The Tree at Michaelmas

The Tree at Michaelmas

The tree at Michaelmas was always bare,
Its pale branches stretched across the sky.
In contrast to the grey clouds there
Were ruddy veil like twigs held high.

The veins of sap were still alive
Hid deep below a show of death.
And we feared it might not survive
As the cold air could freeze our breath.

Just one bold robin filled its twigs with song
And blue tits perched in rings around its crown,
Until one day a strong man came along,
Took up his axe and chopped it down.

© Martin Porter 2001

“The Tree at Michaelmas” is an original poem, written on a chilly day in September in an office but recalling the view from a conservatory window. The details are straightforward, the rhyming scheme is a similarly simple abab, and the scansion is unsophisticated, despite the variation from pentameter to tetrameter and back again. The three stanzas each appear to handle single concepts on first reading, until the final stanza, where the last two lines introduce some humour, or tragedy, or both.

Generally, I tend not to write consciously humorous poetry, although humour does seep through some of my work. An example of the more subtle humour occurs in 1:25000 with the opening line “Only slightly lost” implying the possibility that the narrator holds the belief that “lost” is relative. It is a gentle nod to times when walking companions acting as navigators have marched us into bogs because they knew roughly where we were.

On a more horticultural note, a tree being bare at Michaelmas would be unusual as most deciduous trees would not be shedding trees that early in the autumn., Michelmas falling on September 29th and "Old Michaelmas" on October 10th or 11th. The weather is usually less harsh than described at this time of year. But in law, the Michaelmas term covers October to December, allowing a degree of accuracy, and some schools also speak of the autumn term as the Michaelmas term.
 Many years after completing “The Tree at Michaelmas” in this form I came across Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees”. Interestingly, “Loveliest of Trees” also has similar but not the same scansion, simple, but not the same rhyming scheme, and three stanzas. Perhaps I had seen "Lovliest of Trees" before and it had been buried in my unconscious thoughts, producing a poem with the same subject. Perhaps there is just something about the form that particularly suits trees.

unwritten language / unnamed places

>Language>Place Blog Carnival edition #7: unwritten language / unnamed places features the blog entry Place, Maps, Language as one of the exhibits. Please visit the carnival and browse the exhibits - they are worth every minute you spend there.

practice makes perfect: edition #7: unwritten language / unnamed places

Place, Maps, Language

A map is its own language. Unspoken, it still manages to describe place, location and even scenery, often with an astonishing simplicity, but sometimes with a subtlety that can be quite breathtaking. A bright red line that illustrates a tarmac road, or a thin blue line meandering through a green background may describe a stream percolating through peaty watermeadows. Interestingly, a map with its two dimensional syntax has a sophistication that is denied writing along one dimensional lines. It is here that poetry often challenges the dimensional boundary with precise placement of words on a page. Just as I might spend considerable time appreciating the structure of a poem, so I have spent hours in front of a hostel fire with a pot of tea reading a map to discover its secrets.

1:25000 attempts to capture the mystery of map reading. It starts with a relatively ordinary line structure, with the usual vocabulary and punctuation, but as it explores the landscape it drifts away from a simple syntax towards a looser style that relies on placement, symmetry and wonderment.

1:25000

Only slightly lost, we find the paper
Folded in an inside pocket. We are there,
Somewhere, one to twenty-five thousand,
A mote of mobile imagining.

And a trickle of blue splits the landscape.

In the orange skein
We untangle a rolling surface pressed
Flat on the map, but filled with pebble,
Outcrop, blades of grass.
On close scrutiny of the stylised code
A shrubby plantation catches the eye
With its little lollipop trees
Springing from the rough green hummocks
Of a rough green pasture.

And a trickle of blue splits the paper.

On the ground
We find no deep black names.
No red carpets are laid on our tracks.
Hidden from the ink are the implicit sheep,
The thin, abstracted cry of a curlew’s mate,
The wide airy volume of the space
The loneliness
The unprintable emptiness of being there

© Martin Porter 1999

Shell is a piece written to explore the difference between the mechanisms (the map, the googling and the met report) we use to describe the world and the world itself. In some ways it shares the same properties as 1:25000, with a growing disorder in the punctuation, but in "shell" the contrast between the virtual and the visceral is further examined by the use of upper case characters. The only "reality" in the poem is the Single Fragment of Shell, all the other references are just exactly that, someone elses experiences referred forward.

shell

her father unfolded the concertina
map, laying it in dunes on the table
she googled it, name in box, click
of a button, eyes on the screen
and zoomed in to see

every grain of sand,
a hermit crab caught, mid-
scuttle,

the met report told them it was
comfortable yesterday
comfortable today and
it will be…

i gently rest my finger on the sand,
raise it to my face, observe
the Single Fragment of Shell adhered
and rub it, abrasively, across my open palm

© Martin Porter 2010

As an aside, but nevertheless important to note, is the play with the written language in 1:25000. I do not know how you read that particular string of characters, but the one to twenty-five thousand in the body of the poem probably reads the same, although the string of characters is very different.

1:25000 won 2nd prize in the Jersey Evening Post writing competition 1999
shell was published in the 52/250 blog  18 March 2011