Alan Gould: Two Poems

Maidenly

(Solveig’s Song, Peer Gynt)

 

(Sulur is the mountain above Akureyri in Northern Iceland where my mother grew up. The word means “shawled woman”, in Icelandic.)

 

The Akureyri girls are out on Sulur.

The midnight sunset’s pallor

whites each 1940’s pinafore

in which they gather the ripe blueberries.

And Mum, so maidenly, here you’re othered,

your English years to me ungathered,

and do you wonder what you’re for?

 

Preposterous Captain G. has come.

Your loveliness knocks him sideways from

his English puddings, Baptist regimen

that under-light this Oxford gentleman,

who fresh from Blitzkrieg France,

now mauls Icelandic to decode his hopes

where girls are chattersome on Sulur’s slopes,

and war so oddball in his circumstance.

 

Maybe there’s song that steals up fjord and ness;

to gleam and slide with inwardness,

let’s say Grieg’s Solveig’s Song, as it ascends

these pastures where the township ends,

and you, now cherished by your township friends,

could not be more immersed in North.

How might pure song, free-vowelling voice,

trick your need for further earth

and stranger choice?

 

How might a local girl transcend

her localness to quit a friend

if not by music wildly cued

to offer her its amplitude,

music on its wavelengths making strange

where memes and cells impel exchange

in air outlandishly renewed,

this charm, in-dwelling in deep space

that gives to strangeness its inchoate face.

 

Atom and atom clinch to molecule

to trick from time its inmost impulse,

What else is here? What else, what else?

Atom, bridegroom, bride, the purposeful

takes Sulur down to favour Dehra Dun,

first of your army habitats.

You’ve wived a life of never-fixed-address.

Your photos home show Hindu dress

and Colonel G. bedecked with sundry cats,

 

as, Mum, you sound the opportune,

finding pals in amah and kaboon,

and colonels too, for friendship was your good

to seize how someone else’s feelings stood.

Five decades on, while raking leaves,

down you go from heart. You made good lives,

good motherhood, yet still, what were you for

so whited on that hill in pinafore?

 

When someone raking leaves goes down from heart,

she goes from life that has no counterpart,

and ditto every speck that’s caught

in any midnight sunset’s net,

to go the way it finds, not where it ought

like a woman, vowelling melody

finds the free flow through necessity.

 

Titanium Where My Hipsters Rub

(For Doc Michael Gillespie and his team.)

 

I kept my two Icelandic hips

through infancy and Uni.

They walked and bucked with witty loves,

both medallist and looney.

 

They served through my home-making years

a soccer parent’s frolics,

or lugging babes and bricks upon

synovial hydraulics.

 

Then came my time of cartilege,

my deeply personal hobble.

Masked surgeons disinfected knives

to probe that gyro-wobble,

 

and nursing teams with their regimes

to rebuild buttock muscle,

came gliding wards with sprightly words;

I heard vocation’s bustle

 

direct me not to cross my legs

or gyrate on my pelvis.

Goodbye to my Mick Jagger days,

Hello to Dalek Elvis.

 

They sent me home, I healed, and praise

blue nous that gathered round

my drone of pain, reminding me,

life points to the unfound.