Virginia Rounding's Blog, page 9

Polite Notice

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“Keep clear of lifts” the sign dictates

uncompromising in a dismal station,

not – “Keep clear when the lift is moving”,

“Don’t leave your luggage by the lift”,

“No access to unauthorised personnel”,

or even, “Beware this lift – it bites”.

but – world without end, KEEP CLEAR OF LIFTS.

Don’t succumb to that flight of fancy –

you’re English – cherish no high hopes.

(Lifts seem dangerously European.)

Avoid the doors of perception,

the gates of heaven and hell.

Mind your ps and qs. Don’t sniff.

Play up and play the game. KEEP CLEAR OF LIFTS.

Lifts could catapult you upwards,

leave your stomach hanging in mid-air.

You don’t know where you are with lifts –

they’re something else – they let you down,

they box you in and send you flying.

For safety’s sake, make sure you’ve got

clean underwear – KEEP CLEAR OF LIFTS.

If you want your life to stay the same,

your feet to stand on solid ground;

if you hate the thought of changing levels,

seeing sights you never saw before;

if you catch the same train every day,

clutching your briefcase, a flask of tepid tea:

the writing’s on the wall – KEEP CLEAR OF LIFTS.

©Virginia Rounding, 1993

First published in Ebbing Tide 10, Fall 1995

Leaving Whitstable

In memory of my old friend, the late Canon Gerald Hudson

You’re older this time, driving more erratic,

eyes more bloodshot. We talk and read

and talk again. Not everything is said.

We’ve shared our pilgrimage for years;

When it’s good-bye, how will we know?

Your memories are of Larkin and of Keyes,

your peers at Oxford. I press onward,

seize the challenge, trying in my turn

to speak the silence, sing the dark –

notice, and it’s gone … How capture that?

Inside the train I write to wring

my spirits out, pin them on the sky to dry.

The teasing sun with one last shaft of fire

retires behind the draperies of cloud.

Leaving Whitstable, I mourn.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1993

First published in Aireings 28, November 1994

Mary’s story

A woman broke an alabaster jar,

Emptied it over the head of a prophet.

She wept. Her tears fell on his feet.

A woman enraptured drank his words.

Her sister, cumbered with too much serving,

Complained, but nothing could move her.

A woman afflicted with seven devils

Loved the prophet for his healing,

Came to his tomb bearing spices.

Two women fuse in the last retelling:

Mary the sister of Martha oils his feet,

Soothes with unguent and her hair.

Which of these women was Mary

Called Magdalen, whether they all were,

Is anyone’s guess.

***********************

To overcome my nauseous fear of breathing

Foetid air of the leper Simon eating,

I fix my gaze on the homeless traveller

To whom my comfort comes before his bitterness.

An alabaster box of spikenard, very precious,

I break, and pour the oil upon his head.

Another time I brave the Pharisee,

Hear the whispered condemnation of his guests

Who sprawl at ease around his table –

But he whom I have come to bless

Releases me, dissolves my guilt;

His eyes reflect a love which drowns me,

Cracks my life to fragments,

Splintered images of might-have-been,

And I who once crawled lowly as an insect

Across propriety’s so scornful face

Begin to contemplate myself without revulsion,

Even dream my advent day of hope.

**************************

The men have vanished …

The women watch silently.

So far forgetting themselves and their duty

As to trail a madman around the countryside,

The authorities consider them hardly worth questioning.

He enters a state where they cannot follow him:

His focus fixed on the process of dying.

He is leaving them now, and at resurrection

His body will need no more of their tenderness.

When he is dead, they witness the burying.

***************************

They wrote of our bewilderment, that emptiness we knew,

As though an earthquake happened – some man in white

Descending from the clouds to roll the stone away.

All we felt was blankness, an aching apprehension

That even after death our love was interfered with.

We carried spices to disguise his putrefaction,

Caress him in a final act of love –

Even that small comfort had been snatched.

We had to make what sense we could of what we found –

Traces in a garden of the man we cared for.

Vaguely I remember kissing bloodstained feet,

Soaking up his suffering with my hair.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1992

 

Annunciation

Marie had sex with Arthur once in Bow.

The doctor spoke. He prophesied a birth.

Friends tried to cheer her up: you never know,

Your Arthur might be back some time – although

Who cares? There’s other men, there’s not a dearth.

Marie had sex with Arthur once in Bow.

She wondered why she fell for such a toe-

Rag. What a jerk! she chuntered without mirth.

Friends tried to cheer her up: you never know,

Your Mum’s upset right now, but may not throw

You out – and clothes exist for wider girth.

Marie had sex with Arthur once in Bow.

No angel helped Marie, nor did the glow

Of pregnancy do much for her self-worth.

Friends tried to cheer her up: you never know,

Perhaps you’ll have a famous child who’ll show

Us how to live, who’ll help to save the earth.

Marie had sex with Arthur once in Bow.

Friends tried to cheer her up: you never know.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1992

Joan

Her life’s been rather disappointing

In a way, and lonely. I suppose

That’s why Robert likes to have her here

At Christmas, with her knitting, and those old

Pink mules she’s had for years. Funny

How she never married – still, she must

Be used to that by now – like those women

You read about in Barbara Pym,

Taking books and ovaltine to bed

And dreaming chastely of the vicar …

I never even saw him in his coffin …

I couldn’t bear to meet his friends and relatives,

Be quiet in the background, smile condolences …

We loved each other, and the price I have to pay

For our deception is this loneliness …

I had no life apart from him …

She didn’t come this year. I wrote

To ask her – I don’t think Robert’s death

Should stop us being friends. It’s odd;

I would have thought she’d want to join

In normal family life – the turkey

And the crackers – you know, be part

Of things – as far as spinsters ever

Can. I suppose that Robert dying

Came as something of a shock –

Secretaries don’t like change …

He’d been dead two days before I heard …

A message on the ansaphone that Monday morning –

His wife told how the ambulance had come too late …

It was the call I’d dreaded all these years …

He loved me, and I lived for him … I know

The kind of thing they’ll all be saying now …

Poor silly Joan – we should have guessed …

She must have misinterpreted

His kindness as her boss … These things

Do happen … the archetypal spinster …

His wife’s been very understanding in the circs …

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1992

First published in Iota 26, May 1994

Heloise (and her Abelard)

The best account of the story of Heloise and Abelard, the inspiration behind this poem, remains Helen’s Waddell’s Peter Abelard.

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Unhappy Heloise, as long as though breathest

It is decreed thou must love Abelard.

SHE HEARS WHAT HAS BEFALLEN HIM

So to her confines there comes a horseman,

Riding by night and in haste,

To leave for the cloistered girl

Irredeemable tidings – that her beloved,

Her eagle lover, is no more man.

She longs to run to him, to comfort him –

But how can she find comfort for this?

She waits for no word, no solace now;

Her only recourse and his command

To stay sequestered here for ever,

Refuse to love again now love is torn away.

SHE REPROACHES GOD

She could scream against the heavens

But is restrained, covering herself

With the coarse black cloth

Of anguish and celibacy.

She stands outside the dark chapel

But will not enter for very bitterness:

God, who turn from Your servant Abelard,

Do not expect me to turn to You;

Indeed I left You many months ago

When I gave my soul, my mind and body,

A living sacrifice to Abelard;

I burn now in the flame of my desire for him,

A dry fire never to be quenched:

I have no desire for You.

When I gaze at that tortured body on the cross

It is the blood of Abelard

Soaking into the loin cloth;

When I lift my eyes to Christ in glory

It is Abelard I see

Drawing all men to himself.

As David was to his Absalom

Am I to my Abelard:

Mother father lover husband wife –

All in all to him, my grief, my glory,

My everlasting torment, my most sweet reward –

It is to him I sacrifice

These remnants of transitory beauty,

These widowed nights and tedious days.

SHE RECALLS THEIR LOVE

When he used to come to me at night

In the days of our happy innocence,

When love seemed a private bliss

Before we learnt its power to hurt

And curiously enrage,

I knew him as no other woman had –

The mighty Abelard,

Casting off his learning with his clothes –

I touched his soft skin,

My tongue sought his …

I stroked the smoothness of his naked flesh,

Felt his hand explore my crevice …

But I must not think like this! – I dare not –

Such thoughts only feed my desperation:

My body yearns for him,

Can never now be satisfied.

No others loved like us

To whom love was a holy thing,

Our bodily union a sacrament:

The Church has called that blasphemy,

But I would shout it from the rooftops!

His kisses the breath of life to me,

His thrusting the rhythm of the universe.

SHE LONGS FOR HIM

When I had your body

I had no need of pictures;

Now my eyes caress you,

I press my lips against you every day,

Dear image of Abelard.

Sometimes you come to me in dreams –

But I open my eyes and see no Abelard;

I stretch out my arms to hold him –

He is not there;

I call him – he does not hear.

Interred in cold damp stone,

With dead obedience

I perform my vows,

Devoted to Abelard alone.

SHE THINKS OF HIS DOWNFALL AND OF THEIR SON

What darkness has been wrought by hatred

On one who would bring light to the mind,

Who in the creaking hull of Notre Dame

Strove to pierce the mists above the sea of faith –

Perhaps too soon to stop your shipwreck, Abelard.

Only months ago – such years it seems –

Hand in hand we stood in a meadow

While in the house your sister held our child;

Henceforth he will not see his parents –

Nuns and eunuchs have no sons –

Astrolabius, pray for your mother

Now, and at the hour of her death.

HER HYMN

They say you have attained

Some resignation – even peace –

Perhaps they say the same of me to you;

I say only initiates to despair

Can taste this deadly peace.

They say you speak of the suffering God,

Rejoice to suffer for His sake:

But Abelard, I cannot see it –

If there is a God

He has put out the eyes of my faith.

To my love I stay true,

To the remembrance of my earthly joy;

I desire no empty heaven:

Our love was our salvation, our eternal life,

Heaven was having you, my Abelard.

HE SPEAKS

Heloise, Heloise, Heloise …

Your voice in the whisper

Of running waters, your name

Breathed by the wind in the leaves …

Your Abelard is a broken vessel

For the love of God:

None stays for his comfort.

Now and then an image slips into my mind,

Unquiet in the midst of silence …

Heloise slipping from her clothes …

But memory drives me mad!

Shame presses me on every side.

I bear even to the altar

The burden of our guilty loves.

SHE REMONSTRATES WITH HIM

Is this the Abelard I loved? –

Trapped by a flesh-despising age?

Have you lost your mind through grief

So to torment yourself with blame?

You have no need to hide from God.

Abelard, if love is vice

I have no time for virtue:

If I believed the flames of hell awaited me

For having loved you, I would love you still.

HE BIDS HER FAREWELL

Write no more to me, Heloise, write no more …

Do not add to my miseries by your constancy.

To forget Heloise, to see her no more,

Is what heaven demands of Abelard.

Weep, my child, for your salvation –

No longer for your lover.

SHE SHAMES AN AGE THAT HAS NOT KNOWN HOW TO VALUE ABELARD

For twenty-one years have I lived after Abelard;

Rising each morning to watch by his tomb,

Praying each evening for death –

Now at last the time is near.

But can desire be fulfilled in heaven?

(My lover will not be in hell.)

Will he run to meet me, take me in his arms?

Or must my loneliness endure throughout eternity?

Will there come a time when our love, no more

Condemned, shines in glory? or will the name

Of Abelard never be spoken without tears? –

They shall be tears of shame

For what men did to him

And to his Heloise.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1991

Touchstone

I would be my touchstone,

Unearth my waiting heart

Which is my own still centre,

The source where springs the soul.

False starts, mistakes, rebuffs

Erode, as waves against a rock,

To make my surface smooth

And mould me to my shape.

Come lap against me, waves,

Refine but don’t destroy me,

For I would be my touchstone

Against myself to measure me.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1990

The Night

When I came to say good-bye that night,

Already you were drifting off

Beyond the realms of speech and sight

Or any common sight. Your cough

At last was silent; eyes half-closed,

Unseeing, yet I knew you heard,

Felt my kiss, without a word

Consented to let go. I dozed,

And slept for half an hour or so –

Awoke to words my sister said:

Come on – Mum died a few minutes ago.

And so we sat beside your bed

To say our last goodnight, and saw

Your thin neck taut and stretched with strain –

But all that gone now, and the pain

Was past, so you would cry no more.

Then while we had a cup of tea

The nurses wrapped you up, so small

And shrivelled, save the swollen knee

Where cancer broke the bone. And all

At once my flesh began to creep:

For in place of my comfortable mother

Was a sharp-nosed shape in white, quite other,

Which frightened me and took away my sleep.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1989

First published in  The Eclectic Muse, Vol.4, No.3, Christmas 1994

St Mary’s Abbey, West Malling

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion.

(East Coker, T.S. Eliot)

You wake to hear a chuckling stream

Below a timbered house, and bird song

Through the latticed windows; then cross

The dewy garden to the light-soaked

Silence, where time passes and is still.

The sun, glinting on polished tiles,

Rebounds off a three-handled chalice

And dapples the attendant circle.

Here you will find no false holiness –

The kind that sits around in chapel

Feeling pious, or reaches back

Into the last half-hour to try to

Rescue some residue of meaning –

Missed before, through dreaming of breakfast

Or staring at a postulant;

But here an ordered walking out

To work declares that all is holy

For the holy people of God.

A mind immersed in London keeps on

Flitting, bat-like, to garner future

Moments beneath a leaky roof –

So losing the present through neglect

And taking the shine off time to come,

Like pulling the cherries out of a cake

To render the whole thing tasteless,

Or skimming the back page of a book

And ruining the unfolding story.

But time is treasured here and used well,

In neither hurry nor in idleness;

And so the mind may stop its spinning,

Finding a balance in the stillness

At the heart of the spin, where dwells

A deep pool of silence into which

You can sink, a silence to float in.

And while you rest, you help to make

A ‘point of intersection’ between

This place and the world for which it prays,

Bringing the world of time into

The eternal, bearing the eternal

Back into the troubled world of time.

 

©Virginia Rounding, 1989

First published in Symphony, 1994, No.3

Christ and the smell of fish

The Mistress of Novices in Kathryn Hulme’s The Nun’s Story capturing some of the difficulties of life in community:

‘Once, long ago, I too found the community life a pure agony.  I suffered, knowing that my forced participation could never be pleasing to God.  I struggled to overcome this.  I thought about the Christ who took to Himself the very humblest of companions.  I told myself that quite possibly He could not abide the smell of fish or the frequently childish talk of those simple disciples.  Yet… He lived with them and spoke with them in the picturesque parables they could understand, He who had confounded the scholars of the temple when only twelve years old.’