Fall of the Rebel Angels

Andy Brown is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the

University of Exeter, where he lectures in creative writing and
literature and directs the undergraduate, postgraduate and public
creative writing programmes. Originally, he studied Ecology, a
discipline that informs both his poetry and his criticism. He was
previously a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundations creative
writing courses at Totleigh Barton in Devon and has been a recording
musician. He lives in Exeter with his wife and two children.
Books by Andy Brown
Poetry Books
Hunting the Kinnayas (Stride, 2004)
From a Cliff (Arc, 2002)
of Science (Worple, 2001, with David Morley)
The Wanderers Prayer (Arc, 1999)
West of Yesterday (Stride, 1998)
Poetry Chapbooks
The Trust Territory (Heaventree, 2005)
Vital Movement: Reality Street 4-packs No. 4 (Reality Street, 1999,
contributor)
The Sleep Switch (Odyssey, 1996)
Ode to a BiC Biro after Wittgenstein (Trombone Press, 1995)
Editor
The Allotment: new lyric poets (Stride, 2006)
Binary Myths 1 & 2: correspondences with poets and poet-editors
(Stride, 2004)
Fall of the Rebel Angels
Poems 19962006
Andy Brown
Cambridge
published by salt publishing
PO Box 937, Great Wilbraham, Cambridge PDO cb1 5jx United Kingdom
All rights reserved
Andy Brown, 2006
The right of Andy Brown to be identied as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Salt Publishing.
First published 2006
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Lightning Source
Typeset in Swift 9.5/13
This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,
or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
i sbn- 13 978 1 84471 280 9 paperback
i sbn- 10 1 84471 280 x paperback
TB
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
for my wife, Amy,
invisible in every word
Contents
I
The Thread 3
The River and the Cathedral 4
City Bus Ride 5
Crossing the Sound 6
Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer 7
The Water Cycle 8
From A Cliff 9
Littoral 10
Vertigo 12
Some Kind of Sea Light 13
Cavatina 14
The Lute Girls Lament 15
Shakkei 16
from The Wanderers Prayer:
The Footsteps of God 21
The mornings open . . . 23
Voices ascend . . . 24
A squad of uniformed shy girls . . . 25
What We Think of as Home 26
Autumn, Mount Fuji 27
II 29
A Poem of Gifts 31
The Bee Charmer 33
Colour Theory 34
Verres Luisantes 35
Slippage 36
The Trust Territory:
If I tell you . . . 37
I imagine youve changed little . . . 38
Koi Carp 39
Waking in Manhattan 40
da capo 41
December 42
Daybreak 43
A Breath from the Wood 44
I stood before you . . . 43
Song for the Siren 46
The Vanishing 47
At the River Odet, on Max Jacob Bridge 49
Winter into Spring 51
Roadkill 59
Chess Moves 60
The Broken Mould 61
An Old Cartoon 63
III
A Life Story 67
The Wedding / The Elegant Rooftops 69
Triptych:
An Ill Wind 70
Japonica. Arum 70
The Covenant 70
Life in Ultima Thule 71
The Year Before we Were Healed 72
The Hydroaktylopichharmonica 73
Shooting the Sun 74
Blue-Tits 75
from Field Notes 76
from The Diary of an Ugly Human Being 77
Events Seem Clear Enough, but . . . 85
The Sleep Switch 86
Some Improvements 88
IV
Blindfold Birds 93
To All You Squabbling Poets 94
Three Poems after OuLiPo:
In This House, On This Morning 96
Quote Its a Mans World Unquote 98
What is Poetry? 99
A Miscellany of Birds
An Abecedary 100
A Mythology of Birds 103
At Sizewell 102
Burning Down the House 103
Heavenward 105
Devon Apples 106
Audubon Becomes Obsessed with Birds 110
Fall of the Rebel Angels 113
Acknowledgements
These Poems 19962006 are those alone that I wish to preserve in print
from the rst ten years of my book publication. Many appear as they
were rst published in individual volumes, others have been edited
over the years and it is these nal versions I wish to preserve. The
writing is organized broadly into four musical movements and appears
in no particular chronological order.
Special thanks to those who have generously published and supported
my work during this period, in particular: Tilla Brading and Derrick
Woolf, John Burnside, Peter and Amanda Carpenter, Ken Edwards, John
Kinsella, Rupert Loydell, David Morley, Tony Ward, Anthony Wilson,
the team at Heaventree Publications and all the editors of the magazines,
journals and anthologies where my poems have been published in the
UK and abroad. Thanks also to these and other readers for invaluable
advice on shaping this and other manuscripts. Acknowledgements are
due to the Arvon Foundation and to the School of English, University
of Exeter, for providing the time and context within which to write
these and other works.
Acknowledgements are also due to the editors of the following publi-
cations where some of the latest pieces have been published:
Littoral in Bonre: an international conagration; Winter Into Spring in
the Near East Review; Autumn, Mount Fuji and An Ill Wind in Sentence:
a journal of prose poetics; The River and the Cathedral, Crossing the
Sound and Fall of the Rebel Angels in Stride Magazine.
Cover Painting: The Fall of the Rebel Angels
by Peter Breughel the Elder, 16
th
Century
What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of
creation that ourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their
meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the
fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things, as
multiply and intricately as possible, present and visible in my
mind.
Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I
The self is curved like space.
Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
The Thread
Long before we see the swallows nd their way back home
we sense their coming in our blood,
something unnameable, like the sound of the breathing
we come to recognise as our own,
or the strange shrieks of foxes on lake margins,
which remind us that it is, perhaps,
intangible geometries that tie all this together,
or how, sometimes at night, we think we hear
timber falling in a forest we cannot name,
a wooded col on the peak of our loves
and nd ourselves blessed by the presence of birds,
treesa calligraphy of light high in their branches
and there, in a crack, we nd the threads that link us:
the knowledge that all we have to do is change.
[ 3 ]
The River and the Cathedral
Its certainly a melancholy life;
no joy without an equal ounce of grief,
for what ows through us is ours only
momentarily
a reection caught in an endless plane
of mirrorslike light on a frozen leat,
making it appear our journeys aim
might be the great bend in the oxbows heart
where sunlight nibbles at the lingering ice
in the overhangthat irresistible tug of how
young rivers used to run, fast & bright
as we welcome the passing of winter,
like toads caught on an iced-up pond.
And yet it also seems that, up ahead,
it might be the city that calls; the city
full of people who would rather be
elsewhere.
Didnt we notice it,
the horizontal text of the river? Sure,
we had seen a misted scene take shape,
but that was all compounded of frustration
& desire, wasnt it; our need to run ahead
in spirals, up the steps and banging at the door,
in search of sanctuary; a simple peace?
[ 4 ]
City Bus Ride
I have need to busy my heart with quietude.
Rupert Brooke, The Busy Heart
It is morning in the city. I have boarded a bus,
not knowing where the drivers to, or the route
she will take. Whenever I am able to escape
myself, I ride for hours like this on roads
around the citys parks, with their tall trees
ltering sunlight and their inviting rugs of grass.
When the bus leaves, she goes from a coffee house
where men smoke, drink strong coffee and play
dominoes, even at this hour. The city is vibrant
with motions music. Desires head in all directions.
Ribbons of roads fan out from the heart and make
the city throb with rhythms of legend & myth
there is something ancient in her, like the presence
of the Ziggurat of Ur.
At the end of a bridge,
where the buildings stand in disrepair, the ritual
of two people shaking hands, cryptically symbolic.
A third man on his knees holds congregation
with a ock of birds. Children hurry past him
on their way to school, bubbling into the distance
like beads of faience in an ancient traders hands.
Buzzing with Life, the girl beside me says, although
its never Life itself we see; it is the woman
and woman alone we see moving as she walks
between high terraces banked with plants; the ex
in her arms & legs; the torsion in her back.
The world is real in face of our experience
and nothing more. All philosophy teaches that.
[ 5 ]
Crossing the Sound
Memory is a strange and graceful town:
a comic-opera capital at times,
and other times a busy working port
as migrant terns & plovers see it
ordered its dry docks; wild its beaches . . .
but on beaches, the idea of Yesterday
never happened: twice daily the tides
renew the pristine banks of sand,
pulled by the carapace full moon.
The horizon hovers like a possibility:
how to get there, we think; to see ourselves
safe against the tide, asking questions
of the pleated wilderness of sea.
The sea says a change is in order,
the marker buoys clanking bells
softly; yet we remain rooted,
startled by our own footprints
where before there were none.
Ahead, a sliver of light rises
from the lip of darkness, making us
relinquish all we cant retain; retain
the kick we nd in remembering
our islands moods & rhythms
before they vanish in a icker of wind.
[ 6 ]
Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer
Les Chevaliers? you said and we made it in time
to see ve riders pass on horsebackthose
fabled, snow-white creatures that metamorphose
as they grow, born brown, or black and blanched pure white
by four years oldcrossing the quiet inlet of the delta,
serene in the shadow of Juniper trees. Later,
in the cool church, we touched the disused props
of the lame who came to walk; the patches
of the blind who came to see in this haven
of miracles & changes, where the bones of Saints
are carried through the streets each May,
down to the sea in a healing cavalcade.
And later still we also rode those changelings,
our stallions standing rm at rst, though throwing
back their headsthe air resonant with insects
and then, sensing something inexperienced
in the way we held the reigns, bolting through
the shallow lagoons in an explosion of hooves,
our muscles and theirs screaming with the violent ash
of summer, until they dropped us, their muzzles
foaming in sweat and we slumped from our saddles,
shocked and ghting for breath in the chang grass.
[ 7 ]
The Water Cycle
( for Sally Meyer)
Framed by fences and telegraph lines
as in Spencers Resurrection,
the mourners trudge uphill until
a Church of Scotland road sign jerks them
left beneath the Yes Yes on the gas tank.
1
The cofns borne by hand into the open autumn air,
upon a stripped pine door with stretcher handles.
Stooped & beretd men march on ahead,
the women drag their 30s shoes behind.
Gulls trace mental lines above the lichen-covered roofs.
Seafood enters port in freezer skipsthese graveyards
always sited where the sea and shoreline fuse.
A skein of cloud the length of the horizon
divides the sky & sea, each mirroring the other,
what the other would be. The estuary broadens,
the current slows, as life on shore resumes
its common pace. This is all there is then
one brief crawl up the worlds edge; a glimpse of
impossible light. Outside the wind blew . . .
[ 8 ]
1
Yes Yesa funeral in Tarbert Docks, Isle of Harris, on the day of the refer-
endum for a devolved Scottish Assembly.
From A Cliff
(for George Szirtes)
Say we nd ourselves sitting with our feet
over the edge of a cliff, the horizon bending
not only ahead but all around and even inwards,
pregnant in its curvaturethis grassy ledge
we call a home, the illusion of an island
what of the idea we are then; the image conveyed?
Here are our opening arms, high above the truth of it.
As pigeons in a city park begin the day
and test the sky, subsiding into urried clusters,
we sit as we are, not doing what we are
supposed to be doing, lifeless in suspension;
and what of keeping a notebook of the days
weve made up in our mind? Is that all
this is all about; recorded time?
An idea is nothing but the start of tears;
the utter of fear beneath the skin,
our ngers whisper and that rings true,
not only because ideas become confused,
but also because of speech itself becoming
a part of the painspeaking of jumping
to swim in the ache of the opening air.
Today spills southward using light as a lure,
drifting into airs anticipation. Inside
its gates, again, voicesthe living words
our hearts pick up, all dying of darkness.
We sit abutting change and, yes, its true, almost
to the point of smiling: we learn loneliness,
with solely a monopoly of spirit to reassure its limits.
[ 9 ]
Littoral
The ocean wants for nothing but to be
left alonea dozen tones of turquoise,
mist & spectra. Wrinkled like soft polyps
in their neon castles of coral, your ngers
trace the beachs groynes ligreed by salt
and, as you may now also be thinking it,
the ancients too observed it:
the sustenance of their mother sea; knew how to be
at home with her, from the reef to the salt
marsh, throughout each moment of turquoise,
nudged toward shore by her ngers
like a deepwater swell fanning polyps.
But I have been distracted by the polyps.
The water has shaped me to its
own devices, with persuasive ngers;
it will not let me be
alone with you at the edge of turquoise
and the line of stone breakwaters baked in salt.
We stand now like pillars of salt;
vulnerable as starsh and polyps
washed ashore in storms. This turquoise
if only we could look into its everyday light; its
marvelous animal; its ships and debris, and be
happy with the chances between our ngers,
[ 10 ]
like the sherman who wrapped his ngers
around a bottle, removed the cap, releasing salt
and a cloud of smoke, nding himself to be
in command of a djinn, blooming like a polyp
lled with fearful magic from deep within it;
a terrible shade of turquoise.
Sometimes when I think about the turquoise
depths of the bay; its intractable granite ngers;
the sea seems almost to be
too restless to ever return to; too salty
to anymore sustain us; anemones; polyps.
But like a pair of dolphins breaching through it
I know we must be returned to its saltiness.
Above us and beneath usturquoise; our ngers, ippers;
our eyes like polyps, glowing with the wonder of it.
[ 11 ]
Vertigo
(i.m J.H.)
The curved horizon stares so silently,
inviting you to your ancestral shore
a ship set loose on seas of memory.
A bird beginning ight, you pick up speed.
Above, the terns that saw young Icarus fall.
The curved horizon stares so silently.
A voice within the rock demands you leap.
Suddenly youre heavenrushing; through the door
a ship set loose on seas of memory.
The names of those who leave us rest in peace,
as dust settles on the catafalque.
The curved horizon stares so silently.
Disappearance holds a thread of mystery.
You jump the nest and y, begin to fall
a ship set loose on seas of memory.
I look down at the slip face and the roiling sea.
As if arranged, the breakers part and roar.
The curved horizon stares so silently
at ships set loose on seas of memory.
[ 12 ]