The constellation of lacuna

Marcus Cumberlege

The Ram

(leaving out initial quote)
o soleil, c’est le temps de la raison ardente

WATER dripping endlessly onto stone
I have almost disappeared
Where shall I lay my hands on fire?

O my Nubian bride
vestal of the burnished strands

Our tortuous years are served
at the wheel in the blood-lit chamber
pumping a bellows with air

The sanctuary is bruised open
the grey rock lifted from the heart’s cold door

Dance into the sunlight
shaking may-motes from your hair

As March strips back a snowy cloth
we'll tune the soothing instruments

Your fingers
combs & carding-tools

Your breasts
white sails in a breeze

That willowy pool
where flax lies steeped in summer

*
A HIGH wind rises out of Taurus
curls about the garden
bending the stems of sunflowers & tall delphiniums
heaping rubbish on burnt cities
Thunder & wine boom out of empty cinemas
negro spirituals blaze from a matchbox

The gale allows one fierce-eyed Mrs Mop
to stalk around the block on waxy slippers

A red-breasted sweater swans across the road
past junk-shop corner up righthand alley
a long blue Oldsmobile
speeds through the nineteen-fifties
sacred heart of the Claddagh
clutched between Air Force insignia wings

Everything moves
always

Rings on a rich man’s finger
coil round a dark girl's throat

Leaves of corrugated iron
no bigger than postage stamps
patched on the Connaught Moon
to keep the rain at bay

Woodlice creaking in cardboard
boxes of rotten sticks
*

WHERE the helpful strengths sleep:
Lion rampant & golden spurs
Kortrijk, 1302

Lion couchant
unfurl my flower-de-luce


They have said: destroy the self!

Perhaps they were right.

I am going under water
as daylight ebbs through a net


& the jawless fish of our bodies
glide from a sun-splashed deck

Darkness turns white

We trace the shadows of circles
with our hands
*

Too much air
will snuff out a match

The self is an omnivorous weed
thriving on states of vacuum
(think of Austria…)

But now the wind is quieter

Girl in a small bed reading
her world at peace
on the hinge of a freckled elbow

Mine a manuscript
lost in the Moorish dreams of Potocki
who filed down the silver ball
on a teapot-lid
& fired it into his brain

One gust has unstrangled a pair of brown stockings
hung out by the lady below
& eight or nine sparrows return
to tackle the seeds of a sunflower dead on the bin

Is it a smile or an ignis fatuus
blossoms on the fingertips of your sex?

Do I have your permission?
For it’s Sunday outside the pub!

I kneel to you
cupping my hands
water sponged onto pumice

Man is an elastic animal
possibly a kangaroo

The room is moistening

Ears peel off the walls

...**
I know that Marcus Cumberlege lived from 1938 to 2019 but I know very little else about him. The above is one half of a poem published in 1977 in a book called Firelines. He seems to be a figure who just flew past the radar.
I got this instant response from Simon Jenner:

Very impressed. Seems (obviously) part of a zodiacal cycle, with Aries Taurus and Leo. Maybe just truncated and left with those three signs as it had run its natural lyric course. Macleod might have approved.

Some local particulars maybe but elusive and not to be taken as more than figurative. The Claddagh seems more ring than place, perhaps, and we return to rings. The Connaught Moon imagery is curious: corrugated iron in tiny patches contrasts the obvious, as symbols of 1970s decay (though as this is a figurative time-warp with some places unchanged since the Fifties, one shouldn’t take this literally, unless as universal decay, left-behind spaces. I initially thought of this as figurative).
The Connaught Moon usually places it as the plush indoor garden court moments in the London hotel. Leading to rich men generally - the whole coercive and colonial capitalist trope: ringed hands round throats of dark girls etc.
So I need to unpack where the poet means. Is their vision of a UK so run-down that even the rich justle under a leaky corrugated roof, or is this somewhere else? And how would I know? By contrast we get hanging around pubs. a perennial sad Sunday haunt of disaffected suburban poets.
Or am I overthinking my overthinking? These tropes and gestures would have seemed far more instinctive and go-to at the time. There’s a cultural reach and grab-bag more familiar to readers and writers of 1977; though we were all there, grunting the end of adolescence in different ways….
(back to AD) I think this evokes how mysterious the poem is even though every line is so clear in itself. That scatter is the appeal of the poem. I think the poem touches at least 3 countries.