ESKELETH AND APPLES

Return To Eskeleth The Apples Of Love And Chaos

two poems of place Michael Blackburn

by

Sunk Island Publishing

Eskeleth and Apples Michael Blackburn, 2007 Print version: ISBN 978-1-874778-26-4 This electronic edition 2013 Sunk Island Publishing
Cover: Geoffrey Mark Matthews

Other Works by Michael Blackburn

The Constitution Of Things Why Should Anyone Be Here And Singing? Backwards Into Bedlam The Lean Man Shaving The Prophecy Of Christos The Ascending Boy Portrait Of The Artist As A Cyborg (hypertext) Lets Build A City Big On The Hawkesbury Pocket Venus Spyglass Over The Lagoon Return to Eskeleth was commissioned by The Poetry Society for its Online Poetry Map in 1995. It is an early example of a hypertext poem in which certain words in each section link to other pages. The poem could therefore be read in a variety of directions. The hyperlinks have been omitted here. Two sections, lifting the sneck and the buildings are demolished were published as separate poems in subsequent collections. Eskeleth is pronounced ESS-ku-luth. The Apples of Love and Chaos was commissioned as part of the 24-8 East Midlands Writers Tour of 2003 and was first read in public at the Derby Literature Festival. A Nightingale in Woodhall Spa was published in Nightingale magazine.
Other poems online at scribd.com/michael blackburn

RETURN TO ESKELETH

stoop, as if all makers and inhabitants were small of frame or bent over with unremitting labour and little hopes and then possibly enter a darkness before you find the light switch with your left hand half slapping, half stroking the white wall, your nose picking up the familiar but longlost scent of the place, instant, distinctive, rising up from stone walls and old wood, the years of coal smoke from backdraughts, and something else, seeping in from wind that blows over heather and grass, bracken and stone, with rain, snow and sun...over in the dimness you see the cupboard that held the jigsaws and board games, their cardboard boxes all frayed and worn along their edges, and the looping shape of the black inner tube from a tractor tyre; cold floors of uncovered grey flags...it's children's voices you hear your own among them and see the silhouette of a sitting cat in the big window that gives out upon the daleside the light now undiminished and with it the joy of running chest-high in the bracken on the hill behind and building dams in the stream way up, past the clumps of foxgloves, beyond the pinetree split by ancient lightning

and rowans, yes, even these rowans, mountain ash, sacred tree, lucky tree whose red berries the clamouring birds gorge on and the chilly beck, for these waters are rarely warm but always clear, so you can read the stones they travel upon; the chilly beck where you chase ugly bullhead and shimmering minnow you must climb the stone stile by the road first, descending Gordon's Field through his docile chewing cows to the iron bridge and across, as if on your way to the grey ruins of the powder house on the other side closer now, much closer

And giants they were then; they lived in the land and we clung to their legs, begging for sweets and rides on their back. We were all desire and they were already old, we wanted to be as wild as the fox and cosy as the black cat sitting on the windowsill...

I found my uncle one day scratching with a penknife at the earth beneath a flagstone just outside the front door. When I asked him why he was doing that he replied, 'There's gold in them there hills,' and continued scraping. Then he snapped the blade back, replaced the flag and went about his business. I knew the earth held lead - and copper, whose ore we would find in the spoil heaps and tunnels, bright blue and green - but not gold. Even giants, I realised, sometimes made things up

as poets do...so can you be sure that Eskeleth exists in stone and wood, as a place on a map, a mark on tight brown contours, north by a hundred yards of a thin, errant line that signifies water, a beck that has a name one and a half thousand years old? as a positioning of limestone hewn and laid by people whose names are not remembered? and should it matter that the lintel is low or the room small or that rowans grow there and that if you walked a few yards down the road, past the chapel that was no longer a chapel any more but a glorified shed for Amos's chickens you'd come to another place of water, another wood? I could tell you about the small milk churn that hung from the back of the door, how each morning it would fill with milk from Gordon's cows, how it bore the indent of a pig's bite and also the black inner tube of a tractor tyre, the heavy fragments of lead picked up from old workings, a sheep's skull recovered from the fell, the voices of children between the trees, patterns that lichen made on the drystone walls, yellow and green, and the blackbird keeping an eye on you and after a while they make their own place, their own time, regardless of facts, so real I could believe them myself - or wonder how I could forget

Lifting the sneck I find the room so small, the lintel so low. Even the rowans on the far side of the beck are closer than I thought. And you, my dwindling ancestors, you who were giants once, can you tell me why the years increase only to shrink the world?

and rowans, yes, even these rowans, mountain ash, sacred tree, lucky tree whose red berries the clamouring birds gorge on and the chilly beck still runs clear and cold, though you'd not drink from it as you would when a child, nor spend so many hours chasing ugly bullhead and shimmering minnow to reach it you must climb the stone stile by the road first, descending the field still named after Gordon who is long gone to the iron bridge and across, as if on your way to the grey ruins of the powder house on the other side closer now, much closer

the buildings are demolished or crumbling, powder-house and smelting-mill the long flues collapsing up the hill tick-ridden bracken thickens to the water's edge still I pick stones eager to find unearthed ore dusting the fingers with its weighty presence poison, said mother, wash your hands when you've touched it the cool beck licks my fingers clean and does not die

sneck - the very word snaps in the mind capturing better than any 'latch' or other name its sharp, metallic nature, summoning up its layered northern history like stone and sword; like others, too, the casual brutality of schoolboy talk, I'll sneck you one; or beck and ghyll, fell, syke, snicket and wynd; the ancient tongue of a hardy unsentimental folk, dissenting, stubborn, suspicious and as sparing of their words as their friendship; eyes blue as a clear dale sky, hard as chipped granite; sneck, the cool weight on your index finger as you lift it up, then push the loose-fitting wood of the door; sneck, as it drops back when you let go; sneck, as it rises again and falls when you push the door shut behind you...

THE APPLES OF LOVE AND CHAOS

Refracted Views Of Lincolnshire
Dedicated to the memory of Ken Smith, 1938 - 2003 'Goodbye England, that nest of singing birds' - Hawkwood 'There was so much that was real that was not real at all' - This Solitude of Cataracts, Wallace Stevens

1: Gravity Begins In Lincolnshire Gravity begins in Lincolnshire: the apple, ripe and ready, falls.

2: Cormac ( 4 And A Half) Listens With New Ears To Lincolnshire Listen, I say, as we stand alone on the blond road, succoured by endless warm air and green flat distance, can you hear the sluicing of waters long since drained, and the breath of a thousand labourers ploughing the earth or the chanting of monks in their godly stone houses and the shuffling peasants' feet amid dessicating straws? Silly grandpa: just the cock-da-doodle-do of a yonder cock and the whizz of buzzy bees and a peewit's eeh eeh.

3: A Cyclists Experience Of Melancholy In Lincolnshire a lone cyclist sheltering under trees the light first gold then pewter the rain descending into the green melancholy of his regard he waits for the end

4: The Novelists View Of Lincolnshire the landscape's long ravelling narratives hide everything, show nothing but more hiddenness here be Grendels and submerged sexual rumours of ingrown villages built on a tilting, shrinking land and so I imagine the burked emotions, the squirearchies of corn, the scent of jealousy amid fields of beet, spent sweat and the spittle of anger and sometimes the magnetic rivers of witchcraft that pulse between red farms buckling under a spire-pricked sky

5: Ern Malley, The Australian Poet, Remembers Lincolnshire I had often, in my styptic dreams, consoled myself with the chanting of novitiates at Sempringham's well, waking to thunderous matins as the gods beat their tattoos on the heels of understanding, where the wormwood fen makes an integer of the sky only to find that I had fallen far beyond the scope of Newton's halcyon ecliptic, having stalled with a glass of green absinthe in the taverns of Aphrodite. The glass of the scryer broke, who rode from Mortlake, leather-hooded like a harrier from Nocton Fen, upon a black charger, denying the cylinders of the airman. All foreknowledge shattered, it was a flower dipped in liquid hydrogen then struck on the board. The pressures attained their maximum. I wept, as Caesar wept, among the Ophone, on the river Gram. And still I hear them, the adepts of calculus and prism, tuning their astral prayers like a madrigal of merry pistons, varnishing my days with their benediction.

6: Two Of Our Saints Are Missing, Or, The Stolen Saints of Lincolnshire St Oswald and St Herefrith. One to Gloucester, one to Cambridge. What kind of folk would steal a saint's remains (Especially one without a head)?

7: Shakespeare And Mrs Toogood, Or, The Lost Apples of Lincolnshire Welland Pippin & Wharfland Beauty Cooper's Ambition, Duncombe's Seedling & Dalton's Exquisite The Post Office, The Parcel Post & The Butcher Lavender's Seedling & April Beauty Old Man, Short's Favourite & the Beauty of Lincoln Peacock & September Scarlet Shakespeare & Mrs Toogood

8: A Taoist In Lincolnshire Only that which does not seem to move runs more swiftly than a hare through a field of barley. The motionless cloud flies faster than the hare and the river that hastens beneath the bridge remains where it is by day and night. Thus at the Root of the Gate of Heaven and Earth nothing moves except what is still and that which is still moves eternally.

9: A Nightingale In Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire Scruffy, plump and unconcerned, he deafened all others around him at three in the afternoon like some drunk back from the bar happy, loud, alone, unbearably in tune.

10: The Apples Of Love And Chaos In Lincolnshire I see them everywhere, the apple trees I fail to number. Some in gardens, tightly pruned or neglected, hung with ropes for children's swings. Others fruit in the green oblivion by roads, or cascade to the floor of abandoned orchards to be tunnelled by wasps before the brown rot flowers. These are the apples of love and chaos, my uncompleted passion, the apples of lust and immortality. I'll plunder them where I can, pick them up from the road, or twist and snap them from the overhang of a private wall. I declare them common bounty, as the gift of gods who have long since left this earth. An apple is nothing if not tasted.