Inside us is a dark room where our shame gets tired of waiting. At first we don’t admit it’s there, we don’t do introspection. The trouble starts with dating: so many men prioritise some quirky predilection, some body shape or size. My own turn-on, I hesitate to say, is more unusual. It freaks dates out on any date that plays out in the bedroom.
Last night among his fellow roughs, He plotted, schemed, and swore; An anxious statesman of the Bluffs, Who never looked before. To-day, beneath the foeman’s frown, He stands in Charles’s place, Ambassador from Britain’s crown, And type of all her race. Rich, reckless, posh, well-born, well-taught, Bewildered and alone, A heart with leftish instinct fraught, He yet can call his own. Ay, tear his body limb from limb, Bring cord or axe or flame, He only knows that straight through him Shall England come to shame.
The world, the young woman said, is ruled by old men with hard, brutal faces and an ugly lust for power. Nothing that gym bars or strictures of the personal physician can offer will help them in the end when the dark fog drops to cover the formerly sentient mind, its edicts like arrows that once made the sky dark, repulsed its multiple enemies.
There’s a magical muddle that clings to the page like mist to a meadow. No help in the hurting, no truth in the light, just haze on the harvest. I’ve cancelled my comeback and chosen instead to be cloistered in clover. In the blare of the body the spirit lies mute like a book in a bottle. I’ll hunker in hollows where wisdom is vague and history can’t happen. There’s a heaven of honey in hives of friends’ hearts.
When I was young, nobody ran, unless, behind them on a dark and lonely road, they felt the breath of some misshapen thing, the aspens quivered and the willows wept; or if they’d spent their bus fare on warm beer, and they were overdue where duty called. Accoutred armies hurtle through our parks and boulevards, no good to ask them where’s the fire. Health oozes from their every pore. The race is to the swift, though only three ascend the podium. The rest are also-rans, way down the field, not troubling the judge. But now my ears are pricked, I pick up speed. There is the flag, and there the finish line.
You go here and go there, but also stand still, return to the same spots: the bench on the hill in Victoria Park, above the plane trees that veil through winter branches the city’s spill, platform seven, same-time Tuesdays, Temple Meads gloomy and Cardiff central gleeful in sun, a table in the café waits, routinely where you sit, before work, as you’ve always done. You are running too, when you can, through early dark, sun lifting lazily over Ashton Court’s tree-lined hill, cross-country reps. Wednesdays, in Manor Woods Park, this New Year’s world breathes cautious, centred, still, those night walks home; Orion, seems the spindle, that turns time through January’s long chill.
World’s stock of afternoons is running short And summer’s light is turning golden brown – It’s time to summon up our winter thoughts Since poetry will always be our sport And images, once mothered, won’t disown Our afternoons, though old, though running short, For in mind’s shadows metaphors hold court And new dreams swarm. We fully own It’s time to conjure up our winter thoughts, New entities of if and how, the sort That make us glad to live in winter towns Whose broken afternoons are falling short.
It’s too late now to say you are not old, the years gang up on you, they settle down like locusts falling on a field of grain, the rustling noise you hear, that is their sound. How to be old: I’ll help you on the way. Stand straight. Be calm. Pretend you are a tree Speak like a tree, only speak slow and clear. Speak only once. If words should scatter flashing their tails before they disappear, temporise, change the subject, no great matter – Enough, wrong tone: meaning to make amends should not have used this hieratic patter knew from the start that half I said was wrong pitching it for that By-Our-Lady play And yet, which half was false and which was true? After all, here am I, but where are you?