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.