February Phone Box

Before this short month ends, here is the first, the topmost, phone-box. It is, for those who might detect a slight obsession, significant in one regard: the most northerly phone-box of the British Isles, located on Unst, which is part of Shetland.

Of the hundreds of phone-box pictures that I have taken, this has to be one of my favourites, not only for its significance, but the memory of the trip, the friends I spent time with, and the fact that during a week of sideways rain (as mostly happens on Shetland) we found this famous kiosk just as the sun was setting, pale and bright, on a chilly autumn evening.

The Caller shall remain, of course, anonymous (although his name begins with 'A')

Photos, Foxes, and lots of Phone Boxes

This year, I shall be mostly posting photos – and the occasional poem – maybe a fox will intrude.  I might even open a ‘discussion’ on phone-boxes.  But to start with, the first of a selection of photos that I took in Glasgow, and made into a calendar for my Dad: pictures to remind him of his school days, many years ago.  His old school is now a Business Centre; his old home (its memory) lies beneath a certain busy road. Misty, water-colour memories? But not in black and white…

DECEMBER - Her Winter Houses Moon

Before the full moon wanes its wintry way towards the shortest day, and the days themselves descend towards the year’s end, here is my final contribution.

I began this year’s blog entries by saying that one oughtn’t to ‘explain’ a poem - then went on to do just that!  This, the last piece of my twelve-poem cycle, An Imaginary Menagerie, is possibly the saddest poem I have ever written and, in this respect, perhaps the most personal. Best, then, that I leave it to speak for itself.

If you would like to look up some stuff on Edward Lear, this might give you some of idea of what lay behind the composition. Otherwise, just read it as it is, or interpret it as a photograph, or piece of music, or stone whose meaning is entirely in the eye, or ear, or hands of the beholder.

Moon Phases, December 2010
New Moon – December 5, 17:36
First Quarter – December 13, 13:59
Full Moon – December 21, 08:13
Last Quarter – December 28, 04:18

DECEMBER: Her Winter Houses Moon

The Yonghi-Bonghi-Bo.

Midwinter, and the garden's lake

is petrified to a pool of frozen tears;

a solid silver dish, impenetrable

from above or below by light or dark.

Alone in his Karmic Ivory Tower sits

Lear, with his myriad of nonsenses:

unmarried, impoverished, sedentary,

mind running faster than pulse.

His Eden consists of Bong Trees,

and his serpent less feared or revered

than the Yonghi-bonghi-bo,

Quangle-Wangle, Pobble and Dong.

He named the creatures; his crazy

cosmogony merely a foil to his

sad, self-depricatory sense of humour,

hewn from his ornithological pursuits.

To this end, he refused the fruit,

alleging enforced solitude to be

the sole route to creativity: travel,

his companion, escape his destination.

Yet once, this journey took him to the

land of myth, where one strange siren,

beguiled by the anomaly of his charm

both puerile and old before its time,

attempted to lure Lear from his fantasy.

Threatened by phantasmagorial reality

He ran a mile, preferring to dwell ever

more beneath Her Winter Houses Moon.

And so, regressive and old-fashioned,

unhappily trapped between the

ever after and once upon a time,

he sent out his ridiculous, satirical cat,

to court with wisdom and truth,

in a beautiful pea-green boat.

But now the winter warps the water,

And the Winter House looks out

No longer to a halcyon sea,

or a land of invention and magic:

Only the looking glass, back to front,

mocking Her moon's distorted image.

NOVEMBER - Freezing Moon

Well, we’re nearing the end of this year of lunar-dictated poem-blogs (or should that be, moon-plogs?)  And as the evenings continue drawing in, and the streets are paved with grit, this certainly is the month of a freezing moon – in Scotland’s Central Belt if not the Native Lands of the North American Tribes.  November is also the month of the dead, when people remember saints and souls, certain martyrs and those who died while killing others or defending an allegiance.

If only we could defend the lives of threatened species as well as we defend a flag. Whether these beasts are mythical or really existed is neither here nor there: the loss of any animal, plant, or human life is a tragedy of epic proportion.  God forbid we should lose the gift of empathy that stems from our utmost unique faculty, the Imagination.  But then, it is this loss (or suspension, or suppression) that enables people to fight wars for what they think is right.

Rights are neither here nor there. Death is final, whosever side you’re on.

Moon Phases, November 2010
New Moon – November 6, 04:52
First Quarter – November 13, 16:39
Full Moon – November 21, 17:27
Last Quarter – November 28, 20:36

The Unicorn

A few hundred million years since the dinosaur

was duped by catastrophism, erased by uniformitarianism,

or when the sun's own sister showed her dark side,

and sent cataclysmic hell-showers upon our frozen earth,

a smarter race appeared to test supremacy,

and assist the mutually assured destruction of nature's gentle tide.

And yet the dinosaur is only marginally older than the

contents of the ark: it stands for simply that, an age gone by.

The Dodo has a more difficult time, immortalised

not by its quirky life or shape, but symbolising

in figure of speech the bleak reality of its demise.

Similarly the fate of the tiger, the tusks of the elephant,

and horn of the great white rhino fall prey to lies

which pamper to fallacy, greed, and pallid vanity:

to be hounded out of existence by spurious design.

Perhaps the phallic unicorn evolved

from what was first deemed good:

its epic strength and tender beauty held androgyny

in balance with grace like a mythical god.

But when this horned equestrian

- one of nature's true vegetarians -

gently nudged the fruit with his miracle tool

(which once had the power to quell raging waters -

A wasted potential) he inadvertently speared it.

A kindly, nubile and nymphomaniacal creature

took both the seed and protuberant weapon,

ate the fruit, then purporting it's aphrodisiacal nature,

ground the horn into a paste, inflating the alleged

membership of her race, whereupon

the Unicorn, demoted from ecclesiastical equus

to Grecian bucolis, as punishment for its innocence,

was denied a place on one man's microcosmic paradise.

Denuded and disempowered of its former potency

it perished the ultimate sentence in the deluvian purge.

Had the moon been full when the rain fell,

and had the floods that lifted that floating zoo

been petrified by the freezing moon of the Lakota Sioux,

it might not have preserved the frozen myth,

or the memory of an imaginary menagerie,

but as blocks of ice from God's deep freeze thawed

six hundred million years later, four thousand winters,

or a drop-in-the-ocean millennia or two,

the global warmth might have revealed the truth.

This story is thus;

the punishment of death for good,

whether innocent, naïve, or just plain thick -

it matters as little to us.

Like death, extinct is for ever.

- As the dodo, an irreversible trick.

October - a Month of Five Quarters

As I walked out last Autumn Evening (okay, I cycled if truth be told… this is parody, not paradox) there was a clean, silver disk in the sky above the Stadium. It perched behind the pinked clouds of a sepia season, brighter than the sun that sank behind Sainsbury’s (shut this week for refurbishment, and so I ventured in the opposite direction for my messages – not from the moon, but Morrison’s.)


Luckily, as I returned home by the light of the Hunter’s Moon, as it’s commonly known (the harvest, done) my catch had not wept itself into oblivion, although something had leaked into the lining of my rucksack. Probably the out-of-date fish I’d plucked from the yellow sticker department. Or worse, it was milk, spilt from the impenetrable plastic carton. Still, no point crying over it, they say.

Tell that to this month’s animal from my select menagerie, the ‘Squonk.’ He’s a tricky chap to write a pretty poem on. If he exists at all! He doesn’t appear much in literature to my knowledge; isn’t part of Native American lore, and features mainly in lyrics by two great rock groups. The first song, alluded to elsewhere in this sequence, is by a band who took their name from a strap-on-device coined in The Naked Lunch. (Or is that just rock-and-roll myth? Who can be trusted!)

The second is from the first post-Gabriel album by Genesis, the title of which is alluded to in this poem. The song, ‘Squonk’ was the audition piece that thrust or catapulted Phil Collins from cockney drummer to Front Man (and, alack, song-writer, thus demoting Genesis from the nomenclature of Rock Band to mere pop-group. Discuss.) This highly imaginative album, though, was concerned with the uncanny paradox that lies in the super-existential world of the Imagination: is it true, or false.

Or…


(Discuss?)

Moon Phases, October 2010
Last Quarter – October 1, 03:52
New Moon – October 7, 18:44
First Quarter – October 14, 21:27
Full Moon – October 23, 01:36
Last Quarter – October 30, 12:46

OCTOBER: Hunter's Moon (Algonquin)

"squonk"

More like a blubbery, blubbing crocodile,
if you ask me;

self-pitying, self-effacing, self-mutilating,

his form and being amorphous as the
red-alert moon that chases him
through the forest to his pool of tears:

some reserve, squonk.

His trail is like an old-fashioned paper-chase,
crisp white petals of confetti
dissolved into mulch
overnight, tinged only with morning frost.

A funny fish you are, or reptile or bird,
ugly duckling, chicken all right
- corn-fed no doubt -
yellow enough to be - or not to,
pending your state of fear:
live or dead you're an easy catch,
a trick of the tail and you're in the sack.

I only wanted to be your friend,
yet you spread your maudlin like ointment,
never offering to mop up my tears with your fur;
no condolence in your snuffling, grunting,
shuffling around to be let out of the bag:
gushing forth repentant, acquiescent,
a dribbling pool of aqueous misery.

No doubt you'll re-emerge; like father like son
your whimpering tadpole will turn to a
Munch-like scream, legs, arms writhing,
to evolve this time into more than the
cupboard love crocodile,
preying without pity,
praying without fear,
toughened, no more tears.

Oh dear.

Dear squonk,

queer squonk,

not-quite-all-there squonk,

do-we-believe-in-you

true-or-false squonk.

September - Looking in the Mirror?

Lately I have learned about ‘poaching’ – I thought this would be a good start for this, the month of Salmon Spawning. An expression that has affected me somewhat over the years, but not in the culinary sense: poaching, to put it crudely, is the act of stealing someone else’s bird. Whereas, perhaps, in the past seeing someone in a steady and sturdy relationship put them in the ‘no-go’ category, now it seems they are fair game. After all, it’s a great test of the status quo, especially if all parties assume that any flirting is purely academic.

Having been neither poacher nor poachee but, in my unfortunate past, poachéd, I found myself drinking gin-and-tonic on my sofa with someone who described herself as ‘happily un-single’ – and knew she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Anything but. So, to charm her, I attempted to recite Ted Hughes behemothic poem, ‘Wodwo’ only pausing to breath at the commas. Don’t try this at home, kids. Or if you succeed, move on to the last few pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses without a breath, and see if that secures you a place in the poachability pursuit.

Yes, I cribbed, nicked, filched, pinched, pilfered, poached and outright stole from others to create these tales (but Ted Hughes, too, took his idea from an ancient tale, or teller.) Unfortunately I didn’t get the girl, in spite of plying her with Gin, reciting poetry to her and performing Schubert’s ‘Dichterliebe’ in her honour. Poaching, it seems, like poetry, works well on the surface. But when we break through into it, it seems there are greater truths, and freshness deep down things.

(And that I 'arf-inched from Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Moon Phases, September 2010
Last Quarter – September 1, 17:22
New Moon – September 8, 10:30
First Quarter – September 15, 05:50
Full Moon – September 23, 09:17

SEPTEMBER: Salmon Spawning Time

Wodwo

Man or beast, goblin or troll, reckless or tame,
Wodwo dwells deep in the woods,
in the dark intestine of the mind's green eye.

If curiosity killed the cat,
it procured this vain creature's survival,
climbing through the icy glass of its own image,

the reflection of air and sky and unseen trees
as nihilistic as the illusion it shattered.
However you doubt its existence

time and again the eternal questions exist:
Where did it come from, to where does it go?
Some rabbit-hole: clay's aorta, within, within,

unreckonable with any system or organ or engine,
hovering on the perimeter of existential reality
while sametime lurking deep among the myths of truth.

Not seeded, laid nor spawned, neither animal,
vegetable, mineral, flesh, fish nor foul;
both animus and anima, moon and mind,

lifeblood from the earth's deep bowel,
watered by the darkest beams of creativity.
Embryonic omen, could we dice with blasphemy

and say: beginning and end, death and birth,
swallowed, digested, cathartic, reiterated,
deep down things, in the soil, within, within, within?

There is no answer, save the perennial ticking.
Keep searching, Wodwo.

AUGUST: Moon when cherries turn black

CURRENT MOON

moon cycles

There’s nothing much more I can say about Edinburgh than: it’s August; it’s Festival-time. Some find this season deeply irritating; others, invigorating. Either way, it hits your pocket. Even if you stick to the Free Fringe, you get stung for the price of a pint, and then feel guilty for only having 73 pence to put in the donation bucket. Well, here’s a tip: nearly every free show I’ve been to this year has featured a ukulele or a p**dophile joke – or both. If that floats your rhyming aquatic transport, fine: just look for old episodes of Mock the Week with Frankie Boyle, OR clips of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

One is more entertaining (and talented) than the other.

There’s nothing much more I can say about this month’s mythical creature, the Crow, that hasn’t already been said by Ted Hughes, or Joni Mitchell. Yet I’ll hammer it out, with a few stolen quotes from other crow-poems (if you can spot ‘em – it’s been so long, I’ve forgot ‘em) and let the great edifice of my turreted pretence dissolve. Like Crow, and all Creation Myths, I am a fraud. None is less entertaining (or talented).

Moon Phases, August 2010

Last Quarter – August 3, 04:59

New Moon – August 10, 03:08

First Quarter – August 16, 18:14

Full Moon – August 24, 17:05

The Blackest Bird

Eskimo legend tells us the world was black,

Out of which pall came the darkest bird,

Before the owl blessed the ground with purer snow.

Heath Stubbs gave the Raven a hard time over the Dove;

That rainy November which extinguished Eden's lustre,

Sent for clues, he pecked at the entrails of fallen existence

Preferring Eve's blackened cherry to Adam's peace-offering

Fresh from the soil; and the sister's nocturnal illumination -

Corruption and diving, diving - to daylight's misty spectrum.

Then, in lunatic retribution, silver shadow was eclipsed:

Raven plunged into the dark that bore him in the beginning.

And if the Tower crumble: no great loss. Legend has it, yet.

Besides, he claimed the damp and smelly loam his own.

This strange year, there are more than the months' number

Of ways to view or justify the hidden side of mirrored sun.

I'd rather hear, from the dark side of that bird's abyss,
Heath Stubbs recalling the Raven's querulous 'kark'
Than Ted Hughes' or Joni's black and ragged Crow.