Poems
By Lloyd Alan Fletcher
This is a small sampling, and doesn't include any work that is out in the cold cruel world looking for a place to be published, nor any that is about to be published, nor any that is published in the current issue of any magazine or otherwise precluded due to rights agreement.
All works Copyright Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1994-1999, all rights reserved
Comments or complaints? Send me email
(allem@blueyonder.co.uk)
Open form, formal; serious, sad, strange.
The beauty and brutality of the process.
Watch out for falling clichés!
Attempts at parody, satire, sarcasm, surrealism:
For Cristina
Trees for Crucifixion
No one minds the trees that grow straight and tall,
but those that sprawl, arching, crooked, darkly
scratch the brittle windows of our fears,
and, called diseased, restrained with ropes
are hacked down, or fall
to build our stupid sacrifice.
Trees that bend against the wind are wont to shape it,
turn the howling storm's song to their own,
but sooner face the ax of hateful adoration
that seeks the strangest wood of all.
Wind mourns through dead branches,
requiem whispers repeat:
Vicious, Moon
Owen, Curtis
Hendrix Lennon
Joplin Cass
Morrison
Cobain.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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(A shorter version, comprising the first four 3-line stanzas, appeared in Mind in Motion, Apple Valley, CA, Issue 40, Fall 1996, page 30)
1
I believe tornadoes are made
from butterfly wings
and all the lies told about god.
I believe that lightning
curses the air
when too many people are screaming.
I believe that the uprush of mountains
is the earth's way of escaping us;
the forest is its other hiding place.
And I'm afraid
that blood is the body's lubricant
to free ourselves from reason.
2
I don't like it, but
I believe in will, not free will.
Based on the evidence,
I conclude biology is the inescapable
mirror in which future selves repeat
endless mistakes perfectly.
They have no choice.
3
I believe that we were born to grow
and any "purpose" in our lives
is convenient fantasy, contrived
as an anchor for the directionless.
But if imposed
by some externality,
then that purpose is not our own
and we become like bricks
in an infinite crumbling wall,
and I do not believe
that I am one of those at all.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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(In October 1919, 31 men were lost when the man-engine collapsed at the Levant mine in Cornwall. Appeared in Echoes, Volume 3, Number 5, 1997, page 23.)
A snap
like the breaking of a Titan's shoulder blade
somewhere in the upper dark of candle stars
as if God's ladder
has parted from the world, severing
a way to heaven.
October's men look up
as if in prayer
and give a final curse.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1997
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(Appeared in Echoes, Volume 3, Number 5, 1997, page 23.)
They had built a cathedral down there
or rather, carved it
black from black, heaving
in the vaulted cavern,
the wooden ribs of the stull
arched and clinging
to the vastness of the holy stope.
Slicing into the slanted lode,
they drove rock into pillars,
slim buttresses, unworldly bridges:
dark whispers of rock
mediators between the chasms,
underlings to two thousand feet of planet.
Children at the mother lode
thrusting timbers like prodigious prayers into the vault
as if to stay a matchstick tower already creaking
in its sermon of dust. Worshippers
at the alter of tin
scraping at the floor above the crypt
foundation of the earth, sensing
perhaps, in their deepest ear
that terrible heaven above them
straining to fill the void
with its dark thunder.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1997
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(Appeared in The Lucid
Stone, Issue 7, Fall 1996, The Usual Suspects & Associates, Scottsdale,
AZ, page 38)
Clearing the Coastal Path
Old Sam finds himself
down in the dip
where the ponies are
muzzling dew drops
from the gorse
and the sea breeze
is stifled
as the sun settles
for a morning
building up the fires
in the stones on the parched path.
Old Sam
puts his back into the day,
cuts back the shade
from the overhanging hedge, because
it too must take its share
of this scorching
of his bony shoulders
in a second-hand shirt
and the ruined red neck
above a frayed collar
and his blessed, blistered hands
stroking back the air with the scythe
as if he had been the one
who carved all the granite wrinkles
in this entire coast.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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(Appeared in The Lucid
Stone, Issue 7, Fall 1996, The Usual Suspects & Associates, Scottsdale,
AZ, page 15)
Brushfire Aftermath
This is the secret the moor keeps
beneath its coarse coat. The stench
of the soil's immolation
is like gunpowder.
Rocks are battlefield dead
trapped in barbwire confusion.
Skeletal gorse baked in the ashes
of smoke-like earth, shivers nakedly,
its stumbling holes betrayed.
Its skin-assaulting spines, blunt
as match ends, pull pitifully
at the ankles of trampling feet.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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(A very slightly different previous version appeared in Echoes, Volume 3, Number 3, Summer 1996, pp 40-41.)
Tales Untold
There is a photograph of you
behind the heaped abandoned shapes
of broken china, fractured glass,
and dusty postcards of the coast,
the lifeboat lantern's rusted shell,
the Dunkirk plaque the king bestowed,
and powder horns from Spanish wrecks
you found beneath the summer tide
a life ago in Housel Bay.
The picture speaks the silent words
when craftsmanship would spin the yarn:
you, bent and curled into your work
as loving waves caress the bow;
the flint-edge lips and fire eyes
the wrinkled ocean-beaten face,
and denim hung like weathered skin
on sturdy limbs that tamed the wind.
The lobster pots of hand-cut cane
like idle boulders, tumble-stacked
inside the sea-stained wooden skiff
you rowed round Lizard Point to find
the war ships limping home when you were ten...
Nets hung from nails like shrouds for those
you lost at sea in war and work...
The green glass floats you told me once
were monster's eyes from granite caves...
Neat coils of endless winding rope
on which, you said, you lowered gifts
to faithful mermaid weather witch
beyond Black Head where currents clash...
Creased with bait knife battle scars,
your hands entwine and charm the rope
that whispers in that secret way
of ancient arts not told in tales...
Your sacred tools that crafted lives
are lost in dusty lofts or rest
below Minerva's warping deck
as she lies rotting in the weeds...
Unwritten histories scattered now
across the fields and beaten shore
and sunken in the silent soil
that muffles stories graves could tell.
The photograph of you remains
among a host of forgotten things.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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(Appeared in The Lucid Stone, Issue 6, Summer 1996, The Usual Suspects & Associates, Scottsdale, AZ, page 51)
September Cornfield Dawn
Something lingers
in the field that seems like a lake bed of pewter
shimmering under slanting light.
Dry unpleasant spikes--the corn stalks
cut off at the knees--will be out of their misery soon.
The copse squats on the edge of mist, ponderous
as an island, but alive with crow chatter,
waiting for the return of the tide
from directions of machine voices
coughing coldly into life over hedgerows.
His shadow rises from the invisible
into the corner of an eye: there,
stranded and waving, stuck fast in the dry middle
as if rehearsing for a drowning, he moves
like a human for an astigmatic moment
stretching out his hopeless hands to grasp
at the feet of any damn crow
that comes back to mock.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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(Appeared in The Lucid Stone, Issue 5, Spring 1996, The Usual Suspects & Associates, Scottsdale, AZ, pp 14-15)
The Hedge Witch
just stepped out into the road
like a piece of the fog torn loose:
sod-green coat over mud-shod boots;
her head scarf, colour of the granite,
fought back tendrils of hair like tangled gorse;
and eyes that mirrored the fierce unseeable sea.
stopped the car with a fluttering hand
like a run-down raven's frantic wing,
a suicide rooted to the screeching lane,
as if hailing a phantom bus
strayed from the Helston road to search the fog
and gather odd bits of the fields that walked abroad.
scented the car's leather insides with the acid musk
of soil and fern, unwashed skin, sweat-soaked cloth,
and woodsmoke; muttered enough
pointed words to send us to, "Yonder field
where there are horses." Rain began
to fling itself from the lowering sky.
stabbed a dirty finger's twig
at a spot not two hundred yards further
up the narrow lane, where we arrived after decades
of silent seconds: a towering hedge, its hidden field
guarding flirting shapes of animals,
perhaps, whose sod-soft thundering shook the moor.
fled to the soaking air, fumbled through
a stammered farewell: "They need me now."
No brief thanks but a curious wave,
an incantation over us.
She parted the thick darkness
where the hedge might have held a gate
melted to the mist-focused field beyond.
The thundering ceased. We drove on. Silent,
dry and sober, wondering again at the hints
of shapes tumbled on the brooding Celtic land,
charmed. My sister broke the spell of silence:
"She was a witch," she said, all matter of fact.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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(Appeared in Echoes, #12, March/April 1996.)
The orchard in a childish season
brought bulging crates, a harvest full
of boxes stacked to brimming in the wagon
pulled behind the red tractor Father steered
one handed, easy, down the avenue
of champion trees that shivered in their nakedness.
The boy that ran along behind
played the part of eager son to father,
shrub to tree, or bud to ripened fruit.
He caught the strays that tumbled
from the pile to keep the cargo perfect:
sweet with sour, the blemished with the pure;
apples, plums, sweet pears, and mighty
harsh cookers, bigger than even Father's fist,
smooth as the skin-tight face so grave
it seemed he never tasted fruit. Not sweet, not sour.
Along his straight-cut road of trees
the fruit was either good or bad.
Years pass. The Fall has come again.
The trees look starved, anemic bark is cracked,
ashamed of fruit that dies to compost
at their rooted feet, the sickly branches
bending low, although unburdened by their dead.
The weighty smell of fallen fruit
invades the field grown high and rough
as it had never been when sweetest smells
were those of freshly mown-down grass
churned up by the hearty wheels of the tractor
that falls rustily to bits in the evening
of what was once the vegetable patch.
The path that Father drove in the engine's drowning
wake, the boy pursued to catch the tumblers
for a dozen harvests, as if together
they bore some fruit, some autumn burden,
an industry more profitable than the reaping
of silence they've shared since then.
The path has lost its way now in the weeds;
tire tracks, long turned back to mud,
no longer reach the orchard gate that hides
beneath the ragged hedgerow's darkening face.
The son surveys the trees; their shadow waifs
will haunt the coming dusk. Inside the silent house
the old man draws the curtains
against the waning of the autumn sun.
Back to the list of poems
(Appeared in Mind in Motion, Apple Valley, CA, Issue 38, Spring 1996, page 28)
It was not just
the serpent that he told--
a snake that once had legs,
presumably--before crawling off
to fill his belly with the dust.
It must have been, as well,
the other two he ordered:
Be fruitful and multiply
like a virus,
and fill the earth
with concrete,
subdue it
with cement,
and have dominion
over the dust
you'll eat.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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(Appeared in Sevenoaks Journal, May 1995, Volume 2, Issue 2, Black Oak Press, Lambertville, NJ, page 14; you also might stumble across it if you follow some of the links in
Peter Howard's
Midwinter Fair hypertext poem.)
Dunes are ranked high in defiance of the sky,
lit with green fire sweeping down
in tufts and furrows on burning white.
Shadows are stark, evil
in their depth against the sun;
Wind and sea cannot chase away
these silhouettes cast in sharp bronze or molten silica.
Sand burns my hands as I climb the steepest slope
towards a promised summit and sentinel cliffs beyond.
Sand escapes my footprints,
an avalanche of glittering in the grass.
A shadow. At my shadow's head.
Shouts of warning from below.
A stain of black anger against the sun
hovers twitch-winged, indignant,
descends to tear pieces from my dark twin.
But the claws are real and in my hair
like the bite of sun on grass.
I risk a swipe with one hand,
lose balance, tumbling back in my own avalanche.
Still the gull rises and falls
to strike at the intruder.
At the bottom again, the slope is steeper than before,
hotter against bare skin, marked with the sun's plain warning:
The green-crested summit hides her treasure, safe now.
She will not let me climb again.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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A crow has caught itself up on the wire
above the gate, a mockery in black
of eagles for our Burgermeister's head
to pass beneath. The other crows have fled
the pits, the corpses piled, and stand away
respectfully, as do the men in coats
and hats in wringing hands survey the edge
to see, at last, those things we wanted
not to see. The SS guards, made free by work
at digging graves, now drag the shriveled things
as we are forced to watch. The lines of folk
march in to stare, then sob like children shocked
by mummies in museums. Or is it dread
that we have seen our souls when they are dead?
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Dead stream summer
of sun-bleached roads, the parched boulders
like dried skulls
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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We're charmed by ocean postcard blue,
the purple-heathered cliff-top,
the black and yellow gorse trembling
in a warming breeze, and the impossible
architecture of dead men
like gray outposts against the sea.
How did the miner care for the ragged surf?
tearing itself against granite
with his thousand feet to climb beneath
a wind-assaulted shore, to struggle
hand to filthy hand with slippery beasts
of water and rock, capricious imps
of black powder, and the monstrous outbursts
of engines? What was scenic then?
when the spires of the church of industry
spewed sulfur in the wind, and the roar
of the deadly boilers played crashing duets
with the rattle of the stamps;
and arsenic works separated chemicals
in catacombs of granite; the stark ponds lay
like spills of weeping from the wounded edges
of the moor, the heaps of plundered rubble
lingering for a century of grass
to cover up its shame; and above all,
the beam engines, dipping their massive oiled heads
in squall-anointed prayer for those who trod
the rotten ladder road, piercing the black layers
of the past, to hammer a mean life,
to beat a grim passage across their wasteland,
all the while keeping one wary eye
on the violent scenery.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
See a picture of Botallack.
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Of course I want
to sit at home
quaffing poetry
by the tome, ignoring
the phone and the hopeless
chill of my unpaid
electric bill. I'm finite,
frail and full of holes.
I leak. So I'd rather not
waste my numbered days
in drought: the more
I drink,
the more I think,
the longer it takes
to drain me empty.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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Don't answer the midnight phone
when it strikes the air
with a nightmare kiss,
bringing a mortal news.
Don't reach for the urgent alarm
when the birds have not
yet broken the dawn
and time is a prisoner of sleep.
Politely decline to accept
the rousing charge,
the shaker of dreams
and the bones of the deeply asleep.
Ignore the electric knell,
that will open your eyes
and herald the start
of nervous glances, knowing
knowing, that in some white room
a practiced hand pulls up a sheet
a doctor quickly writes a note
picks up a phone which you
will answer anyway,
already knowing.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Each day is an adventure
of stepping into blur-filled streams
of snarling metal and flaming gasoline,
breaking the curb's edge
to plant a foot in the tentative air
of a heart-in-mouth, life-in-hand moment.
I open negotiations with the unseen traffic;
the stakes are just
embarrassment or death.
There is nothing coming
except common dangers, badly glimpsed,
a best-guess in the fog-mirror
of scarred retinas.
It is thirty years
since the last time I lost the bet: run down,
but the triumph of standing again
in the same bloody road.
Decades of near misses,
quick escapes and screeching brakes are nothing
to the thrill of reaching
the other side.
To cross that gray gulf and spite
the accidents of birth,
turn life's stoplight green
for a moment
anything is possible,
until the next block
and the next street rumbles
tempting death,
each curb a precipice,
each brink of anguished memory
a chance to prove flesh,
defy congenital fate.
The road's a bitter testing edge
where I indulge a moment's thought
of sighted unseen millions
who dare not cross this street at all.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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We are talking like cannon
echoing their bluster across the valley
Smoke clears;
a moment to breathe
carefully, and count our dead,
recoup the bloody thoughts, before
we begin the battle all over again
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Down Billy Lane we
skidded on damp leaves and air
and childish yelps
to the bottom where grass grew
tall before the M5 came through.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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A ghostly shape
beneath the brown surface shudders:
a monstrous pike?
breaks into focus, becomes
the sad skin of a dead whippet.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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I am required to stare.
Pakistan or Burma? Bangladesh? (I forget)
or a thousand other places where fires
smolder at the surface, rage below:
Young men with bricks, sticks, pipes from broken chairs.
The caption says "students."
I try to picture feral grins
and blood stained shirts arrayed in classrooms:
Chatter, laughter, learned voices,
eager arms outstretched to answer questions,
challenge lies.
But these raised hands throw rock salutes
and a bloody noose.
These mouths drip the questions of vultures
hungry to rend the corpse
that hangs hell-mouthed above them
staining its own feet red.
The caption says "Even the corpses must be beaten,"
but does not explain in which lesson they learned
that after the quick penalty of death,
disfigurement drives home the point
that this is not someone with whom they sat last week
but a bloody evil thing that must be purged.
This pictured death is motionless
in black and white; imagined screams are silent.
But if I saw this in the flickering moment of accustomed eyes,
sober as a news anchor's head,
I could not dip my hand into this photograph,
And taste his blood.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Now comes the ritual. Father's mind
has salivated thoughts since breakfast.
He looms above the bird, carving knife and fork
poised like two stakes for Dracula in his final coffin,
a priest robed in perspiration and reluctantly-festive red.
He sneers at the tinsel draped in impudent waves
on the opposite wall. The congregation don napkins
nervously, ready for any random bits of shrapnel
fired from the pulpit. "So," he begins,
and the first cut is made. "Let us" STAB
"be thankful for family," CUT. Juices flow.
Mother lowers her eyes in private prayer.
"And for the gifts they bring." Each word
cuts a precisely brutal slice, dribbles
turkey juice. "Let us be grateful
for children" STAB "and what they marry," CUT.
STAB. The turkey starts to struggle,
clenches a pierced breast around silver tines.
Father grits his teeth, "And their offspring,"
CUT. The fork holds tight as if a defiant fleshy fist
hides in the heart of the dead bird. Father accuses Mother
with his eyes. Wrenches the fork with a hiss
of hot escaping air. The fowl spits grease onto his tie.
He stares at it, the assembled supplicants, the knife.
And with a final swirling cythe-like cut
he cleaves the thing in half.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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(The "Fabulous Find of the Month" for May 1997 in A Little Poetry.)
The sky
curses lightning,
burns holes around our feet;
insane, we leave the tent to trap
the storm.
Canvas
flaps, indignant
at being left alone
to wrestle nature's madness here,
the rain.
Inside
the KOA
we drip dry, shoot pool, drink
Cokes so cold they bite our fingers
like hail.
The storm
moves on at last
to mumble further East,
bombard the Dakotas; we run
outside.
The tent
out here alone
still trembles, and has leaked.
Tonight, we sleep outside beneath
that sky.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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(Appeared in Mind in Motion, Apple Valley, CA, Issue 38, Spring 1996, page 56)
Those thoughts inside my head I took as words
that God had placed to set me on the way:
As Paul had seen the light, so I had heard
a voice to be obeyed without delay.
But still, I'd learned to question every law
to understand if it was good or bad.
I knew no sin to reason "What's it for?"
In fact, there was the chance my brain was mad.
The answer from the voice was clear indeed:
He said I was insane with paradox,
that if I had a voice in me, the need
for God was dead, and I should shut the box.
"No God?," I cried, "No maker of the rules?"
"There is," he sighed then died, "It's you, you fool!"
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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(Appeared in Sevenoaks Journal, May 1995, Volume 2, Issue 2, Black Oak Press, Lambertville, NJ, page 15)
The Etymology of Corruption
From these windows
we look down on old names that
Black Death
carved on signposts in the wake of centuries.
This house wrapped in placid green
confronts
Pestilence Lane,
where carts have cut through hedgerows
like Medieval surgeon's knives to
Black Pits
where they flung corpses torn from diseased homes,
returned them to the soil.
This house on top of
Flaming Hill
stands above a village named for burning
where they scorched a foolish circle in the trees
in vain attempts to staunch the plague,
ward off unwanted guests.
How appropriate
that from these windows
we survey the history of families torn apart
by unbidden shadows that knocked
with rotting hands on unwelcoming doors.
There are things far worse than Death.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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(Placed third in the 1995 Writer's Digest Writing Competition, unrhymed poem category)
First, throw away this recipe. Then learn
to cook yourself; don't be a slave
to master chefs. But taste them, know
what food you like, where your utensils are.
Preheat the mind to 98.6 degrees.
Then chill, and feel ideas condense
from fast nerves into ink-like blood
excruciating from your finger tips.
Now let it sit, coagulate,
then blend it well with ancient zest.
Reform it in your chosen mold, adjust
its shape, remove the fat.
Next, marinade a little while
in logic--not till overdone: let it be
raw, with the life blood still in it.
Do this many times until it burns
to be unleashed,
naked and angry on the world.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Descending at last from the steaming heap of the day,
tie loose, shoes shed, he views the morning paper
with a weary kind of dread. The microwave
demands its evening meal, the TV shows
an idle tempting face. Instead, he sinks into
his chair and finds the pad, the pen. It's getting late.
Something emerges from the quagmire of his mind,
synapses chattering awake as it comes,
shapeless from its sleep cave, snapping neurons
to attention. He stares at the stacks of books unread,
thinks of letters waiting to be written
too many years too late
into the distant aching of friendships.
He peers into the beckoning night
as the beast comes out, picks up his pen
and begins to write.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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Alone with these intimidations,
little brats prodding you
running away squealing
"Can't catch me!"
You offer a parental sigh,
hold on to the edges of the desk.
You'd like to raise the pen like a dagger
and skewer the little bastards. Instead,
you take a deep breath,
close your eyes and count to ten.
Locate them like radar, shadows
sinking through your retinas.
And you have them!
drag them by the wrist and make them
sit down on the page and behave
like good little poems
while you draw rapid lines and circles
around their inexpressible images.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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There is no real getting it right
only this orbit of a spiral
closing in, circling yourself warily,
dropping for ever
onto the asymptotic eye
of perfection.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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For Vera Gibbins, 1914-1997
In Vera's Garden
Her laughter lingers like the breeze in spring
that nods the heads of roses, daffodils,
and sheds the tearful blossom round our feet.
Her smile reflects in petal spattered pond,
a joy of life in nature's earthy song.
These things remain. Life's cycle turns again,
insists that summer softens in our hands;
the roses, beckoned by the soil, must fade;
no light can keep the leaves upon the bough,
or else deny the beauty of the rose:
the new growth thrives on what has gone before.
So in this blood-bound sentimental rite
let's sow one vow: that she'll forever walk
in places where our love for her still grows.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1997
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Mine is the color of old bark and apple trees,
Worcestershire meadows and leafy lanes;
Mine is the color of red brick in school yards
and disciplined bruises from masters with canes.
He bore the color of football pitch skirmishes,
leather boot tokens of games in the mud,
and sanguine with terrible moments of glory,
was blemished by broken nose, bruises and blood.
He took on the tincture of oak-timbered public house,
brown ale and barley wine, tea, eggs with chips;
and tarnished with stigmas of family drunkenness,
blood of an uncle fell pissed from a bridge.
Mine is the color of Mesopotamia,
fair English skin under burnishing sun;
Mine is the color of war under desert sky,
bronzed skin and medals not fought for, but won.
He shone with the sureness of lighthouses blazing
in African darkwoods sunk back from the shore,
not dimmed by the pallor of children left fatherless,
pasty and rusty-eyed, barred from the door.
He wore the stains of dentures and cigarettes
and five o-clock shadow on stiff upper lip;
He bathed in the drabness of gas masks and ration books,
shelters from air raids where rainwater dripped.
Mine is the color of finger-torn telegrams,
sepia pictures of loved ones now gone;
Mine is the color of jungle-eyed Burma
where evil and khaki lost sons to the Sun.
He burned with the fury of foundry-bright embers,
white-heated metal, the light of the day;
He cooled to the languor of dull winter evenings,
cycling home in the pay-packet gray.
He chilled to the darkness of open-mouthed shopping bags
hauled up the hill through the drizzle-washed gloom;
But warmed to the brightness of green English vegetables
eaten alone in the silent front room.
Mine is the color of gardener's fingertips,
Black Country earthiness, heart attack toil;
Mine is the color of marrows and rhubarb,
ordered like soldiers, his friends from the soil.
He took on the semblance of back rooms in darkness,
mildew-stained bedrooms he closed to the light;
His hands lost their color to ice-bitten winters
from counting the pennies and drafts in the night.
He gleamed with the power of order and discipline,
spartan and crisp like the favored white shirt;
And bloomed with the hue of fond rhododendrons
polkadot-blemished with back alley dirt.
Mine is the color of last words unspoken,
the pride and the passion an undisclosed blaze;
Mine is the color of working class sentiments
stained by the fog of Victorian ways.
Was mine the color of sallow-fleshed hunger,
shiny and yellow in hospital white?
Mine was the color of bright eyes that faded
like bottomless shafts that had sucked up the light.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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What were you then, some kind of ancient beast?
Newfoundland ogre wrapped in Labrador?
That thunder bark, the heart as big as night, your
daft tail curled up while herding cats. Not least
among such random traits: those ears! to feast
with laughter on their off-kilter flap, or
scratch the barrel chest, insistent paw
demanding more when finally attention ceased.
It rained today, but your coat would've simply shed
our tears: you chasing down the endless days
to rout imagined foes and show us how
to growl demons from their nightmare bed.
How shall we live now that your crazy ways
are memory? We wonder what you're chasing now.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Stand atop this drystone wall
that delves the valley, crowns the rise;
gaze across these cliffs and fields,
silent but for ravens' cries.
Climb the snake-backed trail towards
the ancient North, the Norman tower;
listen for the silenced sermon,
amid the tombs and meadow flower.
Stroll among those weathered sentries,
watchers, cold as wind or waves;
and ponder as the sea below,
among the long forgotten graves.
Through the lych gate's broken arms,
like sights along the vanquished bow,
find the lonely Celtic downs
where giant iron structures grow,
there sprouted as if, by ogre's hand,
seeds were flung to flimsy earth,
as final tribute monument
or chains about the forger's girth
that cast their shadow links beneath
the moon, or some forgotten place.
To spurn the land, towards the night,
each turns a burnished empty face.
And yet, unknown, beneath those feet,
the aged granite phantom forms:
an other rounded, hand-hewn shape,
that haunts the mist, the night, the dawn.
Discreet as grave or humbled shack,
the tumbled, moss-strewn, ravaged stones
sleep still in damp and darkened cairn
where long ago there once were bones.
Look back along this line towards
the tomb, the church, the wall, the cliffs,
the house of rock and slate and straw
and timbers saved from sundered ships,
its weathered face set sternly as
a sea wall fights the winds of change:
a house that's built on stolen time,
and deathless stones from every age.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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Something descends
upon
a real dead
sparrow
dazed with red
slaughter
like cranberried
turkeys.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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#XVIII:
Her Response
Shall I assault you in the new mown hay?
You are so ugly and so desperate:
rough hands that claw, the stinking breath. You say
that summer burns too hot upon your pate
and makes the cider speak your filthy lines
with barnyard-taught jesticulations trimmed,
that all the glares I give to you are signs
to tempt your lustful course. And so, undimmed
by facts or time, your ardor will not fade
nor blunt itself upon remarks I throw
nor cool to death amid the drunken shade.
Your groin confronts me any where I go:
so long as you must breathe and hamper me,
come close, and feel the ardor of my knee.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1996
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I sat outside the kitchen's hell
with too-tight tie and shiny shoes
while chefs in shifts too turns to cook
with me as meatball for their stew.
Her father grilled me first of all.
On burning coals of blistered fear,
he turned me in the smoky air
and mumbled menus through his beer.
Next her mother battered me
with fluffy eggs and sweetened flour.
She sugar coated head to foot,
then primed me with a whiskey sour.
Her sister had me fried with glee
in pepper sauce and spitting oil.
She cooked me like a nervous fish;
I sputtered to a fevered boil.
The final touch her brother gave
with relish and Indifferent sauce
of dull disdain that he'd refined
on other meats before this course.
So when, at last, she came down stairs
to find me sweating like boiled ham,
I swore an oath in Larkin's name
I'd never be a family man.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Yes, very smart! How did you think of that?
The art: to stab a dictionary with pins
and fabricate a sentence round the words
obscure you found impaled upon the page.
Or did you cull from conversations half
unheard, and references too erudite
for me to share, to render in that tone
of nameless secrets whispered out of range?
I bow before Your Potent Private Grace!
that shows the world you're cleverer than I,
regret I made an insult just to try
and read this thing. Your poet's dagger bursts
the page, my sense of self. So, thanks: I'll keep
my cash, and put your book back on the shelf.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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He couldn't cut it as a talk show host
despite a sponsor's name that none could beat,
and the eloquent gifts of the holy ghost.
The show's producers found him too discreet,
"You fail to meet the listening market's need!
Where is the bile, the bluster and disgust?
The outraged rant on which our listeners feed?
You've got to whip those callers sore. You must!"
He said, "But everyone who's angry will
be judged. Be quick to hear and slow to speak,
be peacemakers, and let your wrath be still."
"You're fired!" they cried, "You'll tell us next the meek
will rule!" They hired a market-savvy sage
instead. Now Satan's show is all the rage.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Can there be simpler words than these that look
as if you plucked them from a manual
on how to paint between the dots, a book?
The characters whose names begin in full
like formal memoranda issued thus:
to Honored Hero Doctor Ryan; dry
and dense as CIA reports that must
inspire in us a simple wonder: WHY?
should readers plod on through the hundredth page
of spastic prose and uneventful plot
before a mechanistic subterfuge
entraps the mind to ponder who or what
with patriotic gaming trick will kill
a character so bland, his death's the thrill.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Oddoe spake Brum nuh-mowwer. Well, perhaps
a twinge just now and then, as rising gout
reminds the joints: there is so much to get
rid of. Or is it like spasmodic returns
to dearly dreary working class
backstreets, a wish to be remembered?
We are dilute. Or is it drowned?
in the wash of global tides: Undercurrents
of slightly less ridiculous "Less-toh"
and things I've trodden on the Pennine way,
the fishy scent of Cornish coves. There is
a war on now: Identity's the prize.
Somewhere down deep, shouting for its own voice
is buried Black Country: hybrid itself,
fighting up out of a coal pit, dueling
with Oxbridge erudite my father learned
fighting his way out of a factory.
Utter confusion! To reconcile, or still
be strange and let that Texan twang that's sung
its incongruities in class, laughed at
like the new boy orphan child of mother's tongue.
What is it that psychotherapists diagnose
for trendy MPD? Unleash them all
to have their say: Be at peace with your selves?
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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Doctor Darby wipes his brow
and listens for a sound below
that says the incised soil has found
some questions of its own to sow.
Will tractors or a trowel unearth
the secrets of this place, in fact?
And find a treasure map in mud
obituaries that boots have tracked?
Will strivings in the dirt unlock
a hidden door, unhinge a box?
a coffin lid nailed down to hide
a world of clues beneath the rocks?
Will anxious digging down fill up
a cistern's catalog again
with dirt-corrupted paper ghosts
or buried metal talismen?
Doctor Darby hunkers down,
and cocks his head to listen for
the murmuring grown louder now
than nightmares that he's had before.
Geometries of roads entwine
the barrows wheeled about to bring
an ancient eager voice that might
have freed itself from groveling.
Shadows rise as levels fall
to meet the modern human face
with flints and bricks and foolish gold
that mocks the Doctor's futile race
to reconstruct elusive past
and leave it to the tender care
of drab museums where theory binds
the stacks that he abandons there.
Doctor Darby meets his fear
that in some morning's misty lull,
a scrabbling in the ardent pit
reveals an ancient other's skull
that seeks with hollow knowing eyes
invaders who have shaken sleep,
its boney hands, to his surprise,
are slowly digging upwards.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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I wonder if his log recorded
incidents of being boarded,
embarrassment, or some regret,
to leave me standing in the wet?
Survivors write the history books,
and I'm not sure the others looked:
too rushed against expanding sea
to see ought but their urgency
Waist high it was when wading through
to ask him if he needed crew:
"A pair of strong and willing arms
to save this sinner's skin from harm?"
With righteous grin he shut the door;
(It was in fact, he said, the Law!)
And left me splashing frantically
until I found a floating tree.
On that old log I ran aground
in worldly parts 'til then unfound,
and waited for the fruitful tide
to wash ashore who's now my bride.
I have no idea what became of the Noahs.
© Lloyd Alan Fletcher, 1995
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