Can You Hear Us In Between? - David HW Grubb

Any Information as to Who or What
(Rialto Magazine)

Perhaps they are Cornish wrestlers or could
it be three curates leap-frogging on May Day?
Often it is a solitary figure, walking away,
and we are left where the photographer or painter
caught the past in a prism of present.
Cows are common, chewing at the planet,
whilst Icarus slipstreams and UFOs collapse,
Or summer fêtes where the workers are set free
for an entire day to walk on the Manor lawn
and watch the rich people inside when it rains;
and here is an image of an organist in a church
playing somebody's music for a wedding or could
it be a christening or is it something from another what?

Starbucks
He was writing at a huge desk with a
bunch of phones. Who would call him first;
Beethoven, Shostakovich or Arthur Anderson
or would it be his wife anxious to hear his voice?
Are we in this Starbucks or the one down the street?
Is this my life or the life made up for me by people
who don't know any better and if this is so who is it
who makes up their lives for them? If this is not
the Starbucks down the street that's fine. If
it is then who are you and what am I and who
will pay? Does it matter? I wonder what
became of Beethoven's mother and what Arthur
Anderson will say when somebody says
Welcome to Heaven. A single solution
to this complex problem is never to visit
Starbucks or indeed visit three at once.
Kinder and gentler is what we like but
sometimes there must be other adventures.

Five Days In May
It was so blue at night you could see where the dreams were
coming from. It made you ready for the day. Sounds of the trees lifting sky and the bell
in your head waking. Voices. The river very close. Swimming. Light demanding space
and the birds quieter because we were there. The ploughed field has become sun and
since you did not as I will not tell you about running. Promises. That is a game and what
we see between the words calls. Tell you about it never. Sometimes I am coming so
close to thunder it ruins my hair. Prayers. Should be in place by now to begin each day
in grace and the light in the mind and the green stones sky bright and when you think
there will be a silence there is a field where it is happening as if original. May comes in
like a spanked hand and by the fifth day you let it lead you.

The Dip In Sales When we ceased trading imagination we were left with a warehouse of ghosts. The sales staff sold what we wanted to be because that is what worked. Sell what you can become was the slogan and the past became lost in jokes, anecdote, pictures of old farts. We gave the founder a face lift. We made him President then God. His sons, sons, son even kept his ashes in a boxroom. In a few minutes we will change again. New crew, new view, new product. The dip in sales seems to coincide with the decision to eliminate the sales staff and so we do have a problem don't we? We don't. We never did. We don't do problems. Our view is on the other side of the mountains. Our view is next year's rain. Our product is not in fact for sale. It is about faith and a higher theory of future. News is dead. Editorial is demise. Our task is to package something in between. Silences tell stories so we use words.

To Sell The Sunshine
"I once knew a woman who thought that she was an egg,"
she said as the poetry reading ended and the listeners left
and I began a journey from the house that they did not want to sell
and its pheasants and its island in time garden and its.
"Did she live in a nest?" I asked, and there being no reply
I began to walk down the valley with my case of books, my
box of words, my library of life, my alphabet of self and.
And I had been reading to them and they had been reading me
and listening to their own lives, wounds, worries, initiations,
laughter and loss. If you thought that you were an egg did
this make God a bird? And did God know? And did?
The pheasants watched me leave and the owner who did not wish
to sell the house which had once been two farm cottages, did
not wish to sell the sunshine in the hedge and the trees that
caught stars and the pheasants who thought they were.
I am the egg woman and I live in a nest in Henley
and I am going to ask God to let me hatch and explore
outside the shell of wonder, of words, of belief,
of cascading April sun and green dreams and.
We do not wish to leave this house and its secret garden
of pheasants and sun that dips here and between and over
and the words that have grown in the rooms. And we are to
pack up the silences as well and label them for heavens!

In The Waiting Light
I am seated in the dark waiting for the angel
to return to this small room of nothing silence.
The dark angel knows where I sit in the waiting light
and enters between the last word and the torn amen.
He comes in his light robes and the room flies about
until he finds the seat at the table at the end.
After wine and some singing and talk of drums and snow
he enters an away and I have to wait all over now.
But this is better than certainty and creed and other
knowledge. This is better than brilliance that breeds.
Afierwards; this room; its chair and its no time at all.

You Might Measure The Sky
for Beverly, Easter, 2002
You might measure the sky
by the graces that have been given to you
and the miracles, such as the evening Gabriel
appeared in the orchard and the geese ran about
as they always do before a storm.
You, of course, did not tell anybody about this
until we were older in our ways and then you told me
as if it were a dream. One evening in the orchard
you said this is where I saw Gabriel and this is where
the geese ran as they do before a storm.
This goes into the memory box like the singing tree
and the child from the lake and the woman who walked through
the cottage wall in Somerset. You might measure the sky
by such tales and tokens and trusts;
then again, you might not.

Easter Story
And if there was no Easter, what then?
An ancient tale waiting for its time,
perhaps later some other child born
to die attended by lepers and miracles and
a cross that bleeds for two thousand years.
If all they saw was ghosts then the glorious
tapestry of lies breeds a rainbow of
perversions, a panoply of visions stitched
by poverty, politics and survival strategies,
a history of conviction catching on its
own crude credo, the beauty of bigotry.
So we have poetry without truth, gestures
and inclinations. The plot was botched
from Bethlehem through to a green hill
where words were nailed to bone and it was
only a man who dangled brilliantly on
a cross of sham. And the world moved
on waiting for the next nutter, the tribal
desire for messiahs, annointing boys who
should have kept to carpentry and never have
listened to the one who was off his head.
Cock crows and denials and later walking
with the dead to keep themselves alive.
Nothing else was possible. They began to believe.

And It Is Time
And it is time we planted some things in our fields.
Will it be words or old prayers or other secrets
because when winter runs out the sun will wish to?
Always at first the idea of where you would rather be
and then the plans drawn out in poems and other stories,
and then the replies to whispers and the dread of getting it
all asunder and wry and wrong and again the weeping dream.
The children tell us about how the sun is a friend
and Mrs Dickinson says she has bells in her head and when
I see another foxglove dawn I am almost sure.
For the great adventure you need shoes and routes and
some idea of what this might do for you. For what have
we forgotten and forgiven? What words were never used?
I go out under the sun again and see that the sheep
still have no idea. Does the god know and can
he hear us in between?

The Cardinals Are Dancing
The cardinals are dancing again.
In chambers of light, between memories
of childhood and the voices of mothers,
they dance to begin, to achieve, to reconcile.
This deceptive flow, these radiant rotations
in triple time, these liquid lilts as if whispers
performed sestinas. The fall of shades on their robes,
these gestures of flight and spectrum, sequences beyond
speech catching fire, enfolding until they hear their names
again and see their sisters in orchards of early evening.
It is then that they consider simpler things; the way fields
never cease, the low sky of winter, how bells do not change,
how a single leaf can glow, odour of the classroom at
the start of term, the way a girl lays a table,
the stillness of oranges in December.
And sometimes even their fathers appear to them, never
understanding what took their sons away, the silence
that can seldom be occupied, a place in the garden
where games simply stopped. There are no letters
or visits or books that they can confide about this.
There is no angel to answer this. It is
in the mind like a lost letter, a poem not written.

Passengers
The people on the train pass by fields,
cows, cottages, trees, rivers, abandoned cars,
nettles, orchards, man on a cross, ladders,
huts, flags, innkeepers.
The people on the train read newspapers,
books, magazines, letters, see new places,
remembered places, man on a cross, scenes
recollected but different, that might be
some place else.
The people on the train do not hear bird
noises, aeroplanes, skipping songs, branches
falling, pig whistlers, man on a cross, kites
crashing, church bells, sheep, rifles.
The people on the train ride past fêtes,
conferences, weddings, burials, public meetings,
crucifixions, markets, bus queues, playgrounds,
family disputes, St Andrew's Church on fire,
police divers, postmen on strike.
They are passengers, on necessary journeys,
both here and there, past and future and not
quite present, holding conversations in their
heads, averting their eyes mostly, getting
nearer to arriving at things, looking through
images of themselves, between times and faster
and late, never quite passing the time.

Easter 2002
Between days and somebody else's music
and the slow dance of being alone
he sits in the small room in the close
to silence space and the wounds begin
again, and the wounds begin it again.
Hands. At the backs of his head. And
then the side-grinding gore that
comes in spasms and the heart heat.
Sometimes there is this lady in the room
with a cloth and tears and her voice.
Sometimes he simply waits for her.
Between the distance of days
and this glide of time and the far away
noises of ordinary lives he hangs
between embraces of pain and the
dislocation of other people's voices
and trees, grass, fields, hedges
become desert, sand, drenching sun;
a drum somewhere and the woman's voice
telling somebody to wait and this is not
death but a type of birthing.

The Snail Whisperers
In a fold in the hills, in the next valley, over there
they do other things.
They do not bury their dead, they dance with their gardeners,
they whisper to snails.
What do they whisper? About the meaning of frost,
the shortness of seasons, how God grips, how deckchairs
used to challenge us, how the Bible is filled with silences,
how fridges should be freed.
They are going to make a film about this.
Some snails will probably become famous.
Their tracks will become fabulous.

The Cleaning Ladies
They arrive at 8.30. After prayers and
Bible Time they begin again; the cloths
sliding surfaces, stroking roundels, crevices
yielding; moving on and across then shaking the dust
from upstairs windows to invisibly escape,
to transfer from here to there and begin again.
Three days a week, floor by floor, until
the vicarage is free of this week's dust,
the shaking away of dirt, the sanctity
restored, dust assembling in places we do
not see immediately, then slowly do;
reclaiming, restoring, its silent insistence
so that the dust and the cleaners return
and after prayers and Bible Time they commence again
and the hours and days and weeks have to be saved
from this layering, this hosting, as if even
the prayers and scriptures needed assistance and
life itself and our own little histories and meditations.

Garden Bird Watch
for Beverly
Watching, coming and going, here and there;
catch of colour, shade flash, busy about being.
What are these fields, gardens, trees, lawns for
but their survival?
On a cold night they can startle you
and when there is a death the silence freezes reason.
Counting these hide and seeking days
and dream song nights.
Counting life and loss and those
we have not seen for years.
We thought they had gone to another place;
then they reappear.
Teaching their young everything
but how to die.

Men In Pubs With Their Hats On
Men in pubs with their hats on
are not much interested in royal weddings
or if they are they should come on out and
demonstrate their loyalty by standing in parks
or at other vantage points to see the happy couple.
Men in pubs with their hats on, however, had better
wait until they are called to perform in other ways,
from the air or the sea or fighting for land that
keeps coming at them, its rivers and ruins and falling
bridges so that letters can hardly be scrawled
without thinking of hymns and sisters
and what our duty is and the real meaning of Closing Time.

You Won't Read This
This is the poem you do not want to read
because it throws stones, gets in the way of fiction,
works between meaning and jeopardies, is light yet
falls like thunder, lets you escape but nails you,
is capable of wounding through wonders.
This is the poem you wish to miss, rushing onto others,
mostly not new, rediscovering the voices you have some
trust in, the footnotes faithful, the obscure bits
not disturbing as they once did, survival comforting
and mostly knowing where you are.
This is the poem you believe is for others, their journeys
and desperate trusts, as a token of how words can silence,
restless in obscurity, the meanings that can turn you off,
the dread of discovery, as if the poet caught you naked
and there was a miracle in your kitchen.
This is the poem that has no god, no ending,
constantly calling and hanging you upside down,
to tell the truth through beloved lies, to proclaim
promises in a vanishing voice. Whose voice,
whose hymn, whose secrets? Your own.