The Commuter’s Tale
For my dad, with apologies to our mutual friend Geoffrey

Prologue
When that my father, on his leggies short,
Descended from that citadel of thought
That “Oxenford” is called, he faced the world
Of business and employment, and unfurled
His MA (Oxon) standard at the scene,
A vista to behold of pastures green.
His living was to keep the books for Ford,
But music, made and heard, struck deeper chord
Within his heart. No great time did he waste
To find a choral outlet to his taste
That made good use of his well-blending voice,
On Second Tenor when he had the choice.
A wife he had with him, of sparkling eye
And measured tongue; likewise a singer she.
For many years each Tuesday would they meet
In the Big Smoke just off High Holborn Street,
He from the office – Whitbread’s Ales by then –
She from their home in Hertfordshire would wend
And with good friends good music would they make
Rehearsing for fine concerts to undertake.
And so this stout, industrious fellow wrought
A life of toil and joy in which he bought,
Through many hours on train, in car, and by
His office desk, the opportunity
To do those things that he did love the best:
Singing and travel, and welcoming each guest
Into a home both modest and pleasant
Where easeful comfort more than flash did vaunt.
Full many a site in every part of France
Was graced by his well-educated glance
While half an eye would constantly remain
On the Michelin Guide Vert for that domain.
And later, as life’s energies began
To ebb upon the stealing tide, this man
Of contemplative spirit made his peace
With expiration of the body’s lease,
A patient surveyor of the scene
In which in’s prime he had full active been.
Throughout his life quiet wisdom he dispensed
Though only when invited he commenced.
With quiet words and few could he dispel
Much gloom and hesitation that did dwell
Upon the hearts of those that gave him ear,
Naming the thing they most had need to hear,
For verb. sap. was ever his philosophy:
A word, well chosen, set minds at liberty,
And many trusted in his judgement sound.
In laughter he’d indulge, his eyes full round
With mischievous delight as he declaimed
A saying of that most beloved and famed
Mad bard of Colney Hatch, The Milligan,
A refugee from logic and a man
Whose inspired chaos always did release
The inner joy beneath Dad’s suit (three piece).
Much comedy could draw from him a grin:
Full easily to chortle he’d begin.
Although at times he waxed irascible,
He was a very perfect, gentle soul.

The Tale
“When with Roots Motor Co. I had my start,
At times anxiety seized my fluttering heart
Lest I fuck up and cost the team a bomb
(If only in red ink); I lacked then the aplomb
Experience alone can offer, and had yet
To learn self-pacing, that each day would set
In manageable order. I made then no waste
Of Old Bull’s counsel to my Young-Bull haste.
A Welshman had I as a trusted friend
And would-be mentor, though to outpace the end
Of sketching him, he was a true-born nut
But withal sure enough to trust his gut
And make a call in wisdom that belied
His visage, as of one whose hair has fried
Under the brainstorm impetus of hwyl;*
In anecdote he could hold forth right well
With much advice for my still-tender ear
The most of which I’d best not repeat here.
A tale he told, how one day with his wife
Behind the wheel – he braced ‘gainst imminent strife
As he endeavoured to instruct her in
The art of driving, in which to begin
He had them motoring all about the town
Despite her mind inclining to shut down
In panic: once, as at a signal red
They sat, unknown to him she’d selected
Reverse instead of first, and as the light
Changed hue, she plunged their chariot of delight
Into the car that them was following
And gave its fender fairly a right ding.
And straightway from the passenger side with fire
Of righteous fury leapt he out; his ire
Upon the hapless victim did reverse,
Declaimed in ringing tones this fearsome curse:
‘It is your fault, for since YOU were behind,
The law perforce against YOUR suit must find!’
Of this rude Celt no more shall I now speak,
And yet he had concealed within his joke
A pregnant moral: thinking sure and swift
Disguised as impulse hot can oft-times lift
A circumstance disfavourable to
Oneself into a form that might accrue
To the quick-minded an advantage sure.
And so, if in good fortune you’d endure,
Ere your hot haste shall render you undone
Engage your wits in forward gear, my son!”

* Hwyl: “…a sudden ecstatic inspiration, which carries the speaker away on its wings, supplying him with burning words of eloquence, which in his calmer and normal state he could never have chosen for himself.” (“World Wide Words,” accessed 12 May 2021 at https://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-hui1.htm)

Ubuntu
A translation into Tibetan

Soften… dissolve… let the wave cap
of ego slip with a sigh back
into the ocean of common awareness,
touching the world with such vivid
humility, gently fashioning a cradle
of compassion: see there the world-child
gaze back with your own eyes, see
your true self in the pain and joy
of other lives, of a larger nature
that births us all. Patiently await
the miracle: to see; touch and taste
and listen too, but above all,
allow yourself to see with newly
opened vision that “I am”
because we are

Sark, July
Author’s note: This was written in about 1992: a good chunk of a lifetime ago

Bare island teeth
stumped by sunlight
The sea’s blunt bite
grey-flecked hound with

no anger left
Mysteries crowd
the hot shadowed
sea-valleys, cliffed

by salt weather
out of old rock
Ochre dusts choke
streets of other

nature, hoof-packed
brown with stale time
Secret ways climb
from the tide-wracked

beaches into
green-hushed conclave
deaf to the waves’
call.  Here trees grow,

careless of years
So the island
counts time in sand
not calendars

Lush woods, dry grass,
silent as feet
pad the soft dirt,
keep their witness

Reckon such groves
within the isle
more than people
And only the waves

crowd this harbour,
pale sea-children
catching the sun
in their laughter

Magnificent Desolation

Those far-voyagers,
eclipsing the world that birthed them, trusting
the motor on their tail to catch them
and latch them into the Moon’s tawny influence,
turned the almost-last corner in the maze
of mission milestones leading from the July-hot
and thrust-blasted Kennedy pad
to this final staging post
for the descent to the surface
and into history.
brings as they’d decided
some weeks earlier, they’d view
the real mission as finally underway.
A ballet of burns, hard-wired software
trajectories and commit points brought Eagle
not to the preplanned landing site but long
and over a boulder field. Nothing for it
but to take the stick, full manual,
helicoptering close across the aeon-tumbled ground
for a better spot. Houston keeping schtum –
out of their hands – as the last seconds
of fuel slip by; then “Contact light,”
a breathless pause, and “Tranquility base:
the Eagle has landed.” “Roger tranquility,”
Cap com comes back, picking up the novel
other-worldly call sign,
“we copy you on the ground.” Sometimes tech-talk
becomes purest poetry; no lyric stylist
could replicate it.
Soon
and cunningly timed for prime-time
the first and second man would emerge,
stand on a lonely little world,
and wonder. They bunny-hopped
efficiently about, a few pounds of likely-
looking rocks selected, a couple of experiments
set up, Armstrong venturing over
to the tiny crater they’d set down beside,
his walk-back limit less than a stone’s throw
to their faithful lander.
Back inside,
they photographed each other’s tired, triumphant grins,
then left that place for ever. The whole trip had been
a surreal kaleidoscope of phases:
not like the Moon’s phases,
flowing seamlessly into one another as poets
through the centuries have noted, but grotesquely
disjoint: the bat-out-of-hell thunder-climb
to Earth orbit; then the time-suspended
translunar coast, the stack turning leisurely
as if on a spit, the Sun’s fierce-heating glare
evenly spread; the dream dance of manoeuvres
to kiss the Moon for one lingering summer instant;
homeward-bound through re-rendezvous and brisker
return coast; and last, the meteoric
ride down from interplanetary speed
to gently parachuted plop into the welcoming
warmth of the Pacific.
Except, then, an epilogue endured
of decontamination suits, quarantine facilities –
the three heroes crowding the trailer window
for awkward words exchanged via prison-visit-style
phone handsets with an insincere
and unsupportive new President – and finally
the ticker-tape motorcades and world touring
beginning the long slow fade from fame’s hysteria
into old newspaper front pages and science
picture books for kids.
As for their legacy: just flags
and footprints? The likely origin-story
of our outsized satellite accidentally
discovered through well-chosen moonrocks?
Or, as the decades start to turn
into centuries, will future perspectives open
onto a Columbus moment? No earlier inhabitants
to kill off this time, but a barrier
brought down: the Moon, Mars, Titan and Galileans
not end goals but stepping stones
into the endless dark from which new worlds,
children to other stars, worlds unimaginable
in ’69, shyly emerge: debutantes
at a galactic ball that’s far
more magnificent than we ever guessed
and far from desolate.

The speed of sound

Between one beat and the next the music is flying –
so very fast and yet immensely still
and I feel like laughing and like crying
or just coasting on this magic carpet ride
as Edge’s mesmeric lead-and-rhythm fill
propels the juggernaut of U2’s “Pride”

or on the second 12 of the second solo
of “Crossroads” at the Fillmore as Slowhand is
abruptly airborne: a god-kindled flow
of countermelody to the blazing riff
comes leaping from the strat as fast as his
mind and fingers can move, and yet as if

this moment had existed all along,
a heart-impaling shard of eternity
suspended between breaths. Or again, the song
of french horns ecstatic in a rising quartet
forged of swooping arpeggios, the pity
of Schumann’s desperate bipolar fate

lost in that limitless arc. Maybe a touch
of genius-madness waits in each normal breast
for angel wings to dip by just so much
and snatch us eagle-high above the ground,
the lands below remote and pin-sharp, dressed
in soaring thermals of transcendent sound

The Gospel according to Thomas
“The kingdom of God is within you and all around you” – Gospel of Thomas, verse 3

Reality is many worlds
within my mind and many more
around me shared with quite certain
other beings – Leo Tolstoy writing works
nor I nor any other could in a thousand
years, warranting his life beyond
the solipsistic cosmos of my own, and thus
warranting so many other lives; the constant
surprise of your creative fecundity
telling me that you are exactly
as real to the wider world
as you are to me

Communication is relationship,
not ownership; flowing, not fixed;
touching, not deflecting. It is
how all worlds are one, all around us
and within us
and among us
and finally beyond us

Generational trauma

When you’re mayfly-close to the surface
of a stone-touched pond, each wave
is steep, high, overwhelming, sourced
from an abstract origin you place
far in the past, if ever; faced
with churn and eddy, you survive

in desperate leaps and darts, lunging
for a second’s safety, another gasp
of life. But imagine if instead
you lofted higher, senses ranging
over a wider perspective, read
as freely as if you could just grasp

a glimpse of some much deeper truth,
a pattern written out in rings
upon a deeper medium,
its depths still undisturbed. Your mouth
slackens an instant, reaching for some
familiar note as nature sings

its untold harmonies, not quite
beyond your ear’s reach, but altogether
unlike anything you’ve heard, even
in dreams; and at once the stark, bright
pain of generations is woven
into something changeable as the weather,

slapping the surface of your being,
stirring a squall of thought, yet leaving
your deeper, wiser self untouched,
placid in the current; not seeing
but intuiting a spiritual calm, latched
to peace, and granting space to grieve in

At Day’s End

Limb overlapping limb
our bodies make a constellation
Seen from above, we could be
a patch of heaven
silent, remote, at peace

Palimpsests
Layers of revelation: Europe, 2011

Van Gogh, in poverty, layered images
no-one thought worth the canvas money
just to save money on canvas. Now
million-buck science has found vestiges
of colours he’d thought were lost, although
in the end all was lost to him – but every

flick and flare of genius for us is counted
costlier than any high-tech tool.
Meanwhile, sleeping on Saxon walls
for a millennium, the art once painted
for the godly of Missenden reveals
a faith as old as that name, that still

finds new life in living eyes beheld.
And last, a revelation more bright
than either of these, as Penrose brings
his vision of lost universes told
in faintest cosmic background rings
to life amid the candle-light

of Wadham’s Hall. Our fabric is woven
into and onto such layering as we
can scarce imagine – and yet we do –
our bare minds stretching to hold a heaven
of tumbled mystery, ready to
be unpacked: an infinite tapestry.

Families

Her face is tired
beyond tiredness; the three
children laugh and move or are quiet,
fearless either way. She holds the youngest
daughter on her hip, the child patting
her face; the older two are in little halters,
whose leashes she holds to free them
from angry words and tightly seized
hands. She is patient, measured,
and terrifyingly generous. The girls,
in matching, size-scaled pajama
leggings and with meticulously braided hair,
are beautifully happy.

Another week, another family:
Four kids this time, mixed heritage, the boy and girls
clustered around their blonde mama’s
free laughter. No fuss, no titanium control
of self or selves – just undistorted life
without tell-tales of loneliness and trauma –
as mothers and children have shared for ever
although lately maybe we have forgotten…

Aestivation

The summer creeps on, quietly
surprising with almost ideal
weather. You begin to feel
rained clean and warmed gently

back to softened life. The skin
relaxes, trusting inch by inch
it’s safe to inwardly unclench
stress-rigid muscles and begin

to breathe. Practice makes perfect, or rather
coaxes magic, as you delve for words
that soar, swift and light-seeking birds,
directed emblems of that other

World-behind-this world. You see
the glass begin to clear, to focus
truth: your life becomes a locus
of wildflower eternity.

Lapis Frequencies

Passing the Rock Shop, something unbidden
by me, made me step in and look,
opening eyes and heart to hidden
inspiration – first for my own
commitment, but as I picked rocks and took
note of the qualities of each one,

the lapis spoke to my heart. I saw
an opening there – not so much
for me, as I first reflected; but for
a way to touch my father, whose eighth
decade was closing soon, at such
a reach that something like a fifth

of the Fiftieth Parallel distanced
parent from son; yet a lovely stone
and that lovelier, unsurpassed
late poem of Yeats, about the sages
and their musician, and what shone
in their eyes as they gazed upon the ages

of ageless nature and the tragic scene
made me see how, miles reduced to zero,
the private frequencies of the fine
unspoken web of veins that join
a boy and his flawed yet gentle hero
can still connect the grown-up son

to the father trapped in a body beaten
by years and booze yet somehow still Here
· · · · · ·
If I find the right music and sounds to waken
a filament – and we both know the other knows –
the shared understanding that can appear
when the inaudible Voice, that blows

through each life catches the hairs on the back
of the neck, reminds my forgetful soul
that even a secret, unpromising track
not taken yet is there to be
attempted; even at death the whole
is not known; and that’s what makes us free

Speaking Pain
A response to another’s desperate biography

Are monsters truly sacred?
Do you name them to their faces?
When your mother says “At least he died
of something respectable” – an obstructed bowel, but never
the darkness that ate your dad
a little piece at a time across decades –
what response is possible?
Maybe just
to live well, and to name
the acid which corrodes, leaving
only the tyranny of unshed tears –
that unmistakable stench: that shame

Shambhala

This space that, temple-like, holds hearts
in safety, reverence, and joy,
is warm and sweet, yet does not cloy,
encouraging, in fits and starts

at first, and then in rivulets
and streams and tides and floods, each soul
to know its goodness, to be whole
before that Sun which never sets

And I, who sought this place to strive,
to save my mind through diligence,
am overwhelmed by evidence
that only others help us thrive

So, finding here a welcoming
within me for my worthiness,
I offer you with tenderness
this latest, truest homecoming

Lotus Heart

Imagined: another continent;
A soundless space of night-dark water
kisses the humid morning air,
reflecting colours of the environment

enwrapped around; and on its still
surface lotus blossoms stretch,
seeking the sunlight above, the arch
of heaven caught and inverted to fill

domes of liquid-crisp petals. The heart
of each unique bloom is hewed
in human thought into an unflawed
jewel: an emblem, filled with light,

for karuna: compassion, compassion in all
its transforming power, compassion piercing
the darkest ramparts of fear, not forcing
but rather inviting the naked soul

to step out, hesitant but inclined
towards that open, embracing zone
formed by the petalled shell, that sign
of daring trust: that, hidden behind

barnacling of wounded-child
defences, a basic quality
of goodness opens an infinity
of yet more beautiful and wild

landscapes leading further in
and further up, abandoning
the shadowlands of suffering,
finding new places to begin

O’Keeffe Country

Sun Prairie, Wisconsin – the name
a forecast and benediction for its favourite
daughter, who made her way to Paris
for cubism and, elevated, came
back to New York to the lens of Stieglitz,
who knew what she was: a darkly bright

star in the avant-garde firmament.
He shot her and sexualized her and together
they attacked the nascent skyline, its hard
verticals coaxed to life when blent
with the air of humid night – each shard
a possible novel. Adirondack weather

at Lake George mostly bored her – too green;
flowers appealed but even these
were seen by the damn critics as Freudian;
she kept on probing the line
between real-world form and halcyon
abstraction, the true Hesperides

of the twentieth century. Then came Taos
and the pueblo and steer skulls and blinding
light on the bone-dry plains and setting
swift behind the Pedernales
and, at last, Georgia, forgetting
the East and people much, was finding

her home and her truest self. “So you fall
off the edge. Who cares?” she’d shoot
at the camera, her eyes warm and fast
like darts. Keeping her footprint small
she made the world enormous. Its vast
emptiness emerged as, en route

to the Far East or South America,
she chose instead to cast her gaze
out of the airplane window, the light
on the cloudscape below catching her
vision of cosmos stripped bare by bright
and aching down-to-the-bone rays.

Form invested with understated
warmth of feminine energy: this
was O’Keeffe’s genius, finally exposed
in harsh New Mexico sunlight; sated
by thirsty landscapes, she composed
to the core of nature a dry-lipped kiss.

For Aaron Copland

Clean, bold intervals hewn
from a bright tonality:
unmistakable declaration of “America”, 
catching the soul of the New
World with that breathless, driving quality 
that hallmarks love: the recognition 
that compels a falling
into love; a landscape never seen 
before, yet instantly familiar
from deep dreams

Isolation

Powerlessness chosen at some blind
spot in deep past; a helpless falling
into that long-time companion, the dark
of the womb: agency countersigned
away, ego shirking the spark
of fighting courage, instead spiralling

inward to comfortable nullity,
nirvana’s opposite. Shunning brazen
demand and gentle invitation
alike, preferring colourless quality
of shuddering, galling hesitation
over sunlight’s healing, the frozen

soul vibrates, self-anguished. The pattern
of harm to self and loved ones, relentless
and yet evolving at each reprisal,
settles about the shoulders, forgotten
understanding at each rehearsal
a weight, a deadening warmth, a heartless

shattering of hearts and hopes. Despair
is temporary but inevitably
recurrent. Which is the real gap
in life’s sequence: the huddling in fear,
or the fleeting dream that this crap
will be over, soon as I want it to be?

I am Tiresias
Inspired by the late Clive James

I am Tiresias
I am a stone that speaks
I hold the unexhausted patience
That seeps drip by drip from suffering
blood-squeezed pumice
No one hears me now, or cares to,
yet in the far-ahead of time a few will listen
in wastelands devastated by metal war
or in the dry spirit’s endless dunes
Amid that wreckage, the unregarded lonely
build their painful lives back
piece by careworn piece as, just offstage,
my long witnessing will come
at length into its own

One never knows when
or how, or by what chances
the unique as well as all the normal
heartbreaks will find their value,
transforming under aeons’ pressure
into glints of diamond
In the long run life is optimistic:
as long as growth is possible
it is, eventually, inevitable
So men – and women, but mostly men –
who carry a lifetime’s guilt
for all the hurts strewn down their wake
at last arrive at the Theban wall
sitting, witnessing, repenting
released into forgiveness
the dazzling world now backlit
by a lifespan of wisdom:
saying their piece, taking a bow,
Exit Stage Left to quiet, lingering applause

Observations

June, a Friday: the rain’s lash
in pulses through these middle hours
washes the people back into
doorways, nothing to kill but time,
nothing to do but be

What if the rain, in
its truthfulness, is a message:
How would you know that
something had spoken behind
your knowing? Maybe
in those doorways, under those
awnings, the smiles
would be a clue

All poems © Tom Moss Gamblin