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Village maidens must have Garlands, white rosettes, leaves, ribbons, gloves and hearts cut out in waxy paper to crimp round a wicker ring, fancies carried before the coffin of the unwed girl by her affectionate friends, Maisie and Daphne and Joan and all in Miller’s Dale.
Courting favours from a bony lover. See, these ghastly gloves for you, my dear, a dirty penny at Goose Fair. Dust-dinged crantsies, cramped together, locked in a glass frame in an empty church. They rustle on about the slack-handed impotent old fool they’re married to with Maisie and Daphne and Joan and all in Miller’s Dale.
Loitering here in a comfort break my head’s filled up, woozy with words. There’s a pond in the hotel garden, a gravelled water feature from the telly. Are golden carp accountable? My resources sit out in a spreadsheet, communications take routes and all the loops snarl up. I have that in me which shares and is competent out of its comfort zone and that which is not. In my is not is my breathing, and I think if I dozed off in a meeting I might drift like weed to where the carp bludgeon the water, clanking scales rough as elephants. I’ve forgotten how to use a comma and there’s no stopping us now, punch-in-air. The bird calling, I can’t answer its notes, my system’s down, impenetrably down in loam and aggregate tipped in from trucks. Once in a meeting a soft grey suited man looked out for any answering eyes caught mine and said in a voice not his I’m going home and went I don’t know where.
The fish forever gulping flimsy data - still can’t hear a word they say, can you? Back in our plastic seats, sandwich heavy and blood-cold I want to say just O and O and seal my mouth on all these careful closed integrities. A curious trickling, like a low sluice tracks me through the minutes, like something tipping hooks about, a this-way that-way lack, a tricksy current lifting some turnscrew worm too soft to gaff.
Walking the water meadows I saw three swans flying broad formation over town: flimsy bombers gleaming in February light. People should have crouched under tables, scanned their flight, counting seconds. But they carried, just, enormous beauty heavy in the feathered belly. And nothing fell, but floated, yellow bugle notes, gods’ stories, slow flap of horizons, snake’s-ease. And that interlay of down that warms butted against the brown river, homely.
How should I your true love know From another one? By his cockle hat and staff And his sandal shoon.
He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone, At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone. (Anon. to the tune ‘Walsingham’. Hamlet 4.5.)
I Alas, look here, a girl in white all lily-sweet, boldly singing the ill-dressed songs of fathers and lovers and what-may-be.
The shallows spread her marriage-bed; her song laps the reeds. The slow current licks her into silence like a mother’s tongue.
Downstream of the curious court Sir Walter catches the tune from the willow, weaves a nowhere song to this Bess and that,
another candle in another bloody wind. Love likes not the falling fruit, From the withered tree. The sea casts him up from his golden dream,
sandals awash with little shells, earns him quietus, a pillow block. Gertrude lies forever in a faint: Elizabeth and Mary dwell in the brick of homage.
II And when our bottles and all we Are fild with immortalitie . . . (Raleigh)
Incense and plaster stiffen their sailing shroud. Inside the shrine a plastic box illuminates the stained Turin face, a not-what-it-seems
by a master in the art of unacceptable truths, of a man forgotten as he came from the holy land, anywhere where news is reliable, but not to be borne.
The Milky Way’s fogged over now, no kind of guide: tourists watch pilgrims for sudden genuflections. Handy dandy, which is the fool and which the king?
It beggars belief, this capital shrine to the one who bore the one who died. Sons are lost, Elsinore and elsewhere: you must sing down a-down
Mary’s ghost croons in the candle light, a Lachrimae Verae under her waxen breath; no dancing on Norfolk’s reed and flinted flats.
III I have plaied so long with my fingers I have beaten out of plaie all my good fortune (John Dowland)
Ophelia drops the lute she little plays, lingers, the boards creaking with pity, afloat on the fervent waters of applause.
The real dances with the true, Bankside, Fetter Lane, Whitehall and Denmark: heroes travel cold seas and colder measures. The Globe sets its ghost train out
in good King Christian’s land, where folly court staggers round the best of London’s music-men, expensive exile, king of the heartsease.
(Musicians in our livery die bloodily enough, but that was in Father’s time and though this one’s a Catholic we shall simply ignore him)
Song and strutting step, people and court, pulses fired into the disconsolate mind to flaunt at fingers’ end in firework fancy.
IV All pilgrims are glad to get home, tired of the one-way traffic of an Anglian village, tired of foppery goldmines and miracles
but from the radio the notes swirl in a feathering tide from the mannered lute so how shall, how shall we forget, on the road
to Walsingham the bravery when Dowland delivers the loop of wit around and under like the green man’s tongue of leaves,
the speaking tune & seven variations for all to follow, rueful, sweet as rosemary, each more rapid, chromatic, dislocated
and swept to the home key of the vibrating shell, for all artists are courtiers to the Antic but then we can build monuments out of thin air.
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