Gentle reader, What you have in your hands is a third pamphlet of my poems - almost everything that bears scrutiny since the last collection, Exposure Factors, in 2013. As you’ll see, they are presented under four broad headings by way of context. I kick off with a few back numbers just to show the distance travelled. Once again the text is broken up with some handcrafted doodling (and the odd visual cue). Thank you for the time, attention and imagination you choose to invest. Hoping you will find some reward, Captain Chaos
1. Travels in the archive 2. Islands in the sun 3. Now and then 4. Set form kenelm@ntlworld.com
WINDOW knees hunched, below the weather vanes and cuppolas, I squat your broad sill: my fourth floor frame of reference. iron balustrades span the overlooked pilasters forgotten grandeur in mock Corinth curlicue. an arm’s thrust to your weighty sash gives air; reveals above sleepless lights, a night sky, a view without. the Thames laps plangent to banks of plane: cloaked by leafy uniform, Ministries lie beyond. apex of Millbank monolith, lidless, a neon eye probes my pool of darkness; questions the quietude.
SPIRIT OF THE SARD
“He who comes from the sea comes to rob.” Mastery rolls in unrelenting as the tideless waves: always someone else’s coast. Safe harbour once for Carthage, before Rome planted grain; later Mussolini mined the coal and discontent; now NATO play their war games here. This island’s had its usage. Time piles up in layers: we look and tread on history quarried and laid out in stone. Everywhere rotund remains mark the Nuraghi’s slow retreat to Barbagia, the unyielding highlands. As a snail withdraws into its shell, so malaria , serfdom, wealth were left behind. In Arborea, last of the guidicati, Eleanor codified laws to endure five hundred years. Unlike her realm’s resistance, broken at bloody Sanluri.
Yet your falcon bears her name still. And free as flight above is the pretty deceit of a snorkel: that one swims with fishes. In their liquid valleys, mountains, forests, all is crystal definition. Our tourist vista, framed by oleander, juniper and myrtle, seldom has such depth of focus.
* * *
NUITS EN MARSEILLES African cloud unloads its burden: teeming rain that pelts the pan-tiled roofs. It washes pavements clean of dog shit, sluicing my prejudice, as unowned refuse, to the drain. Awake. Streetlight through shutters bars our bedroom wall. From the all-hours web cafĂŠ below, a hacking cough explodes. I picture Monte Christo above his vertical, looking out: a long way to fall.
UPWARDLY MOBILE Locals must have heard us coming, packed in our pug-nosed Bedford minibus its cylinders’ spluttered misfire and gears grinding through their changeful accents migrants from the Midlands. Flat vowels swallowed by green field fortune, moving to see what we might become. At three days short of ten years old, rare treat to ride up front beside my father flush with his big promotion. Feet warm on the engine, mother sandwiched in behind with squabbling siblings, grubby and tired of mid-summer, restless to see where we might become. Slipping our moorings, the ferry is roll-on-roll-off basket of promises, deliveries and cheap day trips. Her squat symmetry and shallow-bottom my very own Dawn Treader. Like hawsers thrown to bollards we make fast, settling to see what we could become. Up budget-stretching cul-de-sac, four-square with own coal bunker and shrunken plum, a white walled floor plan forms our blue print. In that detachment - shaped by boundary of crumbling cliffs, creeks and shores; high downs, woods and hidden caves finding how it was we came to become.
POINT OF VIEW
Citadel of crows: dagger-beaked above the motorcycles ranked out front Mick’s monster burger van. Hop. Skip. Peck up what’s left over; bare-faced their opportunism rising and landing between the wheels. This ridge is fortress, brick bulwark, shelters homeland spread on seaboard like a Lego metropolis. Look down, look closer down: tight terraces and concrete blocks, CCTV in cages. Unseen divides. Beyond our watery perimeter childhood’s playful hills dissolve as night and mist enfold them. The lit city transforms to circuit board, pulsing with connections that define us but have no name. Clouds sail over creeks and harbour: not every view is postcard, but always wind moves the shadows on. Islands give boundary, lend distance, are where – if you want – you can be your own professor of secrets.
SKIMMER Much is in the choosing: how shape fits to the curve of thumb and index finger, the weight in your palm. And smoother the better, stone and water both, to amplify the bounces as spin and tension clash. When flicked release is flat as leaning knees allow, then ripples splash the surface, dance in liquid rings. Over tumbled lifetimes, by billion fold collision tide-worn, a pebble waits for you to throw it. Depinde mult de ceea ce alegi: cum forma ei se potrivește la curba dintre degetul mare și cel arătător, greutatea ei în palma ta. Cu cât mai netede cu-atât mai bine, și piatra și luciul apei, pentru a amplifica bolta când torsiunea și forța se intersectează. Atunci când aruncarea este scurtă, atât cât ți-au permis genunchii îndoiți, mici valuri se formează la suprafață, un dans de inele lichide. De-a lungul vremurilor tumultoase, lovită de talazuri nesfârșite de miliarde de ori, o pietricică te așteaptă să o arunci.
BEACHED (Scotts Head from Hayling) Washed out, a beach of stones warms in the callow heat of spring. As pebble to horizon cast, by shallows’ nibbling watermark I gaze the blue distance to my island. But think of yours: its dazing sun an axe cleaving forest to the shoreline. Words skim the waves to where, at higher tides, two oceans kiss and turtles slip from sight beyond the coral shelf. Our scorched contrast of salty skin; sandbars emerge like chest from a shirtfront, the frill of surf their sibilant unbuttoning. We hear the shingle’s grating roar, the same unsure job prospects heaped up by undertow; in dolly mixture beach huts and one-stop only white cruise liners, pleasure’s unlike trappings. Yet slaves to surge and spill ever tides’ cadence bends our will.
SQUEEZING OUT SUMMER
We have been here before, prodding at the precipice of a new term. Dog days, the silly season, street corner boredom. Elsewhere riots.
Hedgerows are ripening. Crow armies manoeuvre, black on gold stubble. Thistledown drifts in stillness. Ragwort runs to seed.
Cycling back from the beach, flush with swimming, wheels scrunch on old ballast. In failing light, thoughts scurry home to be not caught out by rain.
A dredger returned, has disgorged its scrapings. Bait diggers harvest the year’s lowest tides. The last, deep salty draughts.
Evening settles in a blackbird chorus cut through by whine of scooters. Bank Holiday sees the first rally of starlings.
Scratching at midge bites, feel the chill on bare limbs. Reach for sweatshirts sooner. The death of a naturalist. Tucked inside his cover, so long forgotten, your letter.
I’m taken aback at that courting gift, the insight of its guesswork. Old fence posts burn in our fire pit and we are putting socks back on.
MUTATE
Self yet not self. Life at the edge of life. Universal hive-mind microbe, multiform, penny-rife. I am virus. I am virus, resistant to vaccine. On you depend to multiply, to share my deviant gene. You are my host. You are my host: infection, say hello. By casual rash of prefab copies you are consumed, laid low. I am virus. I am virus. My doubtful origin unrecognised, lies dormant: the enemy within. Self yet not self.
THE CRUELLEST MONTH The drawn-out days steal up, unpossessed slip by. While roadside capitals, white-on-red, state changed priorities ahead; we are waiting on swifts. In vested hi-vis yellow men make good our broken pavements. Caught on cones and catkins, flapping plastic bags grace the verge. We are waiting on swifts. Horse chestnut buds are plump on the sticky brink of bursting. Trees in leaf give cover; it’s harder now to see round corners. We are waiting on swifts. Exploding from hedgerows partridge settle on the field’s far side. A still chill wind is pregnant with the weighing of unmarked scripts. We are waiting on swifts. Hawthorn snow at Easter, within the dwell time of our gaze, is rarely seen to fall. But yet gets littered on the ground. We are waiting on swifts. We are waiting on swifts: the skies above with insects swarm. When true blue summer comes, these migrants, scythe-winged, find a home. We're hearing now their scream.
VOTING INTENTIONS (a congenial exercise in secrecy)
It is an act of communion, that slip posted in a tin-black mouth. The don’t-blame-me defence for years to come. Once perhaps the everyday note to milkmen, under empty bottle, weighed down by habit. Its order sometimes blurred by rain. Or maybe a love letter’s captive thought, long pondered, with aching hope sent off. The entreaty hidden beneath a doormat. Or just the random prejudice of a moment, clutched at, like a tabloid spread in sudden ill-wind swept up and flailing. Then, within a flimsy booth, set down in two fleeting strokes of thick, soft pencil: our only choice, this folded curse.
STANDSTILL (solstice at St. Deny’s station)
At junction of thumb and index dusk settles in the platform’s palm: signal colours without word switch, so I halt while the year divides. A scattering of swifts command their heaven, black on dimming blues, as rumbling dock-bound freight, contained and corporate, cuts through the calm. My ears, tuned still for wind of change, are empty waggons seeking load: the weight of remembrance fills them full with lingering, cryptic hues. An express hurls a dawdling dove, in puff of feathery snow, to death. When losing track it is what’s heard that counts, not what we can decode. Beyond the iron footbridge, painted green and red, snaking points choose sides. Homeward, parting light from darkness, my branch line curves and holds its breadth.
Stopover at The Hog’s Head
It has been, as they say, a while. Elbows on grain of pine, with English pints we settle to an earnest unfolding: the maps of our lives. From a plateau either side of sixty, we triangulate scarce-remembered reference points. Draw comfort from the parallels. School geography – “Never write a word across a line”. Now I follow contours where bitumen seals the cracks of least resistance. A door swings open, slamming closed; the candle gutters. Wax spots stick to varnish, turning hard, and my pig’s cheek is wolfed without remark. Our empty plates are gathered up: time to pay and go. Pauses signpost then uncharted shores where old age crumbles into sea. But anecdote is not data; you (as I would) point to local redbrick history. It says that as things have been they do not remain.
LUMBER (an elegy for the Welfare State) Because you’ve grown and grown too tall, too broad, too thick so we must cut you down. Because your spreading mantle does darken all our plot so we must cut you down. For your ambition upward, though long since trimmed each year, means we shall take you down. No more that thrash of branches, in spring storms spilling graceful rain from your lopped crown. No more our summer refuge under your shady dappling, leaves by breeze all fribbled. No more the autumn tableau of patchwork turning, green to amber then to red. No more, when lastly naked, will full moon rising silver your tissue paper skin. Yes, old friend, we are intent with rope and screaming blade, limb by limb to bring you down. And then your trunk, disabled, is creaking hinge of life before the door is slammed.
Out from the piles of fallen bark, ladybirds diverse escape your diamond fissures dark. Pigeons, where once they paused, fly through an empty space the enclosed light let loose. So, stump apart, now lawn is level playing field, while in the ground roots pulse. * * *
AGAINST THE GRAIN How sand piles up, here at my door. Strong winds carry countless skipjack granules, bouncing like beach-balls, from the shore. Checked by picket fences yet marching still, there is no way to hold it back. Reaching through keyhole, it creeps over sill then once inside spreads everywhere. Infiltrates the floorboard gaps. Drowns the joists. Skin-scratching, smothers my armchair. It mounts and mounts: recasts staircase as dune, gets swept in corners, swallows light. Sand-blind, its inert mouth becomes cocoon. Should bell be buried by this grit, guests are warned – “bring spade”. Mine waits in the hall: soon I must dig my own exit.
‘HAIKU MY WAY’
dangling catkins drop soggy caterpillars swim on rain wet pavement reconnect the house padlock under floorboards found – hidden space secure suntanned arms compared pick the raspberry twilight – pupils back at school cats eyes unblinking love steers the middle lane full moon taxi ride
black flags uplifted flapping, fly the cliff face feathered anarchists contrails criss-cross cerulean breakfast sky – glistening snail footprints
TRAPPED
Though bent this way and that, my stem unbowed is not yet blown out. On wind I’m waiting my discharge: a seed globe of beginning, held in hundredfold even feathers proud and parachute-ready, to jump as crowd. Breathless for that stronger, candle-snuffing puff a child who pauses will instinctive bring to spread, on lawns about, my germ dust cloud.
Too late. By pensive fingers now I’m gripped and dipped. In glassy gaol my frailty caught, forever fixed, an ageless unwrapped fate. A lucid gift, admired as much for weight of workmanship, to blustery papers brought. Through resinous skill, see my clock is stopped.
PROVIDENCE
“But though an old man, I am but a young gardener” - Thomas Jefferson
When spring in leaf makes good its pledge that’s when my rusty spade will bite. Across the lawn I’ll mark an edge, my unmade bed to plant with light.
And where my trusty spade does bite the grass is gone, left naked earth, an unmade bed to plant with light. Within its bounds no knotted turf:
the grass is gone, left naked earth. Since winter drear at last will break, within its bounds the knotted turf my blade will cut and lift and shake.
When winter drear at last does break, across the lawn I mark my edge where blade shall cut and lift and shake, for spring in leaf makes good that pledge.
With thanks to Friday poets, in no particular order
Gareth Toms
Denise Bennett
Maggie Sawkins
Richard Pierce
Richard Williams
Pauline Hawkesworth
and Elena Nistor for the Romanian translation of Skimmer June 2016
From Birmingham via the Isle of Wight, Mark Cassidy teaches Radiography in Portsmouth, where he lives with two rabbits, seven trees and the rest of his family. His poems have previously seen the light of day in Skylight 47,
Northwards Now, Poetry Salzburg Review, Pushing Out The Boat, Ariadne’s Thread and This Island City: Portsmouth in Poetry. Others may be found in two previous home-grown pamphlets and are collected on-line at https://markbcassidy.blogspot.co.uk/
