The Year of Not Sleeping (8)

It’s terrible to remember, but it’s far more terrible not to remember.

It’s from a book I read last week*. I have nothing so terrible to remember or forget as had the women whose voices are heard in this book- Russian women who fought in the Second World War- but thoughts about memory, how it betrays us, its unreliability, how we choose to remember some things and blot out others, how memories pop up that give me the screaming ab-dabs, persist. Memory won’t always give us what we ask of it. This is Cavafy- the last few lines of a poem called ‘Grey’, in which he remembers the grey eyes of a lover-

Memory of mine, keep them as they were.

And, Memory, whatever you can of that love of mine,

whatever you can, bring back to me tonight.

I write lots of what I would call memory poems. The memories, though, are uncertain, and the poems usually drift off into something other than I had imagined. Scared of telling the truth? Not sure what the truth is? Wanting to remember, not wanting to remember. Not sure why anyone would be interested in reading what I remember or fail to remember.

Dr Johnson wrote this:

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

Amen to that.

Back and back and back and back I go
I’m 37, 23, then 10
And all the time I wonder what I know
Now, that I didn’t then

As restless as the tide this to and fro
And never free of its incessant row
The question under which will not let go
What I knew then, and do not now

Mnemosyne was the Greek goddess of memory. She’s the woman in the picture (probably not from life).

*The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich

The Year of Not Sleeping (7)

Signs of spring! Not in the photograph, which is of Little Switzerland, a caravan/camping park in Folkestone, but in my street, where the cherry blossom suddenly appeared last week. The poet A.E.Housman has a not-undeserved reputation as a miserable git-

Some can gaze and not be sick,

But I could never learn the trick.

There’s this to say for blood and breath,

They give a man a taste for death.

____

but he was pretty cheerful about cherry blossom

____

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

____

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

____

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

____

74 words, and perfect.

I wrote this in either 2016 or 2017. I suppose if you think of things you consider beautiful, concrete would be at the opposite end of the spectrum to cherry blossom. This is about how we come to like the things we like, whether they be natural things, made things, or art.

Large Concrete Structure

The cherry blossom tells us Spring has come

The cherry blossom tells us Spring has come

There are necessary hormones, rising sap

Come, sit beneath the blossom while it lasts

____

As pretty as a picture you were then

You were as pretty as a picture then

And because you can only think of time as passing

You took a photograph I still possess

____

But I remember it better than yesterday

I remember it better than I remember yesterday

You beneath the blossom at our picnic

Plump with youth and promise in the Spring

____

Here, there is memory and place and no anger

We knew no anger then

We had no reason

Rage came later, for no good reason

For no reason at all

____

But here, there is memory and place and no anger

There were ponies

We were dare-devils, climbing trees

As high as the lowest branch

____

And then those shiny boots, the click and clack

You heard before you saw them

Then rage had its season

____

The speed of change comes quickly

The blossom grows, goes quickly

One year the picture of you under the blossom

The next an abstract of something that might be blossom

Your departure not even hinted at

Your presence not even hidden

____

I look for you in this large concrete structure

I take for a work of art; a structure

That once had use, though no longer;

Not these days. It is labelled Large Concrete Structure

And I admire it more, these days,

Than the lovely cherry blossom in the Spring

—-

And here is a more recent piece.

Urban Myth

the day the alligator poked up in the toilet bowl

was the day my mother died

and my lover left me

and my boss fired me

and I fell for a credit card scam

as a result of which

I got so drunk that I got into a fight

and my nose was broken

and the suit I was wearing was ruined

and when I finally got home

I had lost my keys

and Joanna wasn’t there to let me in

I don’t blame the alligator for any of this

the alligator is the least of my worries

The Year of Not Sleeping (6)

          Ash Wednesday

Not Ash Wednesday in fact- that was yesterday. Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness, during which he ‘eat nothing’, after which he was ‘tempted of the devil’. We are not told, however, if he slept. I am guessing not.

Quite a few years since I last received the ashes on Ash Wednesday, but I fasted, all day until dusk, when I had two hot cross buns, two cups of tea, and an apple. Oh, and a cigarette, which made me dizzy.

T.S.Eliot wrote a poem called Ash Wednesday. Not very cheerful, but he never promised to cheer us up. This is good-

           Teach us to sit still

           Even among these rocks,

           Our peace in His will

           And even among these rocks

           Sister, mother

           And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

           Suffer me not to be separated

           

           And let my cry come unto Thee.

I guess that is what Jesus did- sat still, never mind if he slept or not.

Here is something new by me. Nothing to do with Ash Wednesday or Lent.

I never saw anyone cry for the dead young man
Whose photograph stood on the piano
I never saw anyone play the piano
He’s owed a tear and I would shed one for him
If I knew how
What would our country be if all the names
Gilt on memorials had not died young in wars?
If I could cry it would be for the young man
And the photograph and our country and the wars
And the memorials- the stone, the graved words,
As well as for the upright, forsaken piano

_______________________

I would drop a tear if I could-
A tear of gold, a tear of silver,
One of honey, one of wormwood-
A gothic tear, baroque, rococo

_______________________

An honest tear is hard to come by-
The tear for sorrow, the tear for joy
The tear you save for when love dies
Art deco, cubist, post-impression

_______________________

I would try laughing if I could-
A laugh of mirth, a laugh of scorn
The laugh as innocent as childhood
The opera laugh, the flugelhorn

_______________________

I do not have the stomach for it
Nor the liver, the heart, the lungs
Not even the required conduit
Camera obscura, experimental film

The Year of Not Sleeping (5)

Still waking up in darkness. Rain these last two mornings. Rain is dropping on something that makes the sound of someone hitting a bucket with a spoon. Over and over, 100 times a minute.

I made up a new word for one of the poems below. There are 1832 pages of words in my Chambers Dictionary, so you wouldn’t think it necessary to invent new ones, would you? This is, however, a nonce-word. I am not expecting it to enter my own, never mind anyone else’s, vocabulary. It is based on a Greek word, poulái (πουλάι), which means, or can be used to mean, I think (I am on shaky ground here; don’t know any Greek), ‘dickhead’. This is the sort of thing that comes into my mind at 3am. I hope, when you read the poem, you will appreciate why I wanted it, and I hope it will please you, amuse you.

These four poems are those I read at our first Poets’ Corner Folkestone open-mic event of the year, which took place two evenings ago. They are all either from the end of last year or the beginning of this one. Exegesis is the critical interpretation of a text; scholia are annotations, comments written in the margins.

1) The Ghost of New Year’s Eve

Something that passes all our understanding
Flits unforthright through the sleeping rooms
Cracks and snaps of fireworks close and distant
Sound yet, although the curfew bell has rung.
Bottles smash and someone shrieks with laughter,
Fear, or both. The sirens’ plainsong counts the hours.

Endings never close, their echoes wake us.
The wind, the fireworks, a barking dog.
Commonplace events, and nothing to write home for,
Still -though stillness can’t be had this noisy night-
Something passes- years go by and sadness stays,
This the pretence that life has meaning.

Half-awake dreams of lovers whose names
Are lost, and likely changed long since;
Faces, too; these are the ghosts who come haunting,
Little knowing of their absent presence.
One o’clock, two o’clock, the New Year runs
Like clockwork, just as always. It will pass.

2) Exegesis

The poet uses words to mean something else
I’ve learned something of the poet’s arts
‘Boots on the ground’ is synecdoche
A part of a thing standing for the whole
And so a type of metaphor
A word that has the brass neck to be
No more than the sum of its parts.

‘The pen is mightier than the sword’
Is metonym- ‘the pen’ means more than just pen
‘Sword’ means more than sword- metaphor again.
The poet is careful how he uses words
But I wouldn’t bet on him
To tell me something that he doesn’t know.

When the poet wries of a ‘clown’
You know at once the clown ain’t going to be funny.
‘Clown’ is not exactly a tragic figure
But is definitely not meant to be funny.
This is, I think, Irony- meaning something other than what you say.
Irony is a short and narrow word
And means just what it says.
Irony is a nasty word
There’s poison in its sweet honey.

Poets so often use metaphor
That I wonder if ‘poem’ is a synonym of metaphor.
Metaphor is the failure of poets
To use words to say just what they mean.
Perhaps there are no such words and
They’d be better off switching to semaphore.
A colourful display of flags might
Bring unequivocal delight to lovers of poetry.

Meanwhile, in the absence of words that will say what they mean,
Exegesis is necessary.
Be assured, however,
We’re gentle folk, we scholiasts.
We aren’t noisy, we don’t charge in.
No, we leave the text untouched
And write in the margins.

3

I have lived in the era of tossers
The poulaiozoic era
Everyone says so

It can be dated, perhaps, from Churchill’s funeral
1965, when the world’s population was 3 and a 1/2 billion
Since then it has grown to 8 billion and all of them
But for the few saints, are tossers

It’s early days- the Paleozoic Era lasted
Almost 300 million years.
On the other hand, the Poulaiozoic Era
Has got off to a flying start
The Tosserarchy and the general tosserdom
Being firmly established already

Perhaps it will last for a million years
Perhaps it will end later today
I can’t tell
I was alive for a few years before 1965
But for most of my life it’s been wall-to-wall tossers
So I’ve forgotten what it was like before
And I’ve no idea how to go back or move on
All I can think is that another funeral is needed

4

We shouldn’t be sitting in cafes drinking coffee
We should be gathering and marching on the city
We agreed with each other over coffee

It’s time to march and put an end to war
If we were serious about peace we’d go to war
We dabbed our napkins on lips brown with coffee

We were serious enough to buy a second coffee
And, radically, a custard tart and a Danish pastry.
We were almost ready by now for the revolution.