Rangoon

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Rangoon

The Dignity: 11.0, Sunday night,
Rangoon in full tilt, speakers
on high stands. The amp is tube.

They play in front of the pub’s
oil painting, a woman’s face
in red, the height of a man.

A light is trained towards them,
and the drinkers are tuning in:
some begin to dance. There’s

nothing out there, some shops,
a road that needs maintaining,
electric rails the trains follow

out in the open this far North –
only this Rocking rhythm and words
that link us to the rights and wrongs
of men and women, Burmese monks
with cotton sails, riding against tanks.
Another pint: stand further back.

Curved planes continue through the amp and mike
across the road and into space.
Watch them playing: their eyes lock -

the music follows distant streets,
licks into shadows like a liquorice tongue,
goes blind down midnights steps.

The bassist has a 6.0 start;
A leaf curls round; a waist sways.
In the narrow space between the bar

and the stage, couples are making
each moment count. The bar’s
a rose open for last orders. Soon

last tubes will trundle back, and
in silence engulfed by black light
Rangoon’ll dissolve like sherbet dust.

+++

PoetryPivotal 3

Midnight Steps

Something is moving through a tunnel
a tunnel of silence and of brick,
and as it moves further and further away
the sense of the sound does not diminish.

It is born of a mechanism with many parts,
moves on the edge of what can't be heard;
perhaps it's below me or a few streets South
where the railway goes under the road.

The night is not entirely dark or silent:
the sudden creak of a footstep
in an upstairs flat. Three a.m: a cat sits
and looks out, as if seeing the shape

of something that's there, I can't see.
There's a bridge near Jeffreys Street,
where the nuclear waste in steel wagons
rattles on by, at least three a week

and a side alley leading West, down
seventy feet underneath the line. I sleep
with three storeys above me and three beneath;
the walls are thick, and the River, almost black,

flows under us through hidden arches
from Parliament Hill to Anglers Lane,
a sealed light that can't be seen
clusters on the surface, unexplained.

Some more of Eugene Atget's famous images

Some of Eugene Atget's famous images

Eugene

http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/atget/index.html





EUGENE
(i)
My streets are empty
because I go out early
and take photographs.

My plates are too late,
mere things; what has happened
has left its mark.

Some mornings alone
I set up my camera
and just keep waiting

for the mist to rise,
for the vacancy to be
a few metres clear:

a cobbled concourse
leading to the Moulin Rouge
where dampness glistens.

Someone said I do
crime scenes, bleached and swept;
if so, the cops aren’t interested.

For artists - who else? -
these silver nitride traces,
instalment stories

where no shots ring out,
and there is no embrace, since
the world has ended.

These are documents
and nothing else. I know Man
Ray – he talks of a journal,

new existences.








EUGENE
(ii)

Sometimes, mornings I’m alone,
passing the Metro, and stop,
set up my camera in vain
for the faces emerging
and disappearing to greet
the soul that inhabits life:

the soul which was there
in the Luxembourg Gardens,
in the mist across water.

I record stone thoroughfares,
entrances machines will block,
the shops they’ll demolish.

My horizon is noisy,
limited by offices.

What can’t be repaired:
the stairs between walls,
full of entry points,

entrances for artists.


+++




Eugene (iii)

I took you still in your trades,
as you presented yourselves to me,
a set of prints from the streets
that you cross every day and re-cross,
imprinting yourselves at the heart
of the streets that you yourselves
create: baker, porter and tart,
peddler and hurdy gurdy man.
I made these pictures of you, and
with you, for you, as you were
each standing on your bit of street,
I with my tripod, as I presented
myself to you, fellow Parisian, graduate
of the School of Hard Knocks; we
were daybreakers on the gymnasium floor.

New Second-Hand

Poetry Pivotal 2 - New Second-Hand


Walking through Soho in dry light,
top stories splashed in yellow sun,
difficult for digital these Winter days
in life-on-earth shadow of streets,

grave stone of Hazlitt in the church
garden, backs of Old Compton Street,
their bricks and windows; one, piled high
with books, is glinting high up.

The tomb, in splendid isolation
lies flat on the grass, a clean cut
oblong, could be a book on its side,
a tome, Libor Amoris at rest.

While I photograph I’m watched
by a gardener who’s almost invisible
amongst leaves, brooms and wheel barrows.
Once in the Summer, with a new second-hand,

I was trying to get the spire
in, crouching and pointing the lens
up through foliage at the sky,
and fell over backwards, rolled

laughing in the grass, while
sitters on the church-yard benches,
my public, kept their pose.
Now, it’s the man working and me.


+++++

Documents for Poets

Eugene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Atget

I call my current series: “Documents for Poets”: after consideration I decided for this, because it obliquely touches on the achievements of a famous photographer, who has been an inspiration to many.
The title is borrowed from the celebrated turn of the century Parisian photographer Eugene Atget whose images included Parisian precincts and suburbs where he sought and found relics and preserved masterpieces of a world that was disappearing rapidly. Much of what he depicted focused on the ordinary and everyday, which through his lens was mysteriously transformed to become dreamlike & iconic.
He referred to his photographs as “documents for artists.”
I therefore retrospectively dedicate my “Poetry Pivotal: documents for poets” to Eugene – a title I think he would have understood and tolerated.


Poetry Pivotal 1

(i)

In the window a canal,
bars spill out on the street;
no longer Summer, green September.

There are caravans of ants
on the pavement, trees, rooftops
and the bridge whose angles
pick up the sheen of grass;
pink dark glasses in the day
and glasses to drink from
at night. The motorway’s

curved boomerang shape;
a perfectly formed film star,
in an evening gown, steps
from a cracked walnut;

looking into the canal
her window glimmers.


(ii)

Overarching the concrete and glass
of the station’s restaurants and shops,
Paddington’s still girders –
like elongated yellow bees
the trains reach for clover
and the barley fields.
Once this station was an actor
young and handsome in the Age of Steam.

The past is still doing
its double act with now:
up and down the escalators,
customers who were once passengers
alight at different levels,

and, ranged in a semicircle,
the Station Orchestra is amply playing
the music of the brass, as if
breasting a river somewhere deep,
where, each with its candle glowing,
ride tiny boats across the stream.