The Reinvention of Time Travel

Settlers

There seems to be no escape

from subjectivity?

Why me? 5 (It’s still about me, isn’t it?)

Does it mean when the lights turn red

and there’s still nothing on the road ahead

that I’m special for the life I’ve led?

Or have I been overlooked instead

because I said I wasn’t wed

or once I stayed too long in bed?

Can I deny all I’ve just read,

claim this is someone else’s thread

(the poetry went to my head)?

Is my life rich like sandwich spread

or as homogenous as bread?

As I said, it will always be

all about me

… except in places and

times before the

Traveller was born …

Explorers don’t always board the bus.

Perhaps they book another hotel night,

or ditch the gang, duck the homebound flight,

extend their stay a lifetime. There’s no rush. 

Settlers 1: Conception

Now at war’s-end two lovers hand in hand

sat close on the bridge: a mother–to-be

and a father watched water run beneath

rinsing out certainties and stains upstream,

washing to cities of what is to come.

Bright Young Belgravia and Mayfair Things

undressed there for dirty Skindles weekends,

or slept and left their Thames Hotel excess.

Outraged local decency came unlaced

while the King raced his Rolls up High Street,

took whores on Queen Street, and harpies on Park.

Here by the shipping wharfs of Maidenhythe

village girls purporting still to be maids

scrubbed clothes with silt-and-river memories

in songs of seven centuries ago.

Perhaps these uncouth wash-girls danced nymph-like

to tease blushing farmer lads and delight

the mountebanks and merchants who stumbled from

the flimsy wood-built bridge with its swingeing tolls.

And here came tales of princes, Parliament

and plays, and punishings from travel west,

the slime at Slough and how scared and scathed

you’d be by howling skies at Honeslaw Heath.

Then travellers moved on leaving maids stirred,

unsettled, muted by marvels they’d heard.

Settlers 2: Landscrapes 

Marsh

Residents died when skies etched the marsh

and ague ran over All Hallows and Grain;

with more mist than myth, more harbour than hearth,

they buried Hoo knows, but found me a name.

too tied for an island, too loose to be land

too dry to be estuary, too riven by streams

too lethal for strangers but home to the blind

too worldly to swallow political dreams

too dark for halos too bright for hallows

too easy for bikers too early for cars

too low for engines with ladders and hose

too windy for neighbours with houses on fire

too late for umbrellas too light to catch air

too poor for sickness too proud to have cares

too bitter for siblings too harsh for heirs

too sad for tears with children to spare

too barren for youth, and too lush for war.

Nine hundred years lived in proximity,

chalk runs to Cliffe, mist to infinity:

the Marshes have reasons too long for their shore.

Chalk

I too come from land where chalk runs to sand,

from cowslip to cowwheat, from beech to bland,

where flint meets gravel, and elegy ode,

a place that consumes the broken and old,

where Quarry Woods dizzily shrink the Thames,

where detritus and deluge faced their ends,

and Waltham Plain’s precocious shove denies

their hard-edged challenge with its compromise.

Gravel

Up against lanes of azalea and ash,

unabashed by that entitlement and dash,

the parents pulled hope from a void between wars,

and spoke of the past as history’s flaws;

the years to come were welcome guests, though both

soon loathed to be gorged by their greed and growth.

So they marched as landmarks to match, the way

escarpments in trees brace the river’s race

and curl from an unassuming distance,

dignified by purpose and resistance.

Settlers 3: Rhymes for the Blorenge

Strange bird calls near dawn spurn a still field mist,

defeat a sophistry of feeding gulls.

The timber wagons lunge down lanes and list

with wood for hafts and harrows – all the tools

precious to labourers and artisans;

their welfare – like the churchyard yews

churned by rolling winds – surges, slumps and bends,

till cottaged workers have no more to lose.

An ancient inn half way from county-town

to sea pours relief and sweetens travel

before the stumbling turnpike road stoops down

and swerves to jump the mercury canal.

One way a tow-path hauls to Pontypool,

the other plods the wooded Vale of Usk

where brawling forge-hands, forced by sweethearts, crawl

back drunk and daft with laughter after dusk.

Between the Blorenge and the Sugarloaf

the farmers vie to out-indulge their wives –

with finest flour from Buckland Mill for stoves,

and pure gold honey mined from local hives.

The mists dissolve to rain, then snow to sleet,

on till the winter splinters into spring,

as birds fling mawkish cries across the wheat,

and stalk a country squire’s swagger and swing.

… though place and time may not
be as settled as they seem …

Unsettler

The past is a time of passage and passing

when embered acers face the end,

and cherry sap slips away from branches

dripping ochre, olive, crimson-green.

Old bracken blisters, cracks and curls again.

dyes the moor milk-chocolate brown.

Rain rakes rivulets of mud by the barn

and hooves carve chevrons and crosshatchings;

the rough farm track is brushed and bared elsewhere.

Mosaics of pebbles emerge from runoff.  

We know the present is no stable place,

but our learning will have come to nothing

if we cannot read or appreciate

the change and danger of autumn,

Time seems to run: in fact it surrounds us –

wolves in woods lurking ahead and behind.

It’s said forgetting is the human way

to survive, but so is remembering.

You might catch its flash like kingfisher blue

in a flick of reeds. Perhaps some other bird,

A train of thought, a faint recollection

of some ancient hope or joy. We can’t be sure.

Before March, tentative celandines

celebrate a premature spring.

Mosses mount in minor fronds

on the bones of the telegraph poles;

pigeons hang to bald wires, harbingers.

Woodland floors turn nondescript green,

dogs mercury stirs the countdown, the burn

when everything alive points to the sky

poised for the taper of sunlight that ignites

primroses and stitchworts, and sprays cow parsley

proudly in milky clouds down country roads.

These are dangerous days which may defect

to any future of our conjecture.

… whether real or imagined

Settlers 4: Footprints on Mars

What if ours are the first footprints on Mars?

This planet that wears no outcast sagas

plays a pristine half-world hanging

on a threshold thread of space,

all comparisons borrowed from Earth,

and poised to be likewise despoiled.

Imagine this responsibility.

We will have come to investigate “anomalies”,

the geologist’s term for fucked if we know,

the optimist’s term for down-slope hopes

of ever finding non-terrestrial life.

There were no giants rolling boulders here

or gods with seismic thunder to astonish

these unremitting deserts or tame vanished seas:

only human failure, jealousy and lust,

can outrage this incontinent land.

Remoteness not ghosts froze this surface underworld.

We may in solitude construct flowers from rust,

turn sand grains to leaf-mold, craters to brush,

we may create new landforms from dust,

blind in the eye of year-long storms.

We may stand in foothills on jagged stream waste

shadowed by the dead volcano 16 miles high.

pale against the inkjet pink jet sky

whose opaque sunlight will soon subside

to darkness, silence and ice.

But the life we discover here will be ours,

and we may yet come to respect that these

were always the first footprints on Mars.

Even if the future is uncertain,

we should be ready to shake the curtain. 

Digital police treat me like a prime:

they count on differentials; I’m

the proof and price of calculated crime.

My number’s up. I feel the byte of time.

7. Time Travellers »