Wings


The following poem, inspired by the writings of the Devon writer Mary Patricia Willcocks, was published, in a slightly different format in Tessitura (Shearsman)



Wings
M. P. Willcocks
Novelist, 1869-1952[i]
Life is an ocean on which we are all carried,
 star systems, birds, beasts, and men the living and
 those who are to them but names on a tombstone(MPW)

Like our joined souls/with their unknown linkeages and secret
web of words surrounding/ our galaxies of days (Daphne Gloag)

I have to take another’s alien world
and gaze out
 where is the dead author
her libido is cosmic
countless
constellations
finely-tuned  extra–spatial in dimension
 intricate her biosphere
her writing must keep going as she    i
n all directions
 multi-versed dispersals into other words   
a new child 
 recent poem
fresh text 
different universe.
Explodes (everything is in the word) 
 creating texts
resuscitated in a novel guise 
dark water matters in a many folded universe
altering her imaginary order  
she’s interacting with particles
waves from other sites in space-time
 a system of signs 
 wax works of subjects in process
 these fictional avatars figures in a dream
tiny iridescent bubbles in time’s space
 they stutter twirl waft – away
 dandelions   futuristic
seeding skies …
[floating poem]

… Heart-beat: a clock and all else silent in this room
  she’s trying to find felicitous words
to delineate a writer who’s there beside her
and begins to write herself back
into the place where she was born  
 there was once a child
who set out to find the land of blue distance
… strange blue hills remained
as far away …
 beyond the folded blue
    on pleated purple folds of moor …




Incantations
Joanna McGregor  
recital 2002

Pandora opening a grand-piano’s wing  
              hollow   
                        oscillations of this reverberation  
                                    over-toned
                                                shaped bars                                                      beat far flung   corners
   (black widow spiders  lurk) 
                                    drifts and fills a concert hall    in waves
                         evaporates        warps-in-space
 pulsations
  an/y Other universe 
Sonata’s sounding  
absent                             phonics dissolving blue
  ritardando blue to 
shadow blue  incantations
lured by a cadential figure
caught
in a framework of suspended time      a sympathy
            of resonance
 we    move beyond ourselves into sonic selves
                          other selves sequestered in this manifestation
   of the moment of all time

Wings

                                    1902: novel; London; concert. A pianist
                                    Sarah Bellow interprets Appassionata Inspiritrice
                                    this recital’s reinstating her career - the old
                                    went back to memories, young forward
                                    to their future, for her playing dealt with the song
                                    the voice sings to the soul – she’d been away
                                    at the site of her writer’s dream – for four years lost
                                    In that magic-space of hypertext, hyper-linked long note
                                    of silence absent in a sound within another world
                                    in multiverse transported – mercury shifted
                                    through a futured time-warp. 2002: sister,
                                    a pianist, wraps Sarah beneath her angel-wing.
                                    In the web-cam they exchange sound-tips,
                                    extemporize manuscript inscriptions on runic stones;
                                    in this 3D soundscape their solid ground
                                    is the violaceous throw cast over this late summer moor.
                                                    

                                   
                                    Will o’ the wisp … I try to find
                                    you on that ancient moorland track
                                    that rambles to a figment of a virtual world
                                    knowing you were – and are - as she
                                    who charmed and created you,
                                    now in disrepute. It could be as simple
                                    as finding a feather or agate moss
                                    on a stone at the base of this rock:
                                    look a universe unravels from the protonema’s
                                    green threads; or gazing up through blue-air
                                    that lark’s angled wing-tip is a new sun
                                    shimmering auras of heat-haze; even
                                    this rock crystal rose quartz
                                    enfolds air bubbles wherein you are hidden:
                                    like the Queen of Sheba, not a woman,
                                    but a world, spinning within … the will o’ the wisp
                                                                
                        She carries the air in her speechless words
  a river in the length of a delicate phrase
    Her stanzas follow contours fluid over sound-swept moors
        the crux of each line
          defined
            by the apex of a rocky tor  
                        though scatter outcrops
            send us off on a tangent of (rock) thought
   (an elegant goose chase) …
 bedded on that large page of inner-geography
where all her poetry is made
   ferns
                quilt
                                        crevices
 up
 she’s early singing
wordless
                         melismas with larks 
                                    undulating in tender breeze
 long stones mark the precision of hand-written italic stroke
                                    (graphite poised pencils)
                                                hence her poems are written to last
many are those who follow the quest (via the letterbox trail)
                         to interpret the past and read a landscape’s lyrical guide

…that first garden                                 glade over
            earth
   expanse of space green                 white
            in its chasteness  before language
here iam in and am  it-self
                        snowdrops are secrets
                                    for ever
         white
tassels springing forever in a heart
               send cryptic texts as poems for ever & ever & ever 
  and then   the snow again always  the back beyond of being born
           itself the cusp dispersing into southern seas …



[i] The poem is written as ‘hyper-text’; its parts coexist as collage. The first poem represents the fragmentary science dimension and can be re-ordered. Synchronicity between two parallel space-times suggests that a text now can relate to a text then: Incantations, is visualised as appearing beneath Wings. Perhaps, amongst multiple universes one can perceive, in synchronicity, a dual phenomena linked by the silence of two sounds from two different worlds in space-time. Sarah (pianist-heroine from Willcocks’ 1912 novel Wings of Desire) is in her ‘dream next-door’: in a parallel universe, she can return to the moor; or she can come to the present, her future, and to Joanna’s C20 concert. Though a character created by Willcocks, she is still present, even if her author has been forgotten; if we posit multiverses then those imaginary worlds and characters of fiction may each, from another (real) world, be as figures in a dream , or a bubble in space-time. Willcocks spoke of ‘hauntings’. Ideas and sounds from beneath - words ghosted behind words - infiltrate the upper poem as thought-links between the two pianists and personalities, Joanna (real world) and Sarah (fictional). At the beginning, the poet tries to find the forgotten writer. There is a final, floating, coda: this is Dartmoor, at the heart of the landscape of Willcocks’ writing (she ‘is’ the moor). Land of blue distance … remained is taken from her work: there was once a child who set out to find the land of blue distance, strange blue hills unlike sea or sky in colour , and other words in italics in ‘Wings’, are from her texts. Other background ideas include the philosophy of the minimalist composer Somei Satoh: There is much prolongation of a single sound. I think silence and the prolongation of sound is the same thing in terms of space I would like the listener to experience a new sense of time presented in this music as if eternal time can be lived in a single moment (Satoh).

copyright julie sampson

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