Linda Lake
Poetry - a small selection
(Inspired by Part Two of “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf and first published in the Journal of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain)
As the moon sinks, the air
bustles round each bleak nook,
swallowing and extinguishing hard edges of old pain
left in the dying, rhythmical
breath still resident.
The lamps are out, the fire
burned down; none to speak,
even hear. Airs in ramshackle corners soon resign
to their whispered cries; call and they call,
gently considering their lament.
Weaving, the breezes all conspire,
airily; make fresh talk
with the rose walls which they, fluttering, explain
are questions about time to fill,
the ravishment
of books, letters, flowers; the stair,
lit by a wandering, pulsing look
directed from the sea. Breezes asking, where and when?
and lingering an interval,
gathering transient
thoughts. Billowing dreamscapes offer
no clear sense of lives once lived, of idle talk
clinging to the furred saucepan,
china left to mould; ruinous hangings; receptacles
of hollowness; monument
to forgotten family days, meals to share
happily, or with discord. The open page of a book,
fluttering - no person here to divine -
can give no clue; nothing. All
is aimless air, and ambient.
No weary word spoken, here,
even of banality. Winds pluck,
nosing, rubbing, with no reason
to forbear, no lull
to consider; none repent
the loss. Gatherings recur,
but no sign now of the periodic,
longed-for, family mustering. The hope seems vain,
yet one day soon the candle
will light, burn, nodding assent..
(First published in “The Headless Way”)
And the best day was, she continued,
the day I disappeared,
astonishing myself.
I was what I saw, and became what I was not.
In a crowded room, I was white space.
Nobody noticed.
In my car, the road drove through me.
Nobody saw it driverless.
Out on the Common,
walking my dogs,
they were rounded up,
as strays;
but they knew me,
as animals will,
and heeled to disembodied whistling.
The High Street was best,
she continued.
I waved at heedless friends,
stuck out my tongue
at heedless enemies,
was rude to a policeman
and stole a blind man's cane.
He didn’t need it;
he saw me.
Then the game was up.
She shrugged at the memory
and disappeared,
astonishing nobody.
Into a lemon dawn,
she rises from that undulating sheet
and takes another - flat, white -
tracing sensitised fingers
across its shallow ripples and furrows.
Ladylike and hoity-toity,
Windsor Violet glides across
virgin Ivory wash,
nearly royal, but soon outshone
by Magenta’s whispered tales
of Sultan’s palaces.
Hooker’s Green surfaces,
slides sensuously,
smelling strongly of earthy possibilities,
drenched with daubed intensity.
Brushstrokes play with coy Carmine
until the brittle fragility of her
stretches into surrendered sunset smoothness
upon the blushing sheet.
Venetian Red serenades herself
across Prussian Blue,
who whorls and spins
through less than Permanent Rose.
Over-ripe Plums and Damsons burst,
pouring Burgundy Wine;
Amethyst crystals collide with Poppy’s heady seeds
making Purple Madder
and Madder, until
converging slipstreams of colour
meet in mottled Turquoise Seas;
marooned Sepia Suns burn into Umber Moons;
Cerulean Stars spiral through Ultramarine Galaxies.
Indian Red dips and dances an invocation
to Vermilion; plucks orange-blossom
as totem to her fire.
Indigo dives into Scarlet Lake,
doubling himself in Alizarin mists.
Intoxicated with pigments,
Payne’s Grey weeps into Rose Doré,
stroking her rich complexion
with streaking softness.
And, on that other sheet,
tender-winged prisms brush him awake,
flying into his opening rainbow eyes,
saturating his slow smile
with spectrums of deep delight.
Morning:
a pillowful of sea.
Outside, opal waves
wax a deck-chaired limbo.
Lunchtime
scutters sideways
to the sealed-out sun.
But, tonight,
you are here,
launching curving echoes
into rehearsing mists.
Adolfo Feragutti Visconti (1850-1924)
She left sepia to enter black.
This law was set in suggestions,
threatening the wooden struts and ropes;
unravelling bridge,
held in the claws of a rook.
She learned to be slippery,
growing on rocks
capable of cracking.
She faded whenever we decreed;
lambent in the dark.
She saw no chains
till they found her,
bound her, wound her,
toiling, on a pulley,
held in the claws of a rook
She was left no fixed point.
Sepia’s fading, blacks lowering,
she expected no certainties,
unravelled,
grew immune to dark.
(First published in Retort Magazine)
I cannot hear it yet,
but it scrabbles underground,
edging forward slowly,
narrating itself to portions of me
disconnected from the brain.
Nosing out of its lair,
sniffling its new world,
it refuses to be netted;
will retreat into its dark cave,
if enticed.
Ignore it. Put the kettle on.
Do something worthwhile.
Listen, though, listen….
Listen to the nothingness,
tapping out its rhythms,
singing silent stanzas.
Tap-tap-tapping through
subterranean walls;
thinning walls, covered with
clusters of words, clinging,
entwining, forming cords, chords;
rope-ladders of consciousness.
Clasped inside its pineal bow,
a silver arrow quivers, waiting;
waiting for a gap in the
mind’s noise.
Now! The beast emerges from the lair,
shot swiftly through the heart,
wrapped in wordy nets,
its lifeblood pouring out.
Tangible, terrible sacrifice,
but never so pure again.
(First published in Reflections Magazine)
And the
rivers ran over,
and dried, and ran again,
and they cloned her.
And they called
her cloned self,
‘Dolly’,
after
the sheep.
And the
cloned child smiled,
and cried, and smiled again,
and she hugged her.
And she asked
her twin-self,
“Mummy,
sing
me to sleep.”
And the rivers
sang softly, softly, and the
child grew slowly, slowly,
and the mother watched her own self grow,
and did not wonder
how she would turn out,
what she would be,
or need to know.