We were all in it an opera in a church my youngest brother going into the Ark in the mask of a blue tit Raven Boy twirling to a clarinet Dove Girl with ballet shoes and a bunch of green leaves and Mrs Noah who did not want to go dragged up the gangplank waving a goblet shouting I will stay with my gossips.
(after Tracey Herd) most, is not the goal, the finish-line, but the start, (do any of us know where we are heading), the assortment of people, the runners I mean, stretching, going for last minute pees, doing their weird warm-up routines, and the straggle of loved ones congregating in Holyrood Park. I barely remember the first five miles down Edinburgh’s deep streets, I remember hitting the coast, the exposure at Portobello beach, the surprise of space, the sudden release of the sea’s shore.
Deny it how you will, there are timesWhen, sitting in the car outside the supermarketYou consider suicide A moment before, you’re scrutinisingThe legs of a young mum and the way the breeze playsGames with her skirt A child at her foot –She has a swing to her that hasn’t diminishedStill has a move or two Then rain spits on the windscreenTaps on the roof like a tut-tutting busybody who knowsWhat you’re thinking A warming light goes out, you reachFor a cigarette in the grey stupor of your driver’s seatYou’re under water Or drowning in something just as coldInhaling, you see it for what it is, a descent, an immersionYou’re heavy as a Victorian diving-suit Going down.
We listen to the news on late night TVlike poets waiting for that one perfectadjective wham from the fountainreleased by the front hoof of Pegasus. Instead we get a word which means hurricanebut also warriors out of control crash of a waterfall in burning forestthe music of what happenswhen you open up a hoard of unclaimed body parts,and a world walloping about like a flooded carburettor.
It’s trying to snow but the window’s open wide. My teacher has her hair in a towel and everyone’s a blur because she’s lost a contact lens. Hello Kate! How are you? Class was cancelled so she’s had a nice long shower and now a friend comes in saying Someone asked today have I thought about botox? I said ‘What’s wrong with looking my age? I wear my soul on my face’, but she made me think, you know? Surely there must be an easier way to tie shoelaces. Pole Dance 2 are waiting on the stairs againas I go down to the treadmill.
was drawn-out but fun there was a bonfire with those small sausages on sticks we all whooped it up on homebrew afterwards — not much some- body’s dead uncle with a space for a face onto which we projected our various longings and fears hung about for a time — a clutch of haiku (bad) came of that and one stab (thank God, only one) at an elegy then nothing — for a bit then a wren blew in who an expert swore had sung an entire saga in the original Norse (they ran tests but it died) finally bull -dozers brought.
Odd to think about it now, more than two decades since a bag of blood failed to connect with a tube and spilt over the chair, the floor and you. Not knowing what to do we watched it spread until the practical nurse produced saline to remove the stain and make it better, no harm done. Just then the young doctor, Priya popped her smiling face round the door wanting to share the doughnuts she’d bought to celebrate passing her exams. Everyone laughed and enjoyed the fat, the sugar, and the oozing sticky jam. Those days there was always a party in Haematology, always someone who’d passed another exam.
We’d wear our best to the factory bench to catchsome of the luminescence in their folds, painted nailsand teeth with the stuff Mrs Curie had kept phialsof in her pockets like tubes of mints. Became knownas the ghost girls for the soft, green light we emitted.Looking back we guessed the men with dollars in their eyes,must have brushed away rumours of the paint’s darker side,as they watched us bring to a point the tips of bristles with our lips,to more accurately form numbers on the dials.Claimed we were wanton women with a disease too shamefulto name, when ulcers bubbled up, jaws eaten to the white of bone.Our dangerous selves, developing like photographs in the isolationward at night, condemned to rest glowing under lead lids, when theyshould still have been radiant with life.
Jack would play the organ At the local Odeon Until the talkies came. Could Gwyneth love him the same As when in matinees Crisply shadowed rays Of Hollywood had been On the smoke and on a screen Like linen on the bed Where nothing at all was said, And they moved in a black and white night Of flickerings from streetlight? Oh, how she’d loved that magic, And him there making music!
Are we too old for fish-‘n’-chipsToo well-dressed, perhapsTo queue in a place not found on mapsAs far from a taxi as it’s possible to beAnd whose idea was this anyway? We’ll take them back to mine; noSorry, yours. Am I staying over? EarlyRise, you say. I’d forgotten. Not thinking,And to be honest not feeling greatI’ll see you to your door. Sorry, gate. Not for the first time, I feel foolishOut of my depth, out of step, out of tuneWith the rituals.
After Clacker had roared into the deserted school playground in the works pickup, he wouldn’t budge from his cab. He left it to us to flip the clips to free the tailboards. We took our time dragging the ten-foot sections of Mills scaffold frames and boards off the bed, while he sat in a bubble of Radio Stoke, stony-faced, his eyes restlessly checking the dashboard clock, us in his mirror. He burst from his cab without greetings, as though ready to fight us, tugging on his gloves, yanking each frame, crashing them onto the concrete, chuntering it wasn’t his job to be handling scaffold for painters.
Severed from the rest of what it wasI nab it, pulley-wheel it forty footto the top of the scaffolding. Just after eight,the cars crawling over the flyover,the sun will soon be level with me; here,away from all forgettable activity below,sat on this dry board I settle to my work. What better place to be? What better optionsfor a board: a handy size for keeping outnext door’s cat, mixing cement on,boxing in pipes or as a speaker shelf.Once I’m done I’ll make it a Wet Paint sign,or slip it behind the electric cupboardin the basement for next time.
They are happy, the subjects of the pictures,After a fashion. For, however terribleThings may be, and they seem so even there,They have a peace: the magnificent marble,The red bricks’ warmth that the artist captures,The postures of inhabitants who shareThat space will not fold into the rubble,Nor will they suffer horrors other thanThe ones that they are used to. This is art,A country whose sure boundaries and strict lawsProtect its own. It lacks the strength or heartTo interfere outside when such a planWould undermine its state. Meanwhile, the warsBang on, lives snap and cities fall apart.
i.m. Julia Bentham Thirteen children wheel your bed down the road to the shingly tide-line, the sea’s great oxygen machine. Plugged into a featureless moon it sucks in the pebbles, pauses, exhales, breathes for you, before you set sail. The waves practise their scales, feel for arias between the stones. Thirteen children kneel, rest tired heads, a shoal of hands on your blankets. Not long now... The music rises, shoulders the heavy bed, eases away the land’s hold as we let go and your song, dear sister, returns to the sea.
I have a flat now, three rooms and a view,a place, should your ex-wife think to enquire,of paint tins, crazy paving, sprays of blueconvolvulus on sagged and laddered wire,a bedroom lit all night by passing cars,a kitchen diner, mug-rings, missing tiles,a lounge with peacock feathers in a vaseto add, the landlord says, that touch of style,and every night canned laughter through the walls,sit-coms and game shows all come round againto wake me in the small hours with applausefor thoughts I can’t afford to entertain.
Sure, which serious wannabe poet hasn’t? I mean,that Keatsian/Chattertonian quit-while-you’re-aheadvibe is a persistent buzz and trope — think Dean,Hendrix, Joplin or Jim — but let’s face it, once dead that’s that, it won’t matter how perfect a cadaveryou bequeath to the world since worms and fireare immune to beauty so, these days, no, I’d ratherbe a grump pushing my mortal span to the wire and look forward to eighty and a sympathetic nursewho will listen to my drivel as she wipes my arsethan fall prey to that adolescent narcissistic cursepromoting a life and oeuvre so limited and sparse.
In order to seeRilke closed his eyesMonique Saint Hélier said.In order to speak he employedthe costly services of silence.How illness surprised them alllying in wait in dark hedgerows.When death stepped into the roada slender white figure, a strangerasking for directions to the community.Then some form that thrives unseenand is only imagined, changes directionfrom that place no light reachesat the deepest part of the ocean.So she was left by the open windowas doctors and machines crowded in.Paris stole through like a cat at night,over-scented, quivering, mewlingfor human warmth and new prey,unknowing of the love she hadalready exhausted on that creatureexploring every room restlessly,ignoring the remembered portraitsshe was desperately sculpting,within a narrowing shaft of light.
(after Mallarmé) Those zeroes, foam, that clear line echoes but a glass’s rim as, far away, there plunge slim sirens into sea-blue wine; we voyage, O my diverse friends, I upright on the stern whilst you, at the sharp prow, turn brows to lightning, tides, winters. A fine intoxication compels me to raise this toast, standing tall and with no fear, a toast to whatsoever – solitude, star, coral coast – is worth our sail’s white concern.
From his work in the garden – those strips of wildnesstamed, the carpet lawn watered at the end of day –the gardener goes to his rest. Snails have been salted, roses stand corrected,hawthorn hedges are cut to the back of the headof a West Point cadet. Harebells, foxgloves, the white trumpetsof convolvulus – all have been destroyedin sweaty triumph. Only a few forget-me-nots,their eyes showing, are left, unrememberedunder the hedge. Into the last sunlight the ash raisesits rebel flame. Asleep in his armchair, the gardenerdreams of tree felling.
The letters will be found in the spidery tomb. The madman laughs aloud. There’ll come a time When the characters are together in a room To hear about a codicil or crime. The swindler knows at last he’ll be arrested, The drunken baronet falls up the stairs, The patient women, being sorely tested, Rebel at last and leave the page in pairs. Our histories are yet to be arranged. We like this freedom, though it’s all we’ve got. There are no drafts, and nothing to be changed. There are no chapters, and there is no plot.