I Don't do People
01326 379029
Biographical
Start
I was London born and London bred;
Embroidered time, learnt to be good
At church, at school and abroad.
(A canary in a cage.)
A queen of science married a Master of Arts;
Produced a pigeon pair, stitched rhymes,
Worked and cooked and sewed.
(A hornbill in her tree.)
Seven years solitary, static in States,
taught the art of passing time in paint and patch.
Circling the globe I observed with involvement.
(An albatross on the wing.)
Now, seeking catharsis in Cornwall,
Devil’s advocate, I write in fire,
Paint in water, plant in earth and sew in air.
(A phoenix in embryo.)
In faith we walk backwards into our future.
Resurrection light streams over our shoulders
Illuminating the landscape of the past.
Behind, Christ risen touches us with glory
As we step backwards into his warm embrace
At last his welcoming arms enfold us.
Middle
Some people manage
Day after day
Year after year
Time after time
Doing the things that need to be done.
But I need: Dream time, Drift time,
Floating on the tide time.
Some women go on
Again and again
Over and over
On and on
Doing the things they ought to do.
But I must have: Past time, Lost time,
Sleeping in the sun time.
Looking at the shape of things,
Wondering at the look of things,
Breathing in the smell of things,
Minding in the thought of things.
End
Birth
Times table, small test
Eleven plus, big test
O Level, A Level
Find your own level
Driving test, means test
Blood test …
Death
Final examination
I was London born and London bred;
Embroidered time, learnt to be good
At church, at school and abroad.
(A canary in a cage.)
A queen of science married a Master of Arts;
Produced a pigeon pair, stitched rhymes,
Worked and cooked and sewed.
(A hornbill in her tree.)
Seven years solitary, static in States,
taught the art of passing time in paint and patch.
Circling the globe I observed with involvement.
(An albatross on the wing.)
Now, seeking catharsis in Cornwall,
Devil’s advocate, I write in fire,
Paint in water, plant in earth and sew in air.
(A phoenix in embryo.)
These Words Too
When I die the children will burn my possessions.
What else can they do?
Piece by piece dismantling each hoarded, counted word,
Pinned on paper.
Strand by strand unpicking each hand embroidered stitch,
Painstakingly caught.
Colour by colour draining the rainbow, the sunshine,
Into rain showers.
Sheet by sheet unwinding the long careful hours of thread, thought,
And paint.
Only what I gave will be kept, will escape
The funeral fire.
Waking
I wake. I refuse to awake.
A cup of tea miraculously materialises
Hip out of bed, and halt to another room
With one hand I turn a tap while I land on the seat
I pee, sometimes copiously
I wash, sometimes sparingly.
Off stage breakfast noises, smells
Shall I do my exercise? Yes. No.
Curl and stretch, lift and pause.
Clothed and in some semblance of a right mind
I step down, I sit down, I eat.
Then oh, so slowly misery lifts, daylight shows
Birds sing, flowers shock, the day begins.
Reluctantly
Reluctantly the night gives way to day,
Reluctantly the dark lets out the light,
Reluctantly I rise, unlike the sun,
The shortest day, the longest night.
In eastern dark thin pale streaks of light
Blood orange slice across the sky.
What have you done?
What have you done to the earth?
What have you done?
I stir
Become awake
Lie dormant
Sudden heat flows up and over me
I thrash about half drowning
Throw up my arms
The wave retreats
Stranding me damp
Between the sheets
He turning tears me
From nothingness to life
Brings into focus the demanding day
I do not want to wake
So shut my eyes
Pull up the dark
Repulse life after sleep
I wake
and instantly shut my eyes
another day has dawned
I want neither to look back
at the advancing tide
of emotional debris
detritus of embarrassment
undesired outcomes
demands of family
people
Nor to look forward
at declining years
distresses of occasion
incompetences (incontinences)
demands of family
people
So I look inwards
groaning
invent stories
drivel
anything to cancel past and future
to stop thinking
Eventually I submit
to the imperatives of a new day
Get up and live in the present
shutting my mind to the past
and my eyes to the future
I exist without joy
without desires
Time passes.
I am a woman so your masculinity is at risk
I am intelligent so your thinking is challenged
I am old so your dominance is void.
Poldhu
I am full of sun and wind,
dazed with sparkling water
and replete with thrift:
With thrift and squill,
trefoil and white cress,
bluebells and purple orchids.
A surfeit of pink and white,
with accents of blue and yellow.
Sun shone, wind caressed,
Flowers filled the eyes.
Sand martins easily estimating
accuracy and braking skills.
A perfect day on the Lizard.
The Rumps
Squills and swallows on the Rumps.
Celandine, violets and bluebells too.
Sheep with lambs, cows with calves.
Blue sky, billowing clouds, sun and downpours.
Sea smashing against rocks, with gulls swirling
Or cruising in formation, in still balance.
Stones (Summerhouse June 2012)
Stones
Rise out of the living landscape like dead weights
Holding down lark song, furze and whin
Weighted with the names of the dead
They mark past rituals, kings and torn love.
They count heads, hours, seasons, millennia
The stones dial the sun, touch eternity.
Reproach us with mortality.
Hailstones beat on granite, dissolve the ages
Names liquefy and are gone.
Moon washes the stones clean
Ready for new inscriptions..
Egg stones float broken yolks spill sunshine.
White stones tell sun dialling happy hours.
Hailstones melt slide into nothingness.
Headstones mark lost love, touch eternity.
Great stones stand dissolving horizons.
Sandstone grit
Slick rock sends
Shoes sliding
Over the
edge.
As mild as milk
As pungent as Stilton.
Aldeburgh 2013
1
Cold, that’s the first impression
Blue shale sky, darkening at the sea’s horizon;
Small, clustered, cluttered town;
Stones in walls, houses, patterns, beaches.
Cold, bitter cold.
Muted grass, dingy, droopy plants;
Ships passing far off on leadened seas;
Paving slab, flat, square sided sheds.
Cold, what cold.
Warm red brick and creamy stone;
Mud water, mud flats, mud tracks;
Bright aconites huddle in corners.
Cold, stone cold
Wind drifting north, flags static;
Pigeons concoodle on the cornice;
Dawn touched flight of goose;
Cold, snow cold.
Cold, that’s the only impression.
2
Hotel art, hotel decor, patterned to boredom
Cushy muted bold, recognisably nondescript
National Trust colours, Farrow and Ball.
3
Sated, stuffed, stultified me
Among prosy, pontificating prigs
And cushioned, upholstered besoms.
Pompous old farts.
Slide through the reeds,
Lifting the ducks,
Out down the mudways,
Chasing farther, faster,
Escaping with the tide.
Mother, August 2011 (died October)
What should I be doing?
Who should I remember next?
Whose child is born?
Concentrate. Keep the crossword cells at work.
But redundancy has come unwilling to the house.
The spark of sense is spent, the ashes settle in the heart.
Flesh dries; bones and skin thin,
Face lengthens, angles tighten, bones emerge.
Bound by duty to fight each hour, not to die as yet,
Dredging up adrenalin, dogged persistence,
Head falls on burdened hands.
Stepping slowly, painfully, up a stony road,
Tentatively prodding bruise by bruise.
Hand with heel touches ground, ankle holds.
The last hard uphill struggle,
And at the crest, the pass, what then?
What taste is left, what joy or expectation?
A grey dust settles in a mortal’s clothes.
A breath withheld stirs bones to dust.
But dust’s the matter of the universe; life and thought and warmth.
Who knows? The pass is cold and keen, snow shrouded mist,
But after, downward takes the feet to Elysian gardens
Or springs to wing .
I stand, holding a dead chicken.
A single picture without past or future.
Just me and a dead chicken.
Guy asks: why is your life adrift?
Is it worry of those gone or coming fears?
Your cracked, fast emptying glass?
I reply; I am standing here.
I don’t know why I’m standing here alone
A dead chicken in my hands.
I have been down this road before you.
I know its stones, its salty pools,
Barren places, potholes and airy abysses.
I know it well, its familiar paths,
Dead ends and no-go areas,
Leaden skies and umberscapes,
Dark horizons, hopeless dawns,
Shutting dusks, drawing down the blinds of night.
I walk it daily, hourly.
I recognise each turning and know
Where it leads to the dead wall.
I touch its blocks, I finger its cracks,
I bend down to check the earth beneath
And reach up as far as I am able.
And go back.
I have been along this road before you.
I know it well.
Love comes unbidden
Snake in the grass
Love comes like smoke
Sneaks through a crack
It hangs in every corner
and drifts across the floor
Its unmistakable odour
Is in the sheets, under the bed
It leaks down the stairs
Under the locked door
Into the kitchen.
Uneradicable
It permeates even stone.
I dreamed that I stood in a doorway
Hands holding either side
Before me was a great void
A sky of violet blue
Of immense depth
Alive with light and colour
I want wings to launch myself
into that endless space.
Brittany 2015
Yachts like butterflies on a dancing ocean,
Terns and gulls like bees and wasps,
Under pencilled skies, flutter over the watery abyss
Daily and return to hang in pontoons.
Christmas Walk 2014
The good are in church, the bad in bed.
We, being neither good nor bad,
are spewed out
and are walking the lanes.
Early Morning
These bedclothes are behaving badly
Egged on by the hot water bottle
The blankets are smothering the sheet
which is knotted
The pillow clouds are laughing
as the divots in the duvet
are heading for the floor
To tangle with the dirty clothes
and escaping through the door.
Sunday Afternoon Walk
Up foot! Work!
Toe Heel Ankle Calf Knee Thigh
Bend Lift Right Left
Each foot is forced up, driven down,
Nailed onto the path, heaved out again.
Dragged through purple poppied sands
Clogged with sleep, clotted with dreams
Drifts of night blur the cloud thick brain
Fog fingers felt the fibrous flesh
The cloying strands of honeyed shades
Make each slow sleep slurred step
A deliberate conscious act
All things are tarnished.
The moon is misted over, the stars gone.
Gloomy the horizon and dull the foreground.
Curtaining rain blurs the metallic sea.
Dark birds dive through the softening sky.
Tangled hedges and battered trees
Edge ochre fields and olive grass.
Man moves with grim intent
in straight lines and
geometric forms.
Lines while waiting indefinitely
for the bus to Watford.
Half the morning burns away
While I wait here.
Waiting, I think: ‘What’s life?
Is it to do, or think, or see?
Merely to stand and watch
The sun lift by degrees
Above that line of trees
Feel the slight air lift my hair.
Appreciate the changing patterns of the sky,
And all the colours in each chestnut tree,
Mark each leaf fall, each repetition of the thrush,
Each smell as it assaults my nose,
Each person as she passes by.
And waiting praise.
What benefit in that?
Shall I, by watching, change the clouding of the sky?
Check the leaf fall or correct the thrush,
Cleanse the streets, or modify behaviour,
Make the pattern of creation mine?
What good in that?
Man mars by touching and breaks by thought,
By working alters patterns intricately wrought,
And brings all creation down to nought.
Do I want this? Can I do else than wait?
And waiting praise.
Dancing down the footpath
By maylight and stitchlight.
Walk in the garden
When the blackbird sings
Scent the wallflower flings
Memory draws feet
Out through the gate.
Wander the field ways
When the cuckoo calls
Further the note falls
Pace quickens to go
To rainbow’s end.
Go into the green wood
When the bluebird trills
Melody’s wild note fills
Stand where the blue bells
Thicken and spread.
There, where the branches tangle and leaf,
There, where the birdsong trembles and lifts,
Over the silence that lies underneath
Melody and memory meet.
Christmas 2008
See a baby lying – breathing
Softly round the cradle stepping
Pictured on the wall a haloed boy
Love and peace and joy.
Bless this infant, Jesus
Bless this house and all within it
Now and every day.
See the baby lying – sleeping
Tiny niggling gnats around his cradle peeping
White lies, tell tales, evil eye, sly nicks,
All the little hurtful pricks.
This is not the way we like it.
This is not the world we want.
Kiss it better God.
See the baby lying – dreaming
Round his cradle rockets streaming
Cannon, guns and spitfires fighting
Napalm, anthrax, bombs alighting.
We want an end to this.
We want a new world.
Give it to us God.
See the baby lying –crying
Gathered round his cradle flying
Three great horsemen
Sword and famine ...death.
We want immortality.
We want endless giddy youth.
Cross your fingers.....God?
Life Here is:
Like a bird
On the upmost twig.
In the wind
Swaying, fluttering,
Wing beat flapping.
Balancing
Dicer-ly,
Eventually,
Failing
To fly away,
Falling
Into the sky.
Knitting
I was handed a ball of wool full of knots and breaks,
You got a smooth skein of beautiful colours.
Comfort Zone
My comfort zone is becoming the size of a postage stamp
It is a pretty little stamp, brightly coloured and decorative
It has still life and can go places when attached to an envelope
But it is becoming a comfortable padded cell.
In the Tate St Ives, a Pseud imported from London, spoke. A string quartet waited to play. He argued that just as the frame was more important than the picture, the silence (which he was occupying) was more important than the music. After 15 minutes I left, never hearing the (by now restless) quartet.
When I reported my frustration to Catharine, the poem below emerged next day.
Framed poem
A poem needs a white frame of silence.
Take time to view this pattern of black marks,
In its own space – singular.
Separate by stillness the spoken word,
Catch the quick running impression, the light,
The colour, the brushwork.
The picture’s eye stares, cries out, ‘Look at Me!’
The drum of the poem translates the mind
Demands responding thought.
The egg word on the gallery ocean,
Whole within itself on chaos floating,
Dark before and after.
A Complaint
It wasn’t for a meal ticket
Nor yet a house and garden; but
For love I married you, my dear,
A long time ago.
Two children do not compensate
For a smile of loving care; and
For love I married you, my dear,
Fifteen years ago.
Sex is not an alternative
To laughter, joy and fun; it was
For love I married you; my dear,
A long time ago.
A beautiful September day,
Church bells, wine and merry making;
For love you said you married me,
Fifteen years ago.
I little thought the sea would take
Responsibility and all
The love with which I married you
A long time ago.
A man should take his wife and make
A golden ring a golden crown,
For love God married us, my dear,
Fifteen years ago.
Not for parting and neglecting,
For chilly bed and empty house.
But for yourself I married you
A long time ago.
‘Twas for giving and receiving,
For mutual joy and comforting,
It was for love I married you
So long ago; for love.
Breton Voyage
Chatter of masts and flutter of pennants,
Splatter of colours all constrained
Within grey winds, blue walls.
Clutter of charts with scatter of packets,
Mutter of waves all contained
Inside boat decks, white hulls.
Listen: Throb of engine over rippled seas
See: Islands float above horizons
Yachts trail around in waves, in spasms,
In long floating streamers through touch light winds
Sails droop, flutter, wander from port to starboard,
- and back
Seeking a breath, an aeration, inhalation.
Boats as blown spume spiral from harbours, dance in currents,
twist round marks, gather in eddies and whirlpools, disperse in tides.
Land materialises, islands link beaches.
Boats sway up and down, sidle sideways.
tugging to be bird free.
Eyes burn in sun-starred seas, wave dazzled.
Vanishing beacons, moving targets pass by.
Eel-wreathed channels move past.
Side-slipping slip-shod seaways, slipways.
Broken glass sea reflects, refracts light.
Hurts.
Ichabod
The heavens are empty, the stars have dropt out.
The sun is barren and the moon defunct.
The sky blew out and the sea went.
The abyss opened, standing still
I tripped and fell in nothing.
A hand outstretched touched nothing.
Meaning fled and sense went west,
Eternal verities are null and void,
If not so what?
?
You hurt me,
You hurt me badly, I am still hurting.
We trusted you,
Your experience, your expertise.
You failed us,
You did not live up to your responsibilities.
Did you help when I was down?
Did you call an ambulance?
Did you hold my hand?
Squills and swallows on the Rumps.
Celandine, violets and bluebells too.
Sheep with lambs, cows with calves.
Blue sky, billowing clouds, sun and downpours.
Sea smashing against rocks, with gulls swirling
Or cruising in formation, in still balance.
Day by Day
Draw the curtains, up you get.
Make the breakfast, make the bed,
Wash the clothes, then wash the floor.
Check the e-mails, beat the wife,
No. No. That’s not right.
Beat the batter, not the wife,
Cook the dinner, got it right.
Weed the garden, weed the pond,
Dig the veggies, kill the bugs.
Feed the birdies, peel the spuds,
Pay the milkman, catch the bus.
Talk and chatter, sit and stitch,
Visit neighbours, time for tea.
Back for dinner, bathe and dress,
Read a book and take a snooze.
Stop not, rest not,
Draw the curtains,
Go to bed,
Till you’re dead.