Each of these Late Quatrains was originally a text-message composed spontaneously at the cellphone keypad. The Exercises are formal experiments in rhythm and metre, in the spirit of musical etudes. Taken as a whole, the collection, including the sonnet cycle Red Quartet, may be read as an attempt to reconcile the strictly formal concerns of poetic expression with the informality of existence, the true (in a literary sense) with the real, and the universal with the particular.
“This collection of carefully crafted quatrains (and several sonnets) is in turn witty, profound and enigmatic. At times elusive, the poems shimmer with possibility and reward close reading. The classical references are elegant and this collection should fully establish Bolton as a poet of great talent and promise”
Gus Ferguson
LATE QUATRAINS, EXERCISES AND COMPLAINTS
ROBERT EDWARD BOLTON
SMASHWORDS EDITION 2011
GARAGISTE PRESS
garagistepress@gmail.com
ISBN 978-1-4657-1902-7
© 2010 ROBERT EDWARD BOLTON
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acknowledgements
Versions of several of the poems in this collection have appeared previously in the literary journals New Contrast (exercise 2.5.4: starling) and New Coin (exercise 2.5.6: mirrorman, her red-flushed flight and this is the light he turns from), and online at www.litnet.co.za (face not worth saving and song of a non-working man, from red quartet).
late quatrains, exercises and complaints
impromptu thursday-night ritual
the hourglass of geology, like the line of sight
exercise 2.5.6: underfooting leytonstone
alle goden zijn mijn bondgenoten
the grey and day-long myth of morning
two la chaims for a sodden eid
exercise 3.4.4: kitchen jigging for the tame and carbon-neutral
this is the light he turns from
red quartet
notes
late quatrains, exercises and complaints
while sleep the tame men, he who taunts the fates,
his conscience and the petty gods picks fights
with deep-delved day-shy daimons and equates
his darkness with their festivals of lights.
heri, hodie et cras [1]
last-borne flotsam on the
evening's tide,
what cool nigerian or cardboard greek
will
speak the silvered word which will provide
the crass tomorrow
which you shun and seek?
impromptu thursday-night ritual
I'll trace a bone-dry
circle in this sky
and light a smoke, invoking (inter alia)
old
agni, thanatos and jove. then I
will have you to my little
saturnalia...
you starled and then you
lawnded. I breathed smoke
and, while you floraged, drained my
coffee-cup.
you startled then and, fleeing, rooted up
the quiet
thing you'd come here to evoke.
he is a lion of the
suburbs,
a rider of the tigers
of the picketed night.
he is
the moon's glint
and noonglare
on sleepered iron,
softshod
slinker
through his makeshift marrakesh.
take this burning
filament
and douse it,
the apparati deconstruct
which house
it.
strip of fire the
working wick
and douse it.
nor try to rouse it.
between the night-him and
the morning's them
lies hard terrain. his comrades haul him
through
unmoralled borderlands: a 2am
democracy must have its
heroes too.
he grasps too late that
he's been here before:
he hits the closing chord two bars too
soon.
her pistons strike and he lags in the bore,
his vines
shoot berries at a winter moon...
the hourglass of geology, like the line of sight [2]
our recollections' veering
from the plane
has made an acrobat of gaia. I don
yellow feet
and grey my shoulders, feign
a gull's commiseration with poseidon.
this silvering of beards,
these graded, guilt-edged
archaeologies of self, re-readings
of
our texts of love and vague displeasure:
the mirrored man,
confronted with his silt-dredged
simulacrum, shrugs, the sins
conceding
of which he alone must be the measure.
this hedge I raise against my fellows
and I tend it,
this
palisade against my friends
and (where it fails) I mend it.
she's learned the winds in
order to betray
the winds. today she drifts less frugally,
this
unknoxed, disencalvined, no-god's-prey
whose spirals widen
centrifugally...
she'll be presenting for
their wry approval
(who built camps too) her post-apartheid
pass.
they'll let her through, impose no forced removal,
to
fill with boland wine the london glass...
and here I wake like
lennon, twice alone:
this bird, already distant, now has flown.
exercise 2.5.6: underfooting leytonstone
she overshoots victoria and
misses
her hotel, takes fright at joburg dangers
in the ochre
streets of leytonstone.
this london's midnight ebb-tide
strands her (this is
not quite kansas): seven million
strangers
here, and she is perfectly alone.
the weather and your plane
are coming in:
the coucal murmurs of your e.t.a.
at ten to six.
the breaking of my drought
is fifteen minutes and two k's away.
alle goden zijn mijn bondgenoten [3]
another cannon-cart,
another dirge:
jij weet misschien niet eens ik zing voor
jou.[4]
another
vincent fallen at the verge
of daylight. let the paparazzi
know
but keep unlit, until we've rid the rye-
stalks of our
stalker (one more thaler tagged
for one more dismal day), the
salesman's eye...
give theo what is his. this body's bagged.