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