After the Snake
These remarkable sonnets by Aidan Andrew Dun, which here conduct a highly suggestive dialogue with Christopher P. Wood’s beautiful, brittly colourful post-surrealist paintings, are a minatory response to the crisis of our times. They diagnose what Dun calls ‘Nature’s old pathologies’, evoking the ecological catastrophes of the twenty-first century, but also perhaps the psychopathologies that these catastrophes induce in everyone forced to live with them. Resonating with Biblical, Classical and Romantic echoes, each sonnet is a perfectly crafted ruin that stands as monument to the despoliation and ruination of the planet itself. After the Snake, the title of which evokes another Fall, is a haunting meditation on the apocalyptic landscapes that – if like Dun we have the courage to look at them – lie smoking on the boundaries of our consciousness.
—Matthew Beaumont
Christopher P. Wood, The Speak.
A cloud-anvil hung in the sunset;
the day had been hammered out
on its vast metal-grey silhouette.
Here unnumbered days no doubt
had been forged, as in creation-myth
by the great-grandfather-blacksmith
lord of the worlds, ironworker
extraordinaire, universe-maker
who was now cooling down his foundry
for the night, making sure no spark
escaped into the primal dark
just as the sun crossed day’s boundary
disappearing into that past
where all cold yesterdays are cast.
♣
The winter hills were smoky-blue
the skyline a thin band of pink;
far beyond the eye could pursue
distance, travel to the earth’s brink
witness without analysing
feel without rationalizing.
The world told her great secret;
reality became more complete
not the empire of pragmatic thought
but the high place of feeling.
And while the sun went wheeling
vast red solar juggernaut
out of sight, down into night’s gulf
in the half-light I was void of self.
♣
When November’s velvet days appear
I desire to reach out and stroke
soft-textured aspects everywhere
rainbow-hued horizons which evoke
nature’s luxurious bedroom
where, with muted lights, in semi-gloom
the goddess slowly gets undressed
to lay her down in autumnal rest.
Now she slips between golden sheets
figured with feathers and pinecones
rich with fading undertones;
and more slowly the world’s heart beats
as she drifts away into a dream
through which falls one winter sunbeam.
♣
The sun’s strength is coming back
after his long winter illness.
In the round bed of the zodiac
he lounges with a certain dullness
not quite himself this grey morning.
His liver is malfunctioning
or so he believes, reddish dots
on his face (those famous sunspots)
tell a tale of many late nights
carousing with the crescent moon.
Sciatica too is flaring up;
so from the skyline, rearing up
God-inflated hydrogen balloon
he gives a groan to self-console.
Yet things are better on the whole.
♣
Where other existences encroach
salvaging on the verge of sleep
I search an endless dream beach
curving away in empty sweep
picking up symbolic driftwood
some old detritus of childhood
playing with a sphere of glass
which rolls away into the past.
Trying to overtake, it travels
smoother than a ball of graphite
faster than a kingfisher in flight
disappearing into time-tunnels.
Now, as the night-universe fades
left here alone, memory degrades.
♣
Christopher P. Wood, Balancing Act.
When something demonic passages
across the top of the atmosphere
and when the jet stream rages
night by night whipping the upper air
where then is philosophic stillness?
Are explosions of forcefulness
shriekings of elemental uproar
foreknowledge of some final war?
Now you hear angelic battlecries
scream from windy battlements
dream of grey encirclements
underneath armour-plated skies.
Pity the psychotic antilife
alive only in feral strife.
♣
A golden wound in a grey sky
bleeds light into a pale day.
A dirty cloud tries to apply
a cold compress; a tourniquet
forms as trains of sodden geese
make the draining gold decrease
threading out across the lesion.
Now there’s a blood transfusion
as the sun above the sun transmits
oceans of emergency lifeforce.
But on its accelerated course
the spear of a military jet spits
the vast weeping injury:
thrusts into the great mystery.
♣
I know how the ship feels in dry dock
when they float her in from the sea
stretch her out from block to block
hull careened to some exact degree.
For I have dared the polar storms
which break apart all carnal forms
driven into the east wind
toward horizons ill-defined
oceans dragging on my green keel.
But I’ve seen too much of the deep!
Now it is my time to sleep
a short sleep after a long ordeal.
In the silence of the great shipyard
I rest with the sun for safeguard.
♣
A spiral of smoke rises:
the forest fire of existence
unmercifully blazes.
Animals give utterance
lose all fear and race wildly
to the valley floor, blindly
plunging into more danger.
The firehawk is a pillager
raiding in the flames he’s spread
when he hunts among the refugees.
Nature’s old pathologies
mean we are among the dead
or fall with the instinctive sinners
the fire-breathing breadwinners.
♣
Fearlessness when love looks on
shows strange reciprocity
some hideous liaison
affection and ferocity
bonded as primal opposites.
Yet if love approximates
to the marvel of our making
then is no more heartbreaking
because of that antithesis
where one chases great valour
some destructive Knight Templar
while another dreams of synthesis
bringing an ideal horseman nearer
singing from her flashing mirror.
♣
Christopher P. Wood, Angel Ghost.
Sound carries further at night.
A heavy vehicle of thunder
circles in lugubrious flight
tearing black heavens asunder.
And hearing this oppressor
bring his hostile music closer
space contracts as the monster wheels
dead-boat with wind-slicing keels.
Such amplitude can only mean
we’re hostage to an iron heart
forever made an engine-part
in the procedures of the machine.
And now, as the flying-ship vibrates
your own heartbeat accelerates.
♣
He carries his head so high
to keep from scraping the ground
this from the greenwoods nearby
not something accidentally found
but which waited there for him
log the size of an upper limb
glad to be reacquainted
ceremoniously presented
but only as self-extension
way to take hold of this world
across stellar meadows hurled:
modality of self-expression.
Prehensile, his black jaws clasp!
And all things lie within his grasp.
♣
The thrust of an idea lends dawn
an air of spring. A snowdrop of thought
some conceptual seed reborn
appear as themes I have sought
in the bare wood of my mind
these months of darkness behind.
Now I seem to find a trace of dreams
left long ago by autumn streams
flashes of some lucid insight
in the forest of sleep’s mystery
strange images in trajectory
streaking comet-like across the night.
And early-rising I live again
where meaning penetrates the mundane.
♣
When morning sets a vast wreath
on the temples of the rising sun;
when I cannot see any worth
in any victory I’ve won;
when spring’s annual clockwork
seems only cliched hackwork;
when experience which precedes
all aesthetic industry recedes
into the theoretical life;
when rainclouds oxidize the valley
blending, unifying visually
land’s rough brown with rain’s silver knife:
then I close my spiritual windows
and sing sad, monotonous rondeaus.
♣
The edge of the wind is traced
with essence when the hot pines shift;
the tang of summer dust is braced
with evergreen fragrance adrift.
Bent over double, as a hunchback
Christ comes down a donkey-track;
high in the dry hills somewhere
a buzzard takes a screaming hare.
The Durance has wasted away;
the Solitaire plateau is fiery:
midsummer is harsh and angry.
Descending, making slow headway
jerrycans jangling on his mule
here he is: God’s holy fool.
♣
Christopher P. Wood, Spirit Sapling 2.
A long grey hull diagonals
slanting in the dead water.
Angles of wooden funnels
subsiding in this winter
exaggerate in foundering.
Faint engines still thundering
would propellor at the stern
but timber blades won’t turn
again, churn this iron main
decked with debris of the sun
amber ocean of light undone
rotting into sinister terrain.
See: a gun-turret like a gargoyle
registers its last recoil.
♣
Seventy, and still clinging
to driftwood, a drowning man
improbably still singing
from the backwash of a lifespan.
One more swansong from the waves
(the poetry of watery graves)
bubbles upward with self-pity:
residuum of stupidity.
What makes an au revoir in rhyme
as the cold cramps take hold
as the cruel years withhold
energies of summertime?
Something beautiful, not to forget:
three quatrains and a couplet.
♣
The ordinary air is failing.
I breathe in God’s oxygen
not by regular inhaling
but by attempting to imagine
an atmospheric ocean sunlit
flowing in a conduit
through far-flung cellular lands
antipodes of feet and hands
a bright river of consciousness
transfusing damaged clay
washing anxiety away
until a sense of weightlessness
merges with great lassitude:
until all opposites collude.
♣
Kneeling by night in the pink grove
as rainwater sways above the earth
a boy-soldier stands up from his grave.
Has someone been sowing dragon’s teeth?
Now the sound of a woman sobbing
through the dark heat, disturbing
some incandescent flower-maiden
in the parade-ground of the garden
raining black tears on the carnations.
There’s not enough water in the sky
to aid all in the land who cry
who whimper their recriminations.
And who’s that with medal sewn to chest?
Another lover soon laid to rest.
♣
His outbreath and mine are the same.
He might not have this language
explicit words for making plain
yet when I moan in outrage
my stoic sigh is wordless too.
Words fail and only pain comes through
when I transmit this frustration
being alive within limitation
wearing leather of necessity
collar, harness and heavy chain
to keep me down and to restrain
to dampen this intensity.
And when his groan slides along the floor
I too have lain there before.
♣
Christopher P. Wood, Travel Lodge.
Life has no antithesis.
Another sun shines at our death
casting light on metamorphosis
transformation of our last breath.
Ceasing’s loss is not of living
but of human self-deceiving;
no terrible cessation
only greater initiation
into the mystic shadowside.
Death’s true opposite is birth:
twin gates of this binary earth.
Leave and enter unterrified
undertaking with all your courage
one more starfaring voyage.
♣
Another is hell, yet solitude
seems damnation too, alone
not having chosen to exclude
reclining on my own tombstone
brooding with a heart of granite
on some fierce, angered exit
regretting a sign delayed
as crooked words replayed
in a warped corridor of mirrors.
Ah, the grim reflections from the walls
made of steel in those deformed halls
where I see magnified my errors
wanting to smash that untruthful glass
in which I catch my true image pass.
♣
Somewhere in St Petersburg
the boom of a Turkish drum
punctuates a confessional dirge.
A spider’s web of stratagem
plays out in a game of chess
where one loses under duress
since a gentleman nemesis
outmaneuvres this Narcissus
whose every move is nuanced
by fatal anger and black rage
his weakness being his courage
by cunning counterbalanced.
An affable detour into hell;
and now the devil’s on the stairwell.
♣
Navigations of underbrush
astonish as he infiltrates
underwoods in headlong rush
in haste which never hesitates
where drops begin from secret edges
bounding into tangles and hedges.
Here’s the deft step on all fours
hardly crushing stubble under paws
which burn up the dusk horizon
racing with drives that never flag
running down the arrow of the stag.
And now comes an old comparison:
the hunter, slower than his hound
tracks his shadow over higher ground.
♣
How many yesterdays have crashed
into the void of obsolete time
full of the debris of years smashed
to dust, days too many to name
piled on the dustheaps of the past
days that dreamed they would outlast
until condemned to that abyss
where dreaming ends in paralysis
state in which the frozen body
remains below, abandoned sleeper
too numb even to faintly whisper
an old familiar name: comedy
in which someone forgets how to speak
or speaks words senseless and oblique.
♣
Christopher P. Wood, Spirit Sapling 3.
And when my hand brushes your skirt
does a connection register deep
underground, as those nerves alert
which dream in subterranean sleep
since a traveller moves here
through a double hemisphere
because someone accepts both
canopy and matrix beneath
the visible and invisible
realities you encapsulate
one aspiring to celebrate
transient and invariable
fading of the season’s green
darkness of the worlds unseen.
♣
Pointing to some paradigm
fractured minutes predicate
the confiscation of my time
is something immediate.
Why are all moments degraded
when the immanent is evaded?
Why are these hours sold so cheap
under the clock’s dictatorship
devalued by the militant dial?
Instantaneously the real
secret force of the ideal
continues unrevealed while
momentous seconds are discarded
all their wonder disregarded.
♣
With his ears like radio telescopes
revolving as they track the stars
he trains gaze on some buttercups;
and, picking up faint signals, stares
into these small suns of the meadows
looking through sensory windows
closed to me in my contracted state.
What makes his pointed ears rotate:
faint hiss of distant thunderstorms?
Communications from other worlds?
Strange noises from the golden whorls
make him frown: his head performs
sudden twistings, his face shows wonder.
And now comes the sound of far thunder.
♣
The night-train we rode was streamlined.
And you were even more beautiful
so young in yesterday’s refined
couture, your hair lush and plentiful
jet-black and luxuriant
your eyes flashing transient
glances of interconnection
looks of passionate affection
for me, your wayward wildchild.
And as we soared through dark stations
starclouds and mystic destinations
into these dimming eyes you smiled:
‘The flight is endless’ you said.
And the suns were all green ahead.
♣
Have you watched swallows nestbuilding
beaks overflowing with wet mud
to pack in the wooden scaffolding
cementing twigs with their lifeblood
when slow-prowling cats in the eaves
hunt the housebuilder who weaves
the fabric of her intricate home:
some miraculous inverted dome
worthy of Sir Christopher Wren.
I have seen flickers of indigo
flashing from blue wings aglow
where life takes form in an earthen
cradle shaped like a hemisphere
in the summertime of the year.
♣
Christopher P. Wood, The Speaker.
After the snake came dark fairytales:
three litres of sulphuric acid
on a blackened bed, gory details
in the splashy tabloids, avid
for proof that evil exists
stories of insane chemists
betrayed in love and striking back
some brooding insomniac
lashing out in visceral revenge
using perhaps a pseudonym
stories straight from the Brothers Grimm
where twisted human beings unhinge.
And the poet like a cursed mirror
reflecting all ten times clearer.
♣
What is it about these impressions
characteristically deficient
these elaborate expressions
forever insufficient?
Ask the question, but for answer
accept taciturn censure:
elucidation is far away
over the hills, for another day.
Sensation points toward beauty
not of this order of things
more aesthetic, where music sings
not in accursed brevity
but gliding through a grand sky
resonant with eternity.
♣
Coffee sipped in Montmartre cafes
invoking the exotic master:
shipped in bales by him halfways
across the world. What a disaster
if artificial willpower alone
never infiltrates the unknown
since identity vaporizes
as steam from a stovetop rises.
Surrender is this homemade shirt
dirt-cheap, white American cotton
square-cut, makeshift, without a button
to catch, comfort or assert.
He lifts a dark cup, mordant, deadpan
defeat’s post-narcissistic man.
♣
Passing through a grove of yews
on a spur of the long ridge
we heard the twilight curfews
droning from the dead village.
Light narrowed to a tunnel
sky fell through a vast funnel;
the day was drained of lustre
darkness warred with alabaster.
A black spiral of spinning smoke
rose rapidly from the skyline
ominous, rearing serpentine
meteorological, baroque.
Then, above the megalithic knoll
a windsnake eat the red sun whole.
♣
See his acid squint of faded blue
attending to the business in hand
his train in a desert-rendezvous
with traders from the hinterland
hard-bitten men who speak in verse
even in the toils of commerce
compelling the lyric wheel
to smooth transaction of a deal.
(Blowing in eachother’s faces
the male camels hiss and spit.)
Now the sand dunes are moonlit
interspersed with fireplaces;
now he dreams on a crystal bed
as Arabian stars spin overhead.
♣
If only he could remain
dispassionate in the casino
as cool in luck’s hurricane
as at his desk with cappuccino
considering the curve of a plot
shaping with euphoric thought
labyrinthine turn and twist.
And yet his system is dismissed
at the wheel of the tilted track
just as someone fails to stay calm
when his nerves sound the alarm
counting fatal steps on the way back
to the house of the setting sun
where the red winnings are none.
Christopher P. Wood, The Serpent.
Born in Leeds in 1961, Christopher P. Wood is a painter and printmaker of atmospheric and enigmatic imagery. A skilled artist in collage he also writes and composes. He gained a master’s degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 1986 and has consistently exhibited both in the UK and abroad. His recent exhibition ‘Landscape Reimagined’ at the Goldmark Gallery coincides with the publication of ‘An Innocent Vision’ a survey of his work by Dr Richard Davey. The Goldmark Gallery are the sole representatives for his work.
