Cantos for Adam Blade

by harry gunston

xii. gwildor of my own floorplan

Part of my attraction to you

was your resemblance to the trading cards

of my childhood. When I wrote the cloud

index and let it all loose as

though I can’t tell the river apart

from the days anymore. It

was there I saw a tree undo itself

in a field of clubroot, a dog inherit

heartbreak from a telephone wire.

(We’re talking

about maps here)

Like you, I have been watching Tom’s

adventures with a close eye. Do you

know who I am? Do you?

What if I told you these footsteps

stopped clouds or that I really

couldn’t see you? There

the puddle said the stars weren’t

even an influence and I shot a fifty

on the pond ripple dart board

(I just needed the centrefolds)

and your fingerprints were a million slip roads

inheriting this box of rain

I’d been saving for a lifetime. And I

just wanted to say the right thing

at the perfect moment

all of the time.

xxiv. rashouk the cave troll

Preview a cold wind moaned:

they were my favourite part of the books.

Elena came down the slope and ran over to him,

his bones were wind chimes.

I was right, it doesn’t matter that you’ve lost.

How do you uncut chemtrails from the tendrils of a cobweb?

“Everything is as it should be.” He was no longer frozen,

but she lurked as a seamstress behind spiderwork.

He was becoming real again.

He made domes to deflect the illusion.

Tom brought the side of his blade hacking down

into a glossary of betrayed midwinters.

The Beast roared in agony.

But I could see from your eyes this whole afternoon was wrong.

xxxvi. i practiced the commissioner’s posture

today in the security of tree and woodsmoke

baffled by the souvenirs in a wind whistle

i unpicked sounds from a litany of bad endings

and renegotiated the curve of an office chair

all in my sleep

the aardvarks had mounted the deer heads

country songs sung from obscure narrative perspectives

we played ping pong in a constantly-revised orphanage

and convinced the mad commissioner to draw our dreams

all in my sleep

if the morning felt relegated then blame the legend

of leaves under windscreens left in spring mildew

the falling columns of barcode rain

a laser beam shot through this ice wire of thistle

(i will use them to sleep).

***

Disappointments in my adulthood always have some relationship to

the experiences of my childhood: the way Mister Maker looks now,

the persistent claims to the newness of Monster Munch, the slow

death of ITVBe. If I see a kid do a wheelie in the street I don’t feel

right for a week.

The newest addition to this litany of pain is that the acclaimed Beast

Quest author Adam Blade is, in fact, a fiction. Adam Blade is a ghost

constituted by the writerly hands of an unspecified number, a

“confluence of voices”.

I tried re-imagining the Tolstoy of my childhood in these new terms.

I tried thinking of Adam Blade as a vast interlocking network of

experiences, but it felt too much, too sincere. I went back to Beast

Quest books I found in charity shops and unguarded children’s

bedrooms. I used them as maps to pin the coordinates of my

disappointment.

The poems came about as a response to this disappointment. I

imagined what a poem might sound like if it was written by a host of

people imitating a particular style. It was meant to hover in and out

of focus, postured on distraction or a discursion, but concluding by a

nod toward some idea of a fictionalised confessional line. Images

might reappear recycled and recontextualised, both familiar and not.