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
copyright julie sampson
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