On the march. Simmer down your almost last arrivals
rendered like lard, leaf from stem reversion. Will she
finger the flute, cold and wet, breathing on through it
but making no fit sound. What makes a small fad mark
on the paper, as a reminder. Not like last time parch
and drain a zodiac, undaunted here: take the folded
cloth in both hands, put it square on, notice a ring
just touching against the horizon and emptied out flat.
(RED D GYPSUM, p.11)
As if to confirm that Prynne is a visitor from the immediate future
(estimates vary from between three and twelve months ahead), the
above stanza proves the most trenchant commentary upon the ISA of the
Orange Order and its encampment above the Garvaghy Road.
"Simmer...lard": the Walks down Maryhill Road in Glasgow which have
woken me at 8 a.m. every Saturday morning for the last two months
are composed, like those of the poem, of breathless, red-faced,
ginger-haired, overweight, sweating lard-asses already knackered by
the first fifty yards from the Lodge up the road. Ignoring the
feminine pronoun (because we can), the gasping, stumbling
unfit Loyalists are unable to produce a "fit sound" from their flutes
("flutes" also being a reference to rained-on suits...the feminine
pronoun, reintroduced, produces an entirely other sense to the
sentence and stanza)). And you can fill in the rest yourself. Last
two and a half lines are, I think, references to Masonic ritual.
Perhaps Ric Caddel, Grand Master of the North of England Basil
Bunting Loyal Lodge no.343, could unpack them for us?
[Other related references in RDG to the above include "every
striation laps pat to it"; "sash cement"; "slung jollops" (a "jollop"
being a kind of Protestant shillelagh); the whole "Irish butter"
thing on p.16; both stanzas on p.18 (the drums, weapons).]
all best
robin
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