what comes out to light E-Book

graham bowers

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 66

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This is the third collection of poetry from Graham Bowers. The palette of forms and techniques used in the poems is as broad and varied as the themes and subjects.

Leseprobe

And when we clear away

All this debris of day-by-day experience,

What comes out to light, what is there of value

Lasting from day to day?

Louis MacNeice

(from Autumn Journal, 1939)

Contents

Here and now

After

Admiring her I asked

Mist

Signalling (Joe the cat)

Observed

Oxel

One last glass

A single cat's hair

Would that

Whichever way

Bag, bin, box

Fair enough

The auction

There and then

A new pencil

Ashes

If to understand

Some of the time

April evening

The path (a study plan)

As I

Fractional

A step aside

Splash and fall (

song lyrics)

Memory

Matches

Collective

Cephalopod

Pub talk

Bat haiku

Senecio

Being Learning Knowing

Screenings

(

Not the) same

Frog: being, whereabouts

Raising a glass

Found out

Seismogram

A poet

Older

Survival guide

Tête-à-tête

To whom it may

Responsibility

Gone almost before

Two trees

If/it

ID

Here I am, and now.

That's not a definition,

just a vantage point.

Here and now

After

Afterwards

as aftermath grows

out of the aftershock

you try to take stock

with a sidewards look

(the sides being

outside,

inside).

And it's hard to decide

what was key, what was lock,

what caused, what ensued

from, the downward slide

with its varying shapes –

sometimes a cascade

where it all comes unhooked,

sometimes a slower

downwards glide,

or the lesser uncontrol

of a downwards ride.

And once it's all levelled out

at the foot of the fall

with, say, the sea and the shore

and a moment that's still,

it seems some succeed

once they've slid and slipped

with what you've only tried –

they seem better equipped

to take things in their stride.

From where you stand, too,

it seems luck seeks them out:

horses come to their hand

in their moment of need

boats wash up on land,

and they find the right track

for a new upwards ride

knowing how reins and saddles work,

or can canoe

against the tide

knowing how waves and paddles work.

Though maybe that's just

what it looks like to you

since for you things impede

(outside, inside,)

the easy bounce-back:

the gaps are too wide

for spectacular leaps

your backbone's just normal

your muscles are slack

your eyesight's a limit

that keeps you in check.

The only way back

or up or through

for you is to walk;

thinking, as you place one foot after

the other, how so much that we learn

must be self-taught

and come with the taut, dry

aftertaste that resides within

the afterthought.

Admiring her I asked

Admiring her sure-footedness I asked if she could take me

through how she did it, how she thought,

hoping that could make me

I don't know, less erodable, better able to cope.

"Well", she said, "one thing: I have no set of strictures

that can forsake me

as if I had been clinging to a non-existent rope

twisted of values wanting me to worry

if they love or hate me,

a rope which can be snapped, can drop me. And while I know

it happens, I try to ducks-back it

when other people conflate me

with pre-conceived pictures, memories, their own version

of me, their slants on life. Their problem if they under-rate

or overestimate me.

But if this sounds like I see in life a quest, as though

I had a heroic notion of myself as a beacon of unblur-

ability, then you mistake me.

All that talk of buddhistic balance, of constant composure? No:

love, passion, embroiling human commitment – these I welcome

when they shake me.

All these pulsing things – let them tell you they're the nub, the centre

round which it all spins. Let them pull and push you, lung-pump your blood,

don't think, 'They might mis-shape me.'

Maybe it's like surfing – keeping my joints responsive in the rush and noise

of the wave, living the elementals, knowing that life

sometimes will becalm me, sometimes spate me."

She made it sound, not easy, but as if nothing could dent her,

and she could always be in that engaged and generous, yet

unperforably sovereign state. Me,

I feel it's beyond me, her mix of flame and edge and poise,

but can I learn to be less perturbable, so things don't undermine

or overtake me

quite as much? "One thing I think you shouldn't do",

she said, "is feel you need to dodge or ignore the ferment,

fashion an escape. Me,

I say this: for all that life, events, other people too,

are sure to pummel and pressure me, seek to trip or grab

me, try to sliver or deflate me,

knock me down and on their terms re-instate me,

it's not for anyone to think they can chalk up my tab,

plus here, minus there. Whose tab is it? Who is named

at the foot of the slate? Me."

Mist

Mist,

subsume me,

lift, diffuse me;

drift and loosen me;

make me mist.

This:

hard edges held

in abeyance,

their dominance repealed,

over-self-reliance

down-scaled.

Not corporeal, yet

in and of this

world;

not colliding

with it, not dissolving

or exactly over-riding

it, but lacing

through, between, among

the world.

Not

rebuking the non-quiet:

rather, stilling it;

you don't assert

so much as demonstrate

the quieter way

that is not

lessened

by meeting the harshness,

muting it, dimming

the rashness, the rush.

Refuting its absolutism

you brush against it

but are not consumed. Such

are your lessons

as, free

from weight,

yet you are present, palpable.

Molecular, meaning

you have structure

but, uncornerable,

you don't get stuck.

Were I as unshakeable,

as free,

mist.

Your finger to the lips,

mild eclipse of clamour,

reassesses distance

and suggests how to replace

the clang and slam

by simply filling your own space;

then, when gone,

missed.

Signalling (Joe the cat)

Joe the cat

scratches at

my bedroom door

saying with pad

and just enough claw,

"If you want to waste the night,

then sure.

But the magnetic moon

has me on its wavelength

and is silently singing me,

hauling me

out to slip among the trees,

to beat my bounds

and sniff the message-laden air

and night-potent ground,

not only to patrol and mark

the force-lines of my territory

but also, snooking and climbing,

and lying still, too, antennae on full 'receive',

to probe and nose beyond

as I breathe the wind and drink the dark."

There's a pause.

Then, being an understanding cat

he knows that, being human –

weak, and generally poor

at tuning in to all that is

at life's most essential, urgent core;

eschewing even walking on all four

as if, by seeking distance from the floor

we wish to dismiss all the earth

has to suggest, impart and report –

I'm hoping I can ignore the signalling

and not have to leave

the lagging of my tame cocoon;

so the scratching resumes:

"Hear my pawing

through the layers of your dormancy.

All I'm asking is that you,

closer of doors,

release me

into my need

to one myself with the world

of worm and vole, fox and owl,

of rustle, listen, sneak,

and lunge and plunge and call.

Then choose, if you prefer,

once you've stumbled to the door,

to stumble back and sink yourself once more

into that strange, raised sieve

of dreams, of moments slipping down and through.

Sleep, mere human;

I'm Joe the Cat:

let me out, to live."

Sometimes when I don't know

I'm looking, I catch myself

at it: trying to impress

myself.

Observed

Oxel

The English name for the tree out back

is 'Swedish whitebeam'. It doesn't grow