Collected Poems, page 10
drunk you sometimes would. Milky
cocoa. Preston. We’d all
laugh. Milky cocoa. Drunk,
drunk. You laughed, saying it.
From all over the city
mourners swarmed, a demo against
death, into the cemetery.
You asked for nothing.
Three gravediggers, two minutes
of silence in the wind. Black
cars took us back. Serious
drinking. Awkward ghosts
getting the ale in. All afternoon
we said your name, repeated
the prayers of anecdotes,
bereaved and drunk
enough to think you might arrive,
say milky cocoa . . . Milky
cocoa, until we knew you’d gone.
Dream of a Lost Friend
You were dead, but we met, dreaming,
before you had died. Your name, twice,
then you turned, pale, unwell. My dear,
my dear, must this be? A public building
where I’ve never been, and, on the wall,
an AIDS poster. Your white lips. Help me.
We embraced, standing in a long corridor
which harboured a fierce pain neither of us felt yet.
The words you spoke were frenzied prayers
to Chemistry; or you laughed, a child-man’s laugh,
innocent, hysterical, out of your skull. It’s only
a dream, I heard myself saying, only a bad dream.
Some of our best friends nurture a virus, an idle,
charmed, purposeful enemy, and it dreams
they are dead already. In fashionable restaurants,
over the crudités, the healthy imagine a time
when all these careful moments will be dreamed
and dreamed again. You look well. How do you feel?
Then, as I slept, you backed away from me, crying
and offering a series of dates for lunch, waving.
I missed your funeral, I said, knowing you couldn’t hear
at the end of the corridor, thumbs up, acting.
Where there’s life . . . Awake, alive, for months I think of you
almost hopeful in a bad dream where you were long dead.
Like This
When you die in the city where everyone was young,
at the end of the dark, drunken years that kept you there,
old friends walk up through the wild streets
to the alehouse, whose watery, yellow lights
are a faint, hopeless beacon in the night,
and, nearer now to you, they get in the rounds,
the solemn, slow, ceremonial rounds which soften their tongues
to speak brief epitaphs of love, regret; meanwhile,
you lie in an ice-cold drawer, two postal codes away,
without recall or recourse, although you had both,
although you are not yet old, although a woman is crying
in the big house on the park where they carried you out
for the last time, where you were told how it would end,
how it would be like this unless, unless. And it is.
Who Loves You
I worry about you travelling in those mystical machines.
Every day people fall from the clouds, dead.
Breathe in and out and in and out easy.
Safety, safely, safe home.
Your photograph is in the fridge, smiles when the light comes on.
All the time people are burnt in the public places.
Rest where the cool trees drop to a gentle shade.
Safety, safely, safe home.
Don’t lie down on the sands where the hole in the sky is.
Too many people being gnawed to shreds.
Send me your voice however it comes across oceans.
Safety, safely, safe home.
The loveless men and homeless boys are out there and angry.
Nightly people end their lives in the shortcut.
Walk in the light, steadily hurry towards me.
Safety, safely, safe home. (Who loves you?)
Safety, safely, safe home.
Two Small Poems of Desire
1
The little sounds I make against your skin
don’t mean anything. They make me
an animal learning vowels; not that I know
I do this, but I hear them
floating away over your shoulders, sticking
to the ceiling. Aa Ee Iy Oh Uu.
Are they sounds of surprise
at the strange ghosts your nakedness makes
moving above me in how much light
a net can catch?
Who cares. Sometimes language virtuously used
is language badly used. It’s tough
and difficult and true to say
I love you when you do these things to me.
2
The way I prefer to play you back
is naked in the cool lawn of those green sheets,
just afterwards,
and saying What secret am I?
I am brought up sharp in a busy street,
staring inwards as you put down your drink
and touch me again. How does it feel?
It feels like tiny gardens
growing in the palms of the hands,
invisible,
sweet, if they had a scent.
Girlfriends
derived from Verlaine
That hot September night, we slept in a single bed,
naked, and on our frail bodies the sweat
cooled and renewed itself. I reached out my arms
and you, hands on my breasts, kissed me. Evening of amber.
Our nightgowns lay on the floor where you fell to your knees
and became ferocious, pressed your head to my stomach,
your mouth to the red gold, the pink shadows; except
I did not see it like this at the time, but arched
my back and squeezed water from the sultry air
with my fists. Also I remember hearing, clearly
but distantly, a siren some streets away – de
da de da de da – which mingled with my own
absurd cries, so that I looked up, even then,
to see my fingers counting themselves, dancing.
A Shilling for the Sea
You get a shilling if you see it first.
You take your lover to a bar nearby, late evening,
spend it all night and still have change. If,
if it were me, if it were you, we’d drink up
and leave; screw on the beach, with my bare arse
soaked by the night-tide’s waves, your face moving
between mine and that gambler’s throw of stars.
Then we’d dress and go back to the bar, order
the same again, and who’s this whispering filthy suggestions
into my ear? My tongue in the sea slow salt wet . . .
Yes. All for a shilling, if you play that game.
Hard to Say
I asked him to give me an image for Love, something I could see,
or imagine seeing, or something that, because of the word
for its smell, would make me remember, something possible
to hear. Don’t just say love, I said, love, love, I love you.
On the way home, I thought of our love and how, lately,
I too have grown lazy in expressing it, snuggling up to you
in bed, idly murmuring those tired clichés without even thinking.
My words have been grubby confetti, faded, tacky, blown far
from the wedding feast. And so it was, with a sudden shock of love,
like a peacock flashing wide its hundred eyes, or a boy’s voice
flinging top G to the roof of an empty church, or a bottle
of French perfume knocked off the shelf, spilling into the steamy bath,
I wanted you. After the wine, the flowers I brought you drowned
in the darkening light. As we slept, we breathed their scent all night.
The Kissing Gate
After I’ve spoken to you, I walk out to the gate
at the edge of the field, watch a bird make a nonsense
of the air, and wish. This is not my landscape,
though I feel at home here, in a way, in a light
that rolls a dreg of memory around itself, spills it.
You’ll not see it now. The bird. Me at the gate. Call it
a yellowy light. There it goes, into the grass, green,
greener, going. Love holds words to itself, repeats them
till they’re smooth, sit silent on the tongue
like a small stone you sucked once, for some reason,
on a beach. I tell myself the things you’d like to do to me
if you were here, where there’s no one to see for miles,
where I sense myself grow lighter and heavier, dizzy, solid,
and a bird swoops down, down, the light follows it.
Words, Wide Night
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this
is what it is like or what it is like in words.
The Darling Letters
Some keep them in shoeboxes away from the light,
sore memories blinking out as the lid lifts,
their own recklessness written all over them. My own . . .
Private jokes, no longer comprehended, pull their punchlines,
fall flat in the gaps between endearments. What
are you wearing?
Don’t ever change.
They start with Darling; end in recriminations,
absence, sense of loss. Even now, the fist’s bud flowers
into trembling, the fingers trace each line and see
the future then. Always . . . Nobody burns them,
the Darling letters, stiff in their cardboard coffins.
Babykins . . . We all had strange names
which make us blush, as though we’d murdered
someone under an alias, long ago. I’ll die
without you. Die. Once in a while, alone,
we take them out to read again, the heart thudding
like a spade on buried bones.
Away from Home
Somewhere someone will always be leaving open
a curtain, as you pass up the dark mild street,
uncertain, on your way to the lodgings.
You put down your case, and a blurred longing
sharpens like a headache. A woman carries
a steamy bowl into the room – a red room –
talking to no one, the pleasant and yawning man
who comes in behind her and kisses her palms.
Miles away, you go on, strumming the privet.
*
The train unzips the landscape, sheds fields
and hedges. On the outskirts of a town, the first houses
deal you their bright cards. The Queen of Hearts. A kitchen.
A suburban king counting his money. Jacks.
Behind the back-to-backs, a bruised industrial sky
blackens, and fills with cooking smells, and rains.
Treacherous puddles lead to the Railway Hotel. No bar
till 7 pm. At the first drink, a haunted jukebox
switches itself on, reminds you, reminds you, reminds you.
*
Anonymous night. Something wrong. The bedside lamp
absent. Different air. Against the hazarded wall
a door starts faintly to be drawn.
You mime your way ineptly to a switch,
turn to a single room with shower,
an empty flask, a half-drunk glass of wine.
Calm yourself. By dawn you will have slept again
and gone. You have a ticket for the plane.
Check it. The flight number. Your home address. Your name.
*
Urinous broken phone booths lead you
from street to back street, to this last one
which stands at the edge of a demolition site.
Unbelievably, it works. With a sense of luxury
you light a cigarette. There is time yet.
Your fingers press the numbers, almost sensually.
Tomorrow you return. Below the flyover
the sparkling merging motorways glamorise
the night. The telephone is ringing in your house.
November
How they can ruin a day, the funeral cars proceeding
over the edge of the Common, while fat black crows
leer and jeer in gangs. A parliament all right.
Suddenly the hour is less pleasant than it first appeared
to take a walk and post a harmless, optimistic letter.
Face up to it. It is far too hot for November
and far too late for more than the corpse stopped
at a red light near the Post Office, where you pause
wishing you could make some kind of gesture
like the old woman who crosses herself as the hearse moves on.
The Literature Act
My poem will be a fantasy about living in a high-rise flat,
on the edge of a dirty industrial town, as the lawful wife of a yob
who spent the morning demonstrating in the market square
for the benefit of the gutter press. This was against a book
of which he violently disapproves and which was written by some cunt
who is a blasphemer or a lesbian or whose filth is being studied
in our local schools as part of some pisspot exam, the bastard.
I feel a thrill of fear as I imagine frying his evening meal
and keeping his children quiet as he shouts at the News. Later
he will thrash in the bed, like a fish out of water, not censoring
the words and pictures in his head. I would like my poem
to be given to such a man by the Police. Should he resist
I would like him to be taken to court; where the Jury,
the Judge, will compel him to learn it by heart. Every word.
River
At the turn of the river the language changes,
a different babble, even a different name
for the same river. Water crosses the border,
translates itself, but words stumble, fall back,
and there, nailed to a tree, is proof. A sign
in new language brash on a tree. A bird,
not seen before, singing on a branch. A woman
on the path by the river, repeating a strange sound
to clue the bird’s song and ask for its name, after.
She kneels for a red flower, picks it, later
will press it carefully between the pages of a book.
What would it mean to you if you could be
with her there, dangling your own hands in the water
where blue and silver fish dart away over stone,
stoon, stein, like the meanings of things, vanish?
She feels she is somewhere else, intensely, simply because
of words; sings loudly in nonsense, smiling, smiling.
If you were really there what would you write on a postcard,
or on the sand, near where the river runs into the sea?
The Way My Mother Speaks
I say her phrases to myself
in my head
or under the shallows of my breath,
restful shapes moving.
The day and ever. The day and ever.
The train this slow evening
goes down England
browsing for the right sky,
too blue swapped for a cool grey.
For miles I have been saying
What like is it
the way I say things when I think.
Nothing is silent. Nothing is not silent.
What like is it.
Only tonight
I am happy and sad
like a child
who stood at the end of summer
and dipped a net
in a green, erotic pond. The day
and ever. The day and ever.
I am homesick, free, in love
with the way my mother speaks.
In Your Mind
The other country, is it anticipated or half-remembered?
Its language is muffled by the rain which falls all afternoon
one autumn in England, and in your mind
you put aside your work and head for the airport
with a credit card and a warm coat you will leave
on the plane. The past fades like newsprint in the sun.
You know people there. Their faces are photographs
on the wrong side of your eyes. A beautiful boy
in the bar on the harbour serves you a drink – what? –
asks you if men could possibly land on the moon.
A moon like an orange drawn by a child. No.
Never. You watch it peel itself into the sea.
Sleep. The rasp of carpentry wakes you. On the wall,
a painting lost for thirty years renders the room yours.
Of course. You go to your job, right at the old hotel, left,
then left again. You love this job. Apt sounds
mark the passing of the hours. Seagulls. Bells. A flute
practising scales. You swap a coin for a fish on the way home.
Then suddenly you are lost but not lost, dawdling
on the blue bridge, watching six swans vanish
under your feet. The certainty of place turns on the lights
all over town, turns up the scent on the air. For a moment
you are there, in the other country, knowing its name.
And then a desk. A newspaper. A window. English rain.
The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team
Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Baby Love, Oh Pretty Woman
