Poems 2006

POEMS 2006

In Memoriam John Rundle

John, you can’t hear the words of your interpreters now,

in those small rooms with the triangle or circle,

no flying your plane or riding your motorcycle,

no examining tortures’ how

or exploding in anger as to why.

‘Doctor is angry at what they’ve done to you, not angry

at you.’ I used to interpolate

when John was in his angry state.

I got him writing poetry

and he veered towards war poetry

and some sensitive love lyrics

especially one about Toulouse Lautrec

and his love of women.

Of his death I had no omen,

he was talking about a cure for MS,

his poems would make a short MS,

and his specialty of working with possible epilepsy

from blows to the head he pursued rigorously

to the end. Once he said to me

when we were talking: ‘You’re dancing with my brain’,

that was a beautiful comment from a neurologist.

The dance of mourning, of celebration, continues, John, in the many

                                                                                               cultures

you treated. You drew out the gist –

you gave many people a future.

Now you’ve flown the coop,

can’t recover from death’s loop.

You walked to the end with no stoop

and made us interpreters go through mind hoops

of your sessions. Was it fifteen years

you minimalised your own fears

and held back the refreshment of tears

working beyond the frontiers?

Lord John Rundle, that’s what it said on your door,

you died in harness,

you go into highness,

and is it selfish of us to wish you’d gone on more?

Richard McKane 22^nd July 2006

A death of a friend certainly drives

poetry home and it derives

a strong push if it’s kith or kin.

This is how it was for Pushkin

too and any other elegist

concerned to extract the gist

of life from the person become shade.

I sit here in the café in the clouds’ shade

feeling not so much survivor guilt

as sympathy that my friend lived life to the hilt

but could have gone on so much longer

if he’d looked after his body stronger.

23 July 2006

*

I straddle the horse

and I’m back in the saddle,

never more comfortable

than riding the Muse.

If my metaphors confuse

and my words are hoarse

from my pipe, just try to peruse

them as they’re written

with a burden of care but carefreely,

and once you are bitten

by them you’ll be less shy and comprehend them freely.

23 July 2006

FOR RAY

I

We didn’t suggest I was writing godderel

but we did talk about my flirting with doggerel.

I told you I preferred to call it catterel

and also that I took dognaps.

I came to you when three Israelis had been kidnapped

and Israel and Lebanon were virtually at war.

We avoided the Television – we’d seen much of it before

and we concentrated on that ancient art –

conversation, which moved our hearts.

II ABYSS

I’m muddled now as to what we concluded

about the abyss, except you said I’d be deluded

to think I could walk round it and peer in,

thus I’d been rescued once by our friend Helen.

For you, I seem to remember, the abyss was connected with sin

and you were firm about its origin in the Garden of Eden,

a theme I’d approached in the past with a certain

brashness or rashness but without blaspheming,

I trust. So was it then a carnal knowledge

which made them fall off the edge?

And is the Serpent still not a spent force?

But my Adamists and Acmeists turned the course

of Russian poetry by returning the freshness to the apple

and the rose with stem and thorns, and doubled

back to a renaming of things

and found there was something new under the sun

and under your parasol with the beating sun

we searched for and found in conversation – that something.

III

I’m getting warmer, closer to the play.

It’s getting serious. To deliver there aren’t many days

left. I have to rake up the leaves

of files, sort them and not burn them.

Among them is a system of beliefs:

an attempt at philosophy, a love of wisdom.

They may be weak, they may be frail,

they may declare the Holy Grail

is a cup as ordinary as a coffee one

or a wineglass: am I then the scheming, blaspheming one?

Or am I deconstructing symbolism

by these hyperbolisms,

in which there’s always a pinch of salt and humour.

Ray, Sylvia, we do our best to treat the evil malignant tumours.

Long life to you, long life to me

and long life to others whom we can’t even see.

23 July 2006

*

FOR JOHN  RUNDLE

‘You’re dancing with my brain’,

the neurologist said.

Now you’re dead

and we can’t do that dance of words again.

You talked about poetry for you as dancing away,

now you’ve danced with death’s embrace

which you’d diced with before.

Did you know ‘dance’ in Turkish

means ‘game’ and ‘play’.

I can’t write you a tragic play

and it’s curtains for you.

Do I have to live up to your gallows’ humour,

you who left us without even a tumour?

It’s chocks away for you, but don’t forget

to turn the prop from coarse to fine

as you land in some land beyond my mind.

23 July 2006

RUNNING A LIFE: FOR DERIJE.

He came from a country on the run

from an early life of persecution,

at his trial he made the barrister and interpreter’s tears run –

for what he’d been through he’d won recognition.

He had at least three arenas, one

the report with Helen for his protection,

one with Michael training and being trained,

the third arena the track, which entertained his ambition.

All kept up a ‘running commentary’

with him to keep him from feeling solitary.

High on altitude, running was his life, sustained

him. I sat in on the group of seven people who supported

him, heard the sports’ people from Roehampton’s moving expertise –

they went out on a limb for him, they moved officialdom’s trees;

and I who will never run

can only let these inky lines run

for a young man I never met.

Carrie told how at the end of the yoga sessions

he was three inches taller,

feet up the wall, legs up the wall but not up the wall,

his body was perfect in his orchestration.

‘Do you run?’ he said to her: ‘You really should’.

‘As we ran he listened to my breathing, he became my teacher’,

Michael says, but ‘It was like guiding a supertanker,’

someone chips in ‘or a bulldozer’.

He had blackouts. He had continuous anxiety

running in competition that disappears as the race starts normally.

No less than the 10,000 meters in Bejing

was his ambition, this was the thing.

Was it in the 60s ‘the loneliness of the long distance runner’?

But he also had persecution which was a stunner.

He needed more time to run his life

and he didn’t really have a girlfriend who could become his wife.

‘He was an iceberg: I held onto him to move him underwater’

Michael said: in the room at the Helen Bamber Foundation

there was grief and celebration and sad consensus:

                                                         his death was premature.

He didn’t run out on life, his time ran out,

now no hearing the pace of his running shoes on the heath or track

                                                            or the crowd’s shouts,

but his motion, his movement, his time

snatched from him in his life’s prime

are handed on like freedom’s baton or torch

for others to scorch in his tracks.

Richard McKane, Poet at Large HBF