ARTHUR SEELEY
The Jar
…..as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Burnt Norton; T S Eliot
After an early lunch,
an afternoon in the gallery,
quiet as the settle of dust.
I followed the zig-zag,
moved from booth
to booth,
isolated from the last,
insulated from the next.
held that immortality lay
in my ashes used as glaze;
had won him half at least
of such remains.
He dawdled in his own world
of flung clay, kilns
and the resolution
So, alone, I moved ahead.
A tall Tang jar,
undecorated but imperious;
gave me leave to enter.
The silence within silence,
affirmed the possibilities of perpetuity,
taught me, too, its stillness
through the blur of centuries;
and tolerance
for intrusions upon its count.
March morning
The wind beats its wings
against my window,
dawn misfires
into greyness and flung rain.
Bulb catalogue on the mat,
withered leaves against the wall;
season folds into season;
drops glistening on the line.
Moths
Words waltz around
a globe of golden light.
A moth beats delicate wings
against the mesh
that covers my windows;
knocks and strums reverberate.
Soft thuds and thrums;
as gargoyle head and furred antennae
butt the barrier,
compelled by light.
Dazed with foiled effort
the moth persists,
again and again,
with a whirr of ineffectual wings.
I return to my words
to butt my head
and bruise my wing
for the ecstasy of light within.
Whitby
Where have the sunlit mornings gone,
when the quiet sea slapped
and sucked at rocking boats,
a concertina wound a reel
and shadows were long and sharp
on the grey stones?
Gulls swing, wide and silent,
along the sweep of sandy bay,
where I once ran alone,
barefoot brother of the wind,
while the skirt-tucked girl
dabbled her slender brown leg
from a froth of rucked slip.
White clouds pile on the sea-curve,
the unhurried stroll of folk
savor the air, the far music
and the dazzle on the sea;
ephemeral hours - they shimmer and glow,
flare and fade into the ash of years.
Incongruity
Slim as a stick, she steps, new-born, from sea,
a black and streaming Venus, child of foam.
Sarong encases her nubility,
her sleek wet hair held by a pearly comb.
She flops the fresh-caught squids beside her thigh
and picks a rock to chip a scallop shell.
She squints and tests the edge with thumb and eye
then cleans her catch beside the lagoon’s swell.
Ma Belle Sauvage, my Queen, my lissome maid!
Intent on these, your Mesolithic skills,
you do not know I watch you from the shade,
admire your deftness as you clean your kills.
Instead you're rapt in ghetto blaster's spell
with Elvis belting out "Heartbreak Hotel"
The Mummy
I must have been a morbid child,
drawn so easily from the playground,
away from the sunshine and laughter,
to the long silent room,
that housed the municipal museum.
New to death,
I knew only one death.
Nettles and the sound of rain
bleak on elder leaves
across a moorland yard.
The museum was a place
where death glared behind glass,
beyond the probe of rain
and the spite of nettles.
Death swung in mockery of life.
Still birds caught in flight.
An eagle, clamped on heathered rock,
rid a rabbit of its plaster bowels,
beak and claw red and bright forever.
“Vulpes vulpes”, the glass-eyed fox,
teeth white in grinning rictus,
pinned, with bloody paw, a torn grouse.
I shaped strange words with a quiet mouth,
my reflection wraith in glass.<!
She slept under a thin black leatherette cloth;
a cloth I lifted often.
The smeared vague mound of her nose and pits of eyes
were all that made that yellow mud a face.
Her slender shoulders tapered
to the ragged bandage at her feet.
About twelve she was, tiny,
Princess of the Upper Nile,
and those were her toe-bones, the label said,
those polished, earthy pebbles,
spilled from the burst bands.
‘When the four corners of the earth shall meet
you will rise again’:
the hieroglyphs promised.
When the birds swoop and mute swan sings;
the ape gibbers, the pinned spider scuttles,
when stuffed fox yips
and eagle soars with dripping beak;
when rain beads on shining nettle,
those broken feet may dance again
and mud laugh loud as spring.
Rivock.
The small gods’ realms of leaf and bole
are gone now, hewn and hacked,
their temples felled,
melted away into bog and heath,
bracken, whin and cotton grass.
Scuffed by centuries, splashed with lichen,
the rocks remain, etched with cups and rings,
they endure. Scattered over the moors,
their purpose, half-guessed at,
intrigues and puzzles still.
Bent in votive awe, some artist
ran calloused fingers over these first glyphs,
primal mark-making that met a need to order,
an urge to please a god, sate some demon.
Lore and myth carved into stone.
As thumbprint
on some sea-washed broken pot;
as mark on henge or rock;
as eyeless skull or crooked finger-bone
halts the breath,
so do these rough scratchings
point back into the mists
and hint at my own vague tomorrows.
I lay my hand upon forever
and summon that immortality.
I came upon one rock that reared,
breaching the moor, bright with rain,
its gallery of pocks and grooves,
ladders and serpents, shining in relief,
clear in the diffuse light of a cloudy day.
I bent to a lost song
dipped my shoulder, joined an ancient dance,
mirrored the movement of the stars,
printed patterns on a forest floor;
muttered a guttural chorus to my muddy strophe.
Early Lessons
Bum-banging satchel belaboured me
running the long street to school.
The mason, hand bunched thick
round the stock of a flat chisel,
watched me through glasses
frosted by a million flying chips,
returned to peck at that day’s shape.
Strange curves emerged
from his peck, peck, pecking,
patient as dripping water,
that discovered bits of houses
The oily shed, home to an old tank engine
that seethed like a great black kettle on a hob,
steam flowering from its sprung seams.
I knew the sear of that coal-gulping maw
and the sudden vent of dragon breath
that filled the yard with scalding vapours
and belches of sulphur that engorged a sky
bannered with the smoke of a town girded for war.
At the farrier’s hearth,
a hoop glowed in its golden nest of coke
bellowed to a heat I felt feet away.
Mightily rang the anvil to his bouncing hammer,
as he fettled the sparking iron and plunged it back,
into the belly of fire. Swarthy and grimed,
he chimed from the heart of a Vulcan reek,
of quenched iron and burnt hoof.
Late as usual, I was left to chase
into the place of hard desks
chalk and the long slow plod of hours;
a place where good French seemed a logical impossibility
and geometry was a foreign language
News.
The folded paper on the chair,
hides the bleak dispatches.
White walls, strutted with shadows,
stairways climb and cut back,
baffle the perspectives.
In the pool, the plunge of brown skin,
shot with gold, spouts syllables of water,
out-dazzles light.
Sun burns along the river’s tent
melts to deep glooms in the sea’s heart.
The afternoon holds like a pent breath.
Light pins each of us, vulnerable in our frailty,
alone upon the earth. We look to gather
these quiet times of civilized exchange;
the polished cutlery’s gleam, lovers under palms,
the glass of wine’s bled light across the cloth,
‘Vien, Malika’, quietly on a plucked guitar,
silhouettes of vine leaves on the floor.
Shadows, beyond this enclave, crowd closer,
winds from the sea press in,
flap the corner of the tablecloth,
bulge the canopy, shake the dusty leaves.
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