Richard C McNeff
Author
Blue Nest woodcut © Bill Fulljames
THE BLUE NEST
The place is very beautiful
But you do not see it –
The rugged creek
Where Rigoberto painted
The fisherman and his son
Once setting out at daybreak
Again when they returned at dusk,
Moonlight green as glow-worm
On the boy’s pale blouse.
You hardly notice
The slate-calm sea
Or the sloping tile of Formentera
Wedged into the sky –
The immense gull
Perched on the treacherous rock
Of Santa Eulalia,
Which has drowned Phoenician silver
As well as corsair gold,
Is as indifferent as you are
To the bell tolling
Beneath the sea
From the church that slid there
When the men wore red caps
And the women garlands.
In the end, Rigoberto fled the Blue Nest
Bruised by the Argentine
Who plaited her red hair
In the nets of the fisherman –
He no longer saw slate, tile, or steeple –
He was blind to everything
But her soul.
HALFWAY HOUSE
Like a book he could not put down
Rigoberto returned to the Blue Nest,
To the little house shielded by pines
And the breeze they baffled –
He regretted Laura, regretted their battles,
He had a dream she would receive him
Like an old comrade,
Have him sit by her,
Drink and eat the old times,
They would dance to the flamenco
As it played on the phonograph –
He was not seeking love
Nor to usurp the fisherman from his nets
But if that came too he would not demur.
He knocked at the door of the Blue Nest
And a voice gruff with garlic and wine
Demanded what he wanted –
She was so thin
It seemed the door opened itself.
She howled at him in her tramp’s overcoat
That possessed no shoulders
Only spidery arms.
Fleeing from her barbs
He scrambled across the creek
As baffled as the breeze.
Rigoberto's Envoi
Having laboured so long
And gained so little
Rigoberto could scarcely believe
The news the postman brought
As he scrambled down from the tree house
He had built on the tallest pine
To evade Laura.
The prize in Barcelona paid for
The house he built
On the purple hill at the back of Santa Eulalia
Flanked by almond trees still in blossom
The first night he slept there.
Rigoberto left the Blue Nest to Laura,
Left her for the fisherman and drunken waterman
Who caroused with her
When the fits weren’t on her –
He could not believe the wonderful peace
Of his spacious house –
No voice scolded him,
No moans honed his cuckold’s horns –
All the night through
He could not sleep
NORTH EAST WEST SOUTH
( 7 July 2005)
You only made a triangle
Who intended a cross
From Edgware Road
to intersect with Aldgate
And Russell Square.
King’s Cross was closed
So in Tavistock Square
You detonated your scrambled mind,
Finally shattered the vengeful dream.
On the side of the bus an advert states:
“Outright Terror Bold and Brilliant”
A gleeful god laughs,
Your god, Bomber,
Who brings misfortune at the crossroads
And the wrong sort of posterity.
HUNTER
In Memoriam – Hunter S. Thompson
A moment like no other
Came and went –
The wave rose so high
When it was spent
A different world emerged,
Worse and better
Than what had gone before.
Charting it, your head full of
Booze, your pockets packed
With acid and sedition,
You railed against the
Villainous dull ache
Of the everyday.
Firing bullets
At all and sundry
Till one hit you.
RIMBAUD FOUND
“This time we’ve got him! We know where Arthur
Rimbaud is – the great Rimbaud, the true Rimbaud,
the Rimbaud of the Illuminations.”
La France moderne (February-March issue 1891)
At this altitude, it is,
And will be for another month,
Unpleasantly cold.
It rains and hails, and the wind
Is like a mother when she scolds.
I had to buy a mattress, blankets, overcoats.
Forgive me recounting all my troubles,
But I’m about to turn thirty or thereabouts
(Half a lifetime!)
And I’ve worn myself to death
Wandering the world,
To no effect.
The descent to Ballawa from Egon
Very difficult for the porters,
Who stumble at every stone,
And for me, who falters and almost
Tips over with a groan.
The litter is already half dislocated
And the servants completely exhausted.
I try to mount the mule,
With the sick leg strapped to its neck.
I am forced to dismount like a fool
And get back into the litter
Which has already lagged a kilometre behind.
This journey is bitter and wrong.
On arriving at Ballawa, only drizzle.
Furious wind all night long.
Please then, Monsieur Le Directeur,
Send the tariff of services
From Aphinar to Suez.
I am completely paralysed, and so
Wish to embark in good time.
I must be carried on board.
What hour should I come?
I shall go under
And you will walk in the sun.
SIXTY YEARS
Sixty years they loved one another
I missed eight –
Six steadfast decades
From Rommel and the ATS
To Iraq and the PLF
In their true love loyalty
They bickered and squabbled
And danced round the kitchen table
Shouting words of love.
PROVERBIALS
Silly me!
Walking out on everything
Like the proverbial bull –
All that broken China,
Sixty million dead they say,
But I’m so busy with myself
I can’t see the wood
For the proverbials.
OSCAR AND ALFRED
Here the Nineties aren’t so gay,
The pool where Oscar and Alfred lay
No longer hosts the earnest children
With their cheeks to the sun.
The seat of life decays,
Golden boys and golden boys,
Bronzed in their rapture,
Recall those better days
As they timidly examine
Their pale limbs and paler hopes
Finding pointless the expense.
Oscar, whose fetid body revenged itself
Upon the wallpaper that had to go,
Bequeaths to Alfred the Fourth Estate
Who snap him supine on the tiles,
Where death comes as a lizard
Gazing up at him with utterly patient
Bulbous eyes.
THE GUN LOBBY
Reagan saunters from the lobby,
A casual wave, his hair at seventy
A glossy supernatural black.
He thinks of Poland,
Regrets a favourite hunting rifle
He gave the President of Mexico.
The camera records newsmen, crowds,
The usual entourage.
Showdown!
Shots sting the airwaves!
Editors scramble,
Satellites become oracles,
Millions wonder if the deadline
Between flesh and bullet is fatal.
And in those dead lines on the screen
The servicemen lose their secret faces –
Only the assassin keeps his.
The inscrutable masked vengeance
Spawned in the tedium of a small town
By an age that brooks no temperance –
Raised on soda pop, westerns,
The grudge against history
That at last is ours.
There’s no doubt here
Life has outmatched art.
Who could believe a plot
Where motive is a subterfuge.
Its own elegy, entire to itself?
That man killed Kennedy, that man King,
By that hand a pool of celebrated blood
Stained the front page.
On the sidewalks of Dallas and New York
The muzzle of that loaded mind
Took aim.
THE HUNT
Knowing of the hunt
He chased the quarry of their love
Into the thicket of a rhyme
Captured the beasts’ dialogue
In the pivot of an adjective
And cadence of a line.
If words were gold
Then this hoard glittered!
But they are paltry things
Enclosing in the tomb of script
False grandiloquence,
When love, like Tamburlane,
Conquers all
But only passion reigns.
First words stray,
Then the restless Emperor
Rides away.
ART
Your mother made it seem
A fine thing to be an artist
In a broom cupboard –
But when you finally
Attained the garret
And the blank page glowered
Like an absolute stranger,
You realised that nobody cared
About Nerval hanging by the belt
He mistook in his wisdom
For the Queen of Sheba’s garter;
And Vincent was a loser –
Richard Dadd slit the throat
Of his eponymous father
On a train, just to prove
He could paint like a god.
Old Ezra stayed silent,
The best thing to do,
That or change your view.
YOU NEED TWEEZERS
You need tweezers
For her moods,
A cement mixer
For her temper.
So crushed is self-esteem
That not even a cloud
Rising like Battersea Power Station
In the banks of the sky,
Not even that unlikely edifice
Could puff her up.
RIMBAUD IN ABYSSINIA
My papers burned and time
Distinguished to a cinder
By the flames
Itself has raced to these white walls,
White days, my halcyon
Too blistered by the sun,
A weary jewel in its last setting.
Paris was blind,
London grey, Belgium scandal.
So the fickle then disgraced
My voyage and my pen,
Made mute the anvil of my craft –
Hammer and forge were blunt
Before the ink had dried
And as words fled
Something in my spirit died.
An empty rifle and a rotten bow
A hunter in a wooded shack
Some call Rimbaud.
TWO VALENTINES
A shaft of sunlight on a golden barge,
The Nile recedes,
Smitten
Antony recounts heroic deeds
Compares her to a rose –
He will forge his flashing metals
To chains and fetters
The Pharaoh knows.
Icebound!
Surrounded by incompetence!
On the skyline Moscow burns.
Shoot the looters!
Give the stragglers all to death!
But secretly he carries
Cossack lace,
The coins of Empire
Will bear her face.
TRIPTYCH
(7 January 2006)
NIGHT
My dad loved art and Shakespeare,
Hated football and the royal family –
He was born in Wormwood Scrubs
To a neurasthenic soldier
Who left.
Brother Eric died at five,
He told me this to burst a depression,
Revealed the secret of my childhood,
His dark youth, because he loved me
And wished to see me well.
Brother Tommy was killed at Arnhem,
A mangled parachute in a nest of snipers,
I found a daughter and said
This is her because he loved me
And wished to see me well,
Her mouth was Tommy’s,
The same slant of smile,
And in profile
My dad’s Barrymore nose
In his knight’s repose.
SIXTY YEARS
Sixty years they loved one another
I missed eight –
Six steadfast decades
From Rommel and the ATS
To Iraq and the PLF
In their true love loyalty
They bickered and squabbled
And danced round the kitchen table
Shouting words of love.
SWEET FATHER DEATH
Sweetly he went
His body riddled
With disease but in
No pain, he died
Serene, went to meet
No maker that he owned
Yet still believed
In a love allotted evermore.
Sweet father death
Into your dark stables
Take these hooves –
Let them gallop!
SIREN
Pitched in the key
Of Solomon’s desire
He rent the veil.
Tired, love’s clichés
Smouldered at the chords.
The senses’ mountaineer
Climbed the scales,
The circle of a moan
Praised the unrelenting bone.
But in the modern age
The hero crushes death
With razor blades,
Sees it all in a mirror.
On the rocks,
Tim Buckley,
The narcotic siren
Broke you.
IRON LANCELOT
Bring armour and a sword,
The surcoat, polished helm and mail,
Nightly you follow these commands
And watch this tall and silent man
Interrogate his prison of desire.
When the sun docks western cargo
Then I am gold,
Clear with golden light,
My very purpose glitters with false ore,
Resolved to leave,
Despatch and quell
This bitter insurrection of the flesh –
But her corrosive star
I name the acid of my will,
Dissolving fortitude,
Rendering all decision blunt.
A Queen surprised me,
Grain from an unclenched fist
Awoke the clay –
Could I then resist
To bare from shoulder to the hip
And hear fate whisper
Your Venus is delivered from her Mars?
Matchless in law,
The focused common will and scope,
Beloved King,
I do not betray you,
Even led at evenstar
(Myself my fatal shepherd)
A heiffer to love’s abattoir,
Where we are met
Without defiance or regret
In that white room
Upon that usurped bed.
Though long the Queen’s entreaty
And your forced march
Troubled eve and aftermath,
Does a storm question itself
Or thunder beg permission of the clouds?
Does lightning waver where it strikes?
ROADSENSE
The roadsense of my kind,
Those vintage types
Who traced a Grand Prix
In the sand
Then dreamed of lay-bys.
NEOPHYTE
I am a neophyte of The Golden Daw
Fifty years after,
I see the symmetry of worlds
But not their meaning.
I am a shaft of lighning
Burning up a tree,
An incandescent bark
Fanned to question by the wind,
If the universe is song
And we vibrating particles of sound,
(Thin quavers on the interstellar bridge)
What use am I?
An echo of the blaze
That has no keeping
With the tenor of the wind
Or pine’s contralto.
Those who write by night must know
That the vision of angels
Is not that of birds,
And when they have written
All they expect to read
And find they cannot fly,
By the vehicle imagination
This can yet be done.
Rather than to hover here
At the entrance of a hidden way
And never gain admittance
Shall I admit that it is you
Who fills the lamp
And trims the wick
And have done with it?
LAST ENTRY IN THE BOOK OF THOTH
Where stars blazed
And night was the lid of God
There became fixed points
And an assured renewal,
This Logos, absolving destiny,
Proclaimed the death of Horus.
But the man lived!
We saw his star,
And the auguries foretold
The face of Isis
Would be revealed as a virgin
Scrubbing clothes on a stony floor,
Moans and belly kicks and something
Whining.
How then could we have known
That one small cry denied the Aeon?
The eagle’s span was not an ecstasy
But mangled with blood and thorns
Flight was difficult.
In itself nothing –
To he who bears the beacon
Adversity measures the flame –
Pain is the royal road.
But why is the path of majesty
On a fallen plain
Littered with the shards of a mirror,
The old polarity of as above so below
Dissolved to opposites.
Tenants of the burning libraries,
Scribes of Tunis, Alexandria and Thebes,
The breath behind Your prophecy has gathered
a ruined harvest.
Know this: the ageless book is finished
But is worthless,
The swansong of a dying God.
A
Symmetry of wood
Defines
The
Future.
THE POETS
A prophet makes his temple
On the surety of peaks,
Gives credit to the mountain.
A poet, giddy with the height,
Keeps one eye wary on the flux below,
Suffers from a vertigo,
Impersonates the real and the unreal,
Hammers with rebellion
The Kingdom’s rocky seal.
But if the energies decree,
Though every word is swallowed
In the next mouthful,
Oaths betrayed,
Neither promises nor the sacred kept,
What bush burns for him
And waters part,
What towers tremble
At the trumpet blast!
A prophet lives his teaching
Takes the circus out of words.
A poet in the ring
Stabs lions and chimerae
With his pen,
Trains words like fleas,
Is buried in the end
By the sawdust of his dreams.
THE PAINTER
Once they say, he sowed craft’s grain,
Ploughed the furrowed canvas
With seeds of paint,
And still those harvests of resolve
Haunt his light and shade.
But the farm is ruined!
Untended earth revolts with weed
Which he plucks and smokes.
Befuddled by his only crop, the scene,
Which tolerates him,
Exhibitions dwindle to inanity
Where little’s sold.
Besides he is a character
Colourful for bars if not the Louvre,
And when fodder’s at a premium
It is image not worth that counts.
Myself, I have a little lot to tend.
I don’t expect the land to prosper
Or to cultivate much more than semblances
With a shadow plough.
I’ll labour anyway,
Knowing his yield and my dearth
Both feed obscurity,
And what we reap is rarely
The lucid interval, the growth.