the most heavily afforested counties in England, Essex is rich of fine examples of man’s utilisation of wood.   It can be seen in his architecture, in his tools, farm implements and vehicles.   The men of Essex are very conscious of their affinity with trees, and go to great lengths to preserve the more eminent members of their arboreal population, and I find it hard to believe that there is another county in the whole of the British Isles that can boast a greater number of ancient trees that have been propped up and strung up to cast their humbling shadows upon the heads of men.   Most of these old trees are of course oak, for Essex was noted for its oak forests, but as farming spread, so the forests disappeared, and the elms lining the fields and lanes now outnumber to oaks and are a far more familiar sight.   It is these old isolated trees that afford us a tangible link with the past.   They disperse any feeling of isolation in time and give to us instead a much needed sense of continuity, of that which has no end.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

blossom wormhole: BLUEFLAGS by William Carlos Williams
branches & mind wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George
breeze wormhole: A Solitude by Denise Levertov
change wormhole: Bridgnorth
church wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
evening & sky & thpought wormhole: space for probing thought
eyes & passing & shadow & speech & walls wormhole: ‘… plane is upright …’
fir wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
garden wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Pigs
green & Spring wormhole: LIGHT HEARTED WILLIAM by William Carlos Williams
hedge wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Cows
history wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call
knowledge wormhole: ‘a blacknight fitted perfectly …’
leaves wormhole: SPRING & LINES by William Carlos Williams
London wormhole: London refugee march – 120915
oak wormhole: behind / glass walls and wan and hooded eye
pink & time & white & yellow wormhole: THE LONELY STREET by William Carlos Williams
red wormhole: SPRING STRAINS by William Carlos Williams
silence wormhole: despite that
sitting wormhole: getting fat in me old age
smoke wormhole: cross-section
society wormhole: raised brow
trees & war & winter wormhole: What You Are by Roger McGough
writing wormhole: JANUARY by William Carlos Williams

 

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cold wind

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

'scape, 2013, 4*, car park, cars, Crowborough, green, iron, leaf, rust, seeing, town, wind

 

 

 

                                   what
                                   is there
                                   to see in a
                                   small town
                                   back street car
                                   park before a bolted
                                   galvanised railing with
                                   rust just breaking through
                                   behind the smooth bottle-green lines
                                   of a Volvo

                                                     but between
                                   the single curled leaf of a
                                   weed shaking in the cold wind

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

cars wormhole: open window
Crowborough wormhole: tag cloud poem IV – C
green & wind wormhole: on sitting / in front of / a hedge
seeing wormhole: ‘I can hear it raining / but cannot see it …’

 

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the straight line of stones marking the geometry / of death / settle all their own levels over time to make / a new rhythm

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

'scape, 2013, 6*, Castleton, death, fence, fir, grass, hills, iron, leaning, rhythm, rust, stone, time

 

 

 

              the straight line of stones marking the geometry
                   of death
              settle all their own levels over time to make
                   a new rhythm

              the iron fenced ones –
                   the rust of ages past –
              as the grasses reach up through them like
                   an array of grasses

              the stone-cross ones mottled-old like skin
                   ready to sag
              and the upright stones leaning forward to their various degrees
                   and backward like a child’s forest

              the huge upstart fir tree leans too
                   at a good 70º
              but by the flowing hills behind
                   it doesn’t seem so odd

 

 

 

                                       the church graveyard of St. Edmund’s, Castleton, Derbyshire

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

Castleton wormhole: tag cloud poem IV – C
death wormhole: tag cloud poem V – draft-ness
fir wormhole: across the room / through the patio doors / through the conservatory windows / at the bottom of the garden / the still bifurcated trunk of / the oak / before the let-grown hair and fringes / of the fir tree / blown every lifetime in a while by the winter sun // actually
grass wormhole: the edges of my reach
hills wormhole: emerged
stone wormhole: may the supreme and precious jewel bodhichitta … // … take birth where it has not yet done so … // … where it has taken birth may it not decrease … // … but may it increase infinitely
time wormhole: b / l / u / e / s / at a right-angle

 

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still there?

21 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2012, 6*, black, buildings, childhood, Eglinton Hill, Genesta Road, green, Herbert Road, olive, Plumstead, rust, time, white

 

 

 

                           where has it gone
                           the three cannon barrels
                           and the lion’s head
                           in thick rusting metal
                           painted plumstead
                           green on the corner of
                           Genesta Road making
                           my way up Eglinton Hill
                           is it to do with telephones
                           can I try to sit on it
                           where has it gone

                           because the tiled curve
                           of building on the corner
                           of Herbert Road and
                           Eglinton Road with
                           black frame and plumstead
                           green inlay around the black
                           white chequered inset to:

                            H.J. WEBB
                                      LTD.
                            GROCERS
                                            AND
                            PROVISION
                            MERCHANTS

                           onto olive background is still there?

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

black wormhole: clouds
buildings wormhole: wha’
childhood & Plumstead & time wormhole: still there // above the / Dallin Road / allotments / looking high over the river and the city
Eglinton Hill wormhole: dream / 150599
Genesta Road wormhole: from the / bedroom / window
green & white wormhole: mlewisredford introductory complete life audit confessional
Herbert Road wormhole: … still waving!
olive wormhole: in verse / question / m a r k ?

 

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still there // above the / Dallin Road / allotments / looking high over the river and the city

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

'scape, 2012, 6*, childhood, Dallin Road, emergence, green, houses, iron, lifetimes, London, morning, Plumstead, rust, school, Thames, time, voices

 

 

 

                                                                                                                       still there

                                                                                 the hole
                                                                 under the concrete skirt
                                              holding the iron railings upright
                              dividing the conservation ground
                              from the terraced path between houses
                                              the rust of decades bursting through metallic green paint
                                                                 with whole pebbles
                                                                                 under which I’d scrabble

                                                                                 c’mon this way
                                                                                 looking for a shortcut to school
                                                                                 looking for another route to school
                                                                                 always nervous that my head
                                                                                 would get stuck

                above the
                Dallin Road
                allotments
looking high over the river and the city

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

childhood wormhole: across the room / through the patio doors / through the conservatory windows / at the bottom of the garden / the still bifurcated trunk of / the oak / before the let-grown hair and fringes / of the fir tree / blown every lifetime in a while by the winter sun // actually
emergence wormhole: tag cloud poem I – numbers
green & lifetimes wormhole: … still waving!
London & Thames wormhole: a riveral
morning & time wormhole: and
Plumstead wormhole: dream / 190599
school wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’
voices wormhole: I don’t think I could do it anymore

 

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Boy

31 Friday May 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

'scape, 2011, 3*, bicycle, boy, Brighton, buddleia, faces, fence, hair, Have, pavement, portrait, red, rust, walls

 

 

 

                                          Boy

                           down the long featureless
                                          pavement
                           red brick wall rusty fence
                                          buddleia
                           the pinched face wide head
                                          spikey hair boy
                           cycles shell-suit top billowing
                                          building to a jump

                                          over nothing

 

                                          once

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

Brighton wormhole: relief
buddleia wormhole: William Carlos Williams
faces wormhole: Eglinton Hill
hair wormhole: portrait … // … reading
Have wormhole: Have
pavement wormhole: demolition
red wormhole: school uniform
walls wormhole: as

 

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes." ~ Annie Dillard

pages coagulating like yogurt

  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 10
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Introduction
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • William Carlos Williams
  • wormholes

recent leaks …

  • “…and may the great elements…”
  • paisley // implicitly
  • this pocketed being
  • the inevitable tock // when we close our eyes
  • time
  • the simple prayer // the tattered poem // the bitter lament
  • taking birth
  • mirror
  • long / road
  • ‘in my car I pass…’

Uncanny Tops

  • me
  • Moebius strip
  • YOUNG WOMAN AT A WINDOW by William Carlos Williams
  • 'in my car I pass...'
  • 'the practice ...'
  • 'I can write ...'
  • like butterflies on / buddleia
  • meanwhile
  • 'hello old friend ...'
  • under the blue and blue sky

category sky

announcements awards embroidery poems poeviews reflectionary teaching

tag skyline

'scape 2* 3* 4* 5* 6* 7* 8* 20th century 1967 1979 1980 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 acceptance afternoon air Allen Ginsberg anxiety architecture arm in arm attention awareness Batman beach beauty bedroom being birds birdsong black blue Bodhisattvacharyavatara books Bowie branches breakdown breathing breeze brown Buddha buildings career Carol cars change child childhood children city clouds coffee shop colour combe end comics communication compassion compromise crane creativity curtains dancing dark death distraction divorce doing doors dream Dr Strange earth echo Edward Hopper Eglinton Hill emergence emptiness evening eyes faces family father feet field floorboards garden Genesta Road girl giving glass gold grass green grey growth haiku hair hands Have hedge hill hills history holiday hope horizon house houses identity kitchen leaf leaves lemon letting go life lifetimes light lime listening living London looking lost love management managerialism mauve meaning mind mist moon morning mother mouth movement Mum muse music night notice open openness orange others park passing pavement people performance management pink Plumstead poetry pointlessness politics portrait posture power practice professionalism purple purpose quiet rain reaching reading realisation reality red requires chewing river roads roof rooftops samsara sea searching seeing settling shadow shops silence silhouette silver sitting sky skyline sleep smell smile snow society sound space speech step stone streetlight streets sun sunlight superhero table talking talking to myself teaching teaching craft Thames thinking thought time train travelling trees true nature university voices walking walls water waves white William Carlos Williams wind windows wood Woolwich words work world writing years yellow zazen

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