03 Friday Apr 2015
Posted in poems
in the midst of winter
the spirit-cries of crows echo through the naked elms like bronchi
two lone walkers on the path
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
echo wormhole: under silent direction of architecture
walking wormhole: To my Mum
winter wormhole: gold wedding band
27 Friday Feb 2015
Posted in poems
Tags
2015, coffee shop, Eastbourne, feet, gold, husband, married, portrait, speech, table, talking, wife, winter
in winter he has to wear
open sandals to keep comfortable
she sits at the determined table
leans his handsome cane
on the spare chair awaiting
his return one and a half steps
at a time, ‘there, cappuccino,’
placed in front of her ‘americano’
across the table and just the
‘splackk’ of a pack of wafer creams
between; they talk about the
optician’s but end up talking
about Syria; he tries on the
new glasses; he wears a simple
gold wedding band
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
coffee shop wormhole: 1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012
Eastbourne wormhole: I could step / more open
feet wormhole: step
gold wormhole: tag cloud poem VIII – growth
speech wormhole: the streets just fill with business
table wormhole: new year’s eve 2014; train up to London to / walk the bridges across the Thames, and / listen to the voices say it is, and was, like, / but get back home before the fireworks / obliterate it all in the emptying twilight
talking wormhole: the lines are not that straight / after all
winter wormhole: Dr Strange V – all the words of all the times of all the worlds speak
19 Friday Dec 2014
Tags
2012, 6*, autumn, buildings, communication, compromise, Dr Strange, Gene Colan, humanity, knowledge, moon, others, Paul Simon, sharing, sky, speech, Spring, Steve Englehart, summer, time, winter, words, world
‘communication
has undone you; you know of all others’ success and see
only your own failure
you will not
have
ignorance
you would have all knowledge …’*
and build your ignorance to the skies
all the words of all the times of all the worlds speak
and from each word you draw more closely in
upon yourself unable
to settle on shared or compromise
they
‘… stand on their differences
and shoot at the moon’** ‘each man must win
so all men must lose’*
all expansion
must take the turn of contraction, you cannot have
sustained growth only, ‘first comes spring and summer;
but then we have fall and winter,
Ben’***
* Steve Englehart, Dr Strange#10, Oct 1975, from p.15-16
** Paul Simon, Cars Are Cars, Hearts and Bones, 1983
*** Being There (1979), dir: Hal Ashby, Chance the Gardener
askance from: Dr Strange #6-13 (Feb 1975-April 1976); Marvel; writer: Steve Englehart; artist: Gene Colan
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
autumn wormhole: Eglinton Hill
buildings wormhole: never there
communication wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich 121114
compromise wormhole: which is worse
Dr Strange & Gene Colan wormhole: Dr Strange IV – ellipses
knowledge wormhole: we’re born // to die
moon wormhole: knees
others & world wormhole: tong // len
sky & speech wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 290508 – / the breath of London
spring wormhole: no hat
summer wormhole: Jean Miller kissed Salinger
time wormhole: Christmas
winter wormhole: Tulips by Sylvia Plath – How Far To Step Before You Raise The Other Foot
words wormhole: – sigh! –
11 Monday Aug 2014
Posted in poems
Tags
1961, 2014, 8*, air, anatta, beauty, being, books, born-again, breathing, child, compassion, contingency, death, exigence, existence, eyes, faces, family, flowers, freedom, green, hands, head, hospital, identity, journey, life, light, love, nurses, others, peace, perspective, pocket, poetry, pointlessness, reading, realisation, red, renunciation, river, Salinger, seagull, shadow, silence, sleep, smile, sun, Sylvia Plath, Tao, thinking, time, tulip, velcro, walls, white, windows, winter, wisdom, world
Tulips by Sylvia Plath
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
Sylvia Plath, “Tulips” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath.
——~ O ~
Tulips by Sylvia Plath
I read this with a big stupid smile on a long flight from Gran Canaria. It is the third or fourth time I have read it. Some poems open like pockets when read additionally, enfoldingly. And make you smile, stupidly, because you hadn’t realised how much there ever is in the very same journey being made in the reading. How much more beautiful can something become: I am beginning to understand why Seymour Glass suffered from the utter-ness of beauty – how beauty can demand your respective and perspective extinction in its unfoldment if you are not too careful. And Seymour Glass and Sylvia Plath were not too careful – what beauty they saw, how shocking (for us) to behold … if we are not careful.
“The tulips are too excitable …”
ah, it has started, too quick, too late for me to define myself ‘perspectived’ from it – go with it, go with it, trust Sylvia, she went with it, she had no choice, she was ill (emergency appendectomy, recent miscarriage) it will be alright, she coped, she made … Beauty
“… it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands …”
She let her self go, with the season and the walls and the quiet. Relinquishing. Liking it. Finding a more stable existence than all of the rough contingency that perpetually leaves her off-balance. Being it: …
“I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.”
This is not morbidity or illness, this is rest (‘I have nothing to do with explosions’ – beautiful self-humour, the past tantrums and anger dressed as sophistication). This is relief. This is healthy: this most wonderful, laconic humour; she lets her self go then turns to look at what is left with a detachment and indulgence that you would have for your own child:
“They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.”
This is so funny, and not merely because of the ‘pupil’ pun, a beautiful acceptance of how earnest those poets can be, looking at everything to take in its significance. And having accepted herself in all her tragicomedy, what else to look at but the rest of the world:
“The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.”
‘… doing things with their hands’, having accepted the endearing stupidity of one’s own doings, then looking at the impersonal world, but with that same love – impartially, freshly, benignedly, resignedly. So, what have I got in my thirty-year life so far?
“My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.”
Watching all the emphemerality is where it gets uncomfortable – we’re not supposed to think this, are we? Surely this is by what we define our value – you can’t renounce this, you can’t be born-again from this, you can’t give this up, that’s going too far! But the realisation is implacable: you can’t lose one without the other (… the Tao that can be named, is not the eternal Tao). If you fall short – one without the other – you lose the both. If you grant your own lack of exigence, but not others’ lack, you lack compassion for them and your realisation is selfish and isolated. If you grant the lack of exigence of other, but not your own, you are lost in pointlessness and your realisation is mad. If you lack either compassion or wisdom you are foreshortened, even when whole release was so close. This is where the carefulness is so crucial: calculated openness (which begs its own opening), or complete opening which takes no prisoners.
“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.”
This is not morbid, this is not just what she is about – don’t foreshorten her. This is a great yearning for the peace of not being entrapped.
This is where Sylvia falls short. She can embrace her own extinction as escape from her painful world (the whole universe come to a single point of bright tulips in a vase), but she cannot pervade her realisation into the world; it keeps snagging her, they keep snagging her. Nevertheless she is so beautiful in the candour which whimpers, ‘I can’t’:
“The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.”
The others (her family, the world) are hooking onto her like Velcro; she cannot accept their non-exigency, only her own. And to the extent that she cannot accept theirs she is losing her own self-realisation in relief, and becoming paranoid:
“Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.”
You can’t help but love the head of someone that glimpses beauty but is frightened by its implications, seemingly chained by the very things she is enamoured of in the belly of a dark cave. I would hold her dear cranium, feel all of its connected weight …
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
air & pointlessness wormhole: tag cloud poem VI – anyone’s eyes
beauty wormhole: old age
being & identity & poetry & shadow & thinking & world wormhole: the precision // the gentleness // and / the letting go
books & Sylvia Plath wormhole: ‘like a piece of ice on a hot stove / the poem must ride on its own melting’
breathing & love wormhole: our life
child wormhole: on
compassion wormhole: ‘n’
death & family & life wormhole: letters to Mum III – ongoing-term // eventually
eyes & reading & time wormhole: the air of architecture
faces & hands wormhole: city-centre-coffee-shop / talk
green wormhole: cold wind
light wormhole: St. Ludwigskirche
others & sun wormhole: movement
realisation wormhole: I will eventually drift tectonic
red wormhole: the poppies / of van Gogh
river & seagull wormhole: a riveral
silence wormhole: the Buddha head in an antique shop
sleep wormhole: my fidgety self
smile wormhole: no biggie:
tulip wormhole: honest
walls wormhole: deepening with each step
white wormhole: time
windows wormhole: waiting room
winter wormhole: no hat
30 Monday Jun 2014
Posted in poems
Tags
'scape, 2013, 5*, Ashdown Forest, birdsong, blue, bluebells, breeze, clouds, gorse, grass, green, grey, leaves, Spring, trees, walking, winter, yellow
no hat
a long winter
we had of it but then out from a glade we had
bluebells before gorse flower
and the welcome breeze
of birdcall
and wet
grass
rising up
out of the small vale a patchwork of illuminated greynesses
sprinkled chalk dust over
the new-leaf trees certain
there was
a corner
to turn
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
Ashdown Forest wormhole: clouds
blue wormhole: 1963
breeze wormhole: sounds // suddenly / stop
clouds wormhole: letter 080514
green wormhole: the poppies / of van Gogh
grey & trees wormhole: I find / you find your bones / on the outbreath
leaves wormhole: … sshhh
Spring wormhole: tag cloud poem IV – C
walking wormhole: the Buddha head in an antique shop
Winter 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
yellow wormhole: ‘“ruddy crows!” / said my Dad …’
01 Saturday Feb 2014
Posted in poems
Tags
'scape, 2012, 7*, being, childhood, combe end, conservatory, creativity, doing, doors, fir, freedom, garden, ghosts, gold, ideas, identity, knowing, learning, life, lost, melodrama, oak, power, reading, recognition, silence, silver, sitting room, sun, thinking, time, tragedy, values, wind, windows, winter, world
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
from childhood – I just don’t know
so I learn to read a what and when
I learn to make a how and why
and get so lost
every time I am blind-sided and over-ridden
I had
based my identity (out
of ‘don’t know’)
on my seen and proffered
I had
invested my value
in my take and provision
so I become transparent
and even shake my chains a little
every time
for such a long time now
that I sigh a tragedy and become a melodrama
all by myself
actually
I have good ideas and do some good things
but they never were and never could be
me
I had … them
I created … them
and I am ever far far quieter and wider than any local opinion or play
if only I could remember that
if only I could live that
trouble is
the seeking validation
the seeking confirmation that what I say and do
is valid in the world
because
what I think and do is valid but
not because
and never only because
it wins a notice or purchase in the world all like the wind
I have
so much freedom and so much power in the world
I can think anywhere
I can do anything
if only I did but squander it all chasing pieces of silver
maybe
I’m way too polite
I don’t obstruct I don’t get in the way
I keep objection to myself
the only way as a child to be of value or benefit throughout life
hoping someone will notice the golden silence I have to offer
in a pathologically uninterested world
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
being & identity & reading wormhole: only
childhood wormhole: cupboards
combe end wormhole: 3:30 am
conservatory & recognition wormhole: again
creativity wormhole: inverse superhero
doing & life wormhole: Child of Illusion
doors wormhole: the early morning of the sixties
fir & garden wormhole: dream 040198 / Eglinton Hill
ghosts wormhole: nightmare
gold wormhole: heavy shower …
learning wormhole: good / enough
oak & sitting room wormhole: ‘the next station / is Hever’
power wormhole: the way
silence wormhole: zazen in everyday life
silver wormhole: Eridge Station
sun wormhole: red net curtains / with appliqué blooms
thinking & wind wormhole: through the window
time wormhole: too
values wormhole: Put service back into people rather than productivity
world wormhole: Woodbrooke labyrinth / affirmations
windows wormhole: through the window
winter wormhole: the sun / in a clean / industrial / sky
30 Tuesday Jul 2013
the sun
in a clean
industrial
sky
bags out
too cold
in trolley
car locked
bright sun
turn wind
leaves wall
then up on the hill the crane
swings its arm wide wide across the town
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
crane wormhole: Woolwich Central – / making life better
Crowborough wormhole: once
hills wormhole: Eglinton Hill
leaves wormhole: from the / bedroom / window
sky wormhole: afternoon 290613
sun wormhole: out!
walls wormhole: thar she perched
wind wormhole: the pleasant land / of counterpane
winter wormhole: Saturday / afternoon
09 Sunday Dec 2012
Posted in poems
Saturday
afternoon
the sadness of a lighted canopy
at the petrol station under the
dark- en-
ing clear
cold off-
olive sky
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
afternoon & Saturday wormhole: Batman 168
light wormhole: and there is my practice
olive wormhole: thirst? / hunger?
sky wormhole: morning
winter wormhole: winter / weeks
07 Monday May 2012
Posted in poems
dedicated to Linda Redwine who graced the sphere with her blog for a few months and then suddenly disappeared 060512 – where have you gone, Linda!
winter
weeks
since I have used
the conservatory
a fly buzzed
once somewhere
I opened the door
it flew into the sky
and dropped into
the trees
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
combe end wormhole: through the window // it doesn’t matter
conservatory wormhole: 9:05
doors wormhole: door ajar
open wormhole: window open
sky & trees wormhole: ‘small town busy …’
time wormhole: noticeably
a poem each day
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