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January 04 Eruption
Fresh signs. The soil has been disturbed. There is a smear on the sky of birds, wiped out by a careless thumb.
Yours. On my cheek, trailing into my mouth; your blood like the juice of some strange fruit.
Oh the wind sings on a wire, it cuts my throat so cleanly, leaves no mark on the white skin.
Now. As a bird come down or a wounded deer, it tucks itself up small. Whispering things so dark
They'd break your heart like a bone.
August 23 Poem of the weekNovember 7th
SHRIKE
There was a smudge in the far distance
and we were playing with sticks
running them like spoons over rib-bones
this dinosaur fence fallen among the grasses
of a long ago savannah.
I knew savannah - I'd seen it fletched
with horses flying like demons and
flattened beneath an immeasurable sky.
There was hard earth beneath us, and
a strip of something meaty with a
stink not like the butcher's shop, more
sudden and more hungry; flies danced
a dirty lifting tango.
Then closer - and your legs flapped
slapping at the backs of your red
wellies, brows lowered in a primal
grunt. My hand reached for your shirt,
held tight as we walked onward
past the spitted bodies of the
songbirds, jewelled in blood, black
eyepits, serried in a warning line,
their silence going deeper than
the ground. Your numbed expression
stayed, and all the way home
I knew that what had happened
marked you in a way that no one ever saw.
I know it, saw you spiked yourself for
long years after, trailing your damage as a broken stick
smile raised to the sunlight like a rotten trick.
October 4th
WORDS FROM TRAHERNE - Elizabeth Jennings
'You cannot love too much, only in the wrong way.'
It seemed like love; there were so many ways
Of feeling, thinking, each quite separate.
Tempers would rise up in a sudden blaze,
Or someone coming twitch and shake the heart.
Simply, there was no calm. Fear often came
And intervened between the quick expression
Of honest movements or a kind of game.
I ran away at any chace of passion.
But not for long. Few can avoid emotion
So powerful, although it terrifies.
I trembled, yet I wanted that commotion
Learnt through the hand, the lips, the ears, the eyes.
Fear always stopped my every wish to give.
I opted out, broke hearts, but most of all
I broke my own. I would not let it live
Lest it should make me lose control and fall.
Now generosity, integrity,
Compassion too, are what make me exist,
Yet still I cannot come to terms or try,
Or even know, the knot I must untwist.
September 20th
AUTOBIOGRAPHY - Louis Macneice
In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.
Come back early or never come
My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.
Come back early or never come.
My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gently, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come.
When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.
Come back early or never come.
The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.
Come back early or never come.
When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there.
Come back early or never come.
When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied.
Come back early or never come.
I got up; the chilly sun
Saw me walk away alone.
Come back early or never come.
August 28th
Dandelions - Craig Raine
Dead dandelions, bald as drumsticks,
swaying by the roadside like Hare Krishna pilgrims bowing to the Juggernaut. They have given up everything. Gold gone and their silver gone, humbled with dust, hollow, their milky bodies tan to the colour of annas. The wind changes their identity: slender Giacomettis, Doré's convicts, Rodin's burghers of Calais with five bowed heads and the weight of serrated keys . . . They wither into mystery, waiting to find out why they are, patiently, before nirvana when the rain comes down like vitriol. August 23
Name - Carol Anne Duffy
When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?
Its three vowels
like jewels
on the thread of my breath.
It's consonants
brushing my mouth
like a kiss.
I love your name.
I say it again and again
in this summer rain.
I see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish.
I pray it
into the night
till its letters are light.
I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything.
July 29
Wintering - Carol Anne Duffy (first stanza)
All day, slow funerals have ploughed the rain.
We've done it again
that trick we have of turning love to pain.
Grey fades to black. The stars begin their lies,
nothing to lose.
I wear a shroud of cold beneath my clothes.
Night clenches in its fist the moon, a stone.
I wish it thrown.
I clutch the smalll stiff body of my phone.
Dawn mocks me with a gibberish of birds.
I hear your words,
they play inside my head like broken chords.
***
June 22
May 23
Old Jim Hawkins
When the churches empty onto the
cold streets of London, and the
greyness has become some deep
complete thing to sleep in - a day
donated by the Salvation Army -
I know I have nowhere to run.
Where is my shelter now? my
pride of place, my green palace
where I walked all day knowing the
sound of your laughter? There
comes a time when you just turn up
the collar of your coat and let them charge you.
Fucking in strange places, paying coin
to women who have no countenance
might cut out of me the wide, grand
sweep of your coastline. Drunk in a
thousand foreign bars and sleeping
with a small and menacing monkey.
Then death with grey whiskers on an
island somewhere near Costa Rica
with a thin old woman wiping the whisky
from a warm, wood floor.
Get the priest, come quickly. Pass him
the old black hat. Play music.
MAY 15
Shakespeare, 29th sonnet
MAY 7th
I remembered - Sarah Teasdale
APRIL 28
A Particular blue - Joan Johnston
i. m. Roy
This afternoon the weather broke
and changing light
brought back morning,
waking as the shining
water you'd carried for miles
poured into me
from your cupped hands,
became the liquid song
of a blackbird.
Then your promise,
opaque, clinging all day
to the tip of my tongue,
clarified with the start
of rain: you'll bring me
a colour next time, a particular
blue you saw once - beyond
azure, a deep sky. Breathtaking
- your last word - revealed
as you flew again into cloud,
as birds stilled,
stopped singing.
APRIL 19
AIMLESS LOVE - Billy Collins
This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor's window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.
No lust, no slam of the door -
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.
No waiting, no huffiness, or rancour -
just a twinge every now and then
for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.
But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.
After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.
APRIL 6
SLEEPING - Carol Anne Duffy
Under the dark warm waters of sleep
your hands part me.
I am dreaming you anyway.
Your mouth is hot fruit, wet, strange,
night-fruit I taste with my opening mouth;
my eyes closed.
You, you. Your breath flares into fervent words
which explode in my head. Then you ask, push,
for an answer.
And this is how we sleep. You're in now, hard,
demanding; so I dream more fiercely, dream
till it hurts
that this is for real, yes, I feel it.
When you hear me, you hold on tight, frantic,
as if we were drowning.
MARCH 30
SNOW PATROL - Chasing Cars
We'll do it all
Everything On our own We don't need Anything Or anyone If I lay here If I just lay here Would you lie with me and just forget the world? I don't quite know How to say How I feel Those three words Are said too much They're not enough If I lay here If I just lay here Would you lie with me and just forget the world? Forget what we're told Before we get too old Show me a garden that's bursting into life Let's waste time Chasing cars Around our heads I need your grace To remind me To find my own If I lay here If I just lay here Would you lie with me and just forget the world? Forget what we're told Before we get too old Show me a garden that's bursting into life All that I am All that I ever was Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see I don't know where Confused about how as well Just know that these things will never change for us at all If I lay here If I just lay here Would you lie with me and just forget the world? MARCH 17
ROOMS - Billy Collins
After three days of steady, inconsolable rain,
I walk through the rooms of the house
wondering which would be best to die in.
The study is an obvious choice
with its thick carpet and soothing paint,
its overstuffed chair preferable
to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.
And the kitchen has a certain appeal -
it seems he was boiling water for tea,
the inspector will offer, holding up the melted kettle.
Then there is the dining room,
just the place to end up facedown
at one end of its long table in a half-written letter
or the bedroom with its mix of sex and sleep,
upright against the headboard,
a book having slipped to the floor -
make it Mrs. Dalloway, which I have yet to read.
Dead on the carpet, dead on the tiles,
dead on the stone cold floor -
it's starting to sound like a ballad
sung in a pub by a man with a coal red face.
It's all the fault of the freezing rain
which is flicking against the windows,
but when it finally lets up
and gives way to broken clouds and a warm breeze,
when the trees stand dripping in the light,
I will quit these dark, angular rooms
and drive along a country road
into the larger rooms of the world,
so vast and speckled, so full of ink and sorrow -
a road that cuts through bare woods
and tangles of red and yellow bittersweet
these late November days.
And maybe under the fallen wayside leaves
there is hidden a nest of mice,
each one no bigger than a thumb,
a thumb with closed eyes,
a thumb with whiskers and a tail,
each one contemplating the sweetness of grass
and the startling brevity of life.
FEBRUARY 21
MEAN TIME - Carol Anne Duffy
The clocks slid back an hour
and stole light from my life
as I walked through the wrong part of town,
mourning our love.
And, of course, unmendable rain
fell to the bleak streets
where I felt my heart gnaw
at all our mistakes.
If the darkening sky could lift
more than one hour from this day
there are words I would never have said
nor have heard you say.
But we will be dead, as we know,
beyond all light.
These are the shortened days
and the endless nights.
DECEMBER 23
MENU
Here, have this. There is a vast
menu available for you -
all colours, all sizes
shapes and shades, such
varying degrees of saltiness.
For you, all could be. It's
a table, a slab, a horn of
plenty. For just ten dollars
or a wide smile, it's yours.
This window, these white
curtains. The wind pulls them,
the sun like a grill pan toasts
my skin. I read. This menu.
My tongue has had enough -
one flavour is the
same as any other - all skin
all bone. I want only the rare
and salted, solitary feast where
I can taste the only tang
I crave. So send that waiter -
send. That waiter. Away.
'What can I get you Sir?
Is that the way you think
you should behave in this
establishment?' I smile, full
of my only feast. This. You.
So draw the long tablecloth
over me and leave. Taste of
as many flavours as you please.
This diner fancies none of it.
A cold slice only, maybe of
the high, remembered moon.
WORDS, WIDE NIGHT - Carol Anne Duffy
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I am singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this
is what it is like or what it is like in words.
NOVEMBER 28
FLOODED MIND - Norman MacCaig
When the water fell
the trees rose up again
and fish stopped being birds
among the branches.
The trees were never the same again, though,
and the birds
often regarded him
with a very fishy eye
as he walked the policies of himself,
his own keeper.
Also, he was afraid to go fishing
in case he landed a fish
with feathers that would sing
in his net.
No wonder his eyes were
noticeboards saying
Private. Keep out.
NOVEMBER 14
ABSENCE
I am an absence. I have become one of those shadows that freckle the walls of other people’s rooms. Where I used to tread with a firm step I shuffle now without any clear idea of where I’m going.
You have defined me like an entry in one of those books you used to quote to me. A line here, a line there - do this now, go there next. The morning light and the evening shadow, the first and last movements of the creeping world.
I am a waiting room now. Those chairs are not even filled with strangers. The door is ever watched for someone who no longer comes In. I am becoming greyer and more unsure. I have become an unused room shrouded in white sheets.
Only yesterday it seems I was sitting here listening to the sea sing and chasing words across paper like a boy with a big stick frightening crows. Oh I thought I could strangle the world. Now I’m smothered in silence.
I am become an absence. I am a wall that you are spread across. freckled with tiny bits of you, still washing in the rhythm of your heart. Your love that seems now like a memory of rain. I sit in this silence and wait for it to pass.
NOVEMBER 01
THE LISTENER - Billy Collins
I cannot see you a thousand miles from here,
but I can hear you
whenever you cough in your bedroom
or when you set down
your wine glass on a granite counter.
This afternoon
I even heard scissors moving
at the tips of your hair
and the dark snips falling
onto a marble floor.
I keep the jazz
on the radio turned off.
I walk across the floor softly,
eyes closed,
the windows in the house shut tight.
I hear a motor on the road in front,
a plane humming overhead,
someone hammering,
then there is nothing
but the white stone building of silence.
You must be asleep
for it to be this quiet,
so I will sit and wait
for the rustle of your blanket
or a noise from your dream.
Meanwhile, I will listen to the ant bearing
a dead comrade
across these floorboards -
the noble sounds
of his tread and his low keening.
OCTOBER 20
NIGHT LETTER TO THE READER - Billy Collins
I get up from the tangled bed and go outside,
a bird leaving its nest,
a snail taking a holiday from its shell,
but only to stand on the lawn,
an ordinary insomniac
amid the growth systems of gardens and woods.
If I were younger, I might be thinking
about something I heard at a party,
about an unusual car,
or the press of Saturday night,
but as it is, I am simply conscious,
an animal in pajamas,
sensing only the pale humidity
of the night and the slight zephyrs
that stir the tops of the trees.
The dog has followed me out
and stands a little ahead,
her nose lifted as if she were inhaling
the tall white flowers,
visible tonight in the darkened garden,
and there was something else I wanted to tell you,
something about the warm orange light
in the windows of the house,
but now I am wondering if you are even listening
and why I bother to tell you these things
that will never make a difference,
flecks of ash, tiny chips of ice.
But this is all I want to do -
tell you that up in the woods
a few night birds are calling,
the grass was cold and wet on my bare feet,
and that at one point, the moon,
looking like the top of Shakespeare's
famous forehead,
appeared, quite unexpectedly,
illuminating a band of moving clouds.
SEPTEMBER 28
THE DROWNED - Norman MacCaig - a favourite of mine
Somebody said wrecks
come ashore, looking for the drowned
crews, as if they felt guilt, or love, or loneliness.
Timbers for boats, bones for men.
Their friends shut their minds, their
recollections, themselves
to the dogfish love, the ten inch wide
appetite of crabs.
...The tide washes in. And somebody
sings a song. And his friend, picked clean
to the delicate timber of bones,
drifts in the song, complete
as an archangel.
SEPTEMBER 17
A DREAM OF HANGING
He rang me up
In a dream,
My brother did.
He had been hanged
That morning,
Innocent,
And I had slept
Through the striking
Of the clock
While it had taken place,
Eight,
Just about time enough
For it to happen.
He spoke to me
On the telephone
That afternoon
To reassure me,
My dear brother
Who had killed nobody,
And I asked him,
Long distance,
What it had felt like
To be hanged.
'Oh, don't worry, lovey,' he said,
'When your time comes.
It tickled rather.'
Patricia Beer
SEPTEMBER 09
A CHILD HALF-ASLEEP
Stealthily parting the small-hours silence,
a hardly-embodied figment of his brain
comes down to sit with me
as I work late.
Flat-footed, as though his legs and feet
were still asleep.
He sits on a stool,
staring into the fire,
his dummy dangling.
Fire ignites the small coals of his eyes.
It stares back through the holes
into his head, into the darkness.
I ask him what woke him?
'A wolf dreamed me' he says.
Tony Connor 1930-
AUGUST 21
This week, multi-media! First click here: http://www.londonwelshmvc.org/gems3.htm and click on the picture to hear the 'poem' sung by a male voice choir. This place is where a lot of my family are buried, in the churchyard to the right of this cross.
Here it is in English:
WATCHING THE WHITE WHEAT
A simple youthful lad am I Who loves at fancy's pleasure: I fondly watch the blooming wheat, Another reaps the treasure. Oh! Wherefore still despise my suit, Why sighing keep thy lover? For some new charm, thou matchless fair, I day by day discover. Each day reveals some newborn grace, Or does fond faith deceive me? In love to Him who formed thy face, With pity now receive me, Then lift thine eyes, one look bestow. Give me thy hand, my fairest, For in thy bosom, lovely maid, My heart's true key thou bearest. While hair adorns this aching brow Still I will love sincerely, While ocean rolls its briny flow Still I will love thee dearly. Then tell the truth, in secret tell, And under seal discover, If it be I or who is blest As thy true heart's best lover. and in Welsh:
BUGEILIO'R GWENYTH GWYN Mi sydd fachgen ieuanc ffol. Yn byw yn ol fy ffansi Myfi'n bugeilior gwenith gwyn, Ac arall yn ei fedi. Pam na ddeui ar fy ol, Ryw ddydd ar ol ei gilydd? Gwaith 'rwyn dy weld, y feinir fach, Yn lanach, lanach beunydd! Glanach, lanach wyt bob dydd, Neu fi a'm ffydd yn ffolach, Er mwyn y Gwr a wnaeth dy wedd, Gwna im drugaredd ballach. Cwnn dy ben, gwel acw draw, Rho i mi'th law wen dirion; Gwaith yn dy fynwes bert ei thro Mae allwedd clo fy nghalon! Tra fo dwr y mor yn hallt, A thra fo 'ngwallt yn tyfu A thra fo calon yn fy mron Mi fydda'n ffyddlon iti: Dywed imi'r gwir dan gel A rho dan sel d'atebion, P'un ai myfi neu arall,Ann Sydd orau gan dy galon. On the walls of the subway from Waterloo bridge is a poem
stencilled that I always stop to read between the buskers and
the walk upwards. I always wondered what it was, and tonight
I found it on someone's blog. It makes me sad.
Eurydice
I am not afraid as I descend, step by step, leaving behind the salt wind blowing up the corrugated river, the damp city streets, their sodium glare of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain; for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon. Already your face recedes beneath the station clock, a damp smudge among the shadows mirrored in the train's wet glass, will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out past cranes and crematoria, boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shards of roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud, the rows of curtained windows like eyelids heavy with sleep, to the city's green edge. Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear. Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair. You turned to look. Seconds fly past like birds. My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud. This path unravels. Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping. Above the hurt sky is weeping, soaked nightingales have ceased to sing. Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue. I dream of a green garden where the sun feathers my face like your once eager kiss. Soon, soon I will climb from this blackened earth into the diffident light. Author: Sue Hubbard The Room
It is my house, and yet one room is locked.
The dark has taken root on all four walls.
It is a room where knots stare out from wood,
A room that turns its back on the whole house.
At night I hear the crickets list their griefs
And let an ancient peace come into me.
Sleep incercepts my prayer, and in the dark
The house turns slowly round its one closed room
Kevin Hart.
Baby Song
From the private ease of Mother's womb
I fall into the lighted room.
Why don't they simply put me back
Where it's warm and wet and black?
But one thing follows on another.
Things were different inside Mother.
Padded and jolly I would ride
The perfect comfort of her inside.
They tuck me in a rustling bed
- I lie there, raging, small, and red.
I may sleep soon, I may forget,
But I won't forget that I regret.
A rain of blood poured round her womb,
But all time roars outside this room.
Thom Gunn.
Between
As we fall into step I ask a penny for your thoughts.
'Oh, nothing,' you say, 'well, nothing so easily bought.'
Sliding into the rhythm of your silence, I almost forget
how lonely I'd been until that autumn morning we met.
At bedtime up along my childhood's stairway, tongues
of fire cast shadows. Too earnest, too highstrung.
My desire is endless: others ended when I'd only started.
Then, there was you: so whole-hog, so wholehearted.
Think of the thousands of nights and the shadows fought.
And the mornings of light. I try to read your thought.
In the strange openness of your face, I'm powerless.
Always this love. Always this infinity between us.
Michael O'Siadhail. What my Father said
A little rain may fall, but the hedges stay cold, so that our hands brushing against them like they did when we were children is the comfort of long ago - a good enough reason.
What he used to say when it rained like this - our faces as if we had cried forever or been underwater - was how our country had this over the English - that rain had gifted us, with an extra season.
But now the long grass and the path into the hills only make me tired. The air so damp, the sheep calling makes me want to sit down and not get up again - and almost - stop believing.
A little rain might fall, the black birds cry up like messengers from that other place you told me of, whose gateway was always somewhere else and just out of hearing; the world so jealous; so deceiving.
It’s rain that cleans the theatre of the world from cellar to ceiling but I like to hear it whisper in the old woods, my senses reeling. Let me drop down and run on four feet, yes.
Gift me with instinct da arglwydd. With instinct, not feeling
June 29 CHAPTER TASTER - I Like These Books (1. May)O.K. Here's where I give you a little taster from books I've really liked. If you like the sound of them, the idea or the writing, you might go and look them out yourself.
I wondered if perhaps you might like to play 'Guess The Book', so I won't put an introduction at the beginning. If you don't want to play Guess The Book, and you like to have an idea of what's going on first, skip to the bottom and read the introduction and see what the book is first.
DECEMBER 23
Today you get to click this link and read.
NOVEMBER 28
I did go behind one of the play-tepees and experiment with a thorn, but no sooner than the point touched my flesh I turned yellow. I never could get interested in hurting myslef. So I got an arrow, stole a real one with an iron trade point, and wore it in two with a jagged rock. Now the Cheyenne make a chewing gum from the evaporated juice of the milkweed. Buffalo Wallow Woman give me some, but I put it into my belly button rather than my mouth, and stuck in it the end of the arrow shaft that ends with the feathers. The other part, that with the iron head, I fixed so it appeared to issue from the cleft of my arse, the breechclout being drawn aside in accommodation. It looked as if I was fairly skewered through the middle, at an angle of forty-five degrees. When I was all prepared, I come out from back of the lodge, walking funny with my rump cheeks tight, and secretly supporting the feathered end with a hand to my gut as if to catch the pain - that was an infraction of the rules, for the idea is to show a manly indifference to the hurt, but I figured the act would be spectacular enough to cover up an incidental.
I was right. The girls saw me first and slapped thir mouths so hard it's a marvel their front teeth stayed tight. And then the boys, with their miserable little thorns and them tiny animal skulls. In chagrin Coyote ripped his out of his back and throwed it away, and the blood streamed in scarlet ribbons down to his rump. Little Horse began to dance about and boast how he was my friend. Poor old Younger Bear, he just turned and trudged away, the little skulls trailing along the ground behind him, hopping when they struck a rough, and when one of them caught under a sagebush the rawhide line broke rather than his skin.
From here on I was on equal terms in the war games.
From 'Little Big Man' by Thomas Berger
'Berger claimed the Western as serious literature with this part-farcical, part picaresque, part-historical account of the life and adventures of a poor orphaned boy who came to be the son of two fathers — one white, the other a Cheyenne Indian chief who gave him the name Little Big Man.'
SEPTEMBER 21
'Are you warning me about Olikea?'
She was silent. I almost wondered if I had embarrassed her. Was it possible that she felt jealous? I think she heard more than I intended. She gave a soft laugh that held echoes of regret. 'Olikea is a child. There is little to her; you have already experienced all she has to offer you. But you and I....'
'I have no memories of you and me,' I interrrupted hastily.
'You do,' she asserted calmly. 'They are deep in you, as deep as the magic. As real as the magic.'
Her voice had grown warmer. I bowed my head and my throat suddenly tightened with a sorrow that did and did not belong to me. Tears pricked my eyes. I groped out and my hand touched the rough bark of her stump.
'Do not grieve, Soldier's Boy.' Fingertips of moving air caressed my cheek. 'Some loves go beyond bodies and times. We met in the magic and there we knew one another. I schooled you for the magic; it wa what the magic demanded of me. But I loved you for myself. And in the place and time where ages and shapes have no meaning, and there is only the comfort of kindred spirits touching, our love remains.'
'I'm so sorry I killed you,' I cried out. I fell to my knees and put my arms about the standing stump of the great tree. I could not embrace it; it was far too large. Still I pressed my chest and face against her bark, but could not find her there. There was another man within me, one who was me but who had lived a separate life from the young man who had attended the Academy. I had battled that self, and won, but he resided in me still. The tearing grief I felt was his. It was and was not my sorrow.
'But you didn't kill me. You didn't,' she comforted me. 'i go on. And when the days of your mortal flesh are done, you will go on with me. Then, we shall have a time together, and it will be a far longer time than humans can count.
'That's a cold promise for now,' I heard myself say. And it was my own voice and it was me. The tree I leaned on was just a stump with moss creeping up it. I pressed hard against the stump, trying to recapture Tree Woman's presence but she was gone, and with her my awareness of my Speck-self.
I stood up, and smeared the tears from my face. I left that place.
from 'Forest Mage' Robin Hobb. Book 2 Soldier Son Trilogy.
FIFTH SAMPLER: September 06
'As the months passed the tensions increased. Titus and Steerpike were at daggers drawn, although Steerpike, the soul of bland discretion, showed nothing of his feelings, and gave no sign to Titus or the outside world of his loathing of this forward boy. - the boy who unconsciously stood between him and the zenith of his ambition.
Titus, who ever since that day when, little more than a child, he had defied Steerpike in the classroom silence, and had fallen fainting from his desk, had held on grimly to the dangerous ascendancy he had gained by that curious and childish victory.
Every day the details of his after-school duties were read out to Titus in the library, Steerpike flicking through the the pages of cross-reference, and explaining he obscurer passages with clarity and precision. Up till now the Master of Ceremonies had kept rigidly to the letter of the Law. But now, in the all but invulnerable position of being the only one who had acess to the tomes of referecne and procedure, he was making a list of duties which he would insert among the ancient papers. He had been able to unearth some of the original paper, and it was only for him to forge the copper-plate writing, and the archaic spelling and invent a series of duties for Titus which would be both galling and, on occasion, sufficiently hazardous fofr there to be always the outside chance of the young Earl coming to grief. There were for instance stairways that were no longer safe - there were the rotting beams and crumbling masonry. Beyond this there would always be the possibility of deliberately weakening and undermining certain cat-walks that stretched along the upper walls of the castle, or in some way or another of making sure that in following out the forged procedures, Titis would sooner or later fall accidentally to his death.'
This extract is from Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake - the second book in the Titus trilogy: a flight of Gothic fancy which ranks as one of this century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. (not my words). Titus, 77th Lord Groan of Gormenghast, is restless in his cobwebbed kingdom of crumbling towers and ivied quandrangles, dank passages and battlements elbow-deep in moss. The castle is instinct with spreading evil: Titus's father, his twin sisters and several castle officials have met terrible and secret ends, and Titus feels that, if he isn't destined for a similar fate, his life can only ever be an endless round of pre-ordained ritual. Somehow he must cut off the evil at source - or escape into the unknown world beyond Gormenghast.
FOURTH SAMPLER: August 06.
'My mind rode with his, as it had so many times. We left the cave, thick with man-stink, and walked past the cat's new cairn. We smelled her death, and the musk of a fox who had come to the scent, but turned aside at the smell of the campfire's smoke. Swiftly we left the camp behind. Nighteyes chose the open hillside instead of the wooded vale. The sky overhead ws blue and deep, and the last star fading in the sky. The night had been colder than I had realised. Frost tipped some of the grasses still, but as the rising sun touched it, it smoked briefly and was gone. The crisp edge of the air remained, each scent as sharp as a clean knife-edge. With a wolf's nose, I scented all and knew all. The world was ours. The turning time, I said to him.
Exactly. Time to change, Changer.
There were fat mice hastily harvesting seedheads in the tall grass, but we passed them by. At the top of the hill, we paused. We walked the spine of the hill, smelling the morning, tasting the lip of the day to come. There would be deer in the forested creek bottoms. They would be healthy and strong and fat, a challenge to any pack let alone a single wolf. He would need me at his side to hunt those. He would have to come back for them later. Nevertheless, he halted on top of the ridge. The morning wind riffled his fur and his ears were perked as he looked down to where we knew they must be.
Good hunting. I'm going now, my brother. He spoke with great determination.
Alone? You can't bring a buck down alone! I sighed with resignation.
Wait, I'll get up and come with you.
Wait for you? Not likely! I've always had to run ahead of you and show you the way.
Swift as thought, he slipped away from me, running down the hillside like a cloud's shadow when the wind blows. My connection to him frayed away as he went, scattering and floating like dandelion fluff in the wind. Instead of small and secret, I felt our bond go wide and open, as if he had invited all the Witted creatures in the world in to share our joining. All the web of life on the whole hillside suddenly swelled within my heart, linked and meshed and woven through with one another. It was too glorious to contain. I had to go with him; a morning this wondrous must be shared.
'Wait!' I cried, and in shouting the word, I woke myself. Nearby, the Fool sat up, his hair tousled. I blinked. My mouth was full of salve and wolf-hair, my fingers buried deep in his coat. I clutched him to me, and my grip sighed his last stilled breath out of his lungs. But Nighteyes was gone. Cold rain was cascading down past the mouth of the cave.'
This extract is from 'The Tawny Man: book one, Fool's errand, which is in fact book four of The Assassin series by Robin Hobb. Maybe I shouldn't have put an extract from this far in, but never mind. I'd recommend this series to anyone who enjoys excellent fantasy writing, and to anyone new to it. Make sure you start at the beginning though. This extract is where Fitz iloses his bond animal, whose mind, and at one stage, body, he has shared for years. It's worse than a death for him.
THIRD SAMPLER: July 06.
"I don't think I caught my breath until I'd reached the street. The rain was still falling, and all of the street seemed sodden and desolate in the rain, but beautiful. A few scattered bits of paper blowing in the wind, a gleaming carriage passing slowly with the thick, rhythmic clop of the horse. The sky was pale violet. I sped fast, with Claudia beside me leading the way, then finally frustrated with the length of my stride, riding in my arms.
"I don't like them," she said to me with a steel fury as we neared the Hotel St. Gabriel. Even its immense, brightly lit lobby was still in the pre-dawn hour. I spirited past the sleepy clerks, the long faces at the desk. "I've searched for them the world over, and I despise them!" she threw off her cape and walked into the centre of the room. A volley of rain hit the french windows. I found myself turning up the lights one by one and lifting the candelabrum to the gas flames as if I were Lestat or Claudia. And then, seeking the puce velvet chair I'd envisioned in that cellar, I slipped down into it, exhausted. It seemed for the moment as if the room blazed about me; as my eyes fixed on a gilt-framed painting of pastel trees and serene waters, the vampire spell was broken. They couldn't touch us here, and yet I knew this to be a lie, a foolish lie.
"I am in danger, danger," Claudia said with that smouldering wrath.
"But how can they know what we did to him? Besides, we are in danger! Do you think for a moment i don't acknowledge my own guilt! And if you were the only one....." I reached out for her now as she drew near, but her fierce eyes settled on me and I let my hands drop back limp.
"Do you think I would leave you in danger?"
She was smiling. For a moment I didn't believe my eyes. "No, you would not' Louis. You would not. Danger holds you to me...."
"Love holds me to you," I said softly.
"Love?" she mused. "What do you mean by love?" And then, as if she could see the pain in my face, she came close and put her hands on my cheek. She was cold, unsatisfied, as I was cold and unsatisfied, teased by that mortal boy but unsatisfied.
"That you take my love for granted always," I said to her. "That we are wed...." but even as I said these words I felt my old conviction waver; I felt that torment I'd felt last night when she had taunted me about mortal passion. I turned away from her.
"You would leave me for Armand if he beckoned to you...."
"Never....." I said to her.
This extract is from Interview with the Vampire. by Anne Rice. A book open to criticism, yet loved by many, for its underlying themes and message. On the surface, it could be seen as dark and unpleasant, but I think it carries more within it, and I loved the whole series.
SECOND SAMPLER
"..... The pundit lifted a leaf, read a little, wet his forefinger on his tongue and lifted another leaf.
At last he said, 'First of all, the features of this unfortunate boy. He will have good teeth but they will be rather wide, and there will be spaces between them. I suppose you know what that means. The boy will be a lecher and a spendthrift. Possibly a liar as well. It's hard to be sure about those gaps between the teeth. They might mean only one of those things or they might mean all three.
"What about the six fingers, pundit?"
'That's a shocking sign, of course. The only thing I can advise is to keep him away from trees and water. Particularly water.'
"Never bath him?"
'I don't mean exactly that.' He raised his right hand, bunched the fingers and, with his head on one side, said slowly, 'One has to interpret what the book says''
He tapped the wobbly almanac with his left hand. 'And when the book says water, I think it means water in its natural form.'........
.........'Much of the evil this boy will undoubtedly bring will be mitigated if his father is forbidden to see him for twenty-one days'
"That will be easy,' Bissoondaye said, speaking with emotion for the first time.
'On the twenty-first day, the father must see they boy. But not in the flesh.'
"In a mirror pundit?"
'I would consider that ill-advised. Use a brass plate. Scour it well.'
"Of course"
'You must fill this brass plate with coconut oil - which, by the way, you must make yourself from coconuts you have collected with your own hands - and in the reflection on this oil the father must see his son's face.'
He tied the almanac together and wrapped it in the red cotton wrapper which was also spattered with sandalwood paste. 'I believe that is all.'
"We forgot one thing, punditji. The name."
'I can't help you completely there. But it seems to me that a perfectly safe prefix would be Mo. It is up to you to think of something to add to that.'
"Oh, punditji, you must help me. I can only think of hun."
The pundit was surprised and genuinely pleased. 'But that is excellent. Excellent. Mohun. I couldn't have chosen better myself. For Mohun, as you know, means the beloved, and was the name given by the milkmaids to Lord Krishna.' His eyes softened at the thought of the legend and for a moment he appeared to forget Bissoondaye and Mr. Biswas.
This extract is from 'A House for Mr. Biswas' which I found somewhere years ago, read and never forgot. It's one of my favourite books, and is now acclaimed as one of the finest books of the twentieth century (not because I suggested it obviously!). It's just a wonderful book, what can I say. Get out there and read it! Now!
FIRST SAMPLER
'......As the mage stood by the spring looking out over the falling lands and the harbour and the grey distances of the sea, wings beat above him. He looked up, raising one arm a little. A great hawk came down with loud-beating wings and lighted on his wrist. Like a trained hunting bird it clung there, but it wore no broken leash, no band or bell. The claws dug hard in Ogion's wrist; the barred wings trembled; the round, gold eye was dull and wild.
"Are you messenger or message?" Ogion said gently to the hawk. "Come on with me -" As he spoke the hawk looked at him. Ogion was silent a minute. "I named you once, I think," he said, and then strode to his house and entered, bearing the bird still on his wrist. He made the hawk stand on the hearth in the fire's heat, and offered it water. It would not drink. Then Ogion began to lay a spell, very quietly, weaving the web of magic with his hands more than with words. When the spell was whole and woven he said sortly, - "Ged," - not looking at the falcon on the hearth. He waited some while, then turned, and got up, and went to the young man who stood trembling and dull-eyed before the fire.
Ged was richly and outlandishly dresed in fur and silk and silver, but the clothes were torn and stiff with sea-salt, and he stood gaunt and stooped, his hair lank about his scarred face. Ogion took the soiled, princely cloak off his shoulders, led him to the alcove-room where his prentice once had slept and made him lie down on the pallet there, and so with a murmured sleep-charm left him. He had said no word to him, knowing that Ged had no human speech in him now.
As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer leans the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.'
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This extract is from 'A Wizard of Eathsea' by Ursula le Guin. A favourite book of mine since childhood. It grows with you, and you find more in it with each reading as you mature. It came years before Harry Potter, and tells the story of Ged, his time at wizard school and the results of his disastrous pride - loosing the shadow. The extract, from book one, is taken from where Ged has changed form to escape the pursuing shadow, and flown to the safety of his old mentor.
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