GIVEN

                     19.09.90.   15.45.
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                     11.03.92.   Unknown.

 Bigead, worried, shuffled and stacked the facts.
 Purpose? No. Point? No. Plot? No. Substance?
               Yes. That didn't fit the fable.

 

         EXTRACTS FROM THE COUNTY ANTIQUITIES

Haigh (1893) records the legend of Black Gilbert's stone, a rock
thrown downby a giant from a mountain at the end of the world,
which burnt away most of the forest in Yardleah. Farmsteads were
eagerly established in the cleared woods, but the land bore a curse
and each month the spirit of the stone claimed the life of a newly
wed bride. A supplement, Smeeton (1926), tells of the malign power
being vanquished by a woman untouched by the hand of love, dancing
into its sacred circle and breaking the bounds of its power.
  This odd myth, containing garbled elements of considerable age,
has been conflated with strands of the common lore of the bewitched
tree, here identified as a yew. Though the species can be of great
longevity, what seems a single yew may often consist of a group
and it is difficult to assign these tales to a particular yew.
  The name Black Gilbert's stone, or the Gilbertstone, is a late
accretion, perhaps perpetuating the name of a prominent local
mediaeval landowner; or a lost post-Colonial settlement, Gilberston,
Wade & Gillies (1933); otherwise it has little relevance to the
fable. The stone itself is said to lie buried within Hobsmoat
to this day, waiting for the End of Things.

 

           SEEK AND YE SHALL

Carmel hid, hidden, under paving-stones
and traffic signs. Brown eyes peeked out
from sudden, flurrying leaves. Her words
were the suppleness of wind that weaved
as it turned around awnings and trees.
Agiggle, she skipped on deserted streets,
calling her Horatia: You're on, you're it.

 

      STEPPING BACK

Shining-eyed a sister
remembered
'The Lord be with you'

to a teller of torments
recalled

to the Word
of William B. Frankland
by appointment to the Lord.

Bigead masked
displeasure with assent

settling for the faithful,
a two chord chorus,
waiting for an answer

to the Last Days
and End of Eleven Worlds.

 

                              PAROUSIA
                                       I

Imagine this: a room within, the bounds of voice; a crow
cries beyond; a clock counts; a hall empty, a hall full.
                                A voice

comparing: the sons of Belial like unto the word of denial;

preparing: the children of darkness for the prince of light;

declaring: the advent of Israel from the body of the Nile;

a voice aboom abounds above
                                                bowed heads of the belov'd.


                                       II


   It dropped from the sky like a stone burning down
   with the Will of Heaven. It consumed the dark lives

   tangled around roots of pride. It humbled the high
   and low. On our bent knees we move-still forward-led

   towards the Last Day of Days, the First of Ever.


                                       III


            On bended knees towards a You-tree,
            of You twisted
            on the pole of the calendar,
            through a snake-lane we turn,
            bloodied, tilting
            like shadows
            repeating the angles
            of flesh.


                                       IV


   Tell me a history of that saviour who bides
   till the calendar ends in a dancing of flame,
   for a twelfth to come self-slaughtering bride.

   Make me accounts of all redemptions denied
   to justice's pawns in the backstreets of time,
   in slave-ships or coal-mines, on all the wrong sides;

   of yesterdays bartered that something might come;
   and faith sold like charity; and like hope decried,
   till the day of atonement by a redeemer who hides.


                                       V


   Twelve is the count of the tribes and signs
   that order the years till the ending of times;
   divided then divided, by the two that parted,
   it numbers in three the brand of the beast
   to the faithful awaiting the bridebed's feast,
   abandoned in Egypt, their rescue unstarted.


                                       VI

            By Your Whither-tree of winter
            supplicant we count out
            days of a world of waste
            days to a mewling
            new-born calendar, days
            to another

            zodiac and zenith
            culminating by degrees
            its constellated eyes.

 

            HOB MOOR


The wasted moor was the work of hands
and days that tilled an exhausted land;
its lane that Hick, Hodge or Hob ghosted
with rustic rumours, unshriven bands,
plucking to darkness, unwary and ousted,
travellers trailing what folly boasted.

 

            THE EXCURSION

On Poets' Corner Horatia lounged,
waiting the commerce and traffic of night.
Squealing, like brakes slammed down, a girl's
sharp pitch cut at her unconscious being,
pulled her from open-eyed slumber.

A rope dangled in her mind. Alarmed,
feline, her gaze prowled down the long
shadow-thronged street, touching alley-doors
and bushes tumbling on overhung gates.
That voice again. She moved forward,

answering the call.

 

            WORDSWORTH ROAD

No-one called her down an abandoned road
of untenanted houses and departed souls.
No-one called. Night she sensed invade.
Under Alpha Lyrae and Orion's Belt a sign
board proclaimed the Mission of Dr Crabbe
to reclaim the souls of the labouring poor

abandoned too she felt and thought she heard
her Carmel call. No-one had uttered a word.

 

            STRANGE MEETING

He was ambling towards me down that same old
street we fooled and loitered on when young
we bobbed and ran and hung around and chewed
the news. In a long mac he peered out beneath
his black and tilted trilby. Bigead, I cried,
You old poser, how's tricks, eh? Much the same,
as ever he averred. It's all change round here,
I offered, look, th's nothing. Like our lives,
he murmured. Go on with ya, I told him. Sure,
he nodded, and stepped ahead and off. I paused,
but turned, recalling self, and wife, and tea.

 

            THE DETECTIVE'S DIVINATION

Bigead knew now
designs and dimensions
of a map overlaid
by the hands of days
and altered habitations, twisted
courses, that turned

like sites to unlike purpose.
Eighteen over twelve,
the Great Year's proportion,
patterning on land
and drawn lives

the sky-borne, writhing
snake tattoo.

 

            W.B.FRANK-LYNNE D.D.
                        I
               allegro con brio

For a princeling of Sophia
and potentate of charm, pauper amantis,
the numbers ran clear.

Eleven had been struck
from the register of Grace;
on the twelfth note the Divine Hand,
erect on the clock,

would open the Last Count
and charges of Sin,
purging the bestial, raising the pure
to heaven's skyward
star-encircled mount.

                        II
               da capo, con indifferenza
                        ~

 

   FROM OUR STREET CORRESOPONDENT

So there he was, this preacher-like, out front
of that old manky warehouse they calls a church,
an he's all fathery-like and dripping smiles an
all these young girls swarming round him, these
whey-faced fellahs all standing back, so quiet-like,
an he blesses em an kisses em and they all clings
to him and I thinks, I bet he gets some benefit
of office-like, eh, know what I mean-like, eh?

 

            WORK IN PROGRESS
         (from the Sybilline Review)

       This preposterous collection
                                    tricked together
              from an ill-drawn map
                       assembles a collage
       of unlikely histories
                     and unreliable myths
                               like a patched rag coat
                       on the skinny shoulders
                of a would-be detective
                            in a fractured narrative
       (by a would-be poet)
                  coupled with a woman
       of indeterminate means
                  or questionable profession
                         lurking in the back-streets
               and cul-de-sacs of plot
       arriving at nothing
                    but a threadbare proportion
              of basic mathematics:
                                           eighteen over twelve
       one to one point five indeed
                    this is the author's
             desperate invention
                         to salvage a structure
       from his aimless collection.

 

            ORATIO

To the diffident light add edge, her voice said,
to the torn, assembly; to what is less
the more, to a pointless pattern
of untouchable purpose
a palpitant substance

beating in a wave's long rhythm
through a scattered vision
of particles of plot.

O radiance, your broken prism.

 

            ALMOST THERE

Evergreen, troubled leaves
agitated in the air
over a shadowed soul who sobbed
by a yew's bent bulk.
So Horatia sorrowed.

A red swing trembled,
untouched, in a bare playground.
A crow waddled slow
on the gravel.

To the light add cloud
Carmel urged her,
under a storm-shortened pitch
of smothered horizon,
readying to howl.

 

            OVER OUR HEADS

Carmel raged as the rain judged the tarmaced land.
She beat against hoardings and loose latched gates,
rising against traffic-cones, panicking rags of news
on streets of whimpering dogs and tight crouched cats.
At blind smeared panes she spat and bare bowed heads.

Like an echoing drum she shouted out at the end of days.
What am I, what am I, she rattled on nerve skin, merging,
each note she boomed, her indistinguishable witness.

 

            AS THE HEAVENS RAGED

One to one point five hummed in his mind
as the rain poured on a detective of sorts.
One to one a woman he thought
waited his workings in a flat by the park
still calling a sister
caught by a twist of pointless pattern:

passionless, primal, purposeless
number he knew as mover and cause,
imprinting its random, inevitable law
on lives that were tuned
to its ineffable moods. By the green sign
of the Winter King, a stormwind whipped
a black trilby thus concluding
all reverie.

 

            AS I SAW IT

Shouting he ran
his arms sawing fresh air
as a wind bowled a black slant trilby
down the long road he'd trudged
these thirty years
since first he crawled
out his cradle.

But that wind wouldn't listen.
It picked the black hat up
turned it around
like a suspicious buyer
then skim-skewed it
with a shot of contempt
over a red rain-washed tiles
and crumbling
redundant chimneys.

He pulled up
wordless as the wind turned
and shouldered against
him looking hard above cars
at blank absence mapless
for his lost hat
his lost cause.

 

            ETERNITY'S DAUGHTER

On empirical gnomes, guardians
of real and hard won homes,
Carmel furled,
furied, escaped her altered
other world. She lashed out
at lattice-work and louvre
then backed off
when letterbox flaps clapped
to run like a child and scamper
giggling down worn wriggling
beaten paths.

 

            THE VISITATION

The rain rained and a nerve twitch flick
of lightning flicker flashed
over an abandoned heart
of loss lost on a mourning path
that led from a sister's
ending. She cared.

A door happened
from nowhere. At a wyrd
angle on a street
corner she walked
adaze to it
like a dreamer
dreaming the undreamable
she walked in.

From beaten gnomes
and shut manholes
a thin chorus rose:

Ora, Horatia, ore-whore, pro nobis, pro poor.

 

            INSIDE

I made you
from what was half-perceived
flitting on the edge
of the seam
from a turn of the head.
Your sister I called
from a snatch of light
fading as a month died
at day's end.

I drew you so
on two dimensions
a frame for time
curving there
shadowed here mirrored
form we cannot clutch
or keep

existent inexistence
its tale the burden
your sorrows bear.
Your breath

is mine, your sister's life
and death sole point

in a pointless story. It was
nothing it was
number

killed her.
         The thin air
ruffled. No, flatly
she said.

 

            TRUE

Dreaming of being Horatia turned
to her Carmel storm. As the crow heaves
its mass aloft, her thoughts stretched out
in a prolonged longing wave, patterned
thunder with lightning and resurrection
with rage. As the crow flew

Carmel Horatia turned, still,
to a dead pointing needle, aimed
on the direction of a calling Evangel.

 

                        UNBIDDEN HELL
                                  I

            On Milton Court the judgement walked.

                                  II

            At the height of yesterday's storm
            a massive explosion ripped apart
            a house in Milton Court, Yardley.
            The sole occupant, Dr William Frank,
            was missing presumed dead. Arthur
            Potts, an eyewitness, attested
            that the house was struck by light
            -ning seconds before the gas blast
            and the authorities believe there
            could have been a million-to-one
            against mis-chance. Dr Frank, well
            -known locally as an evangelist,
            had ordered his housekeeper, a
            Mrs Batt, to take a half-day off,
            as he planned to spend his time
            in solitary prayer. The blast
            was heard as far away as Millhill
            and its force broke windows and
            damaged stock in Short's Gnomes
            opposite.

                                  III

            On Milton Court the judgement walked.

 

            THE REASON BEING

Had other business, God,
not a singed hair
not a single sparrow
not a calling sister
was His care.

In the long grinding
chains of number
unsayable, unspeakable
a language
crossed and cogged

unlike and alike
in co-incident pattern
that combed
the burrs of words.

His barren face was turned
like a new moon's
at the point
of eclipse

from a world He never made
from a book He never wrote

 

                        LAST CALL

            Tell me an end to an unanswered story
            of what was and who did and always why,
            its horoscopes mounted on misread skies.

            Make me accounts from a black smooth stone
            and a unanimous yew: its branching of many
            to the fire that swallowed the Wait of Love;

            of a mistaken sleuth and his unloving Isis,
            who had tracked a pattern on a handmade map
            to the Hunter's corpse, O fallen Osiris.

 

                        LAST TESTIMONY

So, imploring, ruined, the story ends. As a frieze, broken, from an abandoned
temple - a transplant of Hellas, dedicated to the circling Muses, laid down
by the long body of the Nile; decayed, converted, by other habitations
of creed, then again fallen, its heaven-roof bereft of support.
   With a final call, on the wheeling O of Osiris, an iconographer, obscure,
on a Northern isle, where too a dog-star runs on the Hunter's heel, surrenders
his unfinished Parousia. Parousia: presence, birth of being, Last of Days
and First of Forever, unattainable end and twist of a not-happen plot.
   Did he know what he was doing? Do his last words hide a gnomic model
of covert fusions, or merely the last, desperate conflation of a lost
purpose? Is Osiris addressed? Or thrown down with starry Orion on to the
Nile of Isis? What meaning is there in the obsession with number, the
threes and sixes and almost twelves? What are we to make of the pairing
of the housing-estate detective Bigead with the master of Roger Bacon and
philosopher of optics and land-management Robert Grosseteste?
   For Professor Harbour, the triplicity of Horatia, Bigead and Frankland
reflects the Freudian triumvirate of id, ego and super-ego; whereas Joseph
Woodstream sees a three-way interaction of myth, history and subjective
experience throughout. Others have discovered a moralistic study of hubris:
carnal, in Horatia; intellectual, in Bigead; spiritual, in Frankland. Yet
Hans Serif finds only a displaced mind in an exploded culture, lost in a
symbolic forest of its own devising.
   In 'Restorations', Williams and Wade have argued that, considering the
action takes place in late March to early April, the prominence of both
Orion and the star Vega (Alpha Lyrae) at the same time is difficult to
accept, particularly if the time is early to mid-evening and the place
the suburbs of a large and light polluted industrial city. From this
reasonable comment, however, they reach the extra-ordinary conclusion
that the events occur on another, parallel world, under a similar
but subtly altered sky.

   More interestingly, Murdoch and Mullins, in 'Lost Discourse', have
argued that these and other anomalies, such as the tired, autumnal roses
of 'Tennyson Avenue', represent a deliberate pointing of a fictitious,
illusory world, a reversed paradis artificiel, as it were, brought to
ground in the shabby surrounds of a provincial English town, transforming
the external environment into a projection of its natives' subjectivity. They
stress, too, the layering of decayed and decaying beliefs throughout the poem,
concluding that the 'map is the plot', a reductio ad absurdamof the self
-divinations of Protestant exegis to a 'hotch-potch of half-apprehended
myth and grandiose numerology'.
   For other readers, unease is encountered in the limited characterisation,
leaving most of the brutal litany of slaughtered women as little more than
names on a rote. Indeed, the mortality rate in this creator's brief world
is disproportionate to its content. One wonders whether or not its author
feels any pity for his creatures whatsoever.
   Of the principal figures, the childhood bonding of the sisters is well
-drawn, but it is dificult to believe that the ineffective and perpetually
pedestrian Bigead ever served in the forces. Never believe what you read
in the press, defenders reply. Of the unfortunate Frankland, mis-printed
in death, we encounter little directly, and his beliefs and precise role
in the demise of the girls remain obscure. That Horatia should continue
confident in her detective's mark lack of detecting strains credibility,
and our impatience is goaded by the lack of depiction of any contact
between the two protagonists after the early scenes.
   In a few score chapters without fixed reference, where seasons shift
as street corners turn, and symbols rise without explanation, bequeathing
to their witnesses no understanding, we follow a loose assembly of the
nameless and the uncertainly bonded, tracking a death without reason
through the echoes of myth and history in a nondescript suburb, arriving
without conclusion in a blurring storm at an O of exclamation. It could
be anywhere, or nowhere; anything, or nothing.
   We can accept the coming down to earth, on streets named after poets,
of Oratio, the right discourse and eloquence of rhetoric and the prayer
of ecclesiastic Latin, in the free-market form of Horatia the hooker;
although it is a somewhat nostalgic, High Tory trope for a radical author.
But as to this little world's ultimate purpose and point, that, rather than
its sketchy story, is the real mystery of the tale. in the end we should ask
not whodunnit?, but rather why is it?

 

                                    LAST PAGE


                  H*I*C*I*A*C*E*T

            P*A*R*O*U*S*I*A


                  ITS END FOREGONE


                  ITS CAUSE UNKNOWN


Parousia by David Bircumshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.