45. Peter White
A poet who bridges the gaps between Derbyshire, Devon and Delhi, between the realms of life and death, and between playfulness and profundity.
Peter White was born in Malawi in 1960, crossing the equator at age one to be raised in the UK. The majority of his earlier work dissolved in a flooded basement back in the era of storage on paper. His current output ponders the point at which life's flaws may fracture, and those small moments where yearning breaks into revelation... though not without the relief of an occasional wry playfulness. After many years based in Sheffield, the diverse forces of family now take him between Derbyshire, Devon and Delhi... ever the journeyman, as a shaman friend from Darjeeling called him, since stillness is not always static.
Poems
Lets say there is a path Cloy The in-between Whither Air Pollution Inconsistency goes on and on What seemed like winter
…
Lets say there is a path to follow there, the route a seed takes to the apple’s core. Either side, impenetrable perfume of spring, a sift of blossom underfoot, an insect hum. The sense which curves this way correctly once formed horizon on some old flat earth, open endless plain of talc, powdered petal squirms beneath the toes of pressure. So there must be people here, two in fact, desiccated and vertical, leaving just one track. A half-set sun pushes on the dark side of the globe and lifts full moon into an opposite sky. As visibility declines one figure carries one, the one from whom he, or she, suspend. <<<
Cloy
There you are, lioness, all killer, longing to be prey (and of course it's better to be caught than get away) but capture is but a moment's gift, unwrapped in an instant. Then all’s just dead, mere matter of fact. It's unusual to praise things done by halves, yet it is only when tight-held hair begins to slip through slightly-easing fingers that grasp becomes caress. Half getting away is best. Ah, to be set loose by one strong enough to hold on - the heart expands, deep intake of breath - the relief of a dream tethered by care but never roped down. I know, I know, this possibility is hard to believe. So look at it the other way round, how your teeth and claws might grasp the nothing of aquarian air and leave us free - the lack of responsibility there. You can only really have what you're willing to release. <<<
The in-between
This neem tree over-arches... which humans often like - the desire to have satisfactorily explained under one theory… though it always fails. The shimmer is a parameter of green - effervescent - the sort of fleeting green not used for flag or meaning. Below ground, they say, the dark roots mirror the branches; they under-arch, and shiver the slow subsoil breeze. If canopy's an angel's wing, we lean on the trunk beneath, find shade, breathe easy in the in-between. We dream. Thoughts scurry like squirrels - or squawk, peep, swoop - or simply stop moving like the fingers of the dead. The dead are underneath and at the root of things, here first. The reflection is reversed - death settles and feeds the upward green. * I am sitting beneath a neem tree in my local park. The branches reach out overhead. There is an ancient Y-shaped wound in the trunk, low down, at human height, an old gash which now has rounded lips, from which fluid still slightly weeps. The dappled shade is reassuring. And aware how the roots are spreading out and down beneath me, just as the branches out and up above, I feel held, as if within a forefinger and thumb, not touching, gently curved and open. Or in a womb, like the letter C, an oval space mouthed by the fragile lips of root and leaf. That is how the forest holds me. Every time I quietly arrive here, I'm reborn and leave. <<<
Whither
Once in a while you see an old couple where love unspoken glows, Cupped hands can shape a candle flame and light a hidden ground. Distant now, that tiny, bright waver in the utter dark, seems like a light at the end of nothing, and the beginning of all. <<<
Air Pollution
In a sudden thrub of blooded pearl, a wing skin passes across the moon. Bats plunge into the dipping tree; then muscle and loop around for fruit in some poorly-executed algorithm of monkey motion, lumpy. Improbably as life, vulnerable as parchment, relentless as hunger, hanging on by a web of fingers, the stubborn city we watch from shimmers like a mirage, still hostile but suddenly inconcrete. You may well have previously seen the captioned image of a deer stepping through the white dust of a forest road: “this is not a deer crossing the road, this is a road crossing the forest”. Neat but hardly fitting. In Delhi we breathe the poisons of our own constructions, and count the PM two-point-five with an air of venom, and despair. Citizens protest the obvious idiocy but it’s as if they are not there. <<<
…
Inconstancy goes on and on until it loses the balance it never had, off-kilter and correct in an unstable age. A toppling relieved in grey material. A background of eternal black. Steadfast, it gets there in the end. There is only one thing equal to the relentless persistence of life, as constant in its suckling, as determined, as predetermined - The end. The beauty of its folds outliving the frame softly. As art does, and love. <<<
…
What seemed like winter but must from the wind-dancing leaves have been fall, flakes in the scatter of memory to bare bones. Sapless veins will have stood out, like an act of premeditated recall, from the dry brown flesh of each leaf. The tiredness of chlorophyll passed this way as it gave up growth and lightened, sunlit, lifted free from the burden of provision. Sunlight was toil no longer, and wind, not warmth, opened soul’s dark cloak. Leaf-shaped, a wren enacts the brown season’s heart-hunger and the swirl of leaf hollows the air as if any gasp of joy might turn out to be the last gasp. Winds will ease in the end, the airborne descend to enduring loam. <<<
Profound Peter; after how many decades, you have called me back to the world of poetry and good writing. Definitely going to re-read all of them and relish the gift of being able to ask the writer....
I must re-read before I yap on with any commentary, but thank you for some refreshing subject matter and language. My own visitis to Delhi haven't been that infrequent and that affinity helps, perhaps. Powder paint, fake bandages, paice and buses revving at the end of the Pahar Ganj until it disappears in choking deisel - better to be in Ranthambhore, Corbet, Sariska - with bagh:).