Alex Allison - Poet

All your hills, composed, might I say, around a memory you had of triumph. Human statues battering each other, the sanity of power writ large, seeing from here the cowering cottages dug into the hillside. What a difference your absence will make, so dogged and so human. All your hills, stretching out to the calm, clear waters of a submarine sky, emollient and abandoned around the edges. Intuit the sleeping hordes of your country , prayerful to a stretch, extending glacial feeling. All your hills, arising in layers of golden platitudes, the sun and stars awaiting your maximal riposte; the flocks of cadavers discipling their way through mazes of sleep and half-decisions. Even the wolves now know your words, the bas-relief decree. All your hills, deadlocked in time, to be duly decomposed. A soft chorus of sighs rises from the sleek tenation of sleep and the virile world decides it has better things than you.

      Some of us have found our homes. St. Magnus breathes the stone that lies next to a prayer. The rain in her hair posts a look to the island shore lost in the mist, the spirits of kings coming and fading, their voices subsumed by the wind.       In a refuse of morning, a sad-eyed man sits in an English slum and wonders how exile could be imposed before birth. Hands must wait to touch the old kirk doors, eyes must wait to see that most magnificent glass.    Meanwhile, he hopes the September rain will come to anodyne him, cast him into a state close to forgetting.

waiting, drip by drop, wellies in the puddles a small man in a small room      composing to his daughter the smell of lavender under a shower the bramblings are happy with the allotment beans dead, worms abounding the wood of the shed turning rotten Clytemnestra holds Helen's hand          asks Helen for a story Helen gives a story of wine in the sun             and affection               and contentment the trees like soldiers hold the heat       preparing themselves for battle dust waits beneath the shed          rats wait in the bushes and everyone curses the night waiting   waiting, drip by drop,     for the autumn pentecost

They are asleep. Imagine the things they are dreaming of that will never be - Satie's Serenade for piano and flute, Kant's paper on the psychology of aquaphobia, the surviving sketches of the full first movement of Nielsen's Seventh Symphony... all of this melts away to the sound of the water on the weir (like Ludwig dreaming of rain against the window five days before he died). Stagnant, directionless, melancholy has killed the murder of heat. The damaged are hiding, gone to ground, to find more life for next week. Mistakes disappear just as thunder dies away, the path is clean after the rain - the rains so gentle, as gentle as your face as it smiles in the post-diluvian flood of light.

May rain fall unto the hunted, stiffened, providing the love of pain. May we shake the superflux to them, quotation quotation quotation... Make a list of dead stuff:      Children singing unheard - hands passing amongst each other -      voices from who-knows-where - the impression that frost makes upon a Winter pond      (as seen close by Bradfield) -      boats, preferably with a sense of obscure disconnection . . . Something is hiding now, forewarned by the plates of betrayal, memories of which hang around us like the damaged who do not learn to be alone. Count the things you love in turn:      your big pillow from childhood - Shostakovich's fifteenth -      the music of Louis Vierne - the sound of the wind outside during the night      (with the window slightly open) -      the Polish TV version of 'The Moomins' [1977-'82] . . . May's effulgen...

Didn't you feel drenched to the bone in the hopeless comfort of childhood? Didn't you feel the end of the world, bland and ignored in its threat, sit teetering always in chance? Mere discernment was all it took, like watching the blind world drive through its sleep, as seen from the back of a bus, the cars' dull swish through the gritty streets somehow a comfort, like the distant hiss of music on a worn-out tape. In accepted strain, the cycle starts anew: the grasses after a shower twinkling like starlight, the concentrated circuit of the jackdaw's strut for food, the blithe, demented pleasure of the crocuses gorging themselves on the sky's consideration. Through a window, the shimmering sky, stretched out in errant loneliness, casts doubt upon our need for love, for the growth towards dependence which, after a slack hiatus, comes knocking with its challenge. Perhpas the rain, as we believed, has come to wash the world clean. But as we rem...

Prometheus has ordered the fires be put out and we have lost the landscape to mist. Elsewhere, Neptune is working a tempest to drown poor weakling man. The massive drift of cloud banks over us, subsuming our role to acquiescence. How can we have been so blinded by dull February? Its vacant heart led us to believe that the wind would not return; and yet the crippled sailors shall now be more crippled, older than time's erratic arthritis that weakens the mind's resolve. Somewhere out on the moor someone is getting lost. The lights of a distant farmstead shall offer a sliver of hope. Or are they the eyes of the Beast drawing them to their ruin? Or maybe they are part of a dream that has somehow become solid and the dreadful downpour around is a cipher for confusion and pain - the child has lost its mother, there is no warmth to protect her and all this rain is a mere indication of the state of things to come.

Give us neither silence nor plenitude    but the soft thrumming       of the drizzle upon the plastic roof of this makeshift arbour Everyone here has bated their breath    but clasp their hands together       in remembrance of this time previous: being ready to receive       we received nothing and had to render ourselves as stone       against disease             and the year's infant gloom And now here we are as shivering paupers    the drizzle on the arbour       helping us dismember this pious time, this skeletal time       when everything happens at once may we fight to make our judgements kind

This is the face of rejection showing the kindness of indifference. All we need is sustenance, something to keep us upright to manoeuvre the days of wistful agreement, the year's old ache in the bone, flogged by the old sod Time. Something is coming to life though we cannot define its form. The goodwill of tired people navigating sodden streets hangs magically in the air like a child's sob - we don't want to see the form of the thing that is dying. This December rain, the air's dismal aptitude gives us just the right grief with which to meet the year's end, the quiescence of the new in which to pursue again our faint and fleeting dreams.

Broomhill's bricks are sweating with denial, smearing the sandstone grey. Students in bedsits are dreaming of colours while the smell of tobacco is washed out by the tired-eyed rain, and down below refugees trudge through the misery of Christ in the garden ( Eloi, eloi ) and the steam that fills up the cafés. Trying to find a missing word in a sentence, sitting somewhere between frustration and beatitude, I hide myself in the Nottingham House and delete reality through ogling my namesake. Something is happening, something is buried underneath layers of rubble - but then the rubble is buried underneath layers of rain, and the world is turning into sleep glimpsed through a window like a bird exhausted When the rain ends, we are afforded this sluggish tract of sunlight impinging on the surface of the streets. We would not be blinded by the world's incessantness. Please leave us to the gloom of Christ's deliberations, of cellars filled with darkness,...

                                                  from Bradfield Moor, 1 / 9 / 19                                                    for Harriet Tarlo The clouds salient and slow      stupendous blocks of light    towering over the world, showing neither disdain nor love The ferns      silent armies taking orders from the wind each one alike        each different the family older than our conception of time The rowan trees      their colours proud and sad   as though holding back tears    with their secret spirits close by  hiding in the retreating heather and the heather      colour of earthy judgement whi...

Let it all collapse, and the atoms fall asunder to the wide and friendly chaos of the sea. Let the wrung hands wring their bones to dust and the deaf ear hear the cracking of supports and the candle gutter out. Have you ever seen yourself asleep? The blank repose casts you into a maximal statue of nothing, like Eurydice groping placidly in her blind cave. This is your integrity, your longed-for freedom. And when you awake to the high forlorn sun and make your way to your station of toil, the tension you feel in the base of your breast is more like anger than repentance. Backwards is your pilgrimage.

     the trees blurred and shattered, faintly against the catacomb of light, collected snow from the vault of sky blistering stings into the eyes of an earth-weary pilgrim, limping on hope like a youngling on ice The Hands are Massive. Behind the eyes,        circular memories now careen to and fro, in and out of focus     one foot falls into abyss body floats disregarded and reaches the trees, failed in success.

The sea sits on the sky. Your eyes are wide with terror. I sit and wait for Mujîko and sample the taste of ill-ease while the breeze of the war blows away, to scatter the sky with contempt. Tog, in sartorial contempt, raises his arms to the sky and wishes his sentience away. Wonder replaces your terror, weariness my ill-ease. I have nothing to wish on Mujîko. Tog never much liked Mujîko, and oft held a mild contempt. He thought of the war with ill-ease - the war diseased even the sky, made of old joys a terror and scattered the old life away. Sentience fades away - sartorial grace on Mujîko, who rides from his smoke-shrouded terror viewing us plebs with contempt, even diseases the sky and leaves the earth shrunk in ill-ease. Tog's hands are wrung in ill-ease, but wonder's not all ebbed away. He finds his release in the sky, can shrink the image of Mujîko - then feels a mild contempt for the preoccupation with terror. Nonsense, this trite talk ...

The glittering river of the kingfisher's swoop, the nourishment of the willows and the children's pure delight in play - this is an escape. Or rather, it is a preface to one. By this Bruegelian idyll the poets are taking a nap, the women are drowning their clothes in the river, the cobbles are sweating their moisture. Forms drift like vapour through a close net of dimensions. You think of their dream homes, blue and white on the Costa del Sol with lemons growing in confident clumps and no shadow of a midge at all and the dogs that dance with the sprinklers that baptise the outlying wall. All your curtains are drawn. The bread on the table is dead. The Good Lord's sun bleeds the room's corners orange and red. You judged each living being with no one close to ask why. And as for you, your dream home is a place in which to die.

2nd July 1888 I see the black boys dancing through the window like clay toys or children's dolls jumping about like grasshoppers. Sugar beets are on the table The nurse prays for me hourly. There are creatures here no man should approach. One I saw the other day, the size of my very fist, it scuttled off from a leaf into the foetid undergrowth.    God protect our people from that thing. It occurs to me now that all truths are equal and equally pregnant to doubt. Two plus two is four. A square has four equal sides. A jug of wine is by the window sill, the natives make powerful stuff.     My hands are starting to tremble. I have asked for milk. Now I -    I cannot be bothered Rain        Again Sounds on animals, not ones I know All lines are of equal length They put me in a canoe I think I was awake   the man in front ate flowers, two or three or four I remembered a house burning down blinking ...

in the dim café a cup of sand in the dark nobody watches one Summer Sunday from the window by the door the floor shines with light father Thomas died while casting for clues in books no-one mourned for him from a cracked mirror a man in fragments gurns back his face pale and ill the foot of Bleaklow a book's leaves blow in the wind its language unknown a lonely July everyone is somewhere else the cadence misplaced an old fishing pole that once belonged to a child a child now missing

It's the helplessness you forget You can be witty you can be clever you can be erudite but it won't help you fight when the time comes They disappear all the year round Perhaps you didn't give them enough love You get used to their smiles their way of walking, lightly, joyfully over the wooden floor and then suddenly they're gone to give you their smile no more They took a decision, or came to a conclusion simply enough expressed and we have only to meet the helplessness to pick ourselves up from the floor We know we are meant for better things all we have to do is believe it and live one sad day more

I went to take you wine gums, but I found I couldn't wake you. The oxygen was performing its hypnotic effect, though your breathing was more laboured than I could have imagined. But that is not a problem now. They will tend you, then place a white sheet over you, white being the blankest of colours, that saps away all cares, pains and memories. We shall have them for you now. It is hard to believe that when I speak my voice will mean nothing to you. It is hard to understand that between us now there is nothing but a stainless, smooth, white sheet.

On granite cliffs hits the spray the gulls' pain and the judgement wind I hide my hands from all sight reflect on mirrors and strain feel the descent of the night and the air suffering again Nothing to say Nothing to do Along granite cliffs I walk without you