Searching patterns in the Out, missing the attractor waves
there in the sea of gravity
we heaved ourselves upright in our shackles
fire-canisters threw us out
onto the broad strand
The harness fell off our motions
days of improvised and elaborate gesture
days of effacing borders
every thought traced out
in the heated tank with its forest of weeds
fluent through the linked waterways
in colours of blue and red
Flitting through our own space
flickering in green flare-dappled shadows
& dance in rings among our echoing wet images
patterns glancing out of our spines
I thrash like a tunnyfish
I swish like a reptile
I tumble end over end
The dynamic body ripples a record
on the flat white surface primed for roil prints
The spin of the newts in their tank alerts the pilot
seconds before the drag catches and spins the ship
The ship's planned course (each celestial mass
is a motor, like the ship's; where mass hides without light
and the fine stones in the ear shift to relate the ego to
the verticals local to each centre of Down)
is printed on the screen
where the swimmers' arms left their movements
Weightless in the muscular web
for months until the spiral stabilizes.
Exact radii. Sheaved loops. Among us.
The natives of red water see shapes flow out of their wrists.
In the Echo Nebula
tides shift
as the swimmers' bodies
with a lead of hours
turbulent matter sealed
with the signature of neural patterns, bursts
scoring the white stones cast up on the shore
external bodies litter the Unconfined,
swim into the coves of space
Echoing each others' movements
in the connected shallow pools flowing as air with sound
where clouds of warmth drain us of frustration
the reptile body steals over the laxed primates
the momentary universe of discourse
reconfigures the artificial lake
Blauer Reiter at Ducketts Common
In the blond pine bookcase to the left of the door
The Thames and Hudson book with the photograph
Of the hanging in felt appliqué, with the
Rider in blue tunic and yellow hose
In straight eyelines with the Mother Goddess in full insignia
Repeated all around the wall
Of the ice-lined tomb at Pazyryk, 5th century BC,
Tumbles in the world of the flat, strict profile, and colour patches
And ten feet away on the green chair at the table
With the dead plants and the landlady's hurricane lamp,
In the clothes of a 17th C Greek aristocrat,
Karagoz, the Hero Puppet painted on leather
On a poster for a Turkish festival I tore off the wall by Ducketts Common,
Joins up with the Rider: a line that followed the Turks
From the Altai mountains to the Mediterranean vines.
There Karagoz in his boat hat, his green breeches and yellow stockings,
His red riding-tunic whose skirts fall almost to the knee,
Its white applique flowers and lace jabot,
Fights for the Faith without shifting from the flat plane.
Memory is pressed into a new frame
And matched for fit, two years of
Gawp era, lummox conduct are over. I was so excited
I could barely stand, clogged faculties uttering
To hot-wire the connection which Luci said wasn't there.
What resemblance? Wasn't I proud
To know my sentimentality about folk art,
My weakness for anything Turkish and Inner Asian,
My credulity about traverse cracks in the fabric
Had come back?
I can talk again even if I'm not telling the truth.
She wears a full-length dress juste au corps and a big pillbox hat with jags,
He has a moustache and a little leopard-skin cape stiff out on the wind,
A band of brocade divides his body exactly in two,
She sits on a throne, has our crown-tines, and holds the Tree of Life.
If I write the dialogue that's spurious too.
Do you think I could buy those clothes
Somewhere between Turnpike Lane ABC and the New River?
notes on poems
Swimming in Spirals
I read about newts taken into outer space which began swimming in mathematically perfect spirals. I thought this might be because small variations in gravity were normally overlaid on the spiral pattern of searching for food, making it seem random. Obviously, this feature could also be used to detect large dark masses in nearby space, which would cause small shifts in the spiral courses. The newts (in flotation tanks) would be “otoliths” for the spaceship, just as otoliths act as gravity detectors for amphibians.
I have never thought of a way of explaining this in the text. The poem sets out from the idea of floating and detecting invisible pulses, rather than being a practical design for gravity tracking.
"Blauer Reiter at Duckett’s Common"
Duckett’s Common is a piece of open ground by Turnpike Lane Underground in Haringey, North London. There was a festival of Turkish Culture there (in 1995?) for which there were utterly wonderful posters showing a Karagoz puppet (painted leather). I tore one of the posters off the wall and took it home. What the poem is about is a moment when I put two images together and made a startling discovery. I saw a link between the Karagoz puppet and a painting, about 2500 years older, in a tomb at Pazyryk, which I knew from Tamara Talbot Rice’s Art of Central Asia, which I thought was stylised in a similar way. This meant my brain was coming back – I hadn’t had any ideas for about three years, after a breakdown. This was the point of the poem – the ability to link different frames of reference together. It was also about having the exotic close at hand – the poster was about ten feet away from the Talbot Rice book, so I could check out the idea without leaving my room. I could redefine my flat as an observatory exposed to data from all over the universe. The ABC was a cinema next to the underground station; the New River runs past one end of Turnpike Lane, under the railway line. The tomb figure is “Blauer Reiter” just because he is a blue knight. He is shown in front of a Queen, interpreted as the Mother of All Living Things – why she is holding a Tree of Life. Luci thought there was no connection between the two pictures at all. Maybe not, but in Turnpike Lane people speak Turkish, and this does come from Central Asia. The poem doesn’t work terribly well; it’s too personal, and it belongs to a moment when I had forgotten how to write. I like it because it is saturated with personal meaning.