writing retreat

 

"How are you doing?" he texted.

"Have you written much?"

 

"Don't know," I said,

"But my pencil's much shorter now."

 

Life owes me half a biscuit

 

That's the knowledge deep within that somewhere in the house is the half-eaten biscuit or the cup of coffee with the final waiting slurp.

I have that nagging feeling now. I know there is a task that I want to get you to help with. I didn't call you. It was going to have to wait until you came.

I lift my arms above my head to help the memory. It must be something I can't reach. My right wrist is swivelling. Light-bulb? No, I always cope with those myself. It's not the closing action for the top kitchen cupboard. That's a single downward tap and I manage that one with the long wooden tongs for doing stir-fries in the wok. I wander round the house with my arms raised, looking for the half biscuit of this undone task. Finally I find the precious mouthful. In the office near the window my hands remember and they twist and turn. It's the fastener at the top of the jammed sash window. I sigh with satisfaction.

But by the time you get here tomorrow I shall have forgotten again and my wrists will be asking the same question. Where is my half biscuit?

camera obscura

A short walk up the hill you can look at the telescopes developed over the years by single-minded inventors. Next door, if the room with the Longitude timepiece is shut, you can wonder at the camera obscura. In the late afternoon sunshine of July we push aside the heavy curtain to stand in utter velvet black. Gradually our eyes show us the magic. The whole of Greenwich appears, tiny and in silent moving colour, on the table. Young visitors from the East tug digital equipment from their pockets and flash-photograph our view.

 

Lava

The new Minister of Culture has delighted Brazilians over the years with fifty albums of his songs. The interviewer asks about the content of his lyrics. "Oh, everything," he says, sweepingly, in a dark brown voice. He starts the list: Lava Fairs...

My mind arrests fumbling to encompass this new range of unexpected meanings – setting up a hoopla booth on the fertile slopes of Vesuvius, peddling roast chestnuts straight from the crater's mouth, where red-hot passion explodes up into the atmosphere.

At the edge of the sea may come hissing steamy petrifaction, but until then hearts teeter on the volcano's brink, hold hands and jump, deciding to go with the flow.

Stella cadente

 

Sleep-jumbled automat woman

scorches naked alabaster thighs

on the burning metal radiator

and falls from top-floor window in surprise

describing an incandescent arc

head over heels through the frozen night

reduced to a concentrated spark

of unthinking self-immolation.

Weightless with a head of full-moon light

at one with the whole of creation

she tumbles out, tit over arse,

because he phoned:"Look at the stars!"

Light of the World

("The Light of the World" by Holman Hunt hangs in the chapel of Keble College, Oxford)

 

We went to the knitting pattern building

to see the Light of the World.

The Fairisle College Authorities

have put up a notice

asking visitors to switch off the illumination

on leaving the chapel.

Given the present state of unease

in our crumbling civilisation,

I thought it might be unwise to comply.

 

Etiolated, October

Etiolated

This is my gardening word.

It is the reproach my garden makes to me. The syllables run round my head like the tendrils of the neglected, chlorophyll-starved, light-deprived plants. Long, useless stems develop, unable to feed themselves. They are the pale and sickly children in the Kaethe Kollwitz drawings of families in poverty, clinging to the skirts of anguished mothers. I have not cleared the weeds. I have again not cleared the weeds. I have failed my wispy consumptive plants. These ones will not survive my inaction. Etiolated jumps out at me and will not leave my brain, even though I have now walked well past them and have moved into the sunlit section of the garden where no-one needs me. They are not asking here for hand-outs. These shrubs and nettle-banks flourish and jostle each other in rude health and in the knowledge their families are landed gentry - centuries of inherited decayed vegetation have composted down without my help into prime nutrition. No need to emigrate in search of sustenance. Basking in occasional sun is their right and due. They know nothing of the industrial proletariat of thin shadow-bred scrawn that clusters round my badly-sited patio, holding out begging hands. Day by day I brush them off and ignore their needs. But their cries become etiolated, a word first heard on Gardeners' Question Time and that weaves itself into my conscience and will not let me be. Like hearing the opening notes of Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree by mistake as you pass a radio. Your day is ruined by a tune.

Or by a word.