Whatever savants say, the world is flat, not round; the ships that crowd the bay are for its limit bound. Their cargoes likewise, all consigned to one address, at the world’s waterfall plunge into nothingness. The brightwork, the white sails unfurled against the sky, the million knots and nails for such a voyage, why?
My love arrived with tulips, ‘ten for a fiver’, picked up from the supermarket at the end of the street. Fresh off the plane, perhaps he would have preferred to wash his hands but stood in his coat in the kitchen watching me cut through the cellophane and crush the stems with the stainless heel of the bread-knife. All across Holland trucks were going to and fro between the flower farms and distribution facilities rocking their harvest to sleep over good Dutch tarmac so every bunch could be in store before it opened its eyes, and even as I filled the vase, people on nights were dumping crates of slender-headed replacements cut so premature they didn’t know what kind they were in tubs of glucose solution up and down Holloway Road.
All in the half-dark, we watch the dead playing the parts of the living, in roles we have seen before: The Quiet Man, or The Song of Bernadette. A stranger in a blue Thames van came from somewhere to the west as night drew in, to unload the big, flat cans with reels in them and tramp up the unpainted stairs to the organ-loft in the Church Hall. But I don’t remember seeing this film before: which must be right because I can’t recall what happens next, or even whether it has a happy ending.
Feeling my age, too soon too tired, Whatever gifts I had no more required, I am a hireling called in to be fired. Time was I was ambitious, heretofore. Not any more, not any more. Ridding myself of papers, pots, coins, books, No longer vain about what had been looks, The broth boiled over by too many cooks. Time was I kept some goods held back in store. Not any more, not any more. Taking my time over this last short walk, Not hearing what I say, or how I talk, Pushing my knife against my trembling fork. Time was I knew when I’d become a bore. Not any more, not any more.
And then a dozen Muddy miraculous hares Sprang out of the suitcase, Bounding round and round The hotel suite, Drumming for their wild Crochety queen Back home The moon Above King’s Cross.
Oh take a break at Bleeding-under-Wychwood Away from all the city noise and grime; Where the harvest moon shines bright and the knocking in the night Is the undertaker working overtime. You can dine quite cheaply at the Pig and Whistle On the roast beef of Olde England, rare and lean, But I don’t advise the soup, you’ll be rolling like a hoop For it’s liberally sprinkled with strychnine. You’ll need this little map of Bleeding Manor Where the villainous pursue their dread affairs; See, all the rooms have labels from the attics to the stables With a little matchstick body on the stairs. The squire, Sir Murgatroyd, is old and wealthy And recently has wed a teenage wife.
He had not recognised me or I him. The place was crammed and rackety, and our eyes Took each other in, and we didn’t realise... We stared, and we ruled each other out until After several glassy seconds I found the will And the nerve to speak. Well — it must be! — He knows my name. In the warmth that dropped on me after the ice-cold air, I’d been looking for someone I knew, to launch a greeting Eagerly after long decades of never meeting. In a crowd of loud unknowns I would still have said I might tell this man from the back of his schoolboy head, And a sureness that the same face would still be there.
Here the homeless queue for motherly nuns to dish out meat and veg, for showers, clothes, central heating, company, conversation, medical attention, to use computers to apply for jobs, to borrow blankets against the cold, suits for interviews, an address for housing waiting lists: economic migrants, demobbed soldiers, the divorced, mad, alcoholic, unemployed, unlucky from Africa, Greece, Ireland, Manchester, shop doorways and Westminster Cathedral’s steps.
Black swifts in the sky ascend, soar and glide. They turn all about, seem not to collide. When feeling great joy they scream and they sing. They swoop and they love to mate on the wing. And we on our flight are feeling the same. We eye up the crowd and drink our champagne. With blankets above, seats set to recline, we touch and embrace. Mile-high we entwine. This freedom in air — it must be our right (despite paunches and fat) to like sex at a height.
Like the machine the day had churned in dark circles, But when at last I came back the whole contraption Had stopped too soon, all its baggage had halted In a stubborn wish to stay there and nowhere else. I wouldn’t know when this had happened, Maybe some time in the first half-hour while I Was abroad it had issued a rap, a shudder, A shake, and a stillness. Its red warning Stayed alight on the closed door. Its water Wasn’t going to break into any outlet, Its porthole gave onto a darkness that refused Any sound or movement, and I found myself Looking out for comfort at a clear night sky. It hadn’t stopped.
(for Aidan Williams) After a difficult week at work, when I was trying too hard on a short fuse, I suddenly knew that all the hurt would have a certain way of being released, Googled stables in the centre of town and telephoned, but not to book a ride, just to have five minutes with any one of the ponies, and as he fed I cried deeply from a well I thought was dry, and while I hugged, breathed fully of his sweat, heard him intently chomping on the hay, told him I loved him and kissed his neck, I knew calm like that with you this afternoon, my head on your heartbeat, animal and true.
In Economy’s cramped haul it’s all I ever watch. Our course is laid on screen before me, a dotted line miles wide, plotting the next ten dry-eyed hours. This kind of travel is the loneliest of procedures: solo-piloting a pale track above computer-graphic continents. Across the aisle a blindfold man dreams, ears cupped to rattling Springsteen. It’s for me that the names of India’s cities ride at the horizon; that a picture aeroplane hauls its cartoon shadow. Just as I glaze over, the tracking shot pulls back: the round planet is ribboned in aerial desire paths. Our destination blinks and spins like a mandala. Nine hours, eight minutes. Below us, Japan: its wounded power station close to cracking open.
Ten minutes — or less — before we step down at one of the ‘London Terminals’, ploughed land restarts and the newest cow-parsley spreads by the side of fields that held on through the April drought. The immediate foreground is dashing on past a stationary middle-distance while a forest on the horizon, darkly capped by clouds, races forward at the same speed. It’s comforting that the laws of perspective and motion apply as I saw them, forty years back, in some lines about love and apprehension. These fields we pass are still, as before, to be considered the green foundation of everything, sending out kind seeds into city yards and squares.
Shops that only pop up in your dreams are not unlike the ones you visit awake, except that what you buy then vanishes in the blink of an eye. In my case, it’s never anything practical but always some obscure edition of verse or a record salvaged from the Soviet archives and much of the delight’s in finding the shop itself, a shop that appears to be managed by sleep, yet exists along an everyday labyrinth part-shopping mall, part-walk-in monkish illumination. It feels somewhere I’d like to be in the afterlife — an old, darkly-panelled, cigarette- haunted, quiet centre of browsing, whose stairs twist out of sight above shelves laden with poetry, some of which I feel sure I must have bought before.
Tell me, do you wonder why the lionfish ignores you? Why your face droops into a puddle on the ground is wiped up, wrung out to flavour coffee in a foam paper cup? Well tonight take a step forward, seize life, apply yourself! on the company website to become a lionfish or a paper cup or, failing that, the dishcloth that squeezed your face out.
I have preferred the practice wall and not the netted court a decent racquet and a ball the steady thump of steady thought and no one else at all.
I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying — He had always taken funerals in his stride — And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble,’ Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room.
We went about in circles one hand on the next man’s shoulders something out of Gogol or Great War blind: we ate chicken soup, which gave one old man stomach cramps: he was taken away, snotting. A trustee, if such a thing is imaginable in a lunatic asylum, clicked around as part of a service-trolley, selling cigarettes and bars of chocolate but never newspapers; no telling what bad news could do to the mind. My wife arrived to say she had custody of our children; we wept dutifully and she left, a slim woman keying expertly the buttons on the door’s security pad — some, receiving similar news, screamed.
We learn how every item is its own army the day we split the house down parting lines; the bookcases ready to be divided: the little troops that stand with their stiff spines.
Not birds I know, dank-feathered, inky-eyed, spinning in a ring until one breaks free, flies in. And already I am out of bed and on the path to my father’s room, the whole house sleeping but for him, his old face stunned in the white light webbed on the wall and I say Dad, the bird in my room. Each time he rises, my shadow on the carpet follows where he passes, watches in the doorway as he softly coos and scoops the bird into his palms, strange trophy thrown out into the night again.