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Thread: Delph's back

  1. #76
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
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    Tony and Toni are two different characters, but you're quite right, the names are too similar. As Tony Abbro was a real newsagent on Old Compton Street, I guess it's the fictitious Toni who'll have to be changed to Luigi or something. Can't think how I didn't notice that, so thanks for pointing it out!

  2. #77
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
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    Bile Beans

    We’re discussing the poet, I say I think he’s a twat.
    I’m not supposed to say that. The room goes quiet.
    I’m aware of my small stature, short nails,
    unpolished shoes. One does not criticise God.
    They will take me to the tower, fold me up, crush me
    until I recant. I looked at my watch, the last recourse
    of the desperate, mumble something. They brighten,
    say ‘bye then’ and beam as I leave the room.

    It’s dark outside, raining slightly. I hunch my shoulders,
    trudge up the steep street towards the station past hen parties,
    pink and raucous, cheered at by muscled young men,
    glistening with hair products. Someone’s vomiting into a gutter;
    his mates swear at him, laugh, so full of life. I’m right;
    the poet really is a member of the brethren of boring twattery –
    not that I’ve read what he’s written. Only seen his face,
    wanted to punch it.

    An old painted wall makes a promise:
    Nightly BILE BEANS
    Keep You HEALTHY BRIGHT-EYED & SLIM

    I cheer up. The station’s bright and loud,
    no poets walking around looking pained. Plenty of novelists,
    staring intently at people, turning them into plot devices,
    and one quick-silver short story writer, so alive
    he’s sparking with energy, feeding vampire-like
    on anyone whose life comes close to his. Everyone else
    is a fireman, obstetrician, joiner, thief, flight navigator,
    tyrant, plasterer, social reformer or prostitute.
    I store them up in my head.

    My train arrives, an old one, upholstery saggy and soaked
    with the essence of years of passengers.
    I imagine diffusing my body, softening its edges
    melting into the fabric and soaking up the lives,
    regurgitating them later as poems or cakes or embroideries.

    The train lurches into the night, sways gently,
    clunks over points, across the glittering bridge,
    into the suburbs, dark green places with long strip gardens,
    harkening back to a deeper past. I think of John Betjeman,
    which annoys me because I don’t like him,
    but at least I’d never wanted to punch his face.

    At home, there’s a letter, an acceptance
    for one of my poems. Damn.
    It would be that bloody magazine, wouldn’t it.
    Must I retrace my steps? Walk backwards to the station,
    sit facing the wrong way as old rolling stock
    wobbles back along the line, squeeze past the hens and stags,
    try not to skid in the lake-sized pools of vomit,
    ingratiate myself back into the room,
    swallow the offensive word before it even leaves my mouth,
    look all earnest, and nod and agree?

    Nightly bile beans. That’s what I need.
    I look in the cupboard,
    find chocolate, swallow square after square till I’m
    healthy bright-eyed and slim.

  3. #78
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    Jun 2008
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    Bishop Auckland
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    Twenty-eight Meditations On Finding A Street Piano

    Our young lives are changed by music and our small fingers struggle.

    A piano turns up on a building site in Paris. Broken strings crash, the piano falls down drunk, it chuckles and hammers its strings

    When I am weary, I play Haydn.

    Do not ask how to play – go and find a proper teacher. Do violence, rip out the keys if you can’t get it right. Fold your anger between the pages of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata.

    Two dark tractors pass in a field, one is driven by a man called Chopin, the other by Rachmaninov. The chances of this happening are ridiculous.

    A pale light reflects off brass pedals, burnished by years of use.

    There is sawdust beneath the piano. If you listen closely, you can hear the woodworm boring away, finding their resonant frequency.

    On top of the piano, a lovely piece of slate fashioned into an ashtray, but nobody’s allowed to smoke any more. It rattles when Topper plays the Maple Leaf Rag. He calls it the Maple Teeth. We don’t correct him, he has a temper.

    There’s a young girl standing twenty yards from the piano on Paddington station, yearning. She’ll never move any closer.

    The Prophet Bird sings out, late into the soft October night.

    We leave the performance early, we don’t want to hear the Scriabin. We are not strong enough.

    There’s a distant tapping on the road, the men are working, they have their sign up. We remember how we used to joke about umbrellas. The old piano had brackets for candles.

    Middle C is opposite the keyhole, but I have mislaid the key

    An avenue, dark and nameless, curtains drawn. Someone’s playing scales, C sharp minor, badly. Their playing is uneven, the hands do not match, they should stop and do something else – climb a mountain, and pray to the gods of high places that they don’t pick one where someone has left a piano.

    We dare not go near the piano floor in Harrods. That place means death. It is peopled by ghosts. It no longer exists. The entrance is blocked by brambles.

    Late in the summer the strange horses came, black-plumed, but instead of a coffin, Mozart’s piano, dressed in black crepe.

    I told my son about my father, how he played me to sleep with Schubert and Brahms, and now this is something my son does for me.

    When the water runs into the bath, if you listen carefully, you can hear pianos running through the pipes.

    You could build bridges or be a brain surgeon or play Beethoven. All are skilled jobs. There’s only one you can still do when you’re ninety-four

    Reading music by candlelight makes it sound sweeter.

    And if a man should build a piano out of a quarter ton of Lego, and if the strings should be wound of fishing line, ay, what then?

    The sound of cars passing in the wet, the swish-swish of their tyres, the soaking wet street piano, the boys laughing, trying to play Metallica.

    Why doesn’t he phone? Or am I playing too loudly. Has he phoned, and I didn’t hear?

    In the not too distant future, I will play in seven flats and the sonorities will be glorious, and you will fall in love with me.

    This is a stupid way to die, crushed by a piano falling out of a Glasgow tenement window in a comedy short.

    The piano is under an awning now, the people are talking about rain, the piano is sulking.

    Someone puts a vase of peonies on the piano in memory of a suicide.

    I sit down to play Chopin, the opus 25 Etudes. By the time I finish we are married and have ten children.

  4. #79
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    Jun 2008
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    Bishop Auckland
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    Departure

    I’m walking out of here, you said something stupid
    about Mark Rothko and I couldn’t bear it, you’ve
    no idea what you’ve done – it’s not the art, but the whole

    ‘my five year old could have painted that’ mentality that
    made me realise I’ve been tolerating morons
    for the sake of companionship for far too long.

    I’ve looked at pictures of old London to console myself,
    they help, but it still torments me, this failure, this idea that
    an untalented child with a crayon is greater than a master

    who pours his agonised soul into his work. The child is plump
    and I am happy for her, but that’s not the point; this is not
    the difference between clams and mussels, this is not figgy rolls

    versus garibaldis. This is not even the sound of bickering.
    Sometimes I need to be very drunk to say what I mean,
    but this afternoon, fired by the memory of a man far away

    with kind eyes, I painted a colour that astonished me,
    I thought of Rothko, I thought of all the smug idiots, Ikea kitsch,
    I decided to leave you. This is me going. This is me picking up

    my hat, my coat. This is me kissing the dog one last time.
    He smells, I won’t miss him. This is me shifting the furniture,
    leaving it just the way I like it. This is me writing Goodbye.

  5. #80
    Join Date
    Mar 2012
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    4,350
    Hey Delph, 'figgy rolls' - very good. Could you drop that final stanza? Great poem. Very much enjoyed reading and thinking about it.

  6. #81
    Arlene is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    Apr 2012
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    hallo, Delph, hope your temp's dropped. Love this page of paint, piano, writers in the tube (station?)....don't know which last stanza 5th wants you to drop, but please don't. xo

  7. #82
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    New York, NY
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    6,998
    Catherine, some day I hope we will have drinks and trade opinions on poets, painters and composers. You will probably hate me by the end of it, but it will be fun. "Bile Beans" is great fun, as advertised by the title. I enjoyed "Street Piano" too, the resonant frequency of woodworm, not being strong enough for Scriabin, the last line, many lines. "Departure" is wonderful talk.

  8. #83
    Join Date
    Aug 2002
    Location
    Quito
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    1,771
    Hi, Delph,


    What I'm enjoying so much here are the mini-portrayals and characterizations and how seamlessly you do it. I think that's testament to your work as a novelist.

    My favorites would be 1. The London Season, 2. Ice-Jam, and 3. Ants

    I thought 'The London Season' was particularly strong on the characterization, but also had a strong sense of locale and particular details.

  9. #84
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    Jun 2008
    Location
    Bishop Auckland
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    Thank you so much for the great comments! The London Season was based on some of the photographs of John Deakin, who my father met (and photographed) in Ghana during the war. One of those odd, unpredictable encounters.

  10. #85
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    Jun 2008
    Location
    Bishop Auckland
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    what we should have done, what we didn’t do

    When this is over, when all this is over...
    that’s when I shall give them the finger or him most of all.
    This –
    you know
    I sometimes think of that time we met at the station
    when I waited until he was looking the other way
    when I ran up to you and kissed you hard on the cheek
    so that there could be no misunderstanding;
    and there wasn’t
    you replied in kind and we spent all the moments
    we were allowed in the kind of embrace that is dreamt of
    beyond all imaginings
    but then he turned back
    we sprang apart.
    That was the last time I ever kissed someone I truly loved
    that was the time I went back to the man I had promised to love
    and left the man I truly loved.
    Later that day
    I saw an x-ray of a baby
    frail and unformed
    unready.
    And years later
    after lover after lover after lover
    I wondered that death could undo so much.
    Once I was beautiful
    now no more.
    Now the rain flies down the street
    flaps outside our door
    now rodents gnaw at my legs and ulcerate my pelvis;
    now the sun has exploded and fractured and my eyes
    see only the splinters of what might have been.
    I wear the dead smile of accomplishment –
    oh love.
    This was hard.
    We came so close.
    We knew exactly where to find each other
    but we did nothing about it.

  11. #86
    Sorella is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    Catherine,
    So many raw slices of life here to admire. The very latest is very good, and as for Bile Beans, I laughed out loud at the crow pie -- to eat or not to eat?!

    Sorella

  12. #87
    Join Date
    Jun 2004
    Location
    Israel
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    4,634
    Hi Catherine,

    These are all busting with life, wit, anger, impatience, hunger. It goes without saying that you're narratively strong, but what I found particularly delightful were the many surreal turns you take, busting out of the narrative into that strange place of incomprehensive truth we try to get close to. I want to give special mention to 28 meditations which I think is brilliant and special from start to end.

  13. #88
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Location
    Bishop Auckland
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    Many thanks - and I'm particularly glad the 28 meditations appears to have worked, as I'm always wary of attempting that weird hybrid form, the prose poem.

  14. #89
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    Jun 2008
    Location
    Bishop Auckland
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    now we are old

    we come to the river to stand quietly, barefoot on grass,
    listening to a warm, fat night, swept up in the magnificence
    of old love. I’m wearing red, you touch me, I welcome you.
    We kiss like young lovers, we remember how once we spoke
    of the sadness of discarded clothes – now we are old we scatter them,

    whoop with joy when your underpants land in a tree and we don’t know
    if our knees will be up to getting them back – then we grow serious.
    The thunder rolls closer, whatever may come on this gust of wind, it
    won’t be joy. Our love flies in at a tangent; sometimes it misses
    but sometimes we catch it and hold it and now, love, now!

    Storms always subside, rain soaks away into bloated rivers.
    The sea is impossible, daylight burns us, we crave the night,
    we’re too tired, we seek islands of counted sheep. We dream,
    keeping one sleep ahead of death, one fuck ahead of mortality.

  15. #90
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Location
    Bishop Auckland
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    Echoes of Old Love

    I see her through plate glass,
    Blackberry to her ear.
    I think she’s hearing sad news.

    Perhaps it’s an old lover speaking.
    She doesn’t reply,
    holds herself steady, elegant,

    pearl earrings, hair piled up high
    long ear lobes –
    she is decades older than I

    perhaps sixty, sixty-five.
    Her face is soft-powdered, beautiful,
    hand gently creased

    by the kindness of time.
    She wears dark cashmere,
    the shop is gloomy, I strain to see her.

    A cast of Venus
    stands between us
    holds a bunch of grapes, smiles.

    Women smiling at salad –
    or in this instance, grapes.
    I think of Hera, who could get pregnant

    by a lettuce leaf –
    no wonder we all look so happy
    when we see a salad.

    The woman has finished her call.
    She puts the Blackberry
    in a deep pocket, stares, unseeing,

    through the glass where I stand.
    I wish her well, want to do more.
    She is gracious, elegant,

    I am a ragamuffin.
    I love her.
    She turns away and the moment passes,

    the traffic sounds on the street,
    crowds rushing by, pigeons,
    ripe strawberries, ripe.

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