———————————
OUT OF KILTER
GEORGE BEDDOW ——————————— Introduction by
Jeremy Reed
OUT OF KILTER
GEORGE BEDDOW
Introduction by
Jeremy Reed
Belfast LAPWING
First Published by Lapwing Publications c/o 1, Ballysillan Drive Belfast BT14 8HQ lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry/ Copyright © George Douglas Beddow 2012 Copyright Introduction © Jeremy Reed 2012 Copyright Cover Image © Richard Brooks 2012 All rights reserved The author has asserted her/his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Since before 1632 The Greig sept of the MacGregor Clan Has been printing and binding books
Lapwing Publications are printed at Kestrel Print 028 90 319211 E:kestrelprint@btconnect.com Hand-bound in Belfast at the Winepress Set in Aldine 721 BT
ISBN 978-1-909252-11-0
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to Jeremy Reed for his inspiration, Dennis Greig for his guidance - and Linda for her love. Although the earliest version of one of these poems was published 20 years ago in Lovely Jobly and a few more soon followed in Illuminations – 36 of the 40 poems included in this first collection have been written within the last 9 months.
iii
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: JEREMY REED A BLUE FLOWER
--------------------------
VI
------------------------------------
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
A CLAP OF THUNDER, OR LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT - - - - - - - - - - - - A GAME OF CHARADES WITH EGON SCHIELE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A MOTHER FALLS IN LOVE WITH EUGENE ONEGIN - - - - - - - - - - - A PAIR OF COMPASSES - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A POEM BY MEISTER ECKHART - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - AGAINST INTERPRETATION - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - AND NIGHT WRITES NO REPLIES - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - APOLOGIES TO JOHN ASHBERY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
----------------------------------------------------------------------COSMIC DANCER - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - DAYDREAMING IN A DUNCE’S CAP - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - DO NOT SCORN THE HERALD’S NOTE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ELEGY – A FRAGMENT IN PEN AND INK - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - GETTING HITCHED - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - GHAZAL OF A LIFE UNFULFILLED - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - GRETE TRAKL WITHDRAWS FROM THE SHADOWS - - - - - - - - - - - ARACHNOPHOBIA CARNIVALESQUE
iv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------INVITATION TO THE GIN PALACE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - KASPAR HAUSER FORETELLS HIS STORY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LYRICS FROM THE CHINESE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - MEMOIRS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ONE SECOND BEFORE WAKING FROM A DREAM - - - - - - - - - - - - - OPEN SESAME! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - OUT OF KILTER - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PRODIGAL SON - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SHE LOOKS FUNNY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE ANDROGYNE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE GROOM’S STILL WAITING AT THE ALTAR - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE SHAMAN - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THERE ARE SEVEN WAYS OF GOING - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TYPECAST - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - WITHDRAWAL – A SAPPHIC ODE TO DAVID GASCOYNE - - - - - - - - YOU GAVE ME HYACINTHS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - HIGHLY STRUNG
HOW DID I GET HERE? HYMNS TO THE NIGHT
v
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48
vi
George Beddow
vii
Out of Kilter
To the memory of my Mother and Father
viii
George Beddow
A BLUE FLOWER
The watchers in the scratched-out rye hyperbolise in the eye of a painter’s storm. Artificial fire initiates an endless winter. Mirages gaze ardently at nocturnal vigils. Dancers writing to the logo-rhythm of a psychic telescope… a recalcitrant memory jogs the sand’s indecipherable script. Interminable trumpets beseech resolution distracted only by the sun and a flower painted blue in a field of rye.
9
Out of Kilter
A CLAP OF THUNDER, OR LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Unconscionable vengeance in the grip of premeditated vice! A ventriloquist mouthing enigmas of an obscure lineage. Squeezing its head with his fist in pursuit of a dummy’s vain eclipse. Clownish screams in liquid cracks withering Mrs Dalí’s waxed moustache. Ruder than an out of tune coup de foudre of a hurdy gurdy toy spinning songs of purest love…
10
George Beddow
A GAME OF CHARADES WITH EGON SCHIELE
Vivified nerve-endings prophesy a dissolute silence. Complicit androgyny exhausts the mirror’s expedient contortions. A child’s oblivious cry damns baptismal fire. Conspiratorially prayer subsumes its inevitable desire. Unforgiving angels surface on a music forbidden to the sky. Disturbing the seasons a songbird in glossolalia blushes one side of our windowpane.
11
Out of Kilter
A MOTHER FALLS IN LOVE WITH EUGENE ONEGIN
Her infant solipsist holds a mirror to try and frame the epicene figure of his shadow-fencing twin – left arm hidden behind a shoulder as revision (should he grow older) for a grade 3 violin’s spot-the-difference examination on Preventive Retaliation and the fate of poor Onegin whose soul can find no peace or haven except when passing through translation…
12
George Beddow
A PAIR OF COMPASSES
In the dawn’s rear-view mirror she fingers his psychic wounds as indicative of childhood caresses. Decorated in dwarf roses a baby-faced carriage staggers out of a copse. Air springs clean in a livery of dreams on the say-so of promiscuous birds. They sing of love’s panic between the pencil-skirted legs of an antique pair of compasses. She circumscribes a field of remembrance upon his flesh – look no hands! – in the fingernail-red of a dubious blood-type whose temperature peaks on the high C of a forgotten aria’s lament for the infernal bridegroom perplexed upon waking by his bride’s childlike caresses indicative of psychic wounds.
13
Out of Kilter
A POEM BY MEISTER ECKHART
The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me… Conscripted into a sacred order Infinity is reinvented in the span of an eyelash’s wing landing with a splash below this manuscript’s watermark. Tender glances in the dark interiorise a vestige of marble from whose ears I trumpet the garbled exchange of sleep and desire. Amid fanfare a dusty nostril flares with heretical fires blowing through the shuttered windows of my hearing in tongues. Beyond the penultimate rung of a faithless silence the breath of unrealised music dramatises thoughts my words struggle to conjoin. In a fixed shade of the furnished mind a new coinage pays for the erstwhile lodger’s swift removal of ivory groynes and other gratuitous fittings. Absconding with a self-portrait as alibi for this sitting I straighten my gait to modify the trace of a squint in the master’s eye.
14
George Beddow
AGAINST INTERPRETATION
Inconsolable shadows agog with homunculi. A profound headache disturbs the psychic’s vision. Whose dated perfume heralds involuntary desire? Unassimilable voices anguish in remembrance. Shamanic vibrations sit at a piano with ambidextrous incongruity… he rubs someone’s face from a crystal ball for liberation of her soul and reads transmigratory nemesis in the tea stains of a cup balanced sensitively on the very edge of his hand. The children’s Ouija board indicates a condensation of breath in jade or jade green as a legacy of neurasthenia. Chimerical simultaneity trumps meaningful interpretation of these non-events.
15
Out of Kilter
AND NIGHT WRITES NO REPLIES
She is here to deliver my soul – my soul! – from windowless ruins of self-addressed envelopes affixed with stamps – no longer valid! – issued to commemorate some underground station of the cross – long since decommissioned from our neural circuitry. In a sound sculpture commissioned by the midwife’s receptionist she manipulates tones of redress and recalls soaking her fear in baptismal waters before curling my bones in foetal distress. From a distance she fails to guess the call of her companion struggling through a whorl of octaves to mouth an aphasic scream. She retreats out of range from the fuzz of transmission to parry my thrust with a written admission of what has become of our dreams.
16
George Beddow
APOLOGIES TO JOHN ASHBERY
I flâneur down Queens Street to realise those haunted spaces of an exalted childhood and see my imaginary friend uncomprehendingly pass me by without so much as a mischievous glance! Ducking up for a steaming hot coffee – Proverbs Chapter 13 Verses 7 to 11 – served in one of those flash polystyrene cups upon a saucer I watched the world go round within the frame of what ought to have been a cracked mirror hanging limply above the kitchen door leading to the public conveniences. A boy on the lap of a woman kissed a man who cursed at me just for looking. In the upmarket outfitters for workshy gentlemen I tried on my old school uniform and was delighted to find that neither of my feet had grown too big. At the end of Queens Street I stopped to look back for the very first time on this scene that had disturbed your imagination for centuries. I made a promise there and then only to return in glory.
17
Out of Kilter
ARACHNOPHOBIA
I adopt a manner of sullen repose in the fountain of his youth. The dead spider weaves our biography to a ghost-written choreography. Peering over the curdled rim I subside into an abyss of piety. His words disdain the glass with an oratorical flourish of the heart. A reddish sleep drips from a thirsty poppy beneath eyelids that flicker to a naked light bulb. A trainee priest laments the sudden dark of his hobby.
18
George Beddow
CARNIVALESQUE
13 dancers bite into her startled heart. She delights in a lone compartment on Monsieur Stendhal’s train and its deathless pilgrimage from studded Parisian navel to the chops of an acrobat tumbling uselessly upon a juggling wave’s acquiescence before black and red blinds drawing Venice to a close… she sweeps umbilical fluff immaculately beneath the marble floors of Piazza San Marco’s Basilica. Intricate music defines the ceiling’s mosaic as subservience. Are battlefields of the soul to be vanquished by austere refrains from tatty emblems glittering in a candle-free church? The sentry waives her passage through a sigh into the arms of a whitewashed god whose perennial dreams mirror the deserted sky. She wears his mask to keep her tongue’s fork from lightning.
19
Out of Kilter
COSMIC DANCER
My stricken frame a balletomane whorl contorted in an antique ritual to feign defiance. I wave a spectral branch of coral to seduce the merman. Dare my little bones awake to the pulse of a capricious heart? I seek solace in metropolitan gardens and dance memorials to agitate the peace. I am swooning on a plinth in lamplight and banish obscurity with a leap into sudden splendour. Promiscuous gods affect ignorance of such marvels. I unnerve statues who dismount in shock. I mimic the hands of a faceless clock.
20
George Beddow
DAYDREAMING IN A DUNCE’S CAP
Turning my back to class in a shirt blooded with spits of ink I sense her chalky finger hypnotise the stalk linking hypothalamus to pituitary. I improvise translations from a mimeograph on the missing lyrics of Orpheus circulated by an underground press. A jester drowning in adoration I leap via the chandelier to a seat in the gods with some children of paradise. High in a tree bent double by the strings of a lyre birds drink a toast to the future under surveillance from tight-lipped Eurydice – hitching her skirts higher in anticipation of desire. Pangs of hunger reconfigure the mind’s disabled clock to an imminent synchronisation. The dinner bell signals a rush for the exits as I turn around to acclaim the room’s usurpation.
21
Out of Kilter
DO NOT SCORN THE HERALD’S NOTE
A stash of coals requisitioned from my mother’s vintage gas fire stokes the engine of a ufo and obscures the identity of its backseat driver in a puff of worldly smoke. Echoing a descant’s refrain from my father’s funeral choir the parting lips of a rough self-portrait deign to call me a liar! Reading in translation a verse of condolence (to measure the deepness of my heart) I chance upon the age-old saw – we bereaved shall pity command and ululations assuage when Arabic journeys from left to right and falls headlong off the page… As a finale to the crack of doom a herald’s bum note in the trumpet voluntary unravels some stitches from his maw and imperils the world’s itinerary. Captured in his handkerchief a final sneeze of fate takes pride of place in the outer pocket of my breastplate’s righteousness.
22
George Beddow
ELEGY – A FRAGMENT IN PEN AND INK
Mid-afternoon. Meditative space luminous at his mirrored presentiment’s transmutation through death to re-articulate blossom snowing lilacs blanched in cadence ascendent with Eric Satie’s Gymnopédies Numbers 1, 2 or 3 shades of Persian blue drawing waves beneath her feet.
23
Out of Kilter
GETTING HITCHED
A thumb of morning dark hitches a lift on the fabled wings of a lark – refining her coloratura by sparring with the reflex bag dangling on a short piece of string from the sky’s vaulted ceiling – and puts out the lights of my reeling constellation. Weary of passing the baton from hand to clammy hand a cleanshaven bird wets my whistle and – to weird consternation – solves the crossword puzzle with antonym for a beard of agrarians? The low-slung dawn hitches up my pants to spare its blushes from Toulouse-Lautrec syndrome… while a contrarian pulls down his skirts in some charged encounter with the spokes of an umbrella – its orbit shifting the volition of a jazz quartet’s version of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head – the conductor’s wise guy hat slouched with visions of what comes hereafter and – to the charms of Hart Crane’s gently pitying laughter – a trumpeter scores a palindrome along the tracks of his arms. These are my vitae’s parentheses – the premature removal of a guardian by caesarian section – a mythopoeic air of contrived desire – father’s worry beads turning amber in a solitary game of backgammon as mother and I follow what might just be a lark through the door to a walled garden in which alms are exchanged with the poor. Beyond this ambit of ludic congruities a hitcher pays mind to ancient lore and pickles my throat with a cocktail stick… the car without a driver winds down its windows to betray the secrets of a magic trick before starting the engine without meaning to…
24
George Beddow
GHAZAL OF A LIFE UNFULFILLED
I am infinite windows open to the seas in sleep. Stones at my feet spit in the face of sleep. Slumbering bees – in an obsessive instant – hesitate to sweeten the penny royal tea she takes to abort my sleep. Mysterious undertakings stir in the brilliant whiteness of her muffled skirts – where an alien might sleep. A childlike tune invokes a perfect summer afternoon – the lyric’s wounded secrets betrayed in a dreamless sleep. Silence asserts the memory of a marvellous boy whose face mirrors a thousand heartbeats missed in sleep. A romance giddy in the moonlight of separation ushers the maddening serpent to its sleep. My bony walls set free withered fruits from their sins – for they too shall rest in a garden of sleep. I stand on a distant terrace and hear my thoughts echoed in the songs of a siren from over the edge of sleep. Whose hands are these that rock this listing vessel as I wake for the first time from a cradle of sleep?
25
Out of Kilter
GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO
An epiphany of roses flagrant in premonitory blue… DNA’s logarithmic spirals of consonantal stars inciting vowels dipped in black moons peculiar to Chinese calligraphy?… Arterial fires of amphitheatrical rooms aspire to delineate Infinity passing through glass curtains at noon… Hyacinthine veins entreating visionary birds to leave the fray and Summer intone for one dead young… If You Go Away..
26
George Beddow
GRETE TRAKL WITHDRAWS FROM THE SHADOWS
Transfixed by the glare of a pitiless sun she stares in the mirror to fire a gun at the ghost of her brother who plays with her hair as she sits at the piano and pulls up a chair for their debut recital – with six hands or two? – from illicit Preludes in purple and blue.
27
Out of Kilter
HIGHLY STRUNG
Revised fanfares underscore celestial anxiety of movement. The tousled hair of a priest twists the noose to a question-mark in the eyeballs of arousal. Hand puppets renege against intimations of august lineage and quicken their desultory stride towards a strumpet feasting under the bridge. Hear a drunken herald cut down the haughty pamphleteer with a blow from my ear trumpet! Suspended in these low auditoria the moon reciprocates with a throaty leer.
28
George Beddow
HOW DID I GET HERE?
Extreme is the snow through which I dream of pioneers marooned in hot pursuit of a rainbow’s eighth colour. The story of my life is rich in pallor! In another hoary tale of the tape a stained glass window sneers at my transfixed state of cultivated redemption. Is there no way out of the mind’s conflations? With grave consolation a silver-ringed finger ruffles one’s tonsure and dips my head in Adam’s ale… hymns of a nightingale are quashed by hordes of rousing voices from drunken men on hobby horses inscribed upon misericords… displaying a lack of rustic toil they scribble my lifeline in the soil through aisles of cidery piss… the furrowed brow of a golden orchard trapped beneath these dusty floorboards tells me something is amiss… I resist an impulse to draw back my nose from the brim of a cup that overflows with eight colours of the rainbow. Extreme is the snow through which I dream…
29
Out of Kilter
HYMNS TO THE NIGHT
Blindfolded by a fleeing watchman I spin in the boughs of a cradle struggling to swim from chaos into the light of uncertain provenance through which a familiar child is mouthing hymns to the night. Are we grieving once more with artless intonation for love’s transient vigilance amid the river’s mockery of branchless dreams and moonstruck chance? Astral telepathy in a night-swimmer’s kisses withholds its password from an ancient vocabulary defining what this is…
30
George Beddow
INVITATION TO THE GIN PALACE
Is it so ignominious for a sailor to drown at sea? I buckle one star of three on my bell bottom dungarees after the fashion of Orion. A mislaid Mayan calendar beyond the veil fans a presentiment of sails. I’d rather sweep a full force gale than hear the cries of a shoeless jester hanging from my laces atop the rising water table… His gloves had soiled an able seaman for the wooden kitty of a purser’s heart. Is it by design or a kind of art for green oak to render the part-exchange of a season in hell? A tinker casts his spell on the siren stirring turtle soup as preparation for her part in an act of treason. (One way of reasoning with such broken points of view is to take the air between a left and right hemisphere). Unstitching the button from her belly I sew it to a pregnant seer behind an eyepatch in the crow’s nest of my hair. Declaring the vintage to be really quite rare! an old sot with new braces damns the passing of a year.
31
Out of Kilter
KASPAR HAUSER FORETELLS HIS STORY
In the womb I hear a whispered instruction to caricature the symptoms of my affliction and queer a diagnostician’s pitch. I see only derision in the uncomprehending glare of a stranger bearing witness to the trauma of my birth. I inhabit air with the nervous gestures of an insomniac aroused from a drug-induced sleep. My soul hungers for mystical union in the ritual of bread and water shared with a dog pondering its reflection without a mirror. In vagabondage I cling to a weathervane driven crazy by the contrary paraphrase of funerary birdsong. Enrolled as a toy soldier my tarnished breath rises to the glory of a cavalry charge marked by the bugler in a style idiomatic to no time or place. Diving for pearls in a baroque fountain I see the face of a familiar stranger and hand the visitors book for a note bearing my name in a language only he can understand. Emerging from the periphery I attend a public exposition of my private inheritance. My fate now sealed I draw plans for the headstone to be erected in a country graveyard with the words – Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious.
32
George Beddow
LYRICS FROM THE CHINESE
The road grinds round a sneezing vine of black pepper. A high stepper among the 6 white horses faints in a heady bouquet of spices. My zodiacal crisis is foretold in a cross-eyed rattlesnake’s crawl across the threshold! Towers of gold rise in a spellbound hour – an elder statesman offers the wings of a flightless bird to the red-haired flower girl. Ancient pearls of wisdom sit between a dragon’s indentured front teeth… dare I snuff its nose with the matchstick in my sheath? A lyric from the Chinese turns a wreath into blue or green silk whose strings unravel the view…
33
Out of Kilter
MEMOIRS
Rummaging again through the roots of his despair Sir disdains Latin and Greek for a newfangled Aramaic version of the Bible. Lord Quoth curtseys toward his bearded lady wife who bows in mockery before the pristine glass in the hope of seven years of bad luck. At the tuck-shop in a corner of the playground a toothy girl hands sweetbreads to a shrinking lad whose key-chain jangles with a pocket-knife. Two bum-fluffed guitarists duel in the sports-day sun singing cruelly the gypsy ballads of Lorca to a poet holding the starting gun. The head-girl skipping a breeze to and from her home exchanges an apple for a brand new chemise and a pair of scissors for when alone. As Victor Ludorum I am crowned with laurel. I ride round in triumph on a carousel horse. I’ll write my memoirs in Aramaic.
34
George Beddow
ONE SECOND BEFORE WAKING FROM A DREAM OF MARC CHAGALL
A ripening moon and sun fall aslant into the lap of a fruitarian. The room’s atmosphere disorientates with a smear her mirror’s presentiment. An unseen hand contrives to reopen a window drawn as a device to frame this poem and with needle but no thread embroiders dreams stitched one-to-another interleaved with titles quoting the dead. A path of flowers strewn with lovers leads to the darkened stage of a toy theatre while overhead my doppelgänger plays a fiddle strung from gold or silver thread without a bow to make the air quiver.
35
Out of Kilter
OPEN SESAME!
Here is my scanty interior, hear my pith and kin as together we lisp an air of elision in a genial mist of gum olibanum’s synonym… no more shall it be Autumn, Winter or Spring – serial intervals are now in remission! – so I cleave to your definitive pull on umbilical string and – with a blast of open sesame! from sweet Cicely’s (tin) ear trumpet – heave my ghost from this weary host of bones and skin. Do you remember sleeping – at five in the afternoon – as I bit into a lemon and lit your psychic vision of weeping city walls toppling with derision in a heap of Persian limes? Dare I not recall the ritual of your gall after one too few bottles of gob-stoppered wine? Or falling as rain over the bridge of Frank Lloyd Wright’s proboscis at an exposition on the theme of Architecture, Sprawl… and Ellipsis? Anomalous in ubiquity I loom out of range on the obliquity of your eye’s rapid movement through Autumn, Winter or Spring… between the shutters of elision – in exchange for a season – all what’s missing is that to which we cling.
36
George Beddow
OUT OF KILTER
Dipping a pen in the drowned interiors of a disused ocean her fusty art of fancy lettering longs for a clean slate. On a decorative wall plate the last cuckoo of a carefully delineated spring pops in and out of her mind’s coiffure to mesmerise a startled thrush. A rearranged blush returns to her cheek with every brush of an angel’s wing materialising on her back. More rack than pinion she spins the parasol of her nervous system as shade for lack of a purifying sun. In the confessional she would like to fire a gun and cease the blood’s stale itinerary between the run of arteries and veins. In the rains of a garden beneath the vaults of a tree adolescent voices rouse invasive weeds falling over her shoulders in freshly cut tresses. Unstitching the seams from her dresses she dons a glove to tap the dust free from a tambourine – and with her naked hand interprets the scenes of an afternoon as a series of dreams.
37
Out of Kilter
PRODIGAL SON – for Jeremy Reed
Reoriented. Mimesis ritualising penitence as transgression. The androgyne mask adjuring dawn’s martyrdom. Nerves amplifying the blood-fast dark. Coaxing one discarded vein to famish a hypodermic needle. Pitched high above a wall tongue-tied birds – lost to Hölderlin’s madness – taunt the delirious stasis of a weathervane’s numb shade dizzying on whose spinal column of Bowie’s falsetto? Epiphany. Arterial Icarus plummeting the blue pupil at perihelion disfiguring a syncope mirrored in the lipstick boy’s glare.
38
George Beddow
SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
Tracing nerves along an infinite line of non-Euclidean geometry – she dots the eyes of a stargazing night with the click of a finger – I read palms that till the soil for a death’s head grin remaindered from her twopenny dreadfuls! A jerky requiem clenches its teeth to the squeal of a rabbit. Tonsured hares throwing one last haymaker stutter to a caesura – casting aspersions on our habits. Scissored plasters yellow to an onion! Self-medication soliloquises a mood’s afternoon to the abstraction of an étude. A fuzz guitar displays some loose arrangement in consciousness as a painstaking stream of confetti. Even before it starts it’s over! The rented sunset is pegged to seasick cabin portholes. Tapering breastplates lacquer to a brilliant wave’s capture in those hours of truanting whose froth turns sour on its milky way.
39
Out of Kilter
SHE LOOKS FUNNY – for Linda
That skull-headed moon-face in loon pants seemed once (believe it or not) beyond reach and only the bug eyes remain as testament to her nystagmus meaning no more involuntary wobble of the eyes ( I imagine) every time I enter a room. She tilts her head still to look askance with wisdom and endless forgiveness. You tar barrel-chested beauty I wish to plead allow me to throw you over the river bridge on the 5th! I dare not give the wrong impression. As long as you set me alight she speaks my mind. That small-breasted, narrow-hipped beauty is childless – this sad world makes my choice so easy she would say – and in my dream-state we should run to where the sea greets the sun before my own nurse Nightingale – Dear Flossie! The Forces’ Sweetheart! – administers to my needs with the gratitude of one who knows her leaving me makes her look better from behind. O nose retroussé with a touch of négritude! O long neck too veiny for a wild swan at Coole!
40
George Beddow
SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW
And so we meet again for the first time… Critique – abandon – or just eat this dunce’s doodle of stale garlands we pressed once beneath the cloven hooves of our lovers (thrice removed) and – with hands displaced from around each other’s throats – let us pray for the intervention of a familiar ghost – or two – aching with contrived despair behind these feudal gates. Do you recall a gravel-voiced drive and our three-legged race to the end of a night – striving for love’s homophone to jump-start the mood music of some classic car’s gramophone? Lost in the dark wood I made a vow – at which you palled! – to bow the knee as a last resort… Forgive my nagging at the thought of how you bit into a ninny’s tongue lolling arbitrarily beneath the wig-hat you sported for some godforsaken function beyond my social rung… I may be pleading innocence but was there need to ping my devotion’s garter in witless mockery of that chinless martyr whose sham inheritance – dripping from his oily beard – made your world a tarnished ring to which – inexplicably – I would cling? Oh ball to my chain (I hear your cry) dare you disdain these hands that clenched your black fedora to a pulp in the scene our director pinched from some twopenny dreadful! How dare you clip these nails that flipped your trench coat’s collar to the wind as you sought release from my fire escape up to the sky! Alas it is much too late now for you to wax my ears and scheme for such nights when you could seduce another kind of interlocutor to wind your crank – our dream has capered with the moon – as a poet – in white face – caught red-handed – adumbrates the static crackling through this room… And so we meet again… 41
Out of Kilter
THE ANDROGYNE
Lighting a deadwood match fails to cloud those eyes that blaze through an ancient mask’s half-glazed disguise. Fragments scribbled beneath a hand’s fading line of fate undermine the nightmare’s bait of a sham childhood. Fastening myself in Venus’ girdle to flatten the belly for a pre-dawn raid I dream of the stars untying a bow at the back of my dirndl skirt. Hurt by the unsayable we attest to cries of innocence from one dispossessed by the mirror’s alibi. In the intervals of an eye’s mismatched wink the androgyne swings high and low to find balance in a missing link.
42
George Beddow
THE GROOM’S STILL WAITING AT THE ALTAR
The 13th carriage in a wedding cortege jostles a street lamp and signals the planet’s 19th nervous breakdown with a romantic gesture of rosacea vexing the sky’s moonlit cheek. (Must I follow an order of service whose words I shall not speak?) As one half of the star-crossed pair I lose a game of infinite patience and trace the parabolic arc of prayer from a spire to the chair. I blindfold a psychiatrist and place her anxieties neatly in the trunk all tied up in ribbons and bows to be despatched as a gift for the sea. Her bloodstream flows with an instinct for betrayal and so I freeze this moment in the sepia tones of a film stock soon to be discontinued. I grew up in the arms of a god! is the cry from a falling angel captivated in the hands of my pocket watch whose case delineates a solitary bird singing haiku on the watery blush of cherry blossom. I awake at five in the afternoon and on a 13th chime ponder how she caught the train without a driver to track the time.
43
Out of Kilter
THE SHAMAN
Flinching in the glare of her make-up mirror’s light he rewires the current to an endless night dazzling cruelly on the other side of silence. Stillborn in an illustrious grave his soul surrenders without violence. He is careful to forge a forget-me-not in the fire sale’s inventory of his mother’s earthly goods. (By a lake in the woods a pelican sent to Coventry for the sin of piety finds its voice on the second of Our Lady’s Sorrows). Beyond damp walls in sullen gestures wool-stringed cellos counterpoint the bleating of distant shepherds. How to pass over the salt and peppered contours of a map transcribed by some neophyte psycho-geographer? In a flash his soul is restored by a natural history photographer on the run from an endangered species. O to be the star of a guru’s thesis on why shamans disguised as half-dressed hermaphrodites paint their lips into a crescent moon! A sundial reorders perspective as light recedes from the room. His synesthesia mishears the power-cut for ashes in a tomb.
44
George Beddow
THERE ARE SEVEN WAYS OF GOING
The wily omen in a Caesar cut turns up its toes from the string of jewels perched on a bust of the raven’s roman nose. In the constance of a noonday sun the apprenticed sorcerer flourishes a hose to sink beneath the brim of his one gallon hat. Bathing in the dead sea air’s mysterious seductions a curious cadaver examines its limbs and their loss of functions before yielding to an obituary. A weathervane’s spinal column is fractured in the spasms of feathered castrati who grow fat on Adam’s apples and their sour aphorisms. After one final cut of a crooked pack of cards his promissory note is laid to rest in the inside pocket of a suit of diamonds and its prisms. Expectant with joy the unborn vote for schism and – all thumbs and fingers – recoil from the glare of star-shine. Winding a ball of yarn through the hair of his beloved a waxed royal is entangled in the knots of her navel lair.
45
Out of Kilter
TYPECAST
Alabaster moans of mislaid ancestry and with sonorous inclination holds her head in the reliquary of petrified hands. Is the sticking of sand in an hourglass premonitory? She abandons the stage to vague disharmony from a chthonic choir. Clothing her flesh in a moonlit reversible dress she plucks the strings of a shepherd’s lyre and wanders from view. I repaint the background scenery in blue. A dry wind shifts over the ocean whose waves rise to a herd of seahorses prancing for the shore. She sits on the floor of a frescoed ship and struggles to unfold the map of eternal recurrence. An expert deciphers the mirror writing of her ruined script as a warning on the deadly rapture of a penultimate sunrise. He longs for the fantastical lies of a withheld childhood to cleave this ancient carapace and release her from the role she was born to play.
46
George Beddow
WITHDRAWAL – A SAPPHIC ODE TO DAVID GASCOYNE
Solitary voices photosynthesise a well-patterned spider’s web. An out-of-reach frequency intuits the lolling puppet’s prophetic slogans. Glassy opiates sleepwalking with vagrant soundlessness… at a park derelict in Spring regretful assignations dissolve the dream’s watermarked paper. Consummated grief re-attunes his banished psychic aura. Imagination’s sacral fires reconstitute a volubility scorched to an ending.
47
Out of Kilter
YOU GAVE ME HYACINTHS
A scattering of hyacinths pinpricks the flesh. I waft a red saucer on the hushed tones of a blue season and watch as it drifts through the years of a broken mirror sewn together by the wind. I yield to the notion of an eclogue and walk amid ancient fields in wooden clogs on the heels of a sphinx. Hiding scars behind an immaculate beard she abjures a sacred duty to solve the riddle of her own conception. Am I responsible for this flashing discovery of scruples? Fingering my portrait she scratches out the tongue from a mouth stubborn with insinuations of desire. I hold my hands aloft in sweet surrender and dare the hired gun to resist my calculated devotion. Sticking a finger in one ear her pet nightingale sings the verses of our wedding song with inflections too nuanced for an imitation of mutual suffering. And anyway the season – if not the years – has come around again and if the wind blows hard enough I might just return to where you gave me hyacinths when first we were here.
48
George Beddow
49
Out of Kilter
50
George Beddow
51
Out of Kilter
x 52
L A P W I N G PUB L I C A T I O N S
GEORGE BEDDOW
“My thoughts and feelings about life changed when, as a boy, I had finished reading John Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci… or was it Ode To A Nightingale? Everything changed – except life itself. That, alas, stayed the same. Trying to reconcile the realms of the Imagination with a quotidian world is one reason why poets – and not only poets – go mad.”
“My poetic exemplars transfigure reality – and not merely reflect it. It is this peculiar atmosphere of transfigured reality in which the characters inhabiting these poems live and breathe....” George Beddow
Cover Image by Richard Brooks The Lapwing is a bird, in Irish lore - so it has been written indicative of hope. Printed by Kestrel Print Hand-bound at the Winepress, Ireland
ISBN 978-1-909252-11-0 £10.00