This morning in November in the bar
of the Angel there is an open fire.
I tell you this so you imagine it
as though the bar in the Angel were a
place that has been given to itself, full
of itself, filled with the things there are in
here, such as the fire. Not the words but the
flames.
-- R.F. Langley, 'Skrymir's Glove'
uphill to Alstonefield, sinking with night into the
George Inn with chicken and chips, mild and
Jamesons surrounded by talk, talking the world
into a biological shroud on the mind, doing
fine, having a good time, making news tonight.
The fire burns within, the owls hoot out
in the cold I am a happy lapsing overdraw
-- Peter Riley, Alstonefield, III
Peter, the phallic boys
Begin to wink their lights.
Godrevy and the Wolf
Are calling Opening Time.
We’ll take the quickest way
The tin singers made.
Climb here where the hand
Will not grasp on air.
And that dark-suited man
Has set the dominoes out
On the Queen's table.
Peter, we'll sit and drink
And go in the sea's roar
-- W.S. Graham, 'The Thermal Stair'
thank you.
ReplyDelete'His job is Love / Imagined into words or paint to make / An object that will stand and will not move.'
By Amtrak out of Austin to Alpine,
ReplyDeletecouple of iced Buds in the rattling bar
followed by T-bone and Fort Stockton red.
And through the dust-grained window of the Club Car,
pink Scissor-tails migrating with the fall
Peter Reading, 1946-2011
For by my trouthe, if that I shal nat lye,
ReplyDeleteI saugh nat this yeer so myrie a compaignye
Atones in this herberwe as is now.
I.M., G.MacB.
ReplyDeleteTwenty-six years ago, sipping a Fino or
two in the Langham,
You and I spoke of the grave,
also of Li Po et al.
How the departure of friends on a lengthy
journey was somewhat
similar to their demise --
suddenly, they were not here.
How the convention of giving a willow wand
to a departing
friend who is travelling far
features in much of Du Mu.
I said I thought it absurd to talk to the
dead in a poem --
death, ipso facto, precludes
cosy perusal of verse.
'Just a convention, of course,
just a convention,' you said.
Peter Reading, Work in Regress (1997)