Changeable

This one came from last night's 10-minute exercise at the Dunbar Writers. My prompt was 'hot and cold', and this is what I came up with. It's unedited.


Changeable

It was a warm morning
then a front went through
leaving hours of cool showery air
trailing behind it.

We had lunch in the garden
sitting at the table
with the wine, salad,
fruit and cheese. Balmy,

and then, little by little,
the wind rose, the sky
greyed over, and we were back
in the Pleistocene, felt like it.

The first spots of rain
evaporating on the paving,
released that smell of warm stone,
and then the spots stayed, grew.

We rushed inside, in a flummox
of plates, glasses, salt and pepper,
bowls of salads and boards of cheese,
to continue our meal inside.

You can’t recreate a picnic indoors,
the light’s not there, the sunshine
and the warmth gone, the windows
streaming with rain, chilly.

Colin Will
09/05/2013

The first post-April poem

I've got an idea for a title for my next collection, due 2015. It's The bacon bookmark. (This actually happened, when I was a junior librarian working in Bathgate). I just need to write the poem now. I know how it will end:

It could've been worse,
there was no brown sauce on it,
and it could've been a fried egg.

(We had love letters, French letters, oily bus tickets, and suspiciously brown scraps of paper returned from branches and centres, so there is a poem there waiting to be written).

However, sitting on the train in Waverley Station, waiting for it to leave for Plymouth via Dunbar and other station stops, as the 'train managers' now call them, this poem came:

[Poem removed for copyright reasons]

I've since discovered the statue is called Everyman, he doesn't have a beard, and he has brown skin. So I may need to edit this one later.

NaPoWriMo 30

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NaPoWriMo 27

Death Valley


Poem published in Every Day Poems 2013

NaPoWriMo 26

I want to design a meal, that will move,
startled and satisfied, from one course
to the next. I won’t trouble
with an amuse-bouche,
that pretentious pre-meal trinket,
but go straight in to starter,
fish, main, palate cleanser,
cheese and sweet.

Let’s look for an active balance.
I like soups but they can be
heavy going. I’m less than keen
on frothy cappuccino concoctions
chased with a sheen of truffle oil.
Paté’s out, too risky for my gout.
I lean towards a tasty miso,
fragrant with coriander,
spring onions and clams.

A creamy sauce with the fish course
would be good. Sole Veronique’s nice,
or Bonne Femme, but I favour
the simple, flaky goodness
of cod in parsley sauce.

The main is simpler – you see
where I’m going with this?
A venison steak, flame-grilled,
fondant potatoes, baby turnips,
sprouting broccoli, red wine jus.

Ah yes, the wines.
With the fish, a steely Riesling,

and a big Rhône with the meat,
a Vin Santo with the sweet. Perfect.

A slice each of mango and pineapple,
with minty sugar, follow that.

The cheeses? Stilton – I can’t see past it -
St Nectaire, Camembert.

Et pour le dessert, je propose
a simple Crème Caramel.

Then coffee and cognac
will take you to Heaven.

Colin Will
26/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 25

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NaPoWriMo 18

Ah-Ha! Car keys, so you thought
you could elude me again?
I know your sneaky tricks:
hiding in the pockets of jackets
I don’t remember wearing yesterday,
jumping up to hang from the hook
I put up specially for you,
and which I always forget to check,
slithering under papers on my desk.
You’re almost as bad as my mobile phone.
How many times have I had to call
its number to find out where that little bugger
is hiding? Lost count. Wish I could sync
my keys to my phone, make my key ring.

Colin Will
18/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 17

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NaPoWriMo 16

Poem published on Every Day Poems 2013

NaPoWriMo 15

Poem published 2013

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NaPoWriMo 11

Camargue


It’s a land of water and marsh,
North Uist with warmth.

And how warm it is, 80s in September.
After Arles we start to see black cattle

in the fields, the occasional white horse
near the ditches. The Parc Naturel

is a landscape of lakes, islands,
wooden bridges, walkways, dusty paths.

My first sight of a hoopoe here,
an injured bird in a huge cage,

scratching in the dirt. Short-toed eagle perched,
glossy ibis, pond heron and stork on an island

squabbled with egrets, a night heron,
and in the lagoon flocks of flamingo,

pale pink. One lifted wings and ran over the water
took off and flapped round in a circuit,

but the rest stayed still, sieving the water.
Dragonflies and mosquitos patrolled the air

and we were glad of some shade, a cool breeze,
before the road to the coast, Saintes Maries de la Mer.

By the next month, I know, because it happens,
flamingos and hoopoes will be back in Africa,

and I’ll be back in Scotland.

Colin Will
11/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 10

Fimbulwinter

Winter turned to wan and weary winter,
seeds stayed stubborn in the stone-hard earth,
snow flakes fell in a foul and freezing air,
ice rimed ridge and rig and runnel, snow
packed hard in folds, fields and shadowlands,
and the mires of missing summers.

That was the start of it; my kin starved last year
so I sailed south, cut free of sea-ice,
and slipped down the long loch to leads
of open water, and the sea roads to lands
I hoped were warmer. Landfall on an island
my forefathers’ folk settled and tilled,
parks for the beasts, wheelhouses for shelter,
but friendship and kinship do not sustain.
No feasting, for famine had struck at the homes by the shore,
and most had moved on, as I would tomorrow.

Coastal sailing, by headland and bay, not lodestone nor stars,
and inland the sight of white hills, lands locked in ice-grip
of the Frost Giants. Sons of Ymir, daughters of Freyr,
send greetings to Thor, we need the hammer Mjöllnir
to break the glass of this cold and to strengthen poor Sol.

Colin Will
10/04/2013

NoPoWriMo 09

puffin breast in sand
left by the outgoing tide –
a little white heart

Colin Will
09/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 08

Difficult to know
what a horse thinks,
but sometimes it’s obvious,
like the stud stallion
that time in France,
caught a whiff of mare
and that huge schlong
came out, embarrassing
the ladies of the choir,
and some of the tenors,
when the phrase
hung like a horse
came to life.

Other times, in a cold field,
wearing a stiff canvas rug
and the rain driven by a gale,
they just stand there, nothing else
for it. For hours. You imagine
their thoughts run slower,
blink of an eyelash –
and don’t they have beautiful lashes –
another image of the same field,
the same fence, another blink,
the same. Slow thoughts,
the most stoic of beasts.

Watch them run, warm Spring day,
new pasture, good company,
for the horse is nothing if not
in a herd. Know horse joy.

Colin Will
08/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 07

There was a shortcut, avoiding
the jammed main streets of Sorrento.

It wound down the hillside
in sharp turns, passing
gardens and small plots
strung with vines and lemon trees,
fruit ripening in September sun.

In backstreets, steel-shuttered lockups
where lemon juice and sugar
were mixed with pure alcohol
to make Limoncello,
sold from roadside booths,
cafes and bars.

It tastes good here,
and each maker’s spirit different.

Back home, the commercial stuff’s bland,
too sweet, less lemony,
and the paler sunshine makes
the setting too far from Naples,
Oh, far too far from Naples.

Colin Will
07/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 06

Watch the instruction manual

To change the fingers:
• Hold down the bump in the wrist
below the thumb
and close your fingers.
Reopen, supinate.
• Press the palm twice
to display the line
where your home is.
• Use thumb or ring finger
to advance or retard.
• Press scaphoid bone again
to return to fixed hands.

To change the way your hands wave:
• Hold the pinkie firmly
and press the nail five times.
• Press the thumb against a table
until the nail is flushed and pink.
• Cross ring and index fingers
to move your whole hand
to the desired position.
• Check your pulse with the vein
of your inner wrist.
• Cross your palm with silver,
check the life and heart lines.

To become alarmed:
• Shake your left hand five times.
• Shake your right hand ten times.
• Hold the left hand in warm water,
your right hand in iced water.
• Toggle by switching hands
between basins until
the desired setting is achieved.

Colin Will
06/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 05

napowrimo_05

The Soothmoother borrows a scythe

Let the blade’s weight
do the work. If the edge is keen
the cut slices the sward,
folds it over into a flat parcel
of meadowgrass and herbs.
Keep whetstone and water
tied to your belt.

Grip the handles on the snath,
swipe low, twist from the waist,
keep arms locked and knees loose.
Skim, step forward, skim,
step forward, the rhythm
drives a flat swath
across the field. How you do it,
create a frame of forces, a focus
on the cut line moving on,
and the sweet smell
of mown hay.

Colin Will
05/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 04

On the road South
houses begin brick,
but climate dries
and poverty grows,
and we see it
in the homes
people build.

On the land’s
granite spine
an unseen boundary
is crossed.
Now it’s mud-brick
and thatched roofs.
Neat villages, houses
all aligned West-faced
to Indonesia,
ancestral homeland.

Now in Bara land
with the forests
burned off,
tin-shack territory.

Then, wood walls,
in the roadside dirt,
ever-present chickens.

Finally, the stretch
between Toliara
and Ifaty, poorest
windowless scraps
of boards and plastic,
dirt roads – black mud
in wet season,
strung-out huts
overlook the barrier
reef, and the blue
Indian Ocean.

Colin Will
04/04/2013

NoPoWriMo 03

The big airliner glided in on final approach
for a landing at Beijing. Windows showed nothing
but cloud. Drop-down displays
showed altitude falling, engine notes
fell to a whisper. Forward of the wings
we couldn’t hear the flaps, but we heard
the ‘thunk’ as landing gear deployed.
Fuselage swayed slightly, shook a bit.

Then the engines roared and we lurched back up.
The pilot’s calm voice said because of poor visibility
we would go around and come back
from the Northern approach, slightly clearer.

And that’s what happened; we landed,
shaken a bit, still very tired from the long flight.
Our introduction to Chinese smog,
a scary go-around, and the 5 Ups:
Power Up, Nose Up, Gear Up, Flaps Up, Speak Up.

Colin Will
03/03/2013

NaPoWriMo 02

Waterworld, the seas that surround

the lands of all the earth, are temporary.

They grow and shrink to fill the spaces

between the plates that dodgem

over the planet’s crust.

Iapetus washed Gondwana shores,

the Panthallasic covered half the globe.

Sediments in Tethys formed the Gulf’s oil

before Atlantic opened. Today’s oceans

form familiar blue patterns on maps,

but they too will change with time

and tectonics. Some day the Pacific will close,

as continents come together

in a new Pangaea.

I look out on a smaller sea

that’s swung from land to water

as sea levels changed. Mammoth bones

and tree stumps from Doggerland

are dredged up in nets, when Britain

was a part of the main.

I’ve dabbled in it, paddled in it,

confirmed it’s cold, even in summer,

in this latitude. But the waters

that ring us know no barriers,

pass unflagged from Europe

to America, Africa, India

and circle the chill land at the heart

of the Southern Ocean.

Colin Will

02/04/2013

Prompts for NaPoWriMo

I've given myself this list of words to act as prompts. If I get stuck on a prompt I'll go to the next one. The first one worked OK. It may not be a complete poem, but there's enough there to work on.



volcano
ocean
cataract (eyes)
scythe
lemon
birthday
choir
teeth
lemur
film
wold
program (computer)
plague
birth
red squirrel with blond tail
flames
Ifaty (Madagascar)
Provence
Camargue
horses
passing out
snails
water lilies
corvids
grandmothers
the go-round at Beijing airport (scary)
no heroes
stove
newspaper
weasel
bridge
wine
gout
shieling

NaPoWriMo_01

Under the volcano
little tremors signal
rock-melt rising.

Old fissures open,
pushed by gas front
ahead of liquid magma.

Around the vent pressure drops
and the ground rips apart,
rises, pulverised, into cloud.

Lightning flashes white
against black smoke,
against golden lava.

Red rockets lift off,
rain rock warheads
on the ash slopes.

This is no place
for life, killing fumes
fall from the sky.

Colin Will
01/04/2013

Keepsakes

Keepsakes

My father kept a photo in his wallet,
as I do, as I know many others do.
Mine is of Jane, before we loved,
before our shared life started,
for she was always in my heart
from the first time we met.
His was a woman I did not know,
not my mother, an infatuee,
a besotting I knew nothing of,
a betrayal, probably only ever
in thought, an obsessive attachment,
almost certainly a one-sided non-affair.
He was constant in his way, held tight
his possessions, wife, children, house, car,
but hid a hollow deep within his core.


Colin Will

Six-fold symmetry

Six-fold symmetry

A deepening darkness over the sea,

a black curtain suspended from cloud.

A single snowflake. Then.

Hail of white pellets bouncing

on grey slabs.

The Miya River flows quickly

rushes snowmelt through the city.

Across the Yayoi Bridge, early market.

Large kaki fruit to eat now, ginkgo nuts,

a little taiko drum to take home.

The layer builds up, a gradual quilt,

fuzzy top. Silence.

Outside the trees, wind rises

across the fields. In the hills

a howl, a blast of white-cold.

Little drifts of powder snow

settle in the angles of Wall

and black, polished slabs. Slip-risk.

Near the harbour, a ring

of frozen sea-ice. A walk up-slope,

parasitic cone, the central crater

snow-filled, an icy disk seen through blizzard.

In the morning, tracks.

Night-deer. Owl-wings,

foot-scratches under the feed station,

a hare-trail with spots of strange blood.

Colin Will

Sorry

This is a poem a wrote a few years ago, but I've never sent it out or published it anywhere. I'm not sure if I will. I was only mistaken for Douglas Dunn once this time at StAnza.

Sorry, I’m not Douglas Dunn

Each year in St Andrews some strangers,

sometimes acquaintances,

greet me as if I’m the famous poet.

I let them past the first sentence,

maybe the second, noting the hint

of uncertainty entering the eyes

And then I tell them no, it’s me,

a poet too, though less well known,

similar in some ways, in others not.

I’m not the lyric poet of Terry Street;

much as I admire him, praise his craft,

his generosity, humanity, warmth.

My words try to photograph the spirits of place,

the kami of wildness of mountain and sea,

and the reefs of the unconscious.

Our histories are different, but that’s invisible;

personalities not evident across a room.

How are we resembled? Let me count the ways:

In stature, neither would pass

for basketballers, and in girth

it’s clear that jogging’s off our menus.

Silver hair, yes, though mine is slightly darker,

white beards certainly, though mine

unshaped, definitely less kempt.

We both wear glasses, I guess

myopia’s a gene we share

plus taste in frames.

Born the same mid-War year,

you West, me East, so that ensures

our accents differ, so to speak.

Careers in libraries paralleled,

you in Larkin’s Hull

and me among the books on rocks and plants.

There’s no outward sign these days

in either of us, of far-gone

clarinetting times, and didn’t you play alto too?

It’s down, I’m sure, to squarish outlines,

white, white beards and, I like to think

the kind eyes of two amiable men.

Colin Will

The Gerontion poem

This one was actually written in 2012, and I've been trying to place it in magazines, but without success so far. The Long Poem Magazine said no, but it's too long for most other magazines. The truth is I don't know what to do with it now, but at the same time I still like it. I think it has merit..

It came about after re-reading T.S. Eliot's poem Gerontion, which is why the name is mentioned in the poem.  I didn't want to just make a reflection of the Eliot original, most of which I still love - apart from the obviously anti-semitic sentiments. At the same time, I wanted to include my own classical referents, and to suggest, as does Eliot, a mind which jumps between several different worlds of thought. It's the way I think, and I think it reflects my life at 70 - as good a milestone as any.


On reaching the Biblical span

I

Here I am now, an old man, am qualified
to say that, though I don’t feel it.
I’m mired in memory, and my knees ache.
I’d rather look forward than back,
but the sinuous past slithers
to the top layer of the cortex.

The fence is mended
that kept outsiders from looking in,
but now there are gaps, lines of sight
where we can see the passers-by,
and therefore they can see us.
We’ll make a screen with bushes,
potted shrubs, but nothing clinging,
nothing to rot the nice new timber.

It was in that dire March before Desert Storm,
with warplanes cutting Dunbar air into noisy slices,
that I painted the old fence red.
I left Labour then. And not looked back.
Lies – of course I have.

The snowdrops are dirty now, a single aconite –
yellow cup, green frills – sits on the mound of earth.
Crocuses scatter colour over the grey soil,
daffodils without a Wordsworth in sight
have not yet broken open, momentarily they’re
yellow-tipped erections, flanked by starflowers.
I know their botanical names, Latin epithets,
but why would I use them? Few of us do.

Colours are limited, simplified,
as Hiroshige, landscape painter, print-maker,
rendered views round Edo,
pictured the stations of the Tokaido.
I’ve walked the section at Hakone,
the massive trunks of hinoki cypress
beside Lake Ashi, the orange-painted tori.

II

Madrid is Gallery City, plus tapas.
Velázquez, Goya, Bosch, in the Prado,
from the King’s court to the Black Paintings,
and the Garden of Earthly Delights,
so often seen in books, here artist-sized.
I stood in front of Guernica, stunned, in the Reina Sofia,
and for study reasons the Thyssen
shows the works in chronological order.

With Buddha it’s the mind,
not the man, that matters,
so the focus is on thought,
not treacherous history.

Currywurst mit Pommes
in Frankfurt Zoo, the crashed Grzimek plane
zebra-striped, in the zebra enclosure,
the kingfisher on the branch over the water
safe inside the tiger’s soggy paddock,
the sun bears licking old tyres
smeared with honey.

Oysters, stuffed quail, iles flottante
in Brasserie Bofinger, near l’Opera Bastille,
our little hotel somewhere in the 12me arrondissement.
At night I tried to read a street map
and first found my eyesight failing.

The Abbaye at Fontevraud, empty tombs
of Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard I,
Lionheart, who died nearby at Chinon,
where we saw the Fête Medieval,
the roasting pig, the smoke, fancy dress,
then back on our bikes,
a circuit de degustation.

III

We stay alive longer,
so we need some latitude
in the bands called ages.
When’s middle age? What number
do you put against ‘old’?
Gerontion, where do you fit now?
Between an earlier puberty
and the actuarial approach of maggots,
we spread ourselves thinner through time –
our money’s thinner too.

Of course I blame the banks, the bankers,
but greed’s pretty universal, no?

The red-tops are more effective
than Pol Pot, or Mao’s red revolution,
at reinforcing prejudice, dumbing down,
suppressing attainment, ambition,
glorying the cult of personality.

In the beginning was the Planck Era,
void without form, where there are no names
for the infinitesimal parts of seconds.
Then, give or take a yocto, quarks and anti-quarks
whizzed about in a soup of bosons.
Still no matter, until, after atoms formed,
there was light – had room to move.

Sleeper time runs backwards.
This morning I woke at 6:30, slept
until 4:20, then lay awake
through the fives and sixes – again -
until seven, when I could respectably rise.

IV

So what happens next? I could sit here,
on the Orion Arm of the Milky Way,
near the Aquila Rift, looking for exo-planets,
playing Beethoven’s Ninth,
as the world’s crust spreads like finger nails,
contemplating scenarios, mass extinctions,
and my own. Better to move about,
experience events, see what’s out there,
not what’s in here, indexed in the amygdala
for recall and relevance.

Belief’s an odd bugger. Some things
I take on trust, can’t prove. Is that
what belief is? If the smallest thing
is true, and ten small things
make one large, then that’s true,
and the world is true, and the way
the world works is the way
the world works. Complexity
is just life not yet examined
in sufficient detail.
There is only the real,
a fractal simplicity and a scale factor
to set level of difficulty.

From the Basque refugia
coast-hoppers travelled west
and north, subsisting on shellfish
and forage from the fringing forest.
Sooner or later settlements rooted
in favoured places, round-houses
mushroomed along the western shores.
Folk lived and loved, spoke Old Welsh,
with variations.
I’ve got that gene marker,
the one for 'first farmers',
the plain vanilla ancient lineage
without overprints; the bus pass
to all the lost dead nations
and the lands before nations had names.

On windy nights, the window ventilators
moan and howl in a way I’ve come to find
appropriate. What else can you do
against the wind, but summon noisy spirits?

Which malt tonight? Phenolic Laphroaig?
Flowery Glenkinchie? Warming Linkwood?
Rough-edged Glen Garioch? Unctious Balvenie?

I sit here with the Gold Medal of old age,
in a warm, tight room walled with books
and over my head more books.
It has been a good day
and now I am tired. Tomorrow
can take care of itself.



Colin Will