www.zenspacia.co.uk
2005+ site reborn December 2019
www.zenspacia2.co.uk
next texts only at ZX 77+
Info pages top bar Haiku
composed in 2022-2023
2024 and 2025 problems
of space led to zenspacia
order reversal on top bar.
For any printing to paper
edits may be needed. There
is Diary work and poetry
pure in a way combined.
Agnus Dei Qui
(unus poema)
Walled sundial time is slower
than heart-beat clock time -
unum apricus post meridiem
sed mihi tristis tristis tristis!
Tempus fugit. Carpe alienus
diem a tune in rapt sunlight
Agnus Dei qui tollis...calor
for tristis Soror Jane
==================
PRE SUNDIAL COUPLETS
after Alexander Pope
ex. summer school 2019
Programming (after A. Pope)
Manners, deportment and proper
elocution need to be taught
Helen
She swam into the heart of light
in an interior cavern
Visit Friedrichstein
Beyond ruin, in the stable
block, a tack room with no bridle
The Vanished
All my great Editors are dead.
Alan Ross, Cookson, Martin Blyth
The Others Dead Young
Sophie Hamilton, Fiona
Hobkirk, Joan my mother, Tessa
The Malayan Emergency
Seconded to the Gurkhas, my
patrol father loved his kukri
Secular Society (for H. Bosch)
No grace, before eating: the pride
in gluttony before a fall
Dystopian Fall (after Spengler)
The advance of the zombie, fish-
eyed, lacking reason and language
At Duino Castle Trieste
My father, as the aide-de-camp
had my mother down from Vienna
West German English
The cultured German has better
English than many a teacher
Trying To Find Lady Caroline
Twenty years reaching Aquitaine
for her in the dunes, heading south
The '47 Travels Of 'Buster'
Air-crated, Bombay to Paris
with India partitioning
In The Octagonal Chambers
Who is alive down there? Rampage-
mad rats nip an operative
Alexander Pope 2
After Horace, our first modern
poet. Master of the couplet
The Cutting Room
Lowell penned his dry 'Life Studies'
in heroic couplets, at first
On Pope Imitating Horace
You, sir, got him part-wrong: you lacked
a divan bed in Italy
Marina (for Abby S)
The yacht dipping gently off Maine,
a hand on the tiller, you glowed
For Countess Marie Larisch
With a shower of rain; we stopped
in the colonnade, and went on
Chatham House 1
I imagined antlers, a log
fire, a girl in corduroy
Chatham House 2
passing the port in her blue vest
and a confidential chamber
Blair's Major Error
To try and eliminate core
upper-middle class SOE
And, To Play (source: MOD)
'his pop guitar on the sofa
in Downing Street' whilst C-in-C
Last Lunch with Jean Stewart (MI7)
Mocked 'Obama on a sofa'
but doubted Brown as 'a gangster'
The Polish Cavalry (1939)
Pilecki's horse, Bajka, was shot
dead from beneath him by Panzers
Shostakovitch (for Tippett)
Stalin growling with Beria,
after Macbeth, he wrote the 5th
The Fittleworth Equivalent
A strange, syncopated torment
and rebellion, in Elgar
Entrapment In Fittleworth
A circling black helicopter,
a sports-car U-turn, Range Rover
Albionista Blair Dystopia
Each house fully wired, each car
tracked by a transponder bleeping
'Gentlemen And Players'
Wearing a tweed and twills, one would
scoff in a bar in St. Moritz
Cavalry Twills
Noting me in a pair of jeans,
my mother would order up twills
On Hampstead Heights
Sunbathing on my favourite
tomb, a rectangle in the hills
At Monticello Mount
Jefferson had the one copy
in America of Palladio
Sir Harold Acton Firenze 1970
Lowell came to dinner last night
He wrote of a British fairy
Duino Castle 1947
My parents given a master
bedroom. Rilke walked a rampart
The Battle of The Arun Valley
The many things happened; they think
the story can be denied
Jean Stewart on 60's Cambridge
The invasion of cannabis
a KGB plot. She rang 5
Nikita Series 1
The catastrophe to avert
is the invasion of Iraq
Chatham House 3
Sir Richard Dearlove, it may be
time to pass the fireside port
The Basil Street Hotel
In the old days, one might retire
to a room on the upper floor
Tales Of The Parrot Club
They drank to ripe avocado
with imperial bravado
The Elitist Savage Lenin
For, just the Communist five per
cent, who drove a stolen Rolls Royce
From Princess Paley (1916-1919)
Lenin, driving our Embassy
Rolls Royce, was held up and carjacked
White Cliffs Of Dover
Tired of the hanging gardens,
all that orchid beauty, sprinklers
Approaching Modern Kent
On my last ferry journey back
I saw the pall of orange smog
Brechtian
The resonant and ringing rhymes
the lyric voice of the people
Neo-Egyptian
The fangsterati, blood dripping
from their talons, plan a new heist
Chinese Whisper Land
Speak of the wrong opinion
taken away in a wagon
Morning Glory (for Alison)
Our campanula, a riot
of light purple cinquefoil
Lumpenproletariat
They snack on a sofa all day
watching their wide-screen TV play
Literate Remaining
Beyond the gravel, jittery
beyond repair, the mind-scrambled
Banned Patrician (for Hurd)
The clipped tone of authority
to rule can no longer be heard
Catholic Hegemony
Once, every Church in the land
was Roman Catholic. Pre break
Recusant Rule
We demand a Parish Vespers
for everyone, after school
The Virgin Mary (Ash Wednesday)
Stared at for a quarter hour
she can appear to be alive
The Dunciad Gang (after Pope)
They race to the bottom, culting
failure and mediocrity
Brecht: The Last Summer
You cannot have a land with just
workers and peasants, the man said
The White-Painted Cell
All very neat and orderly
the cell painted for the Stasi
Pietist
There, an unshackled prisoner
might kneel and pray with Luther
The Period Line
Amnesia in Brandenburg
is leaching the mausoleum
The Church v. The Wall (1989)
High in a spire, a preacher
did evoke God as the teacher
Denounced To The Card Index
A whisper anger, born of hate
in a neighbour could penetrate
Wychwood In Die Walde
Walking a path long after dark
I can hear the crunch of snails
The Former East Germany
Well: MI7 thought the old G-
DR 'kept the lid on the place'
Survivor Hermetic
Marry young, and trust the girl
and sleep-talk will not betray you
Ex. Ostpreussen
Countess Marion von Doenhoff
6. Unesco her Friedrichstein
Ex. Huchel On Der Treck
Nearing a cold village, the sound
of tethered dogs a howling wall
Formerly Prussian Baroque
Schloss Finkenstein und Schlobitten;
Schlodien. The Rot Red Army
In 1947: By Evelyn Bark
B.R.C.S. Joan was ordered
to Pomerania, a Countess
Evelyn Bark CMG OBE
Had an office in Kensington
and instructed my mother there
Attached To The BAOR
Joan's favourite health spa was Baden-
Baden, which they went to often
My Parent's Travel Otherwise
Monchengladbach to Hannover
then to Munster, in the Vanguard
At 20 Bergertorwall Herford
Their cross cook remained a Nazi.
I had a gaunt English pramster
In Her Last Week
The happiest time, my mother
said was, though, out in Malaya
Sandy High Garden Terrace
Evening primrose, forget-me-nots
became her view of The South Downs
Lemons Against Scurvy
Much of Sicily a lemon
orchard, for The Royal Navy
After Stalingrad, Manstein
Saner Goebbels with Ribbentrop
asked Hitler to pax with Stalin
France In Part Saved
By colonial militia
landing on the Riviera
Autumn Couplets
A dull sky today, and a pair
of yellow-green leaves on the path
Where is Lady Caroline?
Well, she cannot be on the beach
in Biarritz, slim and sun-toned
For Caroline St. Claire-
What Chateau are you in tonight?
I imagine your bedchamber
The Sun King At Versailles
The Mortemart women amused:
'their lazy, languishing voices'
Windsor Forest v. Canto IV
Really, Ezra Pound, such a debt
to Pope, and his the greater work
Banned Albion Writer
Banned from the big print media
and from a BBC screening
The Couplets
They, designed for the TV screen
and a round table on Newsnight
Digital Daze
Or, should one say haze? and people
are living in their toxic smog
Sacred Artificial Intelligence
The Holy Communion wafer
is Jesus Christ, The Lamb of God
Anglo-Saxon Ditty
Rome ist Roma, Romana-burg
sunne aefre of die Mynster
Brim-fugel (Sea-bird)
Brim-fugel, brim-cald in brim-bliss
haefst bitter breostceare, cald
Christendom
ist cristen-dom and cristen.
God ist god; palm-twig, passion, Crist.
Haerfest Sang
Somor sunne for sunn-beam and sun-
bearo, to rip and rip-tima
Ides (Girl) for Alison
Eall-wealdend, eall-gylden
die ides of die gred and die grene
Mondeo Man
Where in the world does he live?
tied to the diurnal, neon
Mondeo Man 2
Before him came Volkswagen man
pioneered by Hitler for 'bahn
Mondeo Men
Miniature, stand for nothing
but the uncool Neanderthal
Jean Stewart On May 1940
I walked through the men of Dunkirk
bled at Victoria Station
BBC Censorship
Here, a Catholic denial
of sodomy: denied by all
November 11th 2019 or, 11 11
============================
all composed by Christopher Truman who has
the persona of a Lord Rokeby on Facebook
and/or The Ornamental Hermit (c. the 18th c.)
for www.sundialzen.com and eventual storage
on Jpeg image files for future generations
=======================
SUNDIAL TEXT
EVOCATIONS
Vinegar Vignette
No elbows on the table
or sloping arms, bronzed marching
Combatant
White-plated rhodium
she loved the odium
living in The Fourth Reich.
I said, no: The Fifth Reich
and the half-track as large
by the flagged podium
to a smart pounding band
The Combed Spun Plumage
will be as fine as that of a pheasant
sunning on the Dome of The Trinity.
Below, the ashen peasant kneeling
Lyric
Her golden hair
a blonde breeze
(sunlit temple)
her lips, a peach
a rivulet
in Sicily:
blood orange
tongue sinewy
lemon olives
At Selinunte
remembering the carnage
of the Punic Wars, grappling
and red dismembering
to the fate of Carthage, I saw
the march of the elephants
and the death of monuments
The Blooded Sheet
Cherry picking, a fruit too far
in the grove of the marauder
the broad balcony of his villa
above the dusty village square
Inauguration Day 2060
Horseman, interred in the statue!
and carbonised. The Republic
summons to lit screens green
underground (written on the hoof)
on an epic inauguration day
for a much later President Ike.
Snow is falling like a fatal ash
and the hunger games are over
in too many a wired province.
The disfigured, barbed to caves,
prefiguring a genetic late DNA
disorder are sent to quarantine
by those still able to ration night
from day and find love in the stars.
Dark the 'Cyclonic zero of the Word'
The Quadriga
For the bridles charging ost
sky widening above the chariot
to an epic proportion
blitzed blue in a Preussen mania
despite the cornflower
Deep South Fan
Bourbon in the back porch
afloat on jagged rocks
beats camomile on the lawn
and it is a long way
whistling, to New Orleans
The soldiers had to march
to a drumming, drumming
Umbra, Carpe Diem
The golden evening sunlight
failing on tatty dry leaves
and scaly tree-trunk, given a glow
could be from an Ode by Horace
lamenting a passing, the dawn
like golden-stone maybe the last
Ut Pictura Poesis
'As with the painter's work,
so with the poet's' wrote Horace
and 'Concordia discors'
Atque inter silvas Academi
quaerere verum. Vita summam
brevis. O magna Carthago!
In Schlesien or, Silesia
A curvy figurine, her pert breasts
scorched in the spring of rapine
and pillage, sashays blackened
by a mown carriage drive verge
and now, a summer grandeur lawn
open with two banded deck chairs
ready as for a county tea in England
opens you into a novel by V. Woolf
yet, here you are far away in Silesia
and in a late afternoon laurel shade
they linger and bark, like ravenous
stray dogs and there can be amnesia
in a sunlit Poland and East Germany.
Where is lithe cartwheeling Sashen?
Was she born in Austria-Hungary?
A terrible beauty, and flaking roses
and you wonder: was there croquet
ever, on the lawn, to Earl Grey tea?
Ypres Wipers Ypres Jeepers Creepers
Dulce decorum...The futility of war?
With all Flanders taken, the enemy
Siege Guns could be firing on Kent,
our merchant shipping in the Channel.
The Krupp 'Lange Max' gun can fire
an HE shell up to thirty-five miles,
and thus threaten The Port of London
At The Menin Gate
They trumpet for eternity
at eight every evening
the coffered vault echoing
to the summit of heaven,
with every angel listening
Again At Duino Castle Trieste
At the long war's end, my father
became aide-de-camp to General
Airey at our Duino Castle
where Rilke had walked the parapet
composing a wrought Elegy
and they both studied Tito
the Marshal threatening Stalin
with Yugoslavia. Earlier,
in British Military Intelligence,
examining a ruined villa
my father found an Italian girl
in hiding in the basement.
They embarked on a love affair
and she even came out to Malaya
My Father, Dick
Both of his parents dead, their mansion
'Thornthwaite' in Shanghai long gone
to hoodlums playing billiards
in his father Regie's favourite room
when not entertaining in the dining
room, on an elaborate scale
for The International Settlement
saw his adored 'spy' sister Nancy
found dead one morning by her cook
in World War Two, after playing tennis
the day before near to Fleet Lido
with an Officer or three in Hampshire
at her Brook Cottage, her cause of death
uncertain, and then subject to inquiry;
my sad father, rather alone, had but
his one sister Kit, working at Blenheim
in league with Bletchley Park, filing
as one from a 'reliable' background
and his brother Hugh could not be found
My Shanghai Trust 'Aunt Kit'
who loved her dog 'Buster' so
later went living in partitioning
India, until forced back home
to her dividends in Hampshire
with Digby, who later left her
for one Sharon of Basildon
then a boat pram in the hall;
Digby worked in advertising
alcoholic with a head wound
though rejected by every Officer
in his old Anglo-Indian Army
Cavalry Regiment, and Sharon
was his sexy secretary living low
in cute Basildon, Essex; Kit
cried for a month at Brookside
after his unwelcome departure
but in bed, she had never tried.
My father and Kit went to see her
What Of Electric Blue
Basildon Bond writing paper?
What of an oral by Sharon,
Catullus, and was Kit with Lesbia?
and terrified of childbirth, yes
The Shuttleworths India 1947
Major Digby Shuttleworth MC
King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry
owned a bungalow in Deolali.
Did they, once back home, go doolally?
and spent every Saturday beagling.
Their ship left India from Bombay
Divorced Fiddlers Green
The Guardian Royal Exchange
would keep Kit in clover
many lonely years later,
estranged far from Shanghai
lamenting the loss of Nancy
Joan Barbed
She detested, outright
the lounge lizard, the pansy
and no doubt thought
cottaging to be a flogging
matter, so to speak
and laughed at 'the hippy'.
She offered me a one-way
ticket to New Zealand
The 100 Club London
With my Godmother Katherine Studd
Kit's preferred Night Club, from '42
was The Feldman Jazz Club, just opened
in a deep basement in Oxford Street.
Their promotional jingle ran thus:
Forget the Doodle bug-
Come and Jitterbug-
At the Feldman Club
soon a haunt of the American
GI, and the affluent Officer.
She tried not to get the last train back.
The Club did not go the way
of the smarter Café de Paris
in Coventry Street, bombed in March 1941
Papyrus Scroll Delivery
The read poem is horizontal
but deep text online is vertical
though either at a slight angle.
Catullus can be a wall of Latin:
for Horace, the chariot road
for delivery to the Roman villa
President Macron
wants to reinvent a Franconia
incorporating Lotharingia
in a remembering of Verdun
as reparation from Preussen
with one Treasury, in Frankfurt
The Jealous Reich
Of Toronto to New Delhi
and Hong Kong, which is why Berlin
Question For Oxford Union Debate
Should the practice of cottaging,
vile in the public convenience,
be made a criminal offence, again?
one might add. Oscar Wilde, a pink
threat to our vital Empire, which
saved Europe from Nazi Germany
deserved to be punished. The sub-text.
In this respect, I stand with V. Putin
rather than the former PM, Cameron
A Second Coming (In 587)
A salmon-pink dawn, and I think
of St. Augustine approaching Kent
to land on the Isle of Thanet
and proceed to Canterbury, a mission
initiated by Pope Gregory.
The Roman liturgy was in Latin
Variants For Alison
Ides (Girl)
Eall-wealdend, eall-gylden
se ides of se grain ond sie grene
From Low German or Low Saxon
out of Old Saxon near Hamburg
though the Weald is part-Sussex
and the girl Saschen has flaxen
hair, and, she, named after Saxony
butter-yellow and sunlit golden...
I am writing in Middlesex
Brim-fugel (Seagull)
Brim-fugel, brim-cald in brim-bliss
haefst bitre breost-cearo, ceald
Variants for Alison 2
Haerfest Rip Sang
Somor sunne for sunn-beam ond sun-
bearo, to rip ond rip-tima
Medo-heall Medo (Mead)
Se wudu-fugel in se weald
haefst song for se ceorl drincan
Seaxe Hus
G-timbrian mid bolttimber
for aeppeltun, blostm, bloma
Bleo Heofon
A dun-land se lamb, wudu-rose
in sceo und heafonbeacon
Albion Catastrophe 2020+
The lying political class brain dead
for a drear people largely unread
rarely wanting to get out of bed
and the starving many go unfed
a multitude paralysed with dread
to the sound of dark wings overhead
leaving rats to do the unexpected
running riot where most fear to tread
in a land with far too many ill-bred
The Normans
Where are The Normans, to re-order?
and for A Fourth Coming of Rome.
They, who rescued us from the Saxon
and brought us the Romanesque arch
Mansion Report
Admiring the weather with Lady
Bingham, the red-eyed scavengers off
her tennis court, sunny with scudding
cumuli, a clothed statue blowing
a pan pipe or horn, we went indoors
to hear a secret harpsichord keyed
for the few in an ochre-dun room
by bare Bach, a Louis Marchand
Brandenburg Jingle Jangle
Her harpsichord was of a batch
once pleasuring the King of Prussia
in 1769, over time
with a unique plectrum sonority.
He much wanted to conquer Saxony
after Silesia, his Bavaria, for which
Prussia had to win a third war
and defeat the whorl of Vienna
In July 1866
Prussia, armed with a faster loading
rifle, at The Battle of Koniggratz
beat Austria and Saxony
in one day. Forty thousand died
despite the Austrian cavalry.
Prussia won control of Germania
a torch passed from Vienna to Berlin
deciding the fate of Europa. Did
they laugh in the clubs of London?
when not worrying about India
The Radetzky March
To be a honed cavalry officer
mounted, the smart way of life
at The Empire's very frontier;
and the novels of Joseph Roth
Club Talk
There may be another Mutiny
and a further Lucknow. We may
need to order troops for Calcutta
in a tremendous hurry. We need
a submarine telegraph cable route
Bombay-Aden-Suez, for the 1870
British-Indian Cable on to Malta
and then to Gibraltar for Cornwall
beneath the hazardous Bay of Biscay
In July 1870
The Viceroy of India, being at Simla
for the summer, linked by telegraph
with the President of the USA
a message taking but forty minutes.
Lord Mayo engaged with his wife
in Piccadilly London in nine minutes
from the Himalayas in our hot Raj
after a laying of the submarine cable
making it easier to guide Singapore
The Law of St. Dominic's
Albion is still a Province of Rome
(Shakespeare, a closet Catholick)
Mynster Maesse
Se halga gast a se altare,
Anticrist hel-dor. Wundor
Ende
=========================================
Christopher Truman and sundial zen
His work has principally be seen as creating Zen narratives, loci or aids for meditation, a metaphysical 'storyboard' even. Finding a zen at Selinunte, Cathay can venn the neo-Platonic. In a group of prints, he mediates certain motifs in Vermeer; with another, creates a parallel parallel world to explore. A virtual infinity is quested.
Christopher Truman started his groups of prints with experimental Image Text arrays. The work now lives much in counterpoint to his poetry, reflective of many journeys
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