Collected Poems, page 9
and balanced a bright, gone star on the end, and it died.
Descendants
Most of us worked the Lancashire vineyards all year and a few
freak redheads died.
We were well-nuked. Knackered. The gaffers gave us
a bonus
in Burgdy and Claray. Big fucking deal, we thought, we’d been
robbing them blind
for months. Drink enough of it, you can juggle with snakes,
no sweat.
Some nights, me and Sarah went down to the ocean
with a few flasks
and a groundsheet and we’d have it off three or four times
in a night
that barely got dark. For hours, you could hear the dolphins
rearing up
as if they were after something. Strange bastards. I like
dolphins.
Anyway. She’s soft, Sarah. She can read. Big green moon
and her with a book
of poetry her Gran had. Nuke me. Nice words, right enough,
and I love the girl,
but I’d had plenty. Winter, I goes, Spring, Autumn, Summer,
don’t give me
that crap, Sarah, and I flung the book over the white sand,
into the waves,
beyond the dolphins. Click-click. Sad. I hate the
bastard past, see,
I’d piss on an ancestor as soon as trace one. What
fucking seasons
I says to her, just look at us now. So we looked.
At each other.
At the trembling unsafe sky. And she started, didn’t she,
to cry.
Tears over her lovely blotchy purple face. It got to me.
We Remember Your Childhood Well
Nobody hurt you. Nobody turned off the light and argued
with somebody else all night. The bad man on the moors
was only a movie you saw. Nobody locked the door.
Your questions were answered fully. No. That didn’t occur.
You couldn’t sing anyway, cared less. The moment’s a blur, a Film Fun
laughing itself to death in the coal fire. Anyone’s guess.
Nobody forced you. You wanted to go that day. Begged. You chose
the dress. Here are the pictures, look at you. Look at us all,
smiling and waving, younger. The whole thing is inside your head.
What you recall are impressions; we have the facts. We called the tune.
The secret police of your childhood were older and wiser than you, bigger
than you. Call back the sound of their voices. Boom. Boom. Boom.
Nobody sent you away. That was an extra holiday, with people
you seemed to like. They were firm, there was nothing to fear.
There was none but yourself to blame if it ended in tears.
What does it matter now? No, no, nobody left the skidmarks of sin
on your soul and laid you wide open for Hell. You were loved.
Always. We did what was best. We remember your childhood well.
The Act of Imagination
Under the Act, the following things may be
prosecuted for appalling the Imagination.
Ten More Years.
A dog playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’.
President Quayle.
The pyjamas of Tax Inspectors.
The Beef Tapeworm (Taenia Saginata).
British Rail.
Picking someone else’s nose.
The Repatriation Charter.
Gaol.
The men. The Crucifix. The nails.
The sound of the neighbours having sex.
The Hanging Lobby.
The Bomb.
Glow-in-the-dark Durex.
A Hubby.
Bedtime with Nancy and Ron.
The sweet smell of success.
A camel’s jobby.
On
and on. And on. And on.
Eating the weakest survivor.
A small hard lump.
Drinking meths.
Going as Lady Godiva.
A parachute jump.
One breast.
Homeless and down to a fiver.
A hump.
Bad breath.
Here is a space to fill in things you suggest.
Death.
Somewhere Someone’s Eyes
What if there had been a painter – he was drunk – equal
to Picasso, who filled his canvases for years,
destroyed them all, and died? It was the old one
about the tree, the empty wood, the unheard moan
of a great oak falling unobserved. We thought
we’d humour him. Or a composer, whose scores
were never played — who also died — nor ever found?
Because I remember this, a cool room flares
with the heat of a winter’s fire, briefly. His face
glowed red-brown when he spoke to the flames.
I recollect it more than well, smell malt. What
happens to the lost? The shadow his mind made legless
lurched against the wall, glass raised. He cursed,
demanded an answer from the dog. All night it snowed.
Somewhere . . . he said, but we’d had enough, began
to joke and get half-screwed ourselves. Somewhere someone’s . . .
Outside, the trees shifted under their soft burdens,
or I imagine so. Our footsteps disappeared. It was easy
to laugh in that snug house, talk nonsense
half the night, drink. Across the white fields somewhere
someone’s eyes blazed as they burned words in their mouth.
Liar
She made things up: for example, that she was really
a man. After she’d taken off her cotton floral
day-frock she was him alright, in her head,
dressed in that heavy herringbone from Oxfam.
He was called Susan actually. The eyes in the mirror
knew that, but she could stare them out.
Of course, a job; of course, a humdrum city flat;
of course, the usual friends. Lover? Sometimes.
She lived like you do, a dozen slack rope-ends
in each dream hand, tugging uselessly on memory
or hope. Frayed. She told stories. I lived
in Moscow once . . . I nearly drowned . . . Rotten.
Lightning struck me and I’m here to tell . . . Liar.
Hyperbole, falsehood, fiction, fib were pebbles tossed
at the evening’s flat pool; her bright eyes
fixed on the ripples. No one believed her.
Our secret films are private affairs, watched
behind the eyes. She spoke in subtitles. Not on.
From bad to worse. The ambulance whinged all the way
to the park where she played with the stolen child.
You know the rest. The man in the long white wig
who found her sadly confused. The top psychiatrist
who studied her in gaol, then went back home and did
what he does every night to the Princess of Wales.
Boy
I liked being small. When I’m on my own
I’m small. I put my pyjamas on
and hum to myself. I like doing that.
What I don’t like is being large, you know,
grown-up. Just like that. Whoosh. Hairy.
I think of myself as a boy. Safe slippers.
The world is terror. Small you can go As I
lay down my head to sleep, I pray . . . I remember
my three wishes sucked up a chimney of flame.
I can do it though. There was an older woman
who gave me a bath. She was joking, of course,
but I wasn’t. I said Mummy to her. Off-guard.
Now it’s a question of getting the wording right
for the Lonely Hearts verse. There must be someone
out there who’s kind to boys. Even if they grew.
Eley’s Bullet
Out walking in the fields, Eley found a bullet
with his name on it. Pheasants korred
and whirred at the sound of gunfire.
Eley’s dog began to whine. England
was turning brown at the edges. Autumn. Rime
in the air. A cool bullet in his palm.
Eley went home. He put the tiny missile
in a matchbox and put that next to a pistol
in the drawer of his old desk. His dog
sat at his feet by the coal fire as he drank
a large whisky, then another one, but this
was usual. Eley went up the stairs to his bath.
He was in love with a woman in the town. The water
was just right, slid over his skin as he gave out
a long low satisfied moan into the steam.
His telephone began to ring and Eley cursed,
then dripped along the hall. She was in a call-box.
She’d lied all afternoon and tonight she was free.
The woman was married. Eley laughed aloud
with apprehension and delight, the world
expanded as he thought of her, his dog
trembled under his hand. Eley knelt,
he hugged the dog till it barked. Outside, the wind
knew something was on and nudged at the clouds.
They lay in each other’s arms, as if what they had done
together had broken the pair of them. The woman
was half-asleep and Eley was telling himself
how he would spend a wish, if he could have only one
for the whole of his life. His fingers counted
the beads of her back as he talked in the dark.
At ten, Eley came into the bedroom with drinks.
She was combing her hair at the mirror. His eyes
seemed to hurt at the sight. She told him sorry,
but this was the last time. She tried to smile.
He stared, then said her words himself, the way
he’d spoken Latin as a boy. Dead language.
By midnight the moon was over the house, full
and lethal, and Eley alone. He went to his desk
with a bottle and started to write. Upstairs,
the dog sniffed at the tepid bed. Eley held
his head in his hands and wanted to cry,
but Beloved he wrote and forever and why.
Some men have no luck. Eley knew he’d as well
send her his ear as mail these stale words,
although he could taste her still. Nearby, a bullet
was there for the right moment and the right man.
He got out his gun, slowly, not even thinking,
and loaded it. Now he would choose. He paused.
He could finish the booze, sleep without dreams
with the morning to face, the loss of her
sore as the sunlight; or open his mouth
for a gun with his name on its bullet to roar
in his brains. Thunder or silence. Eley wished to God
he’d never loved. And then the frightened whimper of a dog.
Following Francis
Watch me. I start with a low whistle, twist it,
pitch it higher and thinner till the kestrel treads air.
There! I have a genius for this, which I offer
to God. Do they say I am crazy, brother?
Yes, they say that. My own wife said it. Dropping everything
and following that fool! You want to be covered
in birdshit? You make me sick. I left anyway,
hurried to the woods to meet him. Francis. Francis.
We had nothing. Later, I wept in his arms like a boy;
his hands were a woman’s, plucking my tears off, tasting them.
We are animals, he said.
I am more practical. He fumbles with two sticks
hoping for fire; swears, laughs, cups glow-worms
in his palm while I start up a flame. Some nights
we’ve company, local accents in the dusk. He sees
my jealousy flare beneath dark trees. He knows.
I know he knows. When he looks at me, he thinks
I cannot tame this.
This evening, Francis preaches to the birds. If he is crazy,
what does that make me? I close my eyes. Tell my children
we move north tomorrow, away from here where the world
sings through cool grass, water, air, a saint’s voice.
Tell them that what I am doing I do from choice.
He holds a fist to the sky and a hawk swoops down.
Survivor
For some time now, at the curve of my mind,
I have longed to embrace my brother, my sister, myself,
when we were seven years old. It is making me ill.
Also my first love, who was fifteen, Leeds, I know
it is thirty years, but when I remember him now
I can feel his wet, young face in my hands, melting
snow, my empty hands. This is bereavement.
Or I spend the weekend in bed, dozing, lounging
in the past. Why has this happened? I mime
the gone years where I lived. I want them back.
My lover rises and plunges above me, not knowing
I have hidden myself in my heart, where I rock
and weep for what has been stolen, lost. Please.
It is like an earthquake and no one to tell.
An Afternoon with Rhiannon
The night before, our host had pointed out the Building
Larkin feared. He was right, I said, suddenly cold
and wanting home; cold later, too, in bed, listening
to wind and rain whip in to the lonely, misplaced town.
But lunchtime brought a clip of spring; a gold man mounted
on a prancing golden horse en route to the pier-head rendezvous
where your mother set you down. We watched you bumble
after pigeons, squeal as sun and air and Humber spun you around.
Around and around. Then you shouted Boat!, pointing
at nothing, Boat!, an empty river, a boatless blue painting
you haven’t begun yet. A small child’s daylight
is a safer place than a poet’s slow, appalling, ticking night;
a place where you say, in a voice so new it shines, I like
buildings! The older people look, the shy town smiles.
Losers
Con-artists, barefaced liars, clocks shuffle the hours slowly.
Remember the hands you were dealt, the full-house of love,
the ace-high you bluffed on. Never again. Each day
is a new game, sucker, with mornings and midnights
raked in by the dealer. Did you think you could keep those cards?
Imagination is memory. We are the fools who dwell in time
outside of time. One saves up for a lifelong dream, another
spends all she has on a summer decades ago. The clocks
click like chips in a casino, piled to a wobbly tower. An hour
fills up with rain. An hour runs down a gutter into a drain.
Where do you live? In a kiss in a darkened cricket pavilion
after the war? Banker? In the scent, from nowhere, of apples
seconds before she arrived? Poet? You don’t live here
and now. Where? In the day your mother didn’t come home? Priest?
In the chalky air of the classroom, still? Doctor? Assassin? Whore?
Look at the time. There will be more but there is always less.
Place your bets. Mostly we do not notice our latest loss
under the rigged clocks. Remember the night we won! The times
it hurts are when we grab the moment for ourselves, nearly –
the corniest sunset, taste of a lover’s tears, a fistful of snow –
and the bankrupt feeling we have as it disappears.
M-M-Memory
Scooping spilt, soft, broken oil
with a silver spoon
from a flagstone floor
into a clay bowl –
the dull scrape of the spoon
on the cool stone,
lukewarm drops in the bowl –
m-m-memory.
Kneel there,
words like fossils
trapped in the roof of the mouth,
forgotten, half-forgotten, half-
recalled, the tongue dreaming
it can trace their shape.
Names, ghosts, m-memory.
Through the high window of the hall
clouds obfuscate the sun
and you sit, exhaling grey smoke
into a purpling, religious light
trying to remember everything
perfectly
in time and space
where you cannot.
Those unstrung beads of oil
seem precious now, now
that the light has changed.
Père Lachaise
Along the ruined avenues the long gone lie
under the old stones. For 10 francs, a map unravels
the crumbling paths which lead to the late great.
A silent town. A vast, perplexing pause.
The living come, murmuring with fresh flowers, their maps
fluttering like white flags in the slight breeze.
April. Beginning of spring. Lilies for Oscar,
one red rose for Colette. Remembrance. Do not forget.
Turn left for Seurat, Chopin, Proust, and Gertrude Stein
with nothing more to say. Below the breathing trees
a thousand lost talents dream into dust; decay
into largely familiar names for a stranger’s bouquet.
Forever dead. Say these words and let their meaning
dizzy you like the scent of innumerable petals
here in Père Lachaise. The sad tourists stand
by the graves, reciting the titles of poems, paintings, songs,
things which have brought them here for the afternoon.
We thread our way through the cemetery, misquoting
or humming quietly and almost comforted.
Two young men embrace near Piaf’s tomb.
Funeral
Say milky cocoa we’d say,
you had the accent for it,
