Refuge
Authors: Michael Tolkien
OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
Verse booklets
Learning Not To Touch
(Redbeck Press, 1998)
Reaching for a Strange
r (Shoestring Press, 1999)
Verse Collections
Outstripping Gravity
(Redbeck Press, 2000)
Exposures
(Redbeck Press, 2003)
Taking Cover
(Redbeck Press, 2005)
No Time for Roses
(Salzburg Press, 2009)
Narrative verse fantasy for younger readers
Wish*
(Author-House, 2010)
(Due for republication by Thames River, autumn 2012)
Rainbow*
(Due for publication By Thames River, autumn 2012)
*See also: author’s website:
www.michaeltolkien.com
Published by New Generation Publishing in 2012
Copyright
©
Michael Tolkien 2012
First Edition
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the
author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.newgeneration-publishing.com
eISBN 9781909395206
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank the recently-formed local Rutland Poets, a group with whom several problematic poems have been workshopped and ‘rescued’.
Thanks are due also to Gordon Braddy, whose patient and perceptive reading and listening have guaranteed that many poems were profitably reworked.
For the last six years the personal and professional support of Darin Jewell (Inspira Group Literary Agency) has provided me with indispensable encouragement in face of many
odds.
COVER ILLUSTRATION
Rutland Landscape by Rosemary Tolkien.
For Rosemary
...salted was my food and my repose
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
Edward Thomas: from
The Owl
(1916)
CONTENTS
I
IN TOUCH
II
CLOISTER AND PROMENADE
Mrs Primley’s Literary Young Men
III
REFUGE
IV
BELONGING
NO GAME PLAN
Sweet Williams in a brown jug
you happened to find. Your dab of décor
for that sudden party, bright dice scattered
for a quick score. They wilt over
my unsorted mail, your rucked-up
half-read Tom Sharpe and a card
you once scribbled from breezy Margate.
Leaves curl to straw. Crimsons, maroons,
ivories fray like sun-worn curtains.
As I clutch and bin these stale virgins
in their washed-out gear and underwater
stench, I feel your gesture take its chance,
recall those whims that took a slap at time,
and turned my well-laid plans into a game.
IN TOUCH
When August tints and chills to autumn,
I notice how you cling to your clothes at nightfall,
complain that drafty spaces multiply in bed.
But look at the misty golden edge
round evenings closing in, vapours curling up
in hollow places. Remember fire nights,
the primal hiss and crackle, how embers shift and wink.
Be glad to batten down against a threat
that summons the snail in you, backing away and in
to womb, cradle, a first room’s embrace.
My fingers sift again through crumbled red earth
after roots and spuds have done their work,
lie stacked and clamped. I sniff the final
burning of a year’s husks and straws,
walk from its passing blaze and smoke into
your warmth, at ease with my autumnal need
to cover a space that makes me shiver.
ROOTED
Meandering funeral aftermath
finds us side by side
below the comforting splash
of tall, new-leaved limes.
Beliefs and sects creep
into our talk: how some suppose
no breeze can make them totter,
and most don’t need to make a stand.
‘So what are you now?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ you say: assured,
precisely you, leaning a moment
on the chiselled hide of a lime
that knows where it stands,
as you do, gazing clear-eyed
past a blackened tower
to where you stood
and buried two parents,
not two springs apart.
THE YEARS IN 2006
Ibsen has been dead a hundred years.
How many years ago
was Lise Fjeldstad filmed as Torvald’s Nora?
Lively, throttled wife who walked
out of their
Doll’s House
and away
from her stifling century.
In Oslo the hype blows over.
Loading a complimentary DVD
Lise sits down to watch herself
make history in Technicolor,
and finds she’s glancing at a mirror.
Expecting to greet her face
with its familiar lines and cares
she confronts a lithe chameleon,
coaxing, devious, lovingly defiant
in her tormented rôle. Some youngster
moves, laughs and weeps like her,
yet makes her scowl in envy at a fraud
who sheds those intervening years.
TYPING OUTSIDE THE RAIN
On this cold, grey day, though tapping out
fretful messages on unceasing keys,
were you watching the deluge increase
over stone walls, scarcely breathing, anxious about
nothing much? As we who lack something of ourselves can be.
Perhaps thick rain adds a shade more doubt.
Did this amorphous day that cloaked you cling
to your mind with wet lips and discontented breath?
Coffee, cigarettes, a few polite shows of teeth
and drenching walks were its gifts to your willing
body; yet you had to tread the only path
there was,
dimly curious about what premature night would bring.
Did one unguarded moment in this cold rain suggest
you might be too pliant
towards that seminar of bells and cant?
Perhaps as you filed another flat request
damp ends of hair brushed chilled fingers bent
on being
deft; and you paused at the edge of empty trust.
LOST
Safe as houses
was her favourite tag
but at over ninety she was lost
in that steep-pitched, pebble-rendered semi,
floundering, too, since her husband died
trying to start his turquoise Cortina banger.
Slim, slick-haired, tight-suited, eighty-nine,
they called him
Tear-Arse Eddie
, terror
of the local roads. Police found
half a grand stitched inside his jacket.
High time to move her to a home,
her daughter told me, as if that was that.
Neighbours, who should mind their business
liked her pluck in carrying on regardless,
her backyard rites of broom and shovel,
the way she scraped and scrabbled for coal
from ramshackle bunker, poked up weeds and litter,
clattered out plates and cups for daughter,
who shouted in daily at four, and out at five.
In the small hours she’d come alive
and pace about with a swansong, racked
and cheerless as draughts moaning through a crack.
When rain dribbled down her bay window
she sat with opaque under-water stare,
watching her life trickle back. I’d wave,
and to wake her from that lonely deluge,
call in, brew a pot of strong, loose tea.
Yet her vacant eyes like blue-yoked eggs
gazed right through me and my chatter
at splashing traffic and bent, wet heads.