Home of the Steam Highwayman
Inspiration comes from many directions and sometimes it comes direct from my readers. Acknowledgement is due here to Mr Alan Sennet and his fevered brain.
Today I passed another milestone – 1000 complete passages of Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West. It’ll be a great adventure, although wetter than the first three. No energy to say anything else – it’s been a 4000 word day.
Between the lines the story tells
I hear an author’s voice distinct.
Convinced that he and I are linked
I hope to set such stirring spells.
Adventure, or a sudden loss,
Alike speak truth when men can stand
And see themselves as earth of land
And venture futures on time’s toss.
The rafts of dreamers, mad or sane,
Carried by inhuman streams,
Rivers in the sea, strong beams
Of balsa wood and bamboo cane,
Light as light and fragile, lithe,
Barely count to city minds
But when the rocks and anchor grinds
Rafts pass swift on, serene and blithe.
For those who share the water-rolls,
Split and crash through frantic swells
A floating scrap of wood impels
No certain theory, proves no wholes,
But if you have become relaxed
And let the currents rise and dip
Allowed them lift you, turn and tip
Theories convince untaxed.
Every pattern that’s made by the water
Where tides sculpt the ripples of low-slung sand levels
Is hidden, invisible, but for its traces,
The skeleton ridges and quartz-dancing revels.
Across the cold strand the sea is like silver,
Its lobes licking tenderly flattened out swells.
The sand barely rises, except when the water
Displays a true level and every tongue tells.
But even those waters are ebbing and rushing
And never the beach or the sea’s edge is smooth,
But climbing, high-rising, then falling, revealing,
It softens the crystals like lullabies soothe.
I went alone by old canals
And saw the gardens grown from waste
Coal-heap compost, newspaper paste
And smelt the raindrops’ funerals.
Around a reedy, autumn pond
A wary grasp of sycamores
And mortal ash trees marked with flaws
Where wire fences scarred their bond.
Upon the puddles ripples ring;
The sky begins to decorate
The garden with a water-weight
And smack the mud, and patterns bring.
It is a partial sanctuary;
Aided and abetted, rich,
Leafmould rotting in a ditch,
A very sullen place to be.
The lonely walk I’ve taken here
Has led past corners where we laughed
And where we drank a loving draught
And where we shared a pint of beer.
How could it not, when every street
Has been a place we’ve known and shared?
When every roadsign once declared
The city was our place to meet?
I cannot walk past cranes or trees,
Follow paths or railway lines
Without seeing speaking signs
Of what you sometime meant to me.
I had to go to somewhere new –
A place I never shared, and still
As up the tower I found my thrill
I wanted so to be with you.
The train fled through a concrete scar
Half across the garden fields,
Through the chalk your bone-land yields
Not long away – and yet too far.
I felt my trespass in a place
Reserved for our shared wanderings.
I cried to think of happy things –
Cold on the downs, your true embrace.
The beach is shingle and I read
That half the land is shingle too,
Five centuries worth of land born new
Where once the sea lay in its bed.
Each stone a flint plucked from the chalk
And rounded by the waves’ rough play
Until it found a place to stay
Where rustles are the stonefalls’ talk.
There is a castle on the marsh
Built by a famous, frantic King,
Now a ruin, crumbling
And eaten – rotten – broken – harsh.
Built there to stand upon the shore
But stranded by the passing tides
Each bringing stones, and wrack besides.
The sea is not there anymore.
Two miles inland – what a plain sign
For all those things we deem most firm.
The world will change, so ends the term
Of all possession – but chiefly mine.
I loved you till it creased my soul;
I changed my mind to want your shape
And feel the lack when you’d escape:
You did. I let the pebbles roll.
So starts an avalanche again –
The smallest stones move rocks.
The freest hearts are bound with locks
That rust like links in anchor-chain.
The first of many days of Lent,
A walk of indecisive hopes
That fall and flutter, telescopes
Can pick out figures where time went.
One moment I have heart to dream,
Then crush it, sentencing my step
To be man’s mark on barren steppe,
And lose my sight of what I seem.
The promise of another task,
The light of distant island shore,
A flock of child-like bird adore
And ask the questions children ask;
Why does the sea lap up the rock?
The shapes the cliffs make, do they change?
If I walk west, where will I range,
And when return? Who times the clock?
The desperate, half-mocked chance to care –
I didn’t really let the card
Imprinted with a kiss regard
My face’s puzzlement – just there –
I stood it on a shelf as if
I understood its sending, sent,
I understood all that she meant
Because I’ve fathomed motive’s glyph.
All characters are now to me
Like people populaced in books,
Their eyes give wary or vacant looks,
They seek to conquer, or to be free.
Reducing all my colleagues, friends,
And new acquaintances to parts
I vastly undervalue hearts
And so my hope in people ends.
Up jumps a hope, and then it drops,
And day by day or eve by eve
I wipe my tears on my sleeve
And harvest sadness with these crops.
I know too much, yes that I know
And would be glad, surrendering
The rush of teaching’s rendering
Of people, for the chance to go
And live for nothing else but this,
Grass and sand and seagulls’ cries,
Peatsmoke stinging bleary eyes,
Words that heal with their kiss.
When the tide, slow retreating from the beach north of Broadstairs,
Reveals all the liminal acres of shore,
A field of nobbly pinnacles rises
Slathered with purple, green-fingered, white-raw.
The chalk will feel greasy to fingertip gripping,
The seaweed is slippy beneath treading feet,
Yet the softest of stones is defeating the ocean
Absorbing the thunder where seas swell and meet.
The cliffs, yes they tumble, they fall and they shout,
Collapse in the surf of the tide’s furthest rush,
But ten days in twelve the water drains backward
And the roar of the ocean will turn into hush.
The power of water is soon dissipated,
Rollers and breakers split into rills
And the cliffs, slowly crumbling, must face the ocean
But twice a day water retreats and then stills.
Upon the lip a flow like glass,
It seems as solid as the slate
Over which the waters mate,
Salt and sweet, where waves amass.
The waterfall persists its flow,
Its noisy rattle, chatter, rush
But the bigger water sweeps in hush
The shatters patterns with a throw.
Now synchronised in flow and draw
The waves ride in and mount the shelves
Some further, nearer, spend themselves
To salinate the pool-spread shore.
Is it a battle or a game?
These two waters meet head-on
Their distinct selves are seen, then gone.
And left, one cold and salt-sweet same.
How beautiful the river banks,
Each a slick and shining brown.
The tide now slackens out through town
Past railway sidings, standing tanks.
Here reeds are stained and standing thick,
The ducks and gulls squat on the mud
And later comes the brackish flood
But now the silt is dark and slick,
Here interrupted by a pile
Half-rotted, stained with grey and green,
There lies a tire, half-sunk, half-seen,
And so on down the winding mile.
All the way, from here to the sea,
The Thames retreats from its own bed,
Its mind is changed, intentions fled,
So changeful as the moon we flee.