NaPoWriMo - 2021 - VII - The fog being what it is...

The fog being what it is...

...the bellman comes and tolls his bell.
His creaks tread up the outside stairs.
The last few drunks lurch up from chairs
and stumble off to bunks and lashings
of blustery words from bosun's lips
on ships which may not sail in the morning
the fog being what it is.

Between the chimes the sailors' feet
are fading flatly down the street
as the bellman tolls his mournful bell
but whether to summon or to dispel
some troubled spirit of mists and seas
is quite beyond my power to tell
the fog being what it is.

I too had better rise and leave.
My tiny garret coldly waits
and I have tangled threads to weave
into tattered nets by the whale-oil's flicker
which only I shall light in my window --
but first I'll walk the bellman to the dock
the fog being what it is.

We walk in silent whitewashed haze.
Familiar streets are strangely mazed
and the fog-horn shudders the vapour
wound around the cast-iron lamppost
and if neither of us tells a ghost story
it is only because we are living one
the fog being what it is.

And see we've come down to the dock.
A fresher onshore breeze here blowing
vessels that rock and creak on dark water,
the bellman turns towards his light
and I ought to turn for home, except for
my empty window where the white sheets curl
the fog being what it is.

Fog vapours and the mists compete
to drive me from the sodden town
drag me along the strip of salt-wet concrete,
bollards, mouldering rope, and ships
where a man can put his name down for the tropics
—tell the bellman he can have my nets—
the fog being what it is.

Fugit

A poem from 2011.  I'd almost forgotten this one, which is ironic when you consider the subject matter.

This was inspired by an actual walk down to the beach at Ravenscar from Boggle Hole, both excellent places to stroll down to and good for hunting fossils — another rich metaphor about the nature of time, but one I didn't make use of here.

Artistic license alert: on the actual day there were no horses...  but there could have been.

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Fugit

Above the beach are horses, or so we must believe,
having seen them lounge, tails swinging,
beneath the trees we strolled beneath
—the shade now only another belief—
when we kicked down through the evaporating dew
in the imaginary morning.

There is of course no time remaining
the moment any moment's done.
Footprints on the sand lie,
another preceding one,
like a man saying "and before that I..."
all the way back to his birth
over by the corner of the beach hut.

The sun westerns.
The tide erodes the beach.
We each stand at the end
of a line of our own feet,

pointing ahead to empty sand, a canvas,
page, or silence waiting dormant;
the prints we are to make implied.
We know we will walk.
We even choose where the next few fall,
but beyond that know nothing at all
of what rock pools we'll peer into,
which breaking waves we'll salt-spray through;
except that the day in time will end
and we will wend back past the horses
—briefly real again—
with the seashore fading behind us.

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Wave and seagull sounds in background are attributed to "justkiddink" and "eelke", and available from: https://www.freesound.org/

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 15th - The impossibility of Elspeth Spangler

This one languished for a long time as just the first strophe and the idea of releasing the mice.  However on the train yesterday it got its moment to shine...

Elspeth doesn't shine...  she glows gently if she thinks nobody is looking.

I'm not vegetarian but I like vegetarian food.  And I'm not a cat person, but I'm even less a dog person so I get Elspeth to that extent.



The impossibility of Elspeth Spangler


The woman can't exist.  She does not work
for all hours in the whole-food shop.  She won't
arrive at six to clatter shutters down
and shove the drawer back firmly in the till.
She never checks the racks for misplaced packs
or things that need refill.  She has no chance

encounters with her oldest friend or lunch
outside the vegan café opposite,
and they don't laugh round cauliflower bake
or snort latte at what the teacher said
that day when they freed all the classroom mice
in the unreal childhood many miles ago.

And now she doesn't wander, weary, home,
the day of problems not quite out of mind,
although the ones now gone feel so well done.
There isn’t any hint of rain to damp
her slightly battered funky hat. There’s no
absence of boy or girl back in the flat,

boiling the kettle ready. She doesn’t need
to keep her coat and scarf on while the place
warms through. There is the cat, who adopted her
so many years ago and who awaits
the ceremonial filling of the bowl
as if the World were a real and reliable place.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 7th - The rough guide to peri-apocalyptic travel

The challenge was to write a poem using: translucent, black, ride, stuff, house, strike, purpose, yellow, peace, road


The rough guide to peri-apocalyptic travel


I am become translucent on my horse
and yet must ride, the desert not too far
behind, the desert not so far ahead;

its stuff and substance blow around your house,
as I pause to drink and strike some sort of pose.
What is my purpose?  You do not want to know—

the desert will be on you soon, all sere
and grey, and it's late within the day, and I
imagine yellow bricks upon the road:

it helps me go, my name was never Dorothy
and I am grown translucent on the horse,
which is still black.  His name is Acceptance.  Peace.

Late onset fallibility

This is a poem about dementia, which isn't something which has badly impacted me in my life.  Yet...

(My Nan had it, but I wasn't that old and we lived quite a long way away...)

It's going to touch me at some point however.  It's bound to.  About 1/6 of people over 80 are affected, and I know many more than 6 people.

Some see Alzheimer's as the worst tragedy of the modern age.  I am not sure I entirely agree, it's certainly one of the most painful for the victim's family—possibly worse even than having them in a persistent vegetative state, at least in that case the wreckage of the person you loved isn't still trying to talk to you.


However, to my mind dementia, horrible as it is, is a subset of the big tragedy, which is that people die.  I have written about this before: the inevitability of death, how it gets a little more evitable every year, and how that in itself brings interesting, new, social problems.  Those are good problems to have, however.  People living too long is infinitely preferable to them not living long enough.  The increase in diseases we can't yet fix: dementia, cancer, diseases of senescence in general—is the direct effect of taking out all those lesser deaths who were more vulnerable to our sorcery.

None of which makes the failure of a beloved mind any more bearable.


I have been asked why this is late onset, when early onset is even more tragic.  The answer is because early onset dementia is more like a horrible disease, striking down only a subset of us; however the diseases of old age, of which dementia is the one example, get everybody who lives long enough...

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Ian Badcoe · Late onset fallibility

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Late onset fallibility


He returns from walking the dog
no longer quite your father.
It's nearly your dog.

He returns from walking the dog;
he's only been gone two days,
which admits no ready explanation.

He returns from walking the dog
with a jaunty stride
and somebody else's shoes.

He returns from walking the dog:
your mother leaves without a word--
she has been dead for five years.

He returns from walking the dog
smiling strangely to himself;
scowling at you, your brother, the front room paper.

He returns from walking the dog;
seems like he's acting younger
and looking frailer than when he left.

He returns from walking the dog;
wants to speak to your sister, oblivious
that she lives in Queensland now.

He returns from his walk
with a cat on a piece of string
and seven tins of the wrong dog food.

To steer by

(OK, so the northern star isn't a quasar, call it artistic license...)

What's to say here?

Maybe nothing.  Let the poem speak for itself.

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To steer by


If I should go to seek the northern star
I'll shoe my stick in adamant
and take whichever road winds farthest
through wider and more disjunct lands --
a drunkard's life journey, endless in retelling
while the eyes fuzz at 3 a.m.

—although I'll leave before the end of this
or any other tale. Many miles expect
unhurried feet and gaze which notes
the climate cooling as I walk, sees
how a plant displaces softer weeds,
and feels it satisfies some need:
translating feet to miles.

But is there any effort of the patient stride
to bring one to the place of total ease,
to stand upon the landscape where it's clean,
unstirred beneath the empty air,
and the sky a passacaglia
for unaccompanied star?

If I should come beside you as I walk—
in dust, or mud, or chill with sprinkled rain—
maybe I will ask about the road ahead
and while you'll think me friendly in my way,
you will not drag my eyes from the horizon.