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The Incidental Marshman
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TWELVE SEASONAL POEMS
FROM THE COLLECTION - CELLO MUSIC - A5 - 214 PAGES
COPIES AVAILABLE @ £10.00 POST FREE IN THE BRITISH MAINLAND
FROM MERVYN LINFORD
15, HARWOOD PLACE, LAVENHAM, SUFFOLK CO10 9SG
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MERVYN LINFORD
SUMMER:
Sounding Out
There is a blackcap in my garden
and although he wants to skulk within the gloom
of the ceanothus
I play his song on my smartphone’s mobile app
and he comes to look.
He cannot resist the song of this interloper
he supposes must be after what he owns
so lust and love and ownership are such
that here betoken somehow what he is
and what we are
just needs and introspective means and notions
to build a nest or else a solid home:
the doves may yet intone the thoughts of peace -
of sanctity, redemption and atonement
but instinct knows what the blackcap cannot preach
as he sings not a serenade but a song of strength
across the brink and the breach that is only space
and a brief vibration.
Bivalves
Against the tide the cockleboat make headway
- slow but sure -
past the Medway,
Sheppey’s cliffs
and then the Nore
towards the east.
The estuary’s open door invites the sun
to rise above the Maplins and the Swin
where dawn this cool July has gusts of wind
and cloudy prospects.
The west, still dim and drear by Canvey Point,
is a contrast to the brightening ideas beyond Thorpe Bay
and Shoeburyness.
The cockleboat makes headway
- sure but slow -
between the night’s dark ways of drowning stars
and daylight’s open shell beyond the shore
where the yellow-centred mollusc turning blue
filters the strange analogies of light
that the moon uncovers daily like a truth
- every grain -
each gilded
swatchway -
until the proof unwritten and estranged
is measured out in springs and neaps and phases
and like the lonely planets in their chains
we slew around our moorings thus restrained
by time’s ecliptic.
Cinnabar & Ragwort
The ragwort may be poisonous - unloved,
but a moth I know with splendid scarlet wings
and offspring rung all round with black and yellow
- as a vivid warning -
reminds me that
all things are not for us
and not just ours
but have their own intrinsic voice that sings
in another language.
They know us - we know them:
somewhere far off deep in the starlit centre of a need
to discriminate, to understand, and feed
the fruits of difference
a rare angelic thought with scarlet wings
harbours ideas of substance out of air:
without strings - without theories.
AUTUMN
A Butterfly Mind
The lime trees not quite green and not quite yellow:
slowly in the sunlight here undress
as leaf by leaf falls silently to earth
and draws beneath each tree
a golden circle.
And what is bare above, like boughs and branches,
forms a fretted jigsaw for the blue -
like a rare Adonis.
And suddenly a gust unsticks the glue
that holds our grip on reason. Dislodging leaves
that flutter down the airways to confuse
like clouded yellows.
What Falls Rises
Down the air, where else, for the leaves to fall?
It’s autumn what do you expect? They rise
in the wind admittedly - but upwards
forever? As I study their frailty
and think about their journeys in the light,
their transformations, photons to blood
and bone, xylem and phloem, oxygen
and CO², I can feel a kinship
in my veins. Even in the winter,
the arteries, the branches in the frost
remember heat - vitality. I tread
on the thin translucency of summer
that decomposes. Feet and earth succumb
to these connections: hyphae, ganglia, threads.
Fieldfares and the Moon
After the heat - the frost: October brings the fieldfares
and the wind from northern quarters.
The rosehips and the haws are just the thing
to fill their crops and activate the wings
that winter needs to fly towards the thaw
and thoughts of swallows.
For now the hoar spelt differently applies
to brittleness and grasses furred with ice
and all the geometric silken things that glint and glitter.
Across the water meadows, close to dusk -
crepuscular, cacophonous and low
the feral geese, the Canadas and greylags,
follow the light’s slow death before the stars
and as each skein unspools its icy threads
over the river’s meanings and meanders
the vast unsaid, unconscious, cold abyss
offers no more than the moon’s full-rounded jest -
its reflected zero.
WINTER
December 6th
And what would St Nicholas say?
A northerly wind - subarctic,
sleet and the thought of snow. A sign
perhaps of something other - a star,
a sleigh - reindeer. Maybe a boy
once pickled and in pieces - made
whole. A bag of gold to buy
those girls - freedom. Such are the ways
of saints - forget us sinners.
Good or bad, no matter, children
know that gifts will come. Winter
brings such things: frankincense - stillness
in the night, kings and comets -
portents. Odin did it once - now
it’s St Nick - Santa Claus. What next:
a virgin birth - the midnight hour -
myrrh and mirth - rejoicing. I suppose
we need such things before we die.
Miracles fall quietly from the sky -
crystallised ideas, whitenesses - snow.
Birch Trees in the Frost
Four silver/white and splayed up-reaching trees
are redefined, inverted and un-leaved
in this cold pond.
The margins round this still reflective image
are fingered with such splinterings of ice
that even something deep, like winter trees,
are less profound and somehow less complete
as this lone swan , immaculate and white,
amongst the hoar-encrusted withered reeds
revisions and remembers and requites
my frozen heart.
Saltings - Two Tree Island
The saltings are just floss and rusty purslane:
sea asters though not stars nor yet disasters
have set tomorrow’s phases with their seeds
as the moon and tide and midnight glean ideas
that will bring the light.
What dawns right here, right now, are summer’s thoughts
as geese and curlew force the frozen mind
to think about, not ice, but all those flowers
like thrift and all that lavender that lies
beneath the sun.
But there they are
the redshank and the knot
and all those dunlin
that fold and then unfurl in this grey sky
with alternating messages of light
and the dark to come.
The sun will soon stand still for three whole days -
the three-in-one sole harbinger of spring
that moving north increases that cold arc, that half a circle,
that finds the skylark high above the marsh
suspended in the stasis of a song that’s here to stay
yet bound to pass.
SPRING
An Egg for Easter
When it’s green - really green:
not that dull and dark deceptive green of winter
when the rape fields and the wheat beneath the clouds
are cold and dim
and heat is somewhere else and far away.
But here when the woods are ‘greening’ and the fields
are an incandescent memory of spring
that’s here and now.
Then the primrose - only one - at the headland’s edge
is more than just a hint of what’s to come
as the ring doves lift their grey unwelcome shrouds
from the fields of rape
and the gas guns crash and the winter holds its wake
and the sun’s an egg that breaks into liquid gold
as the skylark rises.
The Avenue - Kentwell Hall
The mistletoe in March both green and gilded
attaches sight, so often seen apart,
to something maybe mythic, maybe not,
when men with silver knives and fertile dreams
would stop in some dark grove that time forgot
to cut the everlasting pure white seed
that would not rot like cults or creeds
or cultures.
And here today by Kentwell’s famous Hall
with its everlasting round of going back
to Tudor Days and witch-remembered nights
and parliamentary old remembered plots.
The bells of Holy Trinity, not lost,
on these old ears that time and all its spots
have said without a word, so much, so little,
about the cost of conscience and belief
as sheep that safely graze and lambs that gambol
are slaughtered by the light that gilds these trees
and all our words.
Cusp
Looking here at the groin - its long sea-weeded finger
pointing out towards the sandbanks and the Ray
through the tide’s cold silver
I think of spring.
Although it’s March the weather’s damp and wintry -
sleet and even snowflakes bring the north
when warmth and southern wings are what we need
- just bees and birdsong -
We’re on the cusp between brent geese and swallows
but still the curlew call in isolation -
that lonely drawn out song, that double note,
that seems as long as this undaunted season
that chills and lingers.
The gardens on the cliffs give only hints
with primulas and pansies
- intimations -
and yet that drone, that drowsy summer sound
that light increases is here right now
as one large bee alights on one small flower -
intones its Lenten message like a prayer
and rises as the snowflakes sidle down
and flies away.
COPIES AVAILABLE @ £10.00 POST FREE IN THE BRITISH MAINLAND
FROM MERVYN LINFORD 15, HARWOOD PLACE, LAVENHAM, SUFFOLK,
CO10 9SG - POSTAL ORDER, PAYPAL OR CHEQUES MADE PAYABLE TO MERVYN LINFORD