THE CASTALIAN SPRING

THE CASTALIAN SPRING

THE CASTALIAN SPRING

1
A gush of water, welling from some cave, which slopped
Down to a stone trough squatting stout and chalky as a
Morning sky: I plumped myself on lizard-ridden stone to stare
Into its old truth square that struck me as perhaps another lie
So serious did it look while it promised me, oh, everything.
That honest look of water nursed in stone excited me. Under
The generous trees, tall splotchy planes and brittle ilex, their
Dark flopped down, sun-glare and dust spun through it.

2
I sipped that cold and leafy water tentatively, lost lipstick
Dabbing my mouth, gulped down a little slippery grit I hoped
Was not ferny mosquito larvae; then sat on, guidebook-learned
To get gorgeous and pneumatic in the throat, my bulk deflating
Slowly until, the sunset, when the last coach parties slid away.
The heat of the day peeled off, the light got blurred and hummed,
Pounding dusk struck up then a strong swelling rose in my throat
Thick with significant utterance. So, shivery in my cool and newly
Warty skin, I raised this novel voice to honk and boom.

3
I was small enough now, and stoical, to squat on the slabs of rock
Edging the trough, splashed with the spring that welled steadily into it
Shaking its stone-cupped water. I wear yet a precious jewel in my head,
I mused, this line of old rhetoric floating back through me, as quite
Unsurprised I settled to study the night, flexing my long damp thighs
Now as studded and ridged as the best dill pickles in Whitechapel.
Into the cooling air I gave tongue, my ears blurred with the lyre
Of my larynx, its vibrato reverberant into the struck-dumb dusk.

4
What should I sing out on this gratuitous new instrument?
Not much liking minimalism, I tried out some Messiaen,
Found I was a natural as a bassoon, indeed the ondes martenot
Simply oozed out of me. Or should lyric well up less, be bonier?
So I fluted like HD’s muse in spiky girlish hellenics, slimmed
My voice down to twig-size, so shooting out stiffly it quivered
In firework bursts of sharp flowers. Or had I a responsibility to
Speak to society: though how could it hear me? It lay in its hotels.

5
I spun out some long lines, let them loop in sound ribbons
Lassooed the high branches where they dangled and trailed
Landing like leathery bats in vacancy – alighted, they pleated,
Composed themselves flawlessly, as lifeless as gloves.
The silence that hung on these sounds made me sheepish.
I fished for my German, broke out into lieder, rhymed
Sieg with Krieg, so explaining our century; I was hooked
On my theory of militarism as stemming from lyricism.

6
I’d crouched close by a cemetery; at twilight its keeper
Lit oil lamps in shrines on the pale marble graves, each
Brandishing silver-framed photographs; fresh flowers
For the well-furnished dead shone out amiably, while
The scops owl in residence served up its decorous gulps.
Lights burned on steadfastly in this town of the dead,
Each soul in for a long night, their curtains undrawn.
My monotone croaking rang crude in such company.

7
Black plane trees bent over me, crouched in the night breeze.
For hours I called out on a sonorous roll, growing somewhat self-
Conscious I’d nothing to do but to sound: yet sound was so stirring
And beauty of utterance was surely enough, I thought I had read this.
A wind rose as I tore out my ravishing tenor, or sank down to throb
On my pitted hindquarters while my neck with its primrose striations
Pulsated and gleamed. Then beauty sobbed back to me, shocking,
Its counterpoint catching my harmonies; I had heard a fresh voice.

8
No longer alone, not espousing Narcissus, I answered each peal
In a drum of delirium, recalling with shame the dry white thighs
Of frogs like baked chicken wishbones, sorely in need of a sauce.
Our calls clasped in common, as heavy as love, and convulsively
Thickened by love – until ashamed of such ordinariness, I wailed
In sheer vowels. Aaghoooh, I sloughed off raark, aaarrgh noises,
Deliberately degenerate; exuded ooeeehaargh-I-oohyuuuh; then
Randomly honked ‘darkling blue of Dimitrios’: I had dreamed that.

9
The voice hears itself as it sings to its fellows – must
Thrum in its own ears, like any noise thumping down
Anywhere airwaves must equably fall. I was not that
Narcissus who stared stunned by his handsomeness;
Or I was, but not culpably, since as I sang, so I loved.
In that action of calling hope out I embodied it, grew
Solemn and swollen ushering in my own utterance.
I rang florid yet grave in my ears, as I had to.

10
Did I need to account for myself as noise-maker?
I had stared in the windows of Clerkenwell clock shops
At dusty brand oils for the watchmakers’ trade, made for
Easing the wound spring – some horo-prefixed, and so close
to my horror of time ticking by – brown bottles of clock oil
labelled Horolene, Horotech. Should I wind up my own time,
Chant ‘I was dropped on the Borders, a poor scraplet of
Langholm, illegit. and state’s burden, lone mother of three’?

11
Could I try on that song of my sociologised self? Its
Long angry flounce, tuned to piping self-sorrow, flopped
Lax in my gullet – ‘But we’re all bufo bufo’, I sobbed –
Suddenly charmed by community – ‘all warty we are’.
Low booms from the blackness welled up like dark liquid
Of ‘wart’ Ich auf Dich.’ One Love was pulsed out from our
Isolate throats, concertina’ed in common; ‘Du mit Mir’ was
A comforting wheeze of old buffers, all coupled, one breed.

12
But then I heard others, odd pockets of sound; why wouldn’t these
Claim me to chant in their choir? As I grew lonelier I got philosophical,
Piped up this line: ‘Don’t fall for paradox, to lie choked in its coils
While your years sidle by.’ Some hooted reproachfully out of the dawn
‘Don’t you stifle us with your egotist’s narrative or go soft on “sameness”,
We’ll plait our own wildly elaborate patterns’ – they bristled like movies
By Kurosawa. By then I’d reflated, abandoned my toadhood, had pulled on
My usual skin like old nylons. I drifted to Delphi, I’d a temple to see.