yeoldefinch

 

220520

The day today,

where the source of

what it means to

deconstruct, to question,

to critique, to resist,

left.

 

I had felt the loss for days beforehand.

 

I came from one place to the next,

to follow him.

 

Transported to study and learn and try and be

like that man, that gentle man

who turned law inside out

and told us how it was –

and was not.

 

And to pass today

just as other endings

come by …

all endings being the same.

 

I am taken back to

26,

Bloomsbury,

pinching myself to stay awake during

hefty Foucauldian surmisings,

transfixed by Force of Law-ings –

utterly petrified by the

language of sovereignty.

 

I would sit mute,

where last night’s events still

dripped across my burnt septum,

my tear-stained cheeks.

The imposter of imposters.

 

But he never said anything,

never judged – he must have known.

 

Today I find it hard to write, to think, to breathe,

as a scholar

who came to the job

because of him.

 

Today I am reminded that

I was so conjured and brought to life,

by that man who inspired.

 

How the years have gone by

and law is so obviously shit.

 

But praise that someone

who can take the dirt

and make you see what

delight, play, violence

and menace,

law can be,

all at once.

 

Those who can tear through the bullshit

with such beauty –

the example that rallies

the next,

revealing legacies,

as they really are.

 

The role of the wordsmith,

the verbose academic,

the densely jammed page

of flowery language –

I love.

 

Cut, drawn, quartered

by the market,

he leaves us in times where

the intellectual does not write,

does not think.

The intellectual copy edits –

snapshots and titbits,

abstracts and metrics.

 

Research

barely gathered at all,

before contact hours –

and now contact tracing.

 

This man who inspired

is removed

with such a

deference of mind and pen

that is borne of a time where

there was still an outside.

 

Impact was not quantified,

but his enduring presence regardless.

 

We are feeling him now,

we’ll be celebrating him later,

we read him before we had seen him,

we followed him to Birkbeck.

 

Thank you Peter Fitzpatrick.

Rest in peace.

 

22 May 2020

 

Hiding in a Crowded Wardrobe

Somewhere drips the sweat of yesterday, where skin came together and ripped us from ourselves.  Somewhere I am kissing the proverbial, and you’re absorbed in your own sense of tomorrow. Split screens, screens split, screens split us as blossom glues itself to green embers on garden posts and red pillar boxes.  Foam, formly moistness, rich spittle slices through and lands on the plastic lid, the collection of empties, the emptiness of collectivity.  Where did culture go, sucked out of the ether like a curtain caught in a vacuum, stuck and too big. Too big to be removed, yet it hides in a crowded wardrobe, dusty electric blue heels and monochrome brogues. We are left with the petrified unrest of you.  We are left with the dreaded calm, the luxuriant death swerve. I hear you, not much you can do from an overcrowded furniture space where never worn night gowns hang and fake fur stoles fall on dress fabric and broken plastic hangers.

 

Opening

Something had to be done with the entropy of me.  With a customary fug of overwhelm, it took a while – only over twenty years. The oldest of chasms yawned wide open via the most extraordinary of recent events.

Like the turn of a very blank page, I revisited the cold, dewy condensation of a best friend’s car.  Alert in a morning where Are Am Eye crosshatched staples to the redaction of my first line; a vehicle-scattered Snowdonian valley melting bass and time, muffled and then exact with each beat in the proudest of clouded forests.

The scene incessantly repeated from eighteen to thirty-three, each time disappearing further from sight with the heat-death of dependence – and yet via the vessel of these sublime occasions, this instance of remembrance transcended any oblique nostalgia.

I was transported back to the girl who threw her stomach on to snow, to stop it.  Back to the clutching hand of ripped Rizlas, browned inner fingers, Lionrock and subscription to The Face magazine. I was moved to when we climbed over styles to sit in long, sun-warmed grass, and I pretended not to have been kissed – and then losing you.  The paralysis of presumed failure and adolescent heartbreak was as present as my usual absence.  All things precious and swallowed in the vortex of asceticism regained a vitality.

I opened up the numb – the numb was finally open.

 

I write on my half day

I write on my half day,

stand tall on my full day,

flick the ashes from my corduroy jeans,

with pock marks immortalised as burns –

the full despair of misspent time.

I curl up into a ball hereonafter,

and move mountains,

the forever – who would have thought –

a meeting of hands that are not there.

Moved and weathered veins,

predicting a path

of lattice and overture.

A delicate crossing of fingers,

in the opaque of the juridical.

Care not, care all.

 

Vick’s First Blog Post

Vick sat excitedly,

adventures amidst,

with newly dyed hair

and fresh courage of fist.

Opposite, her sister,

was conjuring ways

of keeping in contact

whilst Vick spent her days.

Loo furrowed her brow,

her brain moved slowly –

knowing her sister

deserved nothing lowly.

Realising the best way

to keep on cog,

was for her sister

to author,

her very own blog.

 

I Once Sang Like You

I once sang like you.

Hard, redolent, like an unfolded dream.

I used to call sweet demagogues

from the birdcage and bricolage,

where I would hold

out my hand in displays of brave persuasion.

And whilst you ate,

I fed too.

I would dance, and still do,

in fire-loops, in hieroglyphic boots

– acrobatics of the mind, less the soul.

I sit at a distance away from where I once used to.

Swapped my head for the shed

and bled my heart until it fell to the grass.

I learnt to ignore you

and at times believed in my success

but all the time you were the

one where all worlds meet.

The pleasure of new sounds,

simple tasks of delicate discernment

as I searched for a new music, for you and in you.

Yet early in the morning

I am ripped open

by your causistry,

the beat of all beats,

a Loss that puts rest to anything

and everything.

Who am I, but another daughter

sitting at the reprimand of another

Mother,

to the amusement and folly of the crowd.

 

Form Manifest

These days are inexplicable life poetry.

Energy runs slowly like magma sinuous across the cracked high up earth.

Tears tell of happenstance and now that happenstance has passed.

An inert push of blood rings through a torpid body and mind as prisms spill onto kissed foreheads.

Mercurial pulses, tapestries of sleep, aquamarine embraces.

These days turn to form, to manifest.

 

Educe, Tuesday

Seeing you today was like seeing you for the first time.

I saw your past, in me, as I held your hands.

You reached out to touch your memories,

gently caressing clarion air

through age-bruised fingers.

My hair in ringlets – to you part of an animal, a cat, a bear.

All your life in cloudy eyes,

the searching look of wonder and primal trust.

Where are you? And who?

But you still know me.

You can hear me.

I am brought to my knees

as I hold on to you, who is me.

In elements and sands –

collective nouns

and up at dawn chorus;

twinkling stories,

finely raucous.

My gentle man,

who will never be bettered.

 

Stills

New shoes –
apparently fifty per cent less likely
to chafe your feet.

“Grand”, I thought.

They were still dripping with shots and stills of last night.

(Enter – Cognition beyond the norm but the same routine appears, despite all. Present as not quite replete.)

I was sporting the oldest, newest boots in town.

… Betelgeuse, polka dot, cadence – with not just the least bit of Cordwainer envy as accompaniment.

My head was caught in a soliloquy of:

“Cut me up. Yes please.” Then on to:

“How far can I go with this new kinesis? Can I touch the stars?”

I got a bit weary, and bored to be honest.

I sat down,
and then embraced what I thought to be you.

Of course, I then fell into the most sylvan,
moss-carpeted woodland.

Took my new (old??) boots, very firmly off.

(Exit – Familiar, Salty, Peter-y air).

 

Tennis Blues

Dear clouds, Please don’t close in on me today. I need to get to the courts, to hit the world away.

 

Verdigris Door

A verdigris door –
the rain finds its way through the painted surface,
revealing the wooden frame.

The detail of the panelling
suggests carpentry
of another time.

Wood touched,
real.

The door stands on its hinges,
closed tight with weathered,
blustery pose.

The interior of the door
is currently unavailable;
like a lift out-of-order.

Its closedness says it all;
a silent turquoise soliloquy.

A psychedelia of reality,
presence to its contrary.

The air jaundiced with memory,
the door remains complete in its
absurd normality.

The more present the door appears,
the less the door isn’t there.

Leaves surround the door’s step;
paper-like, golden,
ochre, brown sugar shades.

Watching the doorway in search of a figure
in the literal;
but the literal is figurative.

Eyes are closed in
unmediated immersion.

The verdigris door
is a verdigris door.

 

Gravity
There will be a moment where you sit and feel the air move past you,
where you are aware of the night in motion,
when life is not imagined.
The ongoing humour, meetings and acquaintances,
fleeting cups of coffee and the odd hiatus.
None of it happens until the most liquid pull of gravity,
in mind and strength,
arrives to the point where a religion is not so far away.
These are shibboleths culminating as a material breeze,
atomised from the acceleration of orbit.
You hold on with,
although accomplished sea legs,
every now and then
experiencing a green and biley tummy.
Plasma – you are in it.
You are it.
And it sears like opera,
climbing matter in a baroque of scale.
Air is jelly, you swim in its void
until the magnet tumbles you to a verdant,
sepia rose
interlacing the wisteria of a high-walled garden;
the lucid exactitude of a G&T;
and the ebony keys of a mint-green upright piano.

 

Plas Teg
Wire hair scattered her head,
leopard print pants
clutch cold legs.
A black eye
shadows her brow,
making clay skin
and pearlescent sheen.
Shifting stones and
chipping Jacobite staircases:
replenishing the dewed house –
taking the big tree away,
taking 26 years and storing them
inside statues,
moss-carpeted pathways,
and snail-etched window-frames.
Nature tip-toeing in,
in stiletto heels.

Girl Shroud
Loudhailer.
A world of microphonic chanting.
Mosque to mosque,
the pitch and tremer …
a sound-map emerges.
Ascending into soporificity,
turning into condensation
as the song sweats from
hot mountains.
Girl shroud.
Until morning dusk.
Calling her wisdom
into leather hands
holding God.

Algos (Revisited)
A familiar freshness of vapour,
the chiaroscuro of timeless
kisses on foreheads.
It moves from the summer jacket,
from one felty bus chair to the next.
The suit houses the handsome man
who’s on his way to work,
his perfumed lapel
manifesting memory.
A cloud of the past,
dispensed into air and atomic history,
re-creating you, with me,
on the 73.

 

Rosebery Avenue (Downhill)
Gold days where mornings begin,
high speed,
arms grasping fresh air,
with glittered eyes and scarlet cheeks.

 

Grey Matter
Folded hands turn into boats for protection, for mending.
Alabaster skin, the sun flecks on the creases in her metaphors,
the patterns in her grammar like semibreves – his falling grey matter.
The longest note,
decanting down into the Giant,
him holding out his favourite tarnished tankard.
Cerebral atrophy,
the kindest eyes.

 

Glass
At times when there is only breath between yours
and mine, my legs, your limbs,
where there may be time to eat and feast upon minutes
or miasmas, who knows.
But there are edges of her hands that have not touched,
anything other than her battles and worn velvetine gowns
drenched in blood.
That said, he was clasping his digital anecdote with nothing other than
buckets for feet, which were as cold as iced rivers.
High as the interstellar freeway,
my head collapsed like cotton sheets blown to the ground,
orange eyes saw graph paper skies and
quixotic neon capsules – I flew, not you.
You went somewhere else, apparently,
but I kissed your glass skin
and followed you to sleep.

 

Hands
We held on to hands,
it was ok.
The reliance
had to go …
with beauty.
We choked at endings,
but realised the world.

 

Alphabets and Oboes
Water placed into caramel,
the thick wetness subdued
– with an additional insect on the side.
Learning numbers and letters,
alphabets and oboes,
warmth like a night jumper …
Becoming-She.
Becoming-Jumper.

Which Day
Flip flops, strewn on the ground,
bottles cut in to varses,
making holders in the trees.
Hot coffee,
accidentally strong enough to
wrench a man from his bed.
Staring and squinting
as the day buzz begins.
Not sure whether it’s Wednesday,
or Tuesday,
or Saturday for that matter.
The giving up pack
of tobacco.
Never seen so many men smoking,
replacing that liquor
with the liquorice paper.
Mechanical fixing,
a neighbour puts their
bike together.
Ready to whizz away,
and join the tropical speedway.

To Be Grateful
Conclusively …
this day has to be taken with:
3 x large shots of irony,
1 x attempt at an application of rationality,
1 x handful of non-projectionist, here-and-now reality,
and 1 x omnipresent pinch of salt.
Sit down on the smallest chair you can find
(so you feel a little taller than usual),
drink the day with a side salad of acquiescence –
knock it back with the dexterity you display at the local pub
on your nights out.
And remember the beauty of your luck.

Kita Air

The play with water, like lyrical bathing. A forever stored memory washes up as the feet get wet. I am back in infant school, pouring water through wheels, watching them spit liquid and spin like Catherine’s sphere. I remember the vast pool where all the flows fall in. Green aprons drenched, cheeks flushed, gurgling outwards at the revelation of discovery.

There, a degraded past in the now, comes and lives in the motions of washing and bathing in my equatorial escape. I am a child again, and always so it seems. The point at which I can no longer seem to be impressed, I am at my most impressionable. The rawness of age is an awareness of how young we are. All part of the experiment.

Taps drip busily and the sink is filled. The bucketing movement is finished, the past shifts away. I change, and clean, and move outside, to where there is a day freshening. Rainclouds temper across the sky, and I remember – we are water.

Cornelia’s House

She welcomes you with her Cheshire cat smile – not a grin, but a warmth of entry, and one that assures you of a safety and a seclusion that is peculiarly hers. She takes your coat and you follow her like an obedient elephant chasing a gazelle as she darts and leaps through the rabbit warren rooms in to the velvet-curtained kitchen.

Lemon light falls from the high window in Jacob’s ladders, splicing the beclouded table that’s carpeted in a melee of cups and saucers to match the colour of the sunlight streaming in. She hurries with the kettle, her blonde wisps of jagged hair trying to keep up, as she prepares to host with her coffee and her immersed interest in you. As she takes her Lidl biscuits from an old Tupperware in the chocolate drawer in the towering Welsh dresser, you notice the soil on the woodened panels of the kitchen table. You cup one of the lyburnum sprees in your hand, and try and place where it may have come from in the apple blossom garden outside.

Iron ore hands that could move mountains, pour milk for you in to the citrus-like jug. The weight of the work outstanding on the house, press through her words as she relays to you what needs to be done outside and inside – on and on, and on …

*

“Which would you like – tea of coffee?”, she says through her infinite scarlet red smile. “I’d love a cup of coffee”, I answer, each word tumbling out as though waiting for the other, in a self-conscious self-consciousness. The scene moves from one of observation to involvement. She has a presence that ushers in histories and imminences, and I find myself replying nervously, as though to match the abstemiousness of her question.

She begins to pour milk from the four litre Tesco bottle, into the jug, which I then pour into my lemon crockery. “So, do you have some long-lost boyfriend down there in London?”, she enquires with a severity of fascination that almost arches the curvature of her spine. “No, not at the moment”, I say, definitely blushing. Her face is mapped with amorous pasts, her magnetic features part of the romantic narrative that removed her to the anagogic belvedere that is Plas Teg. Her leopard print leggings, caked in moss and bits of grass from the garden, cling to her legs in anticipation that she tells you one of her many parables. “Have you ever had any long lost boyfriends?”, I say, knowing full well her history with men, as relayed to me through the siphon that is my mother. “Yes!”, she says, as though she had been waiting all morning for me to ask. As though she may live within the words and the descriptions, where she can see him again. As she tells you her intimacies, you know that she has relayed them many times before, her solitude urging her to reacquaint herself, fuelling her dauntless energy for the never-ending restoration of her magnificent house.

I find myself speaking from a predisposition that is reserved for someone I trust implicitly, yet at the same time with a guarded school-girlishness that suggests a wish to impress. I dribble with agreements and nods of my head, but emanating from somewhere authentic and me.

“I don’t ‘ave many friends around ‘ere, apart from Paul who, bless ‘im, comes to help me after his work, but he’s away in Cirencester at the moment, doing a horticulture degree. He used to help me with the garden and all sorts, but dug up me ranunculus thinking they were weeds!” She pauses with her jaw protruding, animated with her wide smile and her eyes gleaming with a fond permissiveness of her friend’s mistaken botanics. “Yes, I find people here a bit borin’ to be honest”, she says with a mischievous look that encourages me to agree. “I like my neighbours and actually like their daughter even better, but I can’t just pop round there and see her and not the parents, now can I?!”, her arm outstretches with a nudge of further delighted persuasion. Again, I don’t disagree. “Right, shall we set to work?”, she says, gently but firmly gathering me together for my task for the day. I could have sat consuming her for hours, cushioned by her uncommon aura, combined with the friendly embrace of the high-ceilinged starkness of her kitchen. “Of course”, I say, and neatly place the chair under the table and put the crockery by the sink for washing up.

*

I put brush to stone and the verdigre transforms into the glaring white of glossy outdoor paint. The bristles spit droplets on to gravel, revealing drip-scars from the year before as I make my accidental additions. Moving the brush carefully over the cast of the statue, her Hellenic silhouette stars into the distance as though watching ships out at sea. Minerals manicured to create her proud chest, the liquid gives her another layer of herself. I paint the rose leaves that act as her scarf by mistake, and hastily try and wipe away the sticky mixture, but her accessory is now as alabaster as she is.

Time becomes achromic, devouring worlds beyond high walls and windows. Cerebral activity creates glaciers and I am shifting at their pace. The house is a siren, calling and drawing in. My hands fall through heavy spring air, feet paddling through dense coordinates. Collapsing from the graph paper sky, solar steps create stairs and I can see seagulls chasing the horizon.

*

With a push from the ground, I was back standing upright, staring into the mercury ripples of the mirror. It was hung on its haunches, chipped plaster evident behind the back of its frame, as though it had been flung back with some force, multiple times. I realised I had been lying with my cheek to the chill of the slate stone tiles that carpeted one of the many bathrooms. My sinews felt twisted and awkward, as though I had been re-coagulated, re-worked in some way. My arm appeared boneless, like I had been holding my chin in attentive boredom at something for too long, and the feeling had gone. Pins and needles were fizzing down one side of my right leg. I touched the mirror just to check the metallic reflection was as it said it was. It was as impenetrable as one would expect it to be, and I wasn’t really sure what made me check. I patted my jumper down a little, and adjusted myself using the glass.

*

The histories that have been written about Plas Teg have been well documented, and are re-told, re-lived, each time the guides take you around from one room to the next. Standing patiently on a stairwell whilst being intoxicated by tales of romance and tragedy, or the origin of the banister’s timber. Each guide has their own approach, their own preferred story, every tour altering the building’s dramatic past through a resurgence in the now. She or he will entertain a crowd of ten or twelve Sunday afternoon guests with a Wrexhamite lulling lilt, or a Flintshire quip of this and that. Couples from nearby Manchester or Liverpool, or those of Cestria, adorned with cameras that cannot be used, thick fleece coats and over-excitable imaginations. But in order for the house to survive, the National Trust-esque element has to remain. In order for Cornelia for to remain, there must be Plas Teg.

I had only met the ‘Friends of Plas Teg’ very recently, and until they appeared in full force all at once, I had no real idea of their existence. But these are the many names and characters that you are assured to be familiar with, as they are weaved into Cornelia’s every day chat to you. And her intrigued quizzing of how they can help and what they could do. They are the figures that punctuate her speech, and her life, and the maintenance of her house, creating breaths in the paragraphs of her physical tasks, and hemming the security of her great house.

*

I walked form the stair case still in a state of almost translucence, I felt I had journeyed, but as far as I knew I had just been painting a statue. There was a soft beading of sweat across my brow, I wiped away the perspiration with my cold hand. There seemed to be shatterings of sand in the creases of my top, and my feet felt damp inside my walking boots. I wasn’t sure whether it was a wise idea to see Cornelia in this sort of perturbed state. I rested myself down on the wooden steps and caressed the 400 year old carpet, quizzing it with my fingers as though expecting the old worn out cloth to answer me and tell me all. Its fibres were stringy almost like hay interwoven in colours dulled by centuries of bodies pummelling the fabric into the floor. I felt a desire to wander back to the bathroom and re-examine the mirror. I had exited at a bemused haste, unsure of why I had found myself here and wishing to question Cornelia on what had happened to me. But something now told me not to ask, and the very same feeling was drawing me back to the washroom where I had unexpectedly found myself. It was the Regency Bathroom, recounting the name from one of the tours I had assisted on.

My hands, still feeling for clues on the carpet, had warmed up. Spring sunlight came through the tall dusty windows and massaged my previously aching limbs. I was a mood of immovable agitation, the urge to race up the pen-knife chipped staircase to the top floor and reacquaint myself with the room was regaining on me. Like a rabbit caught in headlights, I was caught in an ancient stairwell. I remembered that Cornelia had spent two whole years of her life, painstakingly removing jet black paint from the banisters, revealing mottled oak and the face of the elderly wood. It was enough to put a preservation order on the stairs, and resulted in the house being saved at the same time.

Lost in history, I hadn’t noticed the door to the main hall ajar, and I recognised the busy sounds of Cornelia as she was fetching wood in from the garden to feed the newly-lit fire. I summoned myself and checked my limbs again – I was warm, and feeling somewhat less disembodied than before.

“Ah, there you are!” she said, as I entered the inside of the huge stone doorway. “How much did you manage to get done?”. She was bent over small flames, intent on making them bigger. I actually had no idea how I’d got on with the painting, and my brain began to squirm. “Cornelia, I …”. I suddenly coughed. I was choking, as though my throat had been constricted. “Are you alright, dear?”, sounded a concerned Cornelia as she peered up from the fireplace, through her Poundshop spectacles.

Dark phlegm bubbled and fell from my mouth, like an expelled salt-riddled slug. I was finding it difficult to breath, but attempted a: “Yes, I think so.”

“Have you been eatin’ those funny lookin’ baguettes from Tesco?”. Her accent was an aristocratic cockney, if there were such a thing. “They always do that to me – get stuck on the roof of me mouth and make me choke. Shall I get you some water?”

“No, I’m ok thanks now”, I said, wiping my salivered mouth with a tissue. I had gathered it would be best to leave mentioning my strange experience to her for another time. Something had definitely decided that for me, I thought, as I unblocked an inexplicably hoarse throat.

***