Loyal Opposition


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A selection of poems from

LOYAL OPPOSITION
by
Colin Ball
published by Outposts 1979
© Colin Ball 1979

SPRING RAIN 

Rain in early spring
Is sudden and heavy as sorrow
And as soon ended.
Yet it is not like sorrow-
More like a child's fit of tears when it comes:
Sousing May's drought.
Bringing with it stillness and freshening the green,
Releasing from the choked ground
A madrigal of smells:
Bitter tarmac, biting and pungent,
Sweet cut grass, fresh leaves,
Keen earth smells and cool root in the woods
And headier scents new-wakened from cherry and may
All ring together rinsing the senses
In shining after the rain.



	SPRING RISES IN MY BLOOD

Spring rises in my blood like heady wine
And makes me discontent with discontent.
I long once more for air and southern shores
Where I may sit and think and face the sea.
Once more the haunting images return
Of marble cliffs, white-hot against the sun,
And red-hot flowers that trail round terraces
Where men sit in the shade and smoke all day
Before a table set with yellow wine
And hear the tales of seamen from afar
Whose pale but burning eyes have seen the west.

 
               
     THE SECRET SPIRAL

		 1		
The secret spiral winds so high
Into the hidden heart of light
In unknown towers in alien woods,
By sunless waves and crags of night.

The way is hard, let none aspire
To climb the hidden stair of white
Save those accustomed to endure
And free from fear and fear of fright.

Through labyrinthine forest tracks,
Deeper than conduits underground,
And under whispering caverns deep
The path may both be lost and found.

		2

The head is bent, and in a pool of light-
Making a golden ripple in the panelled room
Long delicate pink fingers hesitate
On faded symbols on a yellowing page.
Outside the window, evening thickens
Making the winter night a comfortable brown
Which in the gaslights of the quadrangle
Expands and bursts in blooms of light.
The drizzle fizzes like a firework
On curtained windows deep against the cold.
And still the head is bent, intent it pores
And still the feet rest in the deep, rich pile,
Where well-oiled shoes reflect the firelight
Which flickers in a warm good-mannered glow.

 	
			3

The evening swirls and eddies and in troubled pools
Flows down the street, Finding the river still, 
Fills every crevice of the bridge with smoke
And mantles water-meadows in deep fur,
Then on it turns and penetrates the docks;
The bonded warehouses and cargo holds
To where a gaslight spurts like the last breath
Of some poor beggar with pneumonia.
Making its way through a cracked window pane
It chokes a figure in an overcoat,
He blows his nose again (he has a cold)
And pulls his muffler tighter round his ears.

			4

A single bulb undims the fireless room;
Bare but for paperbacks, a table and a bed
Where one alone intent upon a page
Ignores the staleing evening and inviting bed.
And sometimes smiles and sometimes wishes he were dead.
Then voices strident in the clinging air:
'I swear I'll kill you, you, you clumsy lout.
Why can't you be more careful...? ' So it goes
And he not daring to descend and like a god,
Descending bring ... a concord in this strife.
'And what with you and that one up the stairs,
The good for nothing, idle ...
I swear I'll have him out - he never pays -
I'll leave you all; I'll go away tonight.
I'll drown myself, get out, get out, get out!'
And so it goes: the talk above the tinkling cups
So much beloved by Johnson and by Pope.

			
			5

But let us leave this evening and this fog
And pass beyond the river and the sea
To where a southern garden lies unknown
Under the violet of a summer sky.
Where hidden by the solemn bulk of trees
A man and woman dressed in happy white
Run floating on the air towards a tower
Whose evening-purpled stone supports a stair
Of whitest spiral, mounting out of sight
And in the wood, a unicorn looks on.

			6

The secret spiral winds so high
Above the power of human eye,
No skill nor study penetrates
Its secrets never born to die.

Only the people of the woods
Dressed in a sympathetic white
And aided by a unicorn
Can find its ways far out of sight.




PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

How artfully the badger brush
Paints on my face a royal beard 
(The king of hearts or diamonds?) 
So white and venerable, I look so old! 
How cleanly now the razor cuts
Thick creamy slices out until
I face the day new-born to youth
And so 'with shining morning face' prepare
To face another day disguised
Securely as a clean anonymous young man.



 GHOST STORY

No longer necessary to die
And rattle chains and chamber pots.  
Revisiting that place I am a ghost
Who finds that nothing there has changed
Except the people who now occupy
The once-familiar places that were mine
Now strange unwelcoming.
Bereft of the identity they gave
I eavesdrop aimlessly on unfamiliar talk
In rooms where once enclosed by friends
I was alive and visible, because required 
To act upon that stage where now 1 watch
Another company enact another scene. 
The present is a foreign country to the past: 
No visas now are issued for return
Across the iron curtain of our days.  
To go back to that place, not at that time 
Is not revisiting, but rather prying
Into another person's future. 
Perhaps our image in the music hall 
Of gloomy ghosts ... is a correct one.


THE OLD AGE OF WIGLAF

Looking back, as I am often asked to do,
When men have drunk too deeply on a winter night,
It still seems strange that I should have gained glory early
When other men, more tried, had run away.
Now I have worn fifty winters away;
Brighter on the borrowed wings of Beowulf's fame
Than I deserved to be.

If I had to do it again, I think I would
It would be worth the fear, and after, the burden of fame
To be there beside him, facing the dragon , s jaws.
It was impossible to see the great hero
Who, to many, had become merely a grand old man

Wade into the beast, as fearless as the hero of a poet's lay,
Without being changed.
Yes, that changed me, but not only that, perhaps,
That is no longer the importance of what happened there;
For now I would not have contempt for the moment of glory
Which had always been in my mind a hollow thing
To be purchased with death.
	
Yes.  Now I remember the eyes of a grateful people;
And raised to a lordship a lifetime would never have won,
I rejoice in the good I was able to do,
Which else had been left undone:
The widows, who, had I not felt under some obligation,
Would have gone homeless, unfed.
And the orphans of war, of these there were plenty
For a rich man to foster
Only too happy to follow me then-
Be formed to a hardy, bold troop.
Such things and many others, where I pitied the poor
I remember.  And am grateful for what I could do
On the proceeds, the spoils of my fame.
Yes, if I had to do it again, I still would not run.
But now old, tutored by grief to belief
In the meaning of fame I once doubted,
This time I should not stand rooted by fear.



DECEMBER 25TH

The frost electrocutes the air
Under a thickening sky, that sickens
Like a hangover.
The mist depresses with its lifeless pale
Winter's accustomed purity.
Only upon the briar branch is the day redeemed
By a splash of unexpected hue,
Where blood bright berries cluster round the thorn.

Bells?  Why bells?
Can thickening air convey a note so clear?
So. Is he born at last, once born so long ago,
And still born every year
	
I enter. Cold stone kills-
Chills the air to dampness in the soul.
Darkness, like a cave, under this heap of rock
Dims the winter morning into night.
Colour inhabits the corder:
Bright red and gold, rich damson warms stone to life.
A single artificial star proclaims
The scene as more than eloquent art's deceit:
Manger, stable, child are living in its light.

Closer now the day is still

Cold clay is now revealed as resting in the hay.
Warm paint can not work magic
On the word carved out of stone:
Token of tale too terrible for art to speak.

Was it that stone might ape warm life
And breathe its colour into Winter's grey
In eloquent deceit
That the dove descending fieshed cold clay to life?
Or was it that blood might drop like berries
From the thorn?



	EPITAPH FOR A SCHOLAR

He added ten books to the total of human advancement
Which even his critics thought competent, scholarly stuff
And were widely read by those who worked in his field,
While his name became known to the general intelligent reader,
Though by no means a household word in the popular world.
In debate he was always formidable,
But now there are those who forget his vigorous prime:
Now the carping, petulant critic has scored a wound in his fame
And the anonymous slighting reviewer hints in behind-the-page snigger
That his scholarship was not altogether beyond reproof; 
And, safe from reply, assigns him his place on the slide-rule of fame
With the dated, who fade into fainter perspective when silently dead,
And defeats his opponent, at last lost to words,
With the withering logic of progress and scholarly fashion,
Which can prove that the greatest of minds are but mortal
And compared to their living detractors, the dead
For all of their wisdom, at least, for the new generation
Are better unread.




THE SECRET AGENT

(for C.H.Ball)

Nothing can now hold off the advance of spring
And I, for one, shall have no fear of this invasion;
Having long fought an underground, lonely war
Under the crushing heel of winter's occupation.

Sudden as unexpected joy, the first wave came
When snowdrop parachutes appeared amongst the fields
And yellow shellbursts, bright beneath the rain
Revealed those sectors where crocuses had gained a footing.

Then came the noise - impossible to define
Of slow inexorable movement like the tanks
Of fresher air, quickening from the west,
Warmer and moister than the retreating steel-grey sky,
And piling silk-sack barrage-clouds in ranks.

Nor were the regimental bands of daffodils so far behind
And soon the hedgerows, woods and lanes were in Spring's hands
And city gardens with their cherry trees
And avenues were bannered with the liberation signs.

Soon winter made an unspectacular retreat
Under a covering fire of unexpected snow
Which vanished overnight with its defeat
Leaving to spring the mastery of the sky.

THE  PROMISE

Now that I have reached the age
Of having no appearances to save:
So finally can be myself -
Let me allow the deepest wells
Of human feeling freely flow -
Not from the Freudian below
But from the mountains of my mind
And learn to recognise my kind.

When I was young I had to be
A man in order to be free.
But age has taught me more than this:
To be a child if I so wish.
So now I know that solemn voice
Is only one thing in the choice
Of being whole: that comedy
Has equal rights with tragedy.

And having grown out of my fears
I have no time to waste on tears,
I leave depression to the grave -
Life is the time for being brave;
And know that man must weep and kiss
And both of these comprise our bliss.
And in all ethics now, I find
The tragic failing to be kind.

So now whenever there's a choice
Between a public or a private voice,
The private always wins, my dear,
My faith increases every year
That Forster had it right. you know,
About the loyalty we owe
To state or friend: that in the end
Betray your country, not your friend.

 In any last analysis
Of guilt or joy we always miss
The point if ever we believe
Our heart should not be on our sleeve:
For everything in the end
Is personal, and so, my friend,
I make my life in private spheres,
But only after wasted years.

When I was acid and austere
And went from day to day in fear
Of feelings that were not objective:
I worshipped only the collective-
Responsibility I found
In the public world around.
Responsibilities I have more now
In keeping every personal vow.


 PASCAL'S  NIGHT  OUT

In the eternal boredom of the limited places,
Among the emptiness of vacant faces
The music and the chatter all insist
Upon a loneliness that is not wished.
The rhythm of the universal dance
Which numbers in its strophe the countless stars
Unheard above the compulsory endless trance
Which moves in waves between the band and bars.
Too late to save time lost, I seek a room
Where, no longer lonely, I may be alone-
Without its mask, away from all those faces,
My face accuses from the mirror of my gloom
That truth and peace exempt the quest to none
For the eternal silence of the infinite spaces.

THE FOX

I shot him after sixteen hens were dead
One statement fromm my twelve-bore instantly pronounced
Civilisation's verdict on the savage-and there he lay;
Lips shrunken, teeth uselessly displayed in an inarticulate snarl,
Limp where he once  was lithe.
His body broken on the blood-bespattered ground.
It is strange that our antipathies are such
That I should kill a creature I admire.
Fine, red, foxy, free-compared to me
All wild things are nature's aristocracy
And I am order's slave.
The problem is just this, and only in extinction
Will it resolve-as when antimatter and matter meet-
My state of nature is Augustan, his is that of Hobbes. 
Wild nature's murderous innocence, since Adam was born a gardener
Has found no welcome in the world of men,
And thus in Eden's garden was the fall implicit
Since what was nature's paradise, in its innocent state,
Given man, in order to stay paradise, then must
Wage war.



 IS YOUR BANKER'S CARD IN ORDER?

Not I, I must be found:
My parts, my title, and my perfect soul,
Shall manifest me rightly: is it they?
	(Oth. I,  ii, 30-32)

'Good morning!' I say.
'Good morning', says she:
I know her and she knows me;
And recognition's greeting
Blossoms from our weekly meeting.
'How would you like it?'
'Tens' I say.
'You have some proof of your identity?'
And I produce a plastic card
That guarantees that I am me,
To take away but what is mine:
There was no question at the time
Of paying in - they took on trust
That I was who I seemed to be.
On my part, well - I always must
Believe the bank will not go bust.

Falling in love is different:
For here no card can guarantee
Whatever we mean by our identity.
There's more at risk on our investmen4t
Than ruin or, at best, arrestment,
But nothing can indemnify
Against the loss of you or I.
For here the categoric must
Compels the ethic of pure trust;
For fraud's rewarded not by gain
Nor punished with a short, sharp pain:
The stakes are higher here, my dear,
And we must take our steps in fear-
For gain and loss come to the same
When we gamble with our name-
By which I mean that part of all
Which we loosely call our soul.
And if we break our faith with it
We fall into the endless pit.
So. like Othello, we must be
Exactly what we seem to be:
That is the meaning of identity,
For lovers, and it is
Entirely on the surfaces.
Faith is the only guarantee,
Where risk is all, of our integrity.


SONG OF A REACTIONARY

I am glad that I was born
Before the first pylon had set foot in Arcady,
When still at early dawn
A boy might see
A solitary unicorn.

I am glad that I was born
Before Hell's concrete bobbin had unwound
Over the face of Albion
Taking tinned people over all the ground
That once was sacred and unvisited.

I am glad that I was born
Before Rome's language had completely disappeared
When in the forests few
The little people still
Distilled the early dew.

I am glad that I was born
Before computers gave us numbers without names
When truth still had her dwelling on the earth
And in the inns a tale
Could be imbibed with flagons of real ale.

I am glad that I was born
Before non-smoking became all the rage
When cigarettes still had romantic names
And I lived in the age
When blowing smoke-rings with a pipe was art.

I am glad that I was born
Before this tranquilised and analgesic age
When joy and pain and life and death were real
And even with the pain a man could feel:
I am glad that I was born.


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