Collected Poems, page 11
were in the Top Ten that month, October, and the Beatles
were everywhere else. I can give you the B-side
of the Supremes one. Hang on. Come See About Me?
I lived in a kind of fizzing hope. Gargling
with Vimto. The clever smell of my satchel. Convent girls.
I pulled my hair forward with a steel comb that I blew
like Mick, my lips numb as a two-hour snog.
No snags. The Nile rises in April. Blue and White.
The humming-bird’s song is made by its wings, which beat
so fast that they blur in flight. I knew the capitals,
the Kings and Queens, the dates. In class, the white sleeve
of my shirt saluted again and again. Sir! . . . Correct.
Later, I whooped at the side of my bike, a cowboy,
mounted it running in one jump. I sped down Dyke Hill,
no hands, famous, learning, dominus domine dominum.
Dave Dee Dozy . . . Try me. Come on. My mother kept my
mascot Gonk
on the TV set for a year. And the photograph. I look
so brainy you’d think I’d just had a bath. The blazer.
The badge. The tie. The first chord of A Hard Day’s Night
loud in my head. I ran to the Spinney in my prize shoes,
up Churchill Way, up Nelson Drive, over pink pavements
that girls chalked on, in a blue evening; and I stamped
the pawprints of badgers and skunks in the mud. My country.
I want it back. The captain. The one with all the answers. Bzz.
My name was in red on Lucille Green’s jotter. I smiled
as wide as a child who went missing on the way home
from school. The keeny. I say to my stale wife
Six hits by Dusty Springfield. I say to my boss A pint!
How can we know the dancer from the dance? Nobody.
My thick kids wince. Name the Prime Minister of Rhodesia.
My country. How many florins in a pound?
Litany
The soundtrack then was a litany – candlewick
bedspread three piece suite display cabinet –
and stiff-haired wives balanced their red smiles,
passing the catalogue. Pyrex. A tiny ladder
ran up Mrs Barr’s American Tan leg, sly
like a rumour. Language embarrassed them.
The terrible marriages crackled, cellophane
round polyester shirts, and then The Lounge
would seem to bristle with eyes, hard
as the bright stones in engagement rings,
and sharp hands poised over biscuits as a word
was spelled out. An embarrassing word, broken
to bits, which tensed the air like an accident.
This was the code I learnt at my mother’s knee, pretending
to read, where no one had cancer, or sex, or debts,
and certainly not leukaemia, which no one could spell.
The year a mass grave of wasps bobbed in a jam-jar;
a butterfly stammered itself in my curious hands.
A boy in the playground, I said, told me
to fuck off; and a thrilled, malicious pause
salted my tongue like an imminent storm. Then
uproar. I’m sorry, Mrs Barr, Mrs Hunt, Mrs Emery,
sorry, Mrs Raine. Yes, I can summon their names.
My mother’s mute shame. The taste of soap.
Nostalgia
Those early mercenaries, it made them ill –
leaving the mountains, leaving the high, fine air
to go down, down. What they got
was money, dull crude coins clenched
in the teeth; strange food, the wrong taste,
stones in the belly; and the wrong sounds,
the wrong smells, the wrong light, every breath –
wrong. They had an ache here, Doctor,
they pined, wept, grown men. It was killing them.
It was given a name. Hearing tell of it,
there were those who stayed put, fearful
of a sweet pain in the heart; of how it hurt,
in that heavier air, to hear
the music of home – the sad pipes – summoning,
in the dwindling light of the plains,
a particular place – where maybe you met a girl,
or searched for a yellow ball in long grass,
found it just as your mother called you in.
But the word was out. Some would never
fall in love had they not heard of love.
So the priest stood at the stile with his head
in his hands, crying at the workings of memory
through the colour of leaves, and the schoolteacher
opened a book to the scent of her youth, too late.
It was spring when one returned, with his life
in a sack on his back, to find the same street
with the same sign on the inn, the same bell
chiming the hour on the clock, and everything changed.
Stafford Afternoons
Only there, the afternoons could suddenly pause
and when I looked up from lacing my shoe
a long road held no one, the gardens were empty,
an ice-cream van chimed and dwindled away.
On the motorway bridge, I waved at windscreens,
oddly hurt by the blurred waves back, the speed.
So I let a horse in the noisy field sponge at my palm
and invented, in colour, a vivid lie for us both.
In a cul-de-sac, a strange boy threw a stone.
I crawled through a hedge into long grass
at the edge of a small wood, lonely and thrilled.
The green silence gulped once and swallowed me whole.
I knew it was dangerous. The way the trees
drew sly faces from light and shade, the wood
let out its sticky breath on the back of my neck,
and flowering nettles gathered spit in their throats.
Too late. Touch, said the long-haired man
who stood, legs apart, by a silver birch
with a living, purple root in his hand. The sight
made sound rush back; birds, a distant lawnmower,
his hoarse, frightful endearments as I backed away
then ran all the way home; into a game
where children scattered and shrieked
and time fell from the sky like a red ball.
Brothers
Once, I slept in a bed with these four men who share
an older face and can be made to laugh, even now,
at random quotes from the play we were in. There’s no way
in the creation of God’s earth, I say. They grin and nod.
What was possible retreats and shrinks, and in my other eyes
they shrink to an altar boy, a boy practising scales,
a boy playing tennis with a wall, a baby
crying in the night like a new sound flailing for a shape.
Occasionally, when people ask, I enjoy reciting their names.
I don’t have photographs, but I like to repeat the names.
My mother chose them. I hear her life in the words,
the breeding words, the word that broke her heart.
Much in common, me, with thieves and businessmen,
fathers and UB40s. We have nothing to say of now,
but time owns us. How tall they have grown. One day
I shall pay for a box and watch them shoulder it.
Before You Were Mine
I’m ten years away from the corner you laugh on
with your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff.
The three of you bend from the waist, holding
each other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement.
Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.
I’m not here yet. The thought of me doesn’t occur
in the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy, movie tomorrows
the right walk home could bring. I knew you would dance
like that. Before you were mine, your Ma stands at the close
with a hiding for the late one. You reckon it’s worth it.
The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?
I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,
and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square
till I see you, clear as scent, under the tree,
with its lights, and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?
Cha cha cha! You’d teach me the steps on the way home from Mass,
stamping stars from the wrong pavement. Even then
I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewhere
in Scotland, before I was born. That glamorous love lasts
where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.
Welltread
Welltread was Head and the Head’s face was a fist. Yes,
I’ve got him. Spelling and Punishment. A big brass bell
dumb on his desk till only he shook it, and children
ran shrieking in the locked yard. Mr Welltread. Sir.
He meant well. They all did then. The loud, inarticulate dads,
the mothers who spat on hankies and rubbed you away.
But Welltread looked like a gangster. Welltread stalked
the forms, collecting thruppenny bits in a soft black hat.
We prayed for Aberfan, vaguely reprieved. My socks dissolved,
two grey pools at my ankles, at the shock of my name
called out. The memory brings me to my feet
as a foul would. The wrong child for a trite crime.
And all I could say was No. Welltread straightened my hand
as though he could read the future there, then hurt himself
more than he hurt me. There was no cause for complaint.
There was the burn of a cane in my palm, still smouldering.
Confession
Come away into this dark cell and tell
your sins to a hidden man your guardian angel
works your conscience like a glove-puppet It
smells in here doesn’t it does it smell
like a coffin how would you know C’mon
out with them sins those little maggoty things
that wriggle in the soul . . . Bless me Father . . .
Just how bad have you been there’s no water
in hell merely to think of a wrong’s as evil
as doing it . . . For I have sinned . . . Penance
will cleanse you like a bar of good soap so
say the words into the musty gloom aye
on your knees let’s hear that wee voice
recite transgression in the manner approved . . . Forgive me . . .
You do well to stammer A proper respect
for eternal damnation see the flicker
of your white hands clasping each other like
Hansel and Gretel in the big black wood
cross yourself Remember the vinegar and sponge
there’s light on the other side of the door . . . Mother
of God . . . if you can only reach it Jesus loves you.
The Good Teachers
You run round the back to be in it again.
No bigger than your thumbs, those virtuous women
size you up from the front row. Soon now,
Miss Ross will take you for double History.
You breathe on the glass, making a ghost of her, say
South Sea Bubble Defenestration of Prague.
You love Miss Pirie. So much, you are top
of her class. So much, you need two of you
to stare out from the year, serious, passionate.
The River’s Tale by Rudyard Kipling by heart.
Her kind intelligent green eye. Her cruel blue one.
You are making a poem up for her in your head.
But not Miss Sheridan. Comment vous appelez.
But not Miss Appleby. Equal to the square
of the other two sides. Never Miss Webb.
Dar es Salaam. Kilimanjaro. Look. The good teachers
swish down the corridor in long, brown skirts,
snobbish and proud and clean and qualified.
And they’ve got your number. You roll the waistband
of your skirt over and over, all leg, all
dumb insolence, smoke-rings. You won’t pass.
You could do better. But there’s the wall you climb
into dancing, lovebites, marriage, the Cheltenham
and Gloucester, today. The day you’ll be sorry one day.
Like Earning a Living
What’s an elephant like? I say
to the slack-mouthed girl
who answers back, a trainee ventriloquist,
then smirks at Donna. She dunno.
Nor does the youth with the face.
And what would that say, fingered?
I know. Video. Big Mac. Lager. Lager.
What like’s a wart-hog? Come on.
Ambition. Rage. Boredom. Spite. How
do they taste, smell, sound?
Nobody cares. Jason doesn’t. Nor does his dad.
He met a poet. Didn’t know it. Uungh.
What would that aftershave say
if it could think? What colour’s the future?
Somewhere in England, Major-Balls,
the long afternoon empties of air, meaning, energy, point.
Kin-L. There just aren’t the words for it.
Darren. Paul. Kelly. Marie. What’s it like? Mike?
Like earning a living.
Earning a living like.
The Cliché Kid
I need help, Doc, and bad; I can’t forget
the rustle of my father’s ballgown as he bent
to say goodnight to me, his kiss, his French scent . . .
Give me a shot of something. Or the sound of Ma
and her pals up late, boozing, dealing the cards.
Big Bertha pissing out from the porch under the stars . . .
It gets worse. Chalkdust. The old schoolroom empty.
This kid so unpopular even my imaginary friend left me
for another child. I’m screwed up, Doc, jumpy . . .
Distraught in autumn, kneeling under the chestnut trees,
seeing childhood in the conkers through my tears.
Bonkers. And me so butch in my boots down the macho bars . . .
Give me a break. Don’t let me pine for that first love,
that faint down on the cheeks, that easy laugh
in my ears, in my lonesome heart, the day that I had to leave . . .
Sweet Jesus, Doc, I worry I’ll miss when a long time dead
the smell the smell the smell of the baby’s head,
the fresh-baked grass, dammit, the new-mown bread . . .
Pluto
When I awoke
a brand new planet
had been given a name –
this Home I’m in,
it has the same soap suddenly;
so, washing my hands,
I’m thinking Pluto Pluto Pluto,
thrilled,
beside myself.
And then I notice things;
brown coins of age on my face the size of ha’pennies.
An hourglass weeping the future into the past
– and I was a boy.
I cry out now in my bath,
shocked and bereaved again
by not quite seeing us all,
half-hearing my father’s laugh –
without the help and support of the woman I love.
Tangerine soap.
To think of another world out there
in the dark,
unreachable,
of what it was like.
Beachcomber
If you think till it hurts
you can almost do it without getting off that chair,
scare yourself
within an inch of the heart
at the prompt of a word.
How old are you now?
This is what happens –
the child,
and not in sepia,
lives,
you can see her;
comes up the beach,
alone;
bucket and spade.
In her bucket, a starfish, seaweed,
a dozen alarming crabs
caught with string and a mussel.
Don’t move.
Trow.
Go for the sound of the sea,
don’t try to describe it,
get it into your head;
and then the platinum blaze of the sun as the earth
seemed to turn away.
Now she is kneeling.
This is about something.
Harder.
The red spade
scooping a hole in the sand.
Sea-water seeping in.
The girl suddenly holding a conch, listening, sssh.
You remember that cardigan, yes?
You remember that cardigan.
But this is as close as you get.
Nearly there.
Open your eyes.
Those older, those shaking, hands cannot touch
the child
or the spade
or the sand
or the seashell on the shore;
and what
what would you have to say,
of all people,
to her
given the chance?
Exactly.
Caul
No, I don’t remember the thing itself.
I remember the word.
Amnion, inner membrane, caul.
I’ll never be drowned.
The past is the future waiting for dreams
and will find itself there.
I came in a cloak of cool luck
and smiled at the world.
Where the man asked the woman to tell
how it felt, how it looked,
and a sailor purchased my charm
to bear to the sea.
I imagine it now, a leathery sheath
the length of a palm
empty as mine, under the waves
or spoil on a beach.
I’m all that is left of then. It spools
itself out like a film
a talented friend can recall
using speech alone.
The light of a candle seen in a caul
