Back to 'Poems by Peter Brooke'     Nothing in Me   Homage to the Twentieth Century Aaron Stating the obvious Being and Time On a photograph of Ernest Bevin at the age of fourteen Meditation in a time of Imperialist war Three poems against love poetry The vigilant eye Conversation piece Nothing in me Meditation and prayer For Pamela Three poems on sleep Spitting in God's face Steam On the boiler (a love poem)   HOMAGE TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Somehow that great outpouring of energy and love that turned in the end so rancid surely must have meant something other than just the preservation against all odds for a time at least of a great empire - the sense of a future turned to the dust of yet another 'victory for the west' - I say that if it gave birth to nothing else it produced a poem or two radiant in the optimism that matter had evolved into Man and Man was evolving into something godlike and bountiful and kind knowing his continuity with the stones, the plants, the animals, love as a discoverable mathematical law but no - Khlebnikov/ Zabolotsky - you were magnificent in your error but you were wrong. There is no such thing as 'Nature'. What then is there? For there is certainly something running through us - Yes, absolutely, Khleb- nikov/Zabolotsky, there you are right, we are the thought, the voice - howling, inarticulate, cruel, incompetent but nonetheless, a voice - of the plants, of the animals, of the stones, the oceans, the stars, of all that the lazy mind calls 'nature' but we have a different and more precise name for it. We call it the creature. It didn't make itself. And its terrible longing that - Yes, absolutely, Khleb- nikov/Zabolotsky, and you too René Ghil (not to forget Ian Curtis) tears us apart isn't a longing for itself but for something other than itself - the only thing that can be other than itself - the Creator - oh but materialism - the understanding of that material unity - understanding that matter is of the nature of consciousness, still was an adventure, and you, the poets, at the head of it, the raw cutting edge of it - ice breakers! and what you discovered, even if it is only part of the truth is true and there is still work for you to do.   AARON Aaron drest the silly priest his two sons blest his two sons dead. Aaron magnificently dressed, humiliated, stumbling after his smarter brother. Aaron the mellifluous Aaron the eloquent Moses the tongue-tied standing behind him his two eyes bored into the back of his head.       STATING THE OBVIOUS To state the obvious, poetry covers many different types of human experience. Or, more accurately, it covers nothing. It touches many things, but to reach that height - well, poetry is always disappointing. It holds within itself the idea but never the reality of totality. Nonetheless, in always promising what it cannot give it keeps the idea of a covering, of a totality alive, and so poetry fulfills, in its own way, God's will. But what, if it is anything, is God's will? Or, if it is nothing, is there something that corresponds to what it might have been? Such as, for example, 'progress'? For those who believe in progress believe that things tend in a particular direction, towards a particular end. Difficult to imagine a teleology without at least something analogous to a will, something that has built into it the sense of a future - and yet the seed goes steadily and surely towards the flower but our will rarely sees the future it envisages. The plant grows, but does that mean the plant does anything? Do any of us ever do anything? or is the doing done through us by someone or by something else? As, for example, 'progress' - the 'Prince of the World', who whether or not he is the Devil, certainly isn't God. And so we return to the poem, which, precisely because it has failed, fulfills God's will, asserts but fails to realise a reality that, unrealisable in the world. remains a reality, a kingdom not of this world, and that, and not the 'progress' or the plant becoming the flower, is how we might understand the indirect and subtle thing that is analogous to God's will.       BEING AND TIME A person is not a thing that does things. How can a thing that does things be distinguished from the doing? I paint a picture of a person on a board. Is that the thing, its reality lying in its mere unmoving? But since Being is in time it never is but always was (and how can we know if it ever will be?). For being to be in the present (which is to say in space) requires Eternity. There and there only can it (whatever it is/was) be.       ON A PHOTOGRAPH OF ERNEST BEVIN AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN   You can see it in his later photos Once you've seen it here. Here its very clear. His eyes are elsewhere.   The young man in his bow tie, His waistcoat and his watch and chain, The orphan boy, Put out to work at the age of ten   Already the pose of a statesman. But his eyes are looking beyond that. I wish I could say I was living in the future he is looking at.         MEDITATION IN A TIME OF IMPERIALIST WAR   When James Clavell reflected upon the Japanese aristocrat dreaming a refined and delicate verse to the sound of his enemy's tortured cries, did he think also of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sydney Walter Raleigh, men of a graceful turn of phrase, land-hungry murderers and men of prayer? We who love well put together well built words, we are their spiritual heirs. So as I praise my own finesse, my subtlety and my most delicate ear, I tremble in fear and say with the psalm Lord, deliver me from blood-guiltiness.       THREE POEMS AGAINST LOVE POETRY Written after reading Jack Clemo's poems Shuttered, Exit and Gulls nesting inland. My love, my need, seems at times so weak so indifferent, and yet, underneath all that indifference, so desperate, and not to be satisfied with one. I am the profligate son - giving my heart to this and that, which is not specifically to do with sex, or adulation. It is always a longing for the one who is not quite there - partly there, yes, and even miraculously, sometimes - but still, not quite. Could Jack Clemo with his 'sea of perilous infinity' - the best image there is of it - not understand that? that his delight in the girl was still, just like the perverse delight in nature, delight in the creature? Sometimes, though, in all that evocative clay I have seen - not in the beauty of his form but in his act of forming - something of the beauty of the creature - Adam - as it was meant to be - not a thing in a landscape (it being only in post-Renaissance painting that there is such a thing as a thing) but an activity. 2 But then again, what does it mean the simulacrum of emotion the torments of unrequited love seen on a screen, looked at in a book. This looks to be a very human invention, unimaginable to the animals who certainly know mimicry but not at that emotional level. We are the animal that imagines pain and makes it pleasurable and that is the secret of the Bible, all those ups and downs being a sort of education teaching us the horror of a world with and a world without (sometimes one wonders which is the worse - our love being perverse, mother of wars) love. 3 Why don't they write about their children - who are, surely, the justification, the real Reason with a capital 'R' for all that messy passion. The poet gets the girl and they live happily ever after and meanwhile a new life, a new mind has appeared, miraculously, wonderfully, and is looking at the world with new never before existing eyes, and that isn't the stuff of poetry? It isn't the desiring or the having that matters but the birth and ONLY the birth, the something out of nothing, and after that all that rich, life giving, life giving.     THE VIGILANT EYE It is as if He was a man - but if He assumed humanity it wasn't as a man that He created the Universe - and yet it is as if He was a man that we ask Him to have mercy on us. And so this child sleeping on the Cross but labelled 'the vigilant eye' might make a sort of sense - God being consciousness - that consciousness being the substance of the Universe (substance being not the stuff itself but the Stuff under the stuff) necessarily, always and everywhere, even as a sleeping child, knows everything, it being that knowing that defines being. To be is to be known by God and 'not to be' isn't an option. So you say - you who talk to me out of a box in my living room - that that is unbelievable, as if anything is believable, as if our limited consciousness or Galen Strawson's panpsychism or Dawkins' autonomous memes are more believable than that Omniconsciousness in which we live and move and have our being, as we live and move and have our being in something, surely, something as unbelievable as the air we breathe. But that that Omniconsciousness should become a sleeping child, a disobedient boy. a troublesome preacher, is improbable, you say, almost as improbable as that a rock should (after no matter how many million years) become flesh and blood, or even (by the intermediary of a limited consciousness) bread and wine. And now imagine (what can we ever do otherwise?) the whole Universe, alive, aware or (better perhaps) embedded in life, in consciousness, and we, part of that consciousness, small and lonely, far out and lost in all that fiery turbulence, ready to drown, ready to burn, but given guides, given help, able to accommodate, able to reconcile, if only the Sea has mercy on us.     CONVERSATION PIECE Every time I think of you and you and you and you and everyone I ever knew I am full of pain, wondering why I let that life, that secret, pass me by for even though there is no-one who is not a mystery before whom a lifetime would not be enough to bow sufficiently deeply we don't see it. We think they are a waste - even a vast emptiness - of time, those images of Christ, those beautiful ears and eyes and noses. You who despise the person sitting next to you on the tube train, have you any idea what a brain is? But oh! your word, your words - when you open your mouth - the 'idiot wind' - is like a door shut on what you are. Or so I thought, but I was wrong. For the complexity of the process is such that it is impossible to speak without speaking poetry/every word spoken anywhere, by anyone is a miracle, we are surrounded by revelation, the ocean opening, one way or another, one to the other, and the door shut is shut in me. And the shut door isn't judgment but self preservation, a protection against a tempest of revelation, of light struck out of the dark abyss, the vast universe that you are, and you and you and you.     NOTHING IN ME John 14.30 (KJV) Yes, I thought the 'Prince of the World' - 'Cosmos' wasn't the Devil, and the icon of Pentecost confirms it. There he is with his crown, the prisoner, not of the Devil but of that other, duller, even deader thing, Hades. The Devil and Hell have a certain raw life about them, but here he is standing, not in fire but in darkness, maybe not even knowing of the saving fire that is falling on the heads of the apostles, who are, after all, bigger than him, surrounding him, this little king of a little Universe. But what are the twelve dead things he is holding in his hands? Perhaps someone knows better but I suggest the twelve dead shells of the physical appearance of the apostles, which is all 'the world' can see of them, all 'the world' holds prisoner - what they look like being better than what they are. So when our Lord broke the gates of brass, did He free the Prince of the World? Or is the imprisonment of the Prince of the visible Universe - the big fish in a small pond - voluntary? Can we imagine the world - as Wordsworth and Constable perhaps imagined it - free of that dark, deadly thing? Is there anywhere else that that could be other than in us? in consciousness? And is the Prince of the World anything other than us? than human consciousness? Our excuse for the tyranny we exercise over the world, which is that we can't do otherwise? And so, to paraphrase Jesus - Cosmos, the Prince, not of what we see but of our way of seeing, cometh, and he hath nothing in Me.     MEDITATION AND PRAYER For Robin Our psychology is not the same as yours. When we strip ourselves down to the bare essentials we don't see anything divine, we see instead a grinning face that is not entirely agreeable and not entirely ours. We are not what we are, and this not us, grafted into us, would by now be all there is if there wasn't another not us, this one being certainly divine but still, definitively, not us, but which might, with difficulty, join us. But if these two activities that are not us are so desirous to war over us there must surely be something there, something that, if it is the object of the desire of two spiritual principles must somehow be and somehow be, in its own incomprehensible way, desirable. Which is to say surely that we are something neither divine nor satanic/angelic but yet, being created, continuous with the satanic/angelic, hence the ease with which he joins us and the difficulty He has. But if we are continuous with creation is there a distinct human substance, or do we carry with us the rocks, the animals, the trees with which (sometimes) (some of us) we feel such sympathy? Is the human form in the landscape or the landscape in the human form? So that the cries of the pain we inflict daily and on everything sound from within? At any rate, it is not to meditation that we turn, not to that vast world of all and everything where everything is broken but to what is not there - the only Thing that isn't in us - our meditation is useless (Father Anthony dixit) if it doesn't turn to prayer.     FOR PAMELA This collection of elements that came together and is/was you (and you and you and you) used as a machine the body, the brain that is/was an intellectual construction - for the Intellect transcends the intellect and has cleverly devised its own means of a particular mode of being, of having been, that means being the material universe. Lucy was rolled around with rocks and stones and trees but you, more like Origen, juggle/will juggle with galaxies. But the means imagined by you, by that of which you are a part, declined, as they do - as they are programmed to do - panic like that of a child on a sledge gone out of control, that is what it is being old. But to be dead is very heaven. You imagined yourself to be in the machine but now you can see the machine was in you.       THREE POEMS ON SLEEP THE SLEEP OF THE JUST (1) How warm and comfortable they must have felt that balmy night when they all fell into a deep sleep where they lay together in the garden of Gethsemane. That drowsiness yielding to sleep, that lovely resemblance to death, we run to it like metal to a magnet. And so they slept peaceful and harmless like children, doubtless dreaming of the wisdom of the Master they all adored, but waking to a chaos of voices, to lights and flashing swords and to what must have seemed to be a bottomless hole of despair.   SEEING IS BELIEVING The competent mind shut down, the real mind gingerly opens its eyes and 'we' look at 'it' tentatively and in- competently mapping out where we are in this place that is intermediate and unreal caught somewhere between the two great realities of Heaven and Hell. Here there is no continuing city and what we see isn't much better than the unreality that overpowers us, binds us captive, when our eyes are open in the moments when we are competent and can do something about it. So we are on a see- saw, from blind and able to sighted and impotent. Up and down and up and down or up and up or down and down.   THE SLEEP OF THE JUST (2) So when the disciples slept was the world they were in less real than the despair of the days before the Resurrection - when the world received the Revelation of the Truth they were dreaming when they lay peaceful and happy, in the garden in Gethsemane? (always assuming that that was really what they were dreaming and not something else entirely. Our greatest enemy is not sin, once we're aware of it, but distraction).     SPITTING IN GOD'S FACE Twice yesterday I spat in my Lord's face. The first time when I met an old friend, wanting to discuss things we had in common, but every time I spoke, her sister intervened, agitated, nervous, anxious to please, laughing at bad jokes, preventing any real encounter, any real exchange of memories. And so in my heart, I spat, I spat, I spat. Then, later, in the street, a beggar came up to me murmuring in a way I couldn't understand, legs unsteady, holding in one hand a complete roasted chicken, in the other a can of beer. Assuming he was drunk, I spat, I spat, I spat, and that immense sea of suffering - my Lord stretched out on the Cross - rolled on past me down the street.     STEAM James Baxter thought when he went to Jerusalem that he should stop writing poetry, because it all seemed so frivolous beside the terrible reality he was now taking on board, and yet, if he had stopped writing poetry I would never have heard of him, never have heard of Jerusalem, and yet he was right, because what does it matter, when my grasp of that terrible reality is so frivolous, that I should or shouldn't have heard of Jerusalem? I am the critic, the sensitive soul who appreciates from a safe distance with a tasteful - and even agreeable - shudder of sympathy Jim Ferris's 'atypical embodiment' and Baxter's 'steam'. Note: Jim Ferris is an American poet, part of a movement of poets who write about their experience of illness or physical disability. Since the relation between body and soul is such an important part of poetry it is a very powerful subject. 'Atypical embodiment' is his phrase for the condition of physical disability. I was introduced to the poetry of James K. Baxter , one of the truly great poets of the twentieth century, by Robin Baldwin. Baxter had a secure established and establishment reputation as a leading New Zealand poet when he gave up everything (literally) to live in poverty in a Maori encampment called Jerusalem. 'Steam' is New Zealand slang for methylated spirits.     ON THE BOILER (A love poem) The boy who arrived in his oversize workman's overalls to fix my old boiler - oh but he looked so very young, and his eyes shone as he tried (not very hard) to persuade me to buy a new one. 'That old boiler', he said 'is as old as me'. And now that he's gone the old boiler in my kitchen is shining with joy and - as in the Bob Dylan song - it seems to me to be 'forever young'.