Eight poems by Alan Gould:
1. “Elegy”
2. “Just Once”
3. “Wishes For Jacko, Four Months Away”
4. “Lacemaker”
5. “Brief Absence”
6. “Dream”
7. “As Dawn Comes Bright With Proof”
8. “King Parrots”
Elegy
My mother died on a recent Tuesday.
She raked the winter leaves
into a blue tarpaulin,
went down from heart,
such that the bronze winter light
held her pale breath then did not.
So falcon-sudden, this
her dive-tumble into death
behind the mountain called Sulur
meaning Shawled Woman
in her first language,
whose indigo reflection I saw
in unblemished Eyjafjord
where my mother came from.
Now her considering person
has come to a costly box.
Her rounded handwriting has ended,
She is beyond reach of neighbours
who would wish to repay
her many small favours.
Faces steam here like windows,
her house is full of guests,
they are welcome, but unwanted.
Her absence is a presence
to which I’ll grow accustomed,
her photos now forever recent.
My last look at her face
was deep in the hospital basement,
a fetor of concrete and this,
my first unmistakeable corpse,
so intact still
her lifelong composure
I expected to see breathing,
and in the church aisle,
the astounding weight
of so neat a person in a polished box?
Missus G. Mum, a lifetime
of good food, good care,
I took for granted,
could not have asked for better.
Altruism and winterbreath
lack purchase on the world.
When I stood by your fjord
I saw the sun unsheathe
a falcon’s underwings
sudden pale of the aurora.
Now fjord and mountain are still,
and here the leaves are ungathered.
A woman complete in her moments,
indigo, rare, has vanished.
© Alan Gould
Just Once
For twenty years an instant will persist.
I’m back in London, high in London mist,
and from the bus glimpse someone draw aside
an upstairs curtain. She is, I see, a bride
who smiles upon that wet, inchoate street,
gives it the ah! it lacks to be complete.
© Alan Gould
Wishes For Jacko, Four Months Away
You sleep in your inland sea; some say you dream.
If so, that is a film you cannot keep,
and we can never know. Mention the womb,
and who will not imagine it, our snuggest room,
earliest welfare state, domed with red pearl,
eerily aswirl behind its veil of water,
while round, over and in between the welter
and glug of mum’s plumbing? But this is collage
pasted from, not plotted on, the memory screen.
Deeply you loom beyond us, a foot that thumps,
a hand already laying down the trumps
from the room next door, not seen, not known,
nor will be for four months more. By guess and phase
you’ll reach your freeholds of speech and mindfulness,
and will surrender as you do, the tender clues
permitting views of these, your wordless days.
Who, after all, among self-conscious folk,
recalls the long occasions of mother’s milk,
those first persuasions of your fluent air?
They belong to where the days of animals
are lost, that Lyonnesse criss-crossed by trails
habitually travelled, possessed, but never known.
In contrast humans own this flight path ending
in cloudy weather. The babe ascending from islands
then peninsulas of self toward
the memory screen, makes the person singular.
I clock in at three, already have unlocked
the syntax room. Below some beeswaxed stairs
I sit with a trainset and two mute bears,
a curlicued white and a straight-haired grey
whose origin was the same benign Cathay
mine was. But mention prior time, Woolwich,
Akureyri, and here’s a someone trying to vary
my version of what’s true. Show me a photo –
Gouldilocks at two – and here’s a tot
posed, curly, claimant, sansculotte,
his smile as undisclosed as Buddha’s. Out
of that intelligent stupor I came, not
entitled to own those things I’d touched
but could not name, my earliest addresses,
or tobacco-rich variants of adult kisses.
In coming months no doubt you’ll be hard-pressed,
engrossed as a serious drinker, but by our world,
growing day by day toward possession
of the genuine inner scenes that come to stay
at your will, ushered by a few guardian nouns,
then later by those adjectives, the trim infiltrators,
who shift the bounds of what was fact, swim
from caravels of what might well have been the case,
make a self sovereign in the twofold place.
© Alan Gould
Lacemaker
She works in such a flush of windowlight,
by loop and twist is reassembling sea-spray
or the mantilla of after-spray
that falls from a wave’s shoulder.
Such bobbin-work with threads of Flemish linen;
she leans to her slow progress, scallops and spangles
white instantaneities,
knots them, nets them, and will
remember nothing of this time. The clock
above her head is ticking beyond her earshot.
If the white walls of her room are hung
with maps or pictures, they
cannot represent her present world.
She’s in a time that’s utterly her own,
inaudible to her as her breathing
now is. And her eyes,
which through this patience may well suffer ruin,
are now enclosed within her whitening field,
within this ground of patient frost,
this snow that will not melt.
© Alan Gould
Brief Absence
My love is out on her bicycle.
Her purple skirt fills like a sail on The Nile.
The likeness of a galaxy
spirals in my coffee cup
as breezes finger apple leaves
like mothers in a fabric shop.
I brood and wander restively,
I’m happy enough, is what I say,
prowling my house like an émigré
among the sunlight’s see-through sleeves.
Annie is out on her bicycle.
Her purple skirt fills like a sail on The Nile.
Hungry, and calling for whisky, she
will come home when the little moon
is a grin perched over our apple tree.
Then ice and glass will clink their tune
and she will talk with easy grace.
I was more than happy, I will say,
to listen for the tell-tale sway
of your purple skirts in our moonlit house.
My love is out on her bicycle.
Her purple skirt fills like a sail on The Nile.
© Alan Gould
Dream
I came by car, you came by rail.
An antique pale
and fissured moon
sat on the sea like a macaroon.
I stood on tenterhooks alert
for rustle of skirt
and for the reckoned
joy to flood the careless second,
when your dear colluding eyes
dropped day’s disguise
and the sea, like solder
silvered your eyelids, your naked shoulder.
© Alan Gould
As Dawn Comes Bright With Proof
The gas-jet blue of day
tilts over hill and roof
finds where their eyes, their hands
still wander, still assume
such joyous rights of way
as dawn comes bright with proof
of how the night’s calm lands
shrink to a paltry room,
shows from the little wood
the magpie choir clock on,
as traffic’s factory hum,
and siren’s wail avow
that what has been is gone.
But what has been was good,
and what was good will come
unasked and anyhow,
joyously they reply.
For though we rise, conform
to agendas not our own,
what wild chance of bliss
swims in the stellar swarm,
lies tranquil in the eye,
or in the girdered bone,
unheeding the abyss.
© Alan Gould
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King Parrots
They have arrived.
That’s all I am allowed to know.
Four, no, six, they have materialised
trembling on the Mexican Hawthorn
as though the tree had just devised them,
six sleek Transylvanians,
six jocund rascals, outrageous
in their green or crimson balaclavas
and crimson pantaloons,
tucking away their conifer wings,
eating with greedy disdain
like babies, or comic strip bandidos.
My lawn is rubbished with half-eaten crimson berries.
Vandals. Solferino angels;
how can my eye stray while they remain
in creaturely candelabra
on a sky of nursery blue.
It’s like a siege.
One cocks its head as though to say,
“Don’t worry. We are too brilliant to be real,”
then goes on eating from my tree.
They’re gone. The branch skitters into stillness.
And I will spend a year behind this glass
fixed on their return.
© Alan Gould
Tideline
The ocean dresses
and undresses the pale beach
with white mantillas,
a bustling mother
trying out wedding clothes on
an only daughter.
© Alan Gould
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The Little White Car
(for Geoff Page’s 70th Birthday.)
Near and far, near and far,
with minimum of brouhaha,
a frosty head and small moustache
just visible above the dash –
you’ll glimpse Geoff Page in his white car
bringing poems to where you are.
Is there someone needs a sonnet
Bruce Dawe’s ímprimátur on it,
or are there writing class requests
for shipments of fresh anapests?
Do workshops crave more live pantoums,
do slim first vols need nom-de-plumes?
Are chefs dependent for their salads
on a seasoning of ballads?
There Mister Page is on the job,
and animates a metric throb
from Marble Bar to Kandahar
and visits dives in Zanzibar
where sullen addicts feeding pokies
pay ingots for small change in trochees,
and does brisk trade in Neufchatel
with virelai and villanelle,
supplies a senator in Lima
ten cantos of ottava rima!
BP, take note! To cap your oil spill
nothing works like rima royal will.
Surgeons harassed by your backlogs,
paste your patients into eclogues!
Now here’s a Swede will reimburse
for prompt supply of mint free verse,
while Masai herding goats and zebra
are Francophile for pure Vers Libre.
Yes, Mister Page is at his task.
Where is he now, I hear you ask.
He’s zipping through the demi-mondo
charged with several gross of rondeaux,
he’s marketing new model stanzas
at universities in Kansas,
he’s lobbying the latest Thai coup
with sweeteners of odes and haiku,
he’s dropping off a brand new tercet
where an Eskimo will nurse it,
depositing a crate of couplets
for mothers coping with quintuplets
modifying old quatrains
to please the ears of aesthete Danes.
And as he drives, his whiskers twitch
with dithyramb and hemistich,
his fingers tap with jazzy fractals
for an ode on pterodactyls,
or construe a sound more Sapphic
as he copes with Athens traffic.
Near and far, near and far,
this commerce that’s a touch bizarre,
its bow wave of a small moustache
dispelling cant and balderdash,
Mister Page is in his car
bringing poems to where you are.
© Alan Gould
Except “The Little White Car”, all these poems can be read in Alan Gould’s book, The Past Completes Me: Selected Poems 1973-2003. (University of Queensland Press, 2005). “The Little White Car” is uncollected and was first published in Quadrant in 2010.
Alan Gould is an Australian poet and novelist. Learn more about him and his publications from his website www.alangouldwriter.com/.