history

Reading: Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi

“Behind the teller’s choices, conscious or otherwise, lies some kind of motivation, whether to entertain, to store for posterity, or to promote a particular image of herself” – Dandelions

The Book: A family biography of Thea Lenarduzzi’s family. Family within its various semantic fields; shifting from Italy to England, the family of mother and fatherlands. Grandmother centred in the field of view, with a focus shifting backwards and forwards in time and bringing sons, fathers, daughters, mothers into view. Or is that too clear a metaphor? There are no photos in the book, though there are photographers, and this nebulises the book, makes image blend into image in my head. Each image blends with images of the ‘old’, from other, flicked through, books.

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V.121

In the city, the Christians
grew accustomed. The empire war,
which had been waging for long years
had its opponents. Casualties –

always fighting, giving leaflets –
learning unaccountable truths –
no concept is safe from the earth.
Boys carry little flags, and gurn,

dragging the flags on the damp stone.
Empire and humanity, age
and mix, as womens’ hair is caught
on long lines of dancing metal

tearing it from their heads. This world
– this economy – transfixes
the human, tears it. Dresses it up
in uniform, in dead structure

We soon turn back, to watch its path
when only we remain. Staring
as images pile up on streets
that are dragged through the shifting dust

The city filled with glowing points
like a lost tangle of string-lights.
We try and unweave it, but soon
crackle and break, changing something

V.90

When you read an ancient poet
and find yourself or part of you
becoming-drift with ancient sands
always enfolding each other,

it is not something of success
or failure – to be the great soul
is to draw all strings into one
cord, and feel your sudden failure –

everything has its ancestor –
unwind one thread and say of it
this is my colour, my tenor…
It’s all a scrub with tiny blooms,

stone, shell, what more? Repetition
is never quite exactly apt –
this courtly poet whispers through
eleven centuries to tell

me of my love for you, clearer
than the scarcest cut ice, trekked out
across the sands and wrapped in palm
to impress the caliph. My song

is an alm on the tree which grows
and falls and grows again. Years pass
and the desert widens, but faint
movements stir the clacking branches

Wetherby Road

The wood gate is crisp
driftwood’s dry mirror –
and the church behind
is the rock upon
which the waves crash hard.

This hubbub decries –
with the tree’s creaking –
those who seek a peace.
Really there is no
well chiselled message;

In the graveyard hear
soft undefined hums
of voice and organ
mixing in hollows –
hear wind whistle through.

Hear your insecure
thoughts tapping upon
the stained glass dust – hear
choral doom and then
lays of the bright voice;

continuity
in time’s long empire
has brought the air here
and the soft water
and me

Zodiac

I

Your week this week will go off
like a rotten egg. Such is life.
This fragment of a year will crack
and spill all over you, achieve

new heights of boredom and disgust.
Why? Do you ask why the fungus
grows at the tree’s base and grows
rotten? Come on. Just accept it

like you accept that your eyes
will look where you decide
and not just swing around like
billiard balls in a washing machine.

Next week brings with it new challenges
as exactly the same thing happens
for the hundred and eleventh time.
But this one, this is the one, I can feel it.

II

The stars are spread out in the orrery
like thick yeast extract on toast.
Things are everywhere finding it difficult
to connect. Take Bellatrix

for example. A salty taste on the tongue
just don’t let it touch an open cut.
Inside this emptiness of pain feeling
there is another expanse of tiny stars –

from each new star, we see new constellations
and the red bloom in Orion
is aching to reach them.
Close one eye for a while and things look flat.

There are an endless array of bears in the sky
clouds, atoms, birds, planes, galaxies –
all of these are bears if you look closely.
This week will bring bears.

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A Natural History of Destruction

In the beginning, something was destroyed
at least it seems that way
and something else rose outwards.
Sky-sized waves follow the instant
an ocean meteor impacts, and ricochet –
the planet at great speed becomes
Something Else – because all ends
are also beginnings, no law is more
certain. What more do things have to say
about destruction – all else is lists
of the long fall of the satellite from orbit
and the short cracks as the overhang weakens
the instant a fish first knows the harsh net.
In my end is my beginning
Is false because the I must end
For something else to begin – materials
work upon themselves some magic
which brings others to the house party
where green glass contains rotten liquids!
Our whole civilisation is a harvest
of destruction, even in its peace, when
blackbirds sing the lay of the worm’s
redescription in branches in the sun.
And nature also, this vast restructuring
where some shapes lose what others
gain – a magpie flies as the sun dips
its smooth light onto the striated oak
and on and again until the end of this
and the beginning of something else
and we can’t often tell the difference

V.44

Coming home on a long warm night
where the air takes the noise of keys
and holds it cupped in its hand like
a ladybird which alighted

on the hand, and is climbing up.
Coming home after mild concern
has flared in a blank stare forward
and later a stratified phase

of conversation while the feet
hit their warm rubber on the path.
Coming home after talk of trade
and politics and other large

and uncontrollable forces
which fluctuate like black storms do,
hung waiting behind the buildings
on your right, and seen between them.

To say power is power just
raises violence to a law
and that seems a dull reversal.
There are as many reasons to

do a thing historically as
there are to do a thing today
at least, and as reasons densen
a cool breeze blows over the street

V.32

The parallax intrudes sometimes
like a muscular pain after
being sat too long in one stance
and you can barely find comfort.

Browsing the internet you find
a cry for help you can’t tell from
pastiche. Then you see an empty
box sat on the doorstep, you see

moth larvae curling in your clothes.
Everything seems to be able
to connect with the following
link. But the pendulum has reached

its apogee and watch it turn
revealing its dark side to you
just as it accelerates down
the side inlaid with relief carve

of massacre and stupidness.
The frictionless pivot of time
and history is mute. But hear
faint squeaks of the ghost hung upon

the nail there, with all its effort
breaks itself to try warn you of
what is to come. But all there is
is a faint sense of deja-vu

The City Moves in Me

Terror swims inside me like a basking shark –
it is my sullen wake, it fills the air behind
as I’m drawn along suburban stone.
I see the wild forgotten as a dream is forgotten
I know I dreamed, but what was it?

I stand on a hill and see the city
draining down its valley plughole –
soft scars left in the grading air.
I see this city move as a scrapheap moves
slowly downwards, churning the earth.

Waiting for a bus I wait too long
and my figure, mistaken for a statue
by some routine artist in a tatty book
is selected for the top of the heap
which moves, and the wild falls further.

In a shifting forest, in the past beyond thought
a foraging girl picks out an acorn
from a skin of dry leaves, her breath
marks the air. She leaves it
and the earth hurtles out from beneath