Rooms Extract 10: FOUR POEMS

THE TROUBLE WITH TALKING ABOUT MOUNTAINS

The trouble with talking about mountains is that words come all too easily — irresponsibly and in season with the rocks.

Sitting in the city, I try to listen to silence, to look back on hugeness. These parks are too flat for walking, and sounds orchestrate extremity unrelated to object. Things are not out of the ordinary.

I take out my collection: my first, then second filmed approach to Lochnagar; the record of a toad croaking on Jock’s way; a petrified piece of forest (long since gone); bacterially pink geode; and a spotted hair from a bird — what am I brewing here?

You can’t think a mountain isolate (like those of Hokusai’s): it is you who must be isolated. To get there, you need a little cold seizure — like seeing marks far ahead and reading them as van with some people clustered, but on approach, understanding there is nothing animate about that arrangement of rocks and colourings. The muddy prints you were tracing have changed (from your person, to a person’s dog, to a rutting stag) and now there’s a bloodied antler in the river.

Here is surrounding.

There are two types of quiet: pelmet capped, and poised exclamation.

With the clamour of beaten cymbals close to the ear, clouds move unsounded and somewhere off the water crashes, the winds moan, and you know it, but here: the smooth precipice of silence is a melting icicle longing for the surface.

The trouble with talking about mountains is you must wait to talk, must wait to reach a returnable place. Talking in the mountains is a brave covering, and anyway, those clingy auto-narrations are vanished by something meaning arrival.

Birds turning to darts, suggesting perspective and draw by their distance my packet of nothing. Conspicuous in human skin, I peel behind a rock and plead with my hands for its shape to fit my shape. Our webs, shells, dens and dams (our human skin and cities) can’t separate from nature. The things we excrete and make have to count as natural.

The trouble is: (in my room) listening to Stravinsky’s Sacrificial Dance I hear that rock* or I hear something like it. I hear that it is out of my hands.

This place is out of my hands.

The trouble with talking about mountains is the drive to have them (the pornography of it!). The tools for taking down are, in the end, blunted.

Yet, I take down the mountains.

In the buoyant home journey, all you can say is: how a mountain silences.

You remember that cold seizure, the stupid thrill of a grouse from heather.

* that rock = Lochnagar

YOUR JAW - DESTROYER OF TOWNS

It’s fair to say that your jaw sculpts the palm of my hand; that scooping and spooning are similar (words) except one draws closer to itself (tightly fitting) while the other is just content to be there.

It’s fair to say that to dream of you is scooping; to hold your jaw, spooning.

We feature in a lot of regrets.

Regrets must be a desire for pushing.

They loosen what is otherwise tightly wound.

So that’s the room I’m in, I see it now — this longing.

Woken by a little thing like a sentence, or an accent, or a cupped jaw — you are a destroyer of my towns (and I am the destroyer of yours).

TRAIN TO EDINBURGH (NOTES)

It was the journey as much as anything that got us there, the melting snow on city fields, the gold course at Potters Bar, winter slanting through Hatfield, place names meaning briefly as we passed.

It was the absentminded sun, hardly woken in the dark. All the hours that ember spent on long low legs tying strings around its tasks. How they went trailing after it! Like molasses, masking the light with bare arms on arms, spelling anything in the snow.

It was the ground in general, the brown cow’s mud calling on rough blonde stalks to set about a cure for baldness, and tufted eyes churned from the whitish stretch.

It was the railway’s porous spaces that got you thinking not of separateness, but the habitable line that separates. The old borders between farms, porous too, the old walls and hedgerows that function as a street for living things. We spotted life even in the starkest scenes.

It was the mating animals confused by the outskirts, blind to classes of fatness between bread and luxurious bread, chips, and chia seeds. (These blends, they say, are bringing down the species.)

It was the speed slouching to a lovely smoothness all that detail, heads and cabbages all flashing. St. James’s graveyard paved into a car park, the church standing about awkwardly with its £2.50 an hour, cloaked in grey and gawky.

That’s where you are and where you’ll be carried, waking into flatness.

The flatness. A plane, and maybe the vast plane. It was that map with its ellipses inside which every part was felt.

It was London’s evolution, how each city is its own special pudding, creating the need to travel. Discovering between these cities the rural scene, and between those scenes, the city.

It was the blue expression filling the window, set against a long strip of yellow, placing “Formica” next to “bright table”. Fully and empty, a blue that leaves you alone by attendance, saying to you till your breathing stops, this is your flatness. That is how it fills you, and so you empty out.

And in the end it’s still a journey, still the journey as much as anything. In the end, we never arrived anywhere except the journey.

YOUR BED BECOMES A BOAT AGAIN

A little motion sickness as what you are moves inside of how, and your bed becomes a boat again.

The carpet wet with your pacific, and even though an ocean sounds like a foreign thought, like a cause glossed over by vague-ish charts, you indicate no reason for cessation.

Distances look like waves but there must be some pointless limit, like a paper wall insisting that you will travel no further. That here you are, tired, and with your catch of landmarks.

What moors you? There are problems to do with the tongue — reflexes that let you forget there’s more to you than water.

You keep your landmarks at bay, become unmeetable. When friends come calling you can locate them twice before their knowing (all of them also oceans). Oh you move me. A face like a moon, and (some parts) unreachable — your mother who’s a therapist says its true (about oceans) though I’m not sure those letters reached you.

Out there in foreignness there’s a challenge of distance. It’s a shame there’s people we won’t know. Undaring by their nature (or whatever) so reading faces in the feet of one another.