Alan Gould: Five Poems

Lucas Windfall

 

Lucas Windfall quit his cradle,

took with him his sherry fiddle.

I met him where the river flowed

and woke into the trance he bowed.

 

Lucas bowed a slanting deck,

I hornpiped on it for his sake

and leapt so high in that no-place

the stars were snowflakes on my face.

 

Lucas played me to the harbours

where his tunes drew cut-throat neighbours.

Our silly chins wagged at the sky

as Lucas played his hush-a-bye.

 

Lucas bowed a merry girl,

warm afternoons of sexual marl.

The streamers from his fiddle string

could prompt delicious tangling.

 

Lucas bowed a deeper reach

where I could dance but had no speech,

to tell what I could recognise

when my true love returned my gaze.

 

A violin will tease excess

from riffs of sheer exquisiteness

where Lucas Windfall is not idle,

conjuring liquid sense from fiddle.

 

 

 

Tudor Song

Lucas Windfall led me on.

In our bright plumage, like two swans,

we played the seigneurs by our lake,

behaving like we owned our luck.

 

Akimbo, Lucas said to me

You’ll have a cheap celebrity

unless some headsman holds your eye,

and you outstare that gravity

 

to coldly see our lives in small

and that this spoiler’s falderal

is where the lightness of our style

must show the humour in its steel.

 

We went dissembling through the town,

played rebel verb to rabble noun

where consciences in heron-grey

gave commentaries on our blasé.

 

A headsman’s axe has edge and face,

his scaffold is a lonely place.

But petty deaths brought us to squalor,

filched the light from our high colour.

 

Yet Lucas Windfall showed me nerve

in just that tact of suave reserve,

that let me know I owned my luck

as swans draw light upon their lake.

 

Lucas Dogfox and the Violin

 

Fiddle, fiddle, slow your pace,

you’ll have my nose outstrip my face.

You’ll have the hairs that tip my ears

perceive the grinding of the stars.

 

Fiddle, hiccup and I’ll sniff;

your reels of tune are my what-if.

I’m Lucas Windfall, alias fox

we lope together in our mix.

 

Fiddle, when Lucas was a fox,

he courted daybreak’s shotgun cracks,

for what’s a countryside but ears

and appetites in bleak arrears?

 

Fiddle, when Lucas passed through death

a nonchalance composed his breath.

for fur and viscera composed

no whole-of-mind where Being housed,

 

but took him through death’s little fuss

to come upon the Universe.

Time spinnaker’d away from him,

All-being was his synonym.

 

Fiddle, hit and squeal death’s wallop,

but still my parts lope at full gallop!

And I’m dispersed through every shard,

yet how to live this? That is hard.

 

 

 

On the Beach with Robert Graves

 

The wind seeks out the dead whale’s ribs—

an earliest lyre that tongues and probes,

and Robert Graves, you’re on this beach

to coax a poem into reach,

and I’m here too, to quiz if good

attends a lyric livelihood

 

when click-and-pluck caress the ear

as shantyman enchants the oar,

when tink, then thump, two hammers hit,

iambic lightning flares from it,

as barefoot, you, with oar and forge,

tickle how English poems emerge.

 

Robert, you have the deadpan eyes,

that watched gas dawns on Flanders rise,

and saw how war’s atrocious farce

infected too that tranche of verse

wherever tawdry jubilee

had spoiled, for you, our art’s integrity.

 

Did no-man’s-land prepare your nerve

to deal the shibboleths their serve,

clap Pound and Milton in the stocks

to cop your cabbages and knocks?

Were you unfair? My oath, for all your humour

swims in moral seas with Homer.

 

Your grandson lived three doors from me,

and shared his grandad’s roguery,

shambled our hillside, slicked with sweat

then suddenly was dead from heart,

his big dog ghostly through our trees

stampeding  twilight’s kangaroos.

 

Two Roberts, barefoot, who compose,

the durance of a family nose,

a burly and endearing Geist

that ghosts how likenesses persist.

The same for poems? Might a screen

display a genome for the lyric scene?

 

And do I write my poems for money?

(their cat-walks cannot tease me any)

Perhaps I write them to be famous

along the broadway of disclaimers.

Or do I not make them at all

but they write me both large and small

 

as verbal music thrums a rib,

that Robert, you and I transcribe

in trance, in heartbreak and with toil

to make for other poems their soil,

while anvil, oar and you and me,

make soundings in this charity?

 

 

 

A Quibble for William Blake

 

Fine Tints without Fine Forms,

so Mister B’s opinion storms,

will always be the subterfuge

of the blockhead and the stooge.

 

Yet when that coy Big Bang

swelled formless like a hot meringue,

say, Mister B. where were the hints

gave Form the premium in your prints,

not Tints?

 

For there’s attrition here

between twin variants of human dare

and both will take the fancy back

to when we smeared on Altamira rock,

aeons before the complex saints

distracted us from tell-tale tints and scents,

got us our lunch, but that’s not all,

showed how the casual and small

possessed antennae for the whole.

Alan Gould