The Albert Mall was a narrow street Named after the dying prince, Where Queen Victoria donned the rags Of a widow, ever since. She'd sat outside in her royal Coach And been heard to mutter, ‘Why? ' While Albert did what he had to do, What he had to do was die!
And we came by when the Queen was dead When the Mall was quite forgot, To rent a room where the prince had died If we'd known, we'd rather not. The Mall was grubby and cheap by then So we thought we'd make it do, I asked Marie if she didn't mind And she said, ‘It's up to you. '
It seems the room had been empty then By the choking layers of dust, I said, ‘Shall I let it blow outside? ' And Marie said, ‘If you must. ' It took us days just to clear the air And to have a look around, In some of the ancient furniture You can imagine what we found.
The robe held some of the smartest clothes I think, that we'd ever seen, I said as much to Marie, ‘that dress You'd swear, was fit for a queen, And there, a suit for a gentleman With a full blown grey Top Hat, I said to Marie, ‘Shall we try them on, ' And she said, ‘Let's do just that. '
So then on the eve of Michaelmas We stood by the mirror there, Arrayed in the best of formal gear They called Victorian wear, And music drifted up through the floor From the ballroom down below, While I, in a moment of madness Blurted out, ‘Well, shall we go? '
We made our way to the music by Descending a curving stair, And finding a throng of dancers who Were dressed the way we were, Then someone called out ‘Her Majesty, ' And the music stayed and died, While they all stared at Marie and bowed, Made me feel queer inside.
I swear that they only saw the clothes, They didn't see us two, And they were a shade ephemeral, I could see right through them, too, They went right back to their dancing While we sat on an ottoman, Whispering what were our chances if We just got up, and ran.
But then they gradually faded, and The music died away, And we were left in an empty room Before the light of day, The clothes went back in the dusty robe And we found another flat, For just one night we were Prince and Queen And we're both in awe of that.
Et nous voilà très doux à la bêtise humaine, Lui pardonnant vraiment et miªme un peu touchos De sa candeur extrême et des torts très logers, Dans le fond, qu'elle assume et du train qu'elle mi¨ne.
Pauvres gens que les gens! Mourir pour Colimi¨ne, Epouser Angolique ou venir de nuit chez Agnès et la briser, et tous les sots pochos, Tel est l'Amour encor plus faible que la Haine!
L'Ambition, l'orgueil, des tours dont vous tombez, Le Vin, qui vous imbibe et vous tord imbibos, L'Argent, le Jeu, le Crime, un tas de pauvres crimes!
C'est pourquoi, mon très cher Morat, Morat et moi, Nous otant dopouillos de tout banal omoi, Vivons dans un dandysme opris des seules Rimes!
The Meeting of Albert Loosestrife and Sally Light-foot
It was their first time, their first time ever. Of course neither would admit to it, and neither knew, about the other that is, that they had never done this before. Life had sheltered them, and they had sheltered from life.
Their biographies put them in their sixties. Never mind the Guardian magazine proclaiming sixty to be the new fifty. Albert and Sally were resolutely sixty – ish. To be fair, neither looked their age, but then they had led such sheltered lives, hadn't they. He had a mother, she had a father, and that pretty much wrapped it up. They had spent respective lives being their parents' companions, then carers, and now, suddenly this. This intimacy, and it being their first time.
When their contemporaries were befriending and marrying and procreating, and home-making and care-giving and child-minding, and developing their first career, being forced to start a second, overseeing teenagers and suddenly being parents again, but grandparents this time – with evenings and some weekends allowed – Albert and Sally had spent their time writing. They wrote poetry in their respective spaces, at respective tables, in almost solitude, Sally against the onslaught of TV noise as her father became deaf. Albert had the refuge of his childhood bedroom and the table he'd studied at – O levels, A levels, a degree and a further degree, and a little later on that PhD. Poetry had been his friend, his constant companion, rarely fickle, always there when needed. If Albert met a nice-looking woman in the library and lost his heart to her, he would write verse to quench not so much desire of a physical nature, but a desire to meet and to know and to love, and to live the dream of being a published poet.
Oh Sally, such a treasure; a kind heart, a sweet nature, a lovely disposition. Confused at just seventeen when suddenly she seemed to mature, properly, when school friends had been through all that at thirteen. She was passed over, and then suddenly, her body became something she could hardly deal with, and shyness enveloped her because her mother would say such things. . . but, but she had her bookshelf, her grandfather's, and his books (Keats and Wordsworth saved from the skip) and then her books. Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas (oh to have been Kaitlin, so wild and free and uninhibited and whose mother didn't care), Stevie Smith, U. E. Fanthorpe, and then, having taken her OU degree, the lure of the small presses and the feminist canon, the subversive and the down-right weird.
The sea had given its all to the land And retreated to a far distant curve. I stand where the waves once broke.
Only the marks remain of its coming, Its going. The underlying sand at my feet Is a desert of dunes seen from the air.
Beyond the wet strand lies, a vast mirror To a sky laundered full of haze, full of blue, Rinsed distances and shining clouds.
When Albert entered his bedroom he drew the curtains, even on a summer's evening when still light. He turned on his CD player choosing Mozart, or Bach, sometimes Debussy. Those three masters of the piano were his favoured companions in the act of writing. He would and did listen to other music, but he had to listen with attention, not have music ‘on' as a background. That Mozart Rondo in A minor K511, usually the first piece he would listen to, was a recording of Andras Schiff from a concert at the Edinburgh Festival. You could hear the atmosphere of a capacity audience, such a quietness that the music seemed to feed and enter and then surround and become wondrous.
He'd had a history teacher in his VI form years who allowed him the run of his LP collection. It had been revelation after revelation, and that had been when the poetry began. They had listened to Tristan & Isolde into the early hours. It was late June, A levels over, a small celebration with Wagner, a bottle of champagne and a bowl of cherries. As the final disc ended they had sat in silence for – he could not remember how long, only from his deeply comfortable chair he had watched the sky turn and turn lighter over the tall pine trees outside. And then, his dear teacher, his one true friend, a young man only a few years out of Cambridge, rose and went to his record collection and chose The Third Symphony by Vaughan-Williams, his Pastoral Symphony, his farewell to those fallen in the Great War – so many friends and music-makers. As the second movement began Albert wept, and left abruptly, without the thanks his teacher deserved. He went home, to the fury of his father who imagined Albert had been propositioned and assaulted by his kind teacher – and would personally see to it that he would never teach again. Albert was so shocked at this declaration he barely ever spoke to his father again. By eight o'clock that June morning he was a poet.
For Ralph
A sea voyage in the arms of Iseult And now the bowl of cherries Is empty and the Perrier Jouet Just a stain on the glass.
Dawn is a mottled sky Resting above the dark pines. Late June and roses glimmer In a deep sea of green.
In the still near darkness, And with the volume low, We listen to an afterword: A Pastoral Symphony for the fallen.
From its opening I know I belong To this music and it belongs to me. Wholly. It whelms me over And my face is wet with tears.
There is so much to a name, Sally thought, Albert, a name from the Victorian era. In the 1950s whoever named their first born Albert? Now Sally, that was very fifties, comfortably post-war. It was a bright and breezy, summer holiday kind of name. Saying it made you smile (try it). But Light-foot (with a hyphen) she could do without, and had hoped to be without it one day. She was not light-footed despite being slim and well proportioned. Her feet were too big and she did not move gracefully. Clothes had always been such a nuisance; an indicator of uncertainty, of indecision. Clothes said who you were, and she was? a tallish woman who hid her still firm shape and good legs in loose tops and not quite right linen trousers (from M & S). Hair? Still a colour, not yet grey, she was a shale blond with grey eyes. She had felt Albert's ‘look' when they met in The Barton, when they had been gathered together like show dogs by the wonderful, bubbly (I know exactly what to wear – and say) Annabel. They had arrived at Totnes by the same train and had not given each other a second glance on the platform. Too apprehensive, scared really, of what was to come. But now, like show dogs, they looked each other over.
€˜This is an experiment for us, ' said the festival director, ‘New voices, but from a generation so seldom represented here as ‘emerging', don't you think? '
You mean, thought Albert, it's all a bit quaint this being published and winning prizes for the first time – in your sixties. Sally was somewhere else altogether, wondering if she really could bring off the vocal character of a Palestinian woman she was to give voice to in her poem about Ramallah.
Incredibly, Albert or Sally had never read their poems to an audience, and here they were, about to enter Dartington's Great Hall, with its banners and vast fireplace, to read their work to ‘a capacity audience' (according to Annabel – all the tickets went weeks ago). What were Carcanet thinking about asking them to be ‘visible' at this seriously serious event? Annabel parroted on and on about who'd stood on this stage before them in previous years, and there was such interest in their work, both winning prizes The Forward and The Eliot. Yet these fledgling authors had remained stoically silent as approaches from literary journalists took them almost daily by surprise. Wanting to know their backstory. Why so long a wait for recognition? Neither had sought it. Neither had wanted it. Or rather they'd stopped hoping for it until. . . well that was a story all of its own, and not to be told here.
Curiosity had beckoned both of them to read each other's work. Sally remembered Taking Heart arriving in its Amazon envelope. She brought it to her writing desk and carefully opened it. On the back cover it said Albert Loosestrife is a lecturer in History at the University of Northumberland. Inside, there was a life, and Sally had learnt to read between the lines. Albert had seen Sally's slim volume Surface and Depth in Blackwell's. It seemed so slight, the poems so short, but when he got on the Metro to Whitesands Bay and opened the bag he read and became mesmerised. Instead of going home he had walked down to the front, to his favourite bench with the lighthouse on his left and read it through, twice.
Standing in the dark hallway ready to be summoned to read Albert took out his running order from his jacket pocket, flawlessly typed on his Elite portable typewriter (a 21st birthday present from his mother). He saw the titles and wondered if his voice could give voice to these intensely personal poems: the horror of his mother's illness and demise, his loneliness, his fear of being gay, the nastiness and bullying experienced in his minor university post, his observations of acquaintances and complete strangers, train rides to distant cities to ‘gather' material, visit to galleries and museums, homages to authors, artists and composers he loved. His voice echoed in his head. Could he manage the microphone? Would the after-reading discussion be bearable? He looked at Sally thinking for a moment he could not be in better company. Her very name cheered him. Somehow names could do that. He imagined her walking on a beach with him, in conversation. Yes, he'd like that, and right now. He reckoned they might have much to share with each other, after they'd discussed poetry of course. He felt a warm glow and smiled his best smile as she in astonishing synchronicity smiled at him. The door opened and applause beckoned.
Your legs stick out from my side as you sing from the corner, A challis to your lips, contracting flesh from your hips, you drink and I know you think more then most so a quick glance is all ill shoot you I wonder if the house dj knows your favorite songs, you've both been regulars for quite Long, he plays requests for the crowd but you've still grown quite close, and he plays your special requests the most, but it's almost like you sing to me, I've Seen some of the back wall, and you've seen me stumble and almost fall, but I caught myself staring at your angles, and I just can't make sense of them, I Am no Albert Einstein, and I hate the recognition of time, so I party all the time, and I forget about what time it is and the dj plays his favorite songs
Not the the Crystal Palace in reality, However those ideas influence the results This hole is now defunct An amusement park was built on the palace, And the establishment of a number of devices Queen of Arts and Sciences: Create a community, rely on the stone, steel and glass And destroy the machine. This is narrow, but practical The creation of such a failure. Use the best art and writing Use space and red cards wisely, As well as a set of rules, set by the blue. Queen of the South at all levels of exhibition space. First, in a new way. In this case, a beautiful Victorian style. However, it is a big job, The United Kingdom is planning to make the bath water, Miles of new hair and clothing. They are conducting research on human society, Students would be able to do a lot of reading to the public The old music, dancers and volunteers Who kill the games room on Sunday, the peace of God, This is convenient, The first day of the annual summer meeting The temperature is an important risk factor, And drought in the mix
Pianist's fingers, Preacher's tongue, She is the dark sky Where the stars Are hung. A living dream in Men's perfume, She speaks of oblivion, The nothingness And doom. The question you have Remains to be answered: How could a lady Who is named after someone So holy Declare that the key to People's heart Is a knife? How could you, Who is named after someone So wise Lose your wits When she looks at you With those eyes? Fortune favors the bold Has been inked on your skin At fifteen so you shrug And fearlessly accept The Little and Big Death.
