Eclipse

(Note: this is based on a short extract from a book called "The Life of Willibrord", written by Alcuin of York in about 750. I am using C. H. Talbot's edition:

"Filled with fear, she awoke at once and went to recount the dream to a holy priest, who asked her whether during the night the vision came she had known her husband in the customary way. When she assented...." )

"Why do you ask me that?
You who have not known a woman!
But yes, I bestraddled him
And my breasts hung like twin moons
Eclipsed by his hands or mouth.

"Then later, as he slept
My mind's eye saw the crescent moon
Swell: grow to fullness

"So, what means this, friend priest."

Yrmenlaf

At first glance, he seems the younger man,
Bright gortex pulled tight against the wind
It is the rucksack -
Surely the load he carries -
That makes him so slow up the hill.

The other, sheltered by the wall from the squalls:
Waits, huddled by the gate, until the time
For the exchange of words
Wisdom or foolishness
For two men in this wildness must speak.

"There is nothing beyond" He keeps his face hid
Beneath the brim of his shepherd's hat
"Many have ventured this way
Across the fells
None have returned to green pasture"

The first man laughed: despite the storm and his load,
He laughed. "We played together, you and I
As children. You lied then
And you lie now.
See: I leave here my legacy: bread, wine and light."

Y.

The Work of Reassembly

The man rakes through knapped flakes
of flint, like leaves or blades, slices
of a body. He pictures unknown molluscs boring
into chalk, breaking down, leaving holes
that fill slowly with black, going bad, going hard;
thinks of an edge slitting hide, a heart flapping

in its own cavity. He finds the next piece,
sticks it carefully to the last, Superglue and blood
on his fingers. He’s surrounded here by flint,
a thousand facets, more, spread out in shiny slices,
eyes staring up, frozen, each preserving an image
of a man swinging a stone blade, working flint,
moments captured in an immutable emulsion
of geology, fixed in leaching calcites and metamorphic
pressure - a record of clicking, grunting, industry

of rainfall or sunlight, smells of roasting
flesh, fur, cracking of fat and bone -
but he knows that these eyes look out only
from the impossible. These are not the flint roads
to a land of the dead, we shall not reach out
quivering hands to our mitochondria through this
avalanche of fossil. There are no sparks left
here, these fragments are cold as fish scales
to his fingers, this pool blind to both oceans

and the man refitting the scales, jigsawing through
codas of the Permian and Palaeolithic. He is precise,
determined; he assembles, he attempts, he rejects,
searches. He finds, growing in his hands, a nodule,
a flint - three dimensions, four, others perhaps
inert, coiled in a hole in the core in the shape
of an axe head. This is what he finds here

- holes - here in his hands, holes like words
transmitted from the Stone Age in its cataract
of sediment. He senses violence gestated, birthed
in these sockets, and his fingers sting
with the sensing. He knows the excitement,
the slight tremor as his fingers reach back,
adding more fragments, more of the hole, ignoring
the dreams that crowd upon him. He feels the void,

the discovery, absence, the discovery of absence.
The finding of holes. The shape of the absent -
he traces its periphery, its rim, feels the shape
of what has been taken. This is the beginning
of the work of reassembly: the finding of holes.
Later will come measuring and recording, cataloguing,
later still the taking of casts. Much later,
the tentative matching of specimens. For now,
he feels them in his hands, flints with no hearts,
light as pumice, warm as fists, dark as deep history.

Steve Parker - 2006.

Rondelet

I never knew
you very well. But now the man
I never knew
is on my mind. Perhaps your few
well-chosen words, concealed a plan
To know me too but understand
I never knew


Upordown

And

the star shines brightest at the tip of the
whitecap as it leaps and turns, travels up,
licks at the night to find the silver point,
the direction in which to travel,
faux in the pas of the twinkle
single shine in the constellation
and having found it, only once
beats back down into surf
restless, boiling, rolled into undercurrent
silver reflection burns through the surface
reminds it to leap again, this time higher
faster, washing into the tear of a star
that burns alone and waits for that lost kiss.

Notelvis

Watching ballet in mother carey's kitchen

As I descend
I trust my life
to this nylon thread.
Below the white foam hypnotises;
another world
where surface equals vertical,
green transforms to white and grey,
where gulls and jackdaws
wheel and screech
and tiny fish
weave their silver paths
through deep, purple pools

I run the ropes through fingers,
commit to tantric dance,
edges, cracks,
and rock protrusions.
feet smeared, body twisted,
my universe collapsed to
seven feet of overhang
casting shadow.

I stretch, clasp, swing in space.
My heel curves around my head.
I pull, slap, latch a pocket,
pull again and I can stand.

I breathe.

The last few feet go by with ease,
my sequenced movements dance
in perfect choreography

I take my perch,
a grin across my face,
and my ankles dangling,
languid in the void.

The ballerina enters;
her dance, on fingers of wind,
her backdrop, sea, sky welded;
Eyes lock, wings tuck
She stoops unseen.
A thud,
a flurry of feathers
and a pigeon for her table

My head is bowed
in admiration.

Chris Wyatt 11/01/07

Rattle

Hey! No time for that, No time for fun
No time for playing, there's work to be done

Don't play with the silverware, the reflections you've seen
Go outside with this rag, and polish it clean.

Hey! No time for that, No time for fun
No time for playing, there's work to be done

Put down your linen, your silks and your jewels
Go fetch the benches, the seats and the stools

Hey! No time for that, No time for fun
No time for playing, there's work to be done

Stop stealing titbits from under my eye
Or you'll be bloated, too full to eat by and by

Hey! No time for that, No time for fun
No time for playing, there's work to be done

Put down that sackbutt, that crumhorn, that shawm
I need this floor sweeping clean before dawn

Hey! No time for that, No time for fun
No time for playing, there's work to be done

Stop practicing dance steps; slow, quick-quick, slow
There's bread to be made: hey you, knead this dough

Hey! No time for that, No time for fun
No time for playing, there's work to be done

Y.

Forbear

The three bears
Each presented their gifts
To the golden-headed Christ child:
Porridge with too much salt
A throne, too soft for judgement
And a comfortable bed -
So that the Christ might sleep
And make no noise.

And the fourth bear, the Magdalene,
Petrified in her lascivious debauchery
Faces the rain, the storms
Dances the heather swell
Of the moor edge
Scarred for all to see.

Y.

http://www.brimhamrocks.co.uk/gallery.cfm?pic=dancing_bear&p=1