(for Sonia and Michelle, the gauche mystique) Liberty guides us on the narrow path her ponytail a torch for the groaning peoples. Someone has dropped a bead of pomegranate, I imagined Kore rapt in the act of eating in this shaded place of wild asparagus, the surface fissured where she was taken under.
So much steam and shaftsof sooty light. The porterslook like Laurel and Hardyand I like the train driver’sleathery smell, the glowof hot coals, the crowdedplatforms. Our mumsand dads are on the move,escaping wars, seekinglost weekends, travellingsomewhere sad alongwith the dead. WhenI blink whole epochsare shunted off. Onthe holiday specialwhere I once satthere’s a dazed, aged man. He’slooking lost as landscapeshurtle past. All thosehills and fields and cowson stilts, no wonderhis mind is never at rest. Perhapsan old Punch and Judy Showstill waits, as promised,at the very next stop?
Sometimes nothing would do but the jug band from the swamp stomping the dirt road down the bayou grunting bass and wailing mouth-harp chain-gang holler and low moon riding the cypress trees hauling along that long-time sorrow crying out in that strange joy sometimes nothing else could hope to bring it home.
I wanted to be a writer, but instead of sitting down I strode out over the shingle ridge and saw the sun coming up pink, pushing the thick clouds away, and felt the cold wind forcing the morning’s door, hurrying everything along, even the tiniest stones, which rained down in little landslides no bigger than my hand. I walked parallel to the water and spied a dark object ahead. It was the foot-half of a boot – very large – the rest of it bitten away; no threads or laces; each seam neatly needled with deliberate holes; the stiff leather blown open. I hovered by it; pushed it with my toe; picked it up. Heavy: the wooden sole waterlogged.
Life begins, everlastingly, with light.A cloud-green chaos, the creator’s tear,that crystal deluge breaks to disappear.Rich oil, soft ochre-black, becomes a heightof stone, to pierce, amid the wilderness,our Virgin Mother’s deep azure and gold.Her fingers, hesitant as blood, unfoldto bless the child above the last abyss. Land’s End. Nanjizal Bay at low tide formeda cratered Armageddon where the wrathof castellated quartz and mica blazedlike God. But then I saw the granite archwhere tourmaline and haematite gashed blue,through which, to carve the earth, the ocean stormed.
The geometric universe reels beside the motorway – this Lammas night, a measure on the harvest sway of ears, a murmured song, a lullaby from spheres of leaf-green light, breathes circles, petals, stars, makes rough bristles collapse suddenly as one, and, while the lorries pass, the pattern’s spun.
Time, Butcher’s Van, that I began To hymn you panegyrically! When at your wheels the gravel pinged And tingled, no van, were it winged, Could have arrived more lyrically! We marked the man vacate you, Van, To hob and nob satirically With maid and cook, produce the book To sign as proof, empirically, Of how he’d made the drop Of chuck and blade and chop. And so Goodbye to the shrilling of children, The honking of jovial women admirers; The pungent trays are re-racked In the back of the motor.
Slowly the slow train pulls away To run beside the river bed With everything I long to say To people who are long since dead.
A response to Larkin’s poem ‘The Old Fools’ No, Philip, they’re not fools they’re just old, the world over mind-boggling millions of them the lot who are always losing things — sometimes not only things — the stooped battalions for whom bladders and stairs are now an issue along with banks without cashiers, opening tins staying awake after lunch. Of course they drool, fart noisily like well-fed cattle close up, don’t always sniff too good, but that’s a station to which all are headed. What interests more is something that you judged as weakness and they’re too modest to say is courage; theirs is no witless failure to fear the dark alp, days spent in vacant dreaming.
The house I hatedhated me, gave mea precariously narrow landingat the top of stairs, so I fellinto intensive carefollowed by Neuro-Rehabilitationresidence where I pay little attentionto double vision, double incontinenceand a wheelchair, focusing on the dizzinesswhich suggested that brain and Imay not be keeping company. Occupational Therapists –Nonulia watches me make a cup of tea.She wants me to make a meal with herand I refuse. Why risk a pasta saladaccident in an unknown kitchen?A brain may disregard its instructionalpathways, yet common sense was there.Was it my refusal to play the gamewhich removed the security of a wheelchairto reach the exit on liberation day?I must stay upright and walk there.
i.m. Charles Ferdinand Smyth, born 9 January 1865 at Stephen’s Green; died February 1871 of rheumatic fever 29 June 1876, Hokitika, South Island, New Zealand – All went in search of the donkey, Dandybear, & found the truant half way on the road to Kaneiri. The children ride on this animal on saddles of home manufacture. I dressed up as Mrs Byrne in the evening to edify the children, but remained in cog. Took them on my knee & sang comic ditties but the innocents did not see through the disguise.
Only I was allowed to sit on the Golden Bidet of Lerici. Lord Byron sat on it as well as Percy Bysshe and Mary. D.H. Lawrence swung by and perched there like a demigod – as well as Frieda von Richthofen. Virginia Woolf sat on it in 1933 knocking out a beautiful sentence – Max Beerbohm banging at the door. Henry James dropped his drawers to sit on that glittering throne, his buttocks pale and tragic. I bestraddle the cosmic rocket. Five, four, three, two, one...
Who wanted to be my mammy. Who I wanted to be my mammy. We didn’t tell anyone not even ourselves. Mother stood in the way obdurate, certain of ownership, not knowing I’d fallen in love with another. Ida wanted to hold me I wanted Ida to hold me It never happened. We knew it was illicit this mother daughter adoption. I memorised her address (2 Chapel Road) in case I should need to run and find her, be the child she didn’t have. I knew all about her sisters, Madge and Dolly and the dresses they wore each with a sash of a different colour. In Ida’s cold kitchen I’d find a bowl of raspberry jelly put to set under a cloth weighted with bright glass beads.
these days to rob any bank would take a certain élan – a Clyde-like bohomie – smiling shouting ‘Thanks’ as you fire over their heads a sweep of the hat a flourish before you run now The Banks are boarded-up or have taken a turn are de-commissioned sell coffee exotic plants and snacks are full of freshly-cut forecourt-flowers we idle in them for hours each defunct cash-point recess a window-box choking beautifully with wilted lily and wild extraneous weeds.
i.m. The ‘Discovery’ Tree, c. 609-1853 5 September 1876, Calaveras Big Trees State Park, four miles northeast of Arnold, California – At the Calaveras Grove there stood a tree which the guidebook says took 5 men 25 days to cut down, the work being performed with pump augers. Upon the stump which measures 25 feet across a pavilion has been erected in which 32 persons danced 4 sets of cotillions at one time.(From the journal of Victor Emmanuel Smyth) In winter small sequoia flowers bloomed turning the green crown golden in cold sun – pollen falling on snow in yellow clouds dusted each bough and needle as it fell. The Miwok saw this as they hunted game, Miwok meaning people in the Miwok tongue.
There was a train in the distance.Comforting to know the train was coming.Comforting to know it was a long way off. One day I stood on the platformtrying to imagine the train lolloping in.It rushed by and kicked up a wind.And – figure this? – it knocked off my hat.
Patricia – Pat – was dumpy, with a curling lip, Pat was in fact the Office Bitch. Every night she walked (stridently) home along our beautiful meaningless beach. I sometimes saw her from the car, an umbral figure with an itch for grey skies, pavements and — she told us this — ‘some decent human misery’, which of course was never to be: the sun was unstoppable, relentless the rapture of the sea. So Pat went ‘home’ to London and lived alone, unhappily.
Hans Island, 80°N 66°W There’s a small island in the north that bears your name—not named after you but after someone with the same name as you, and not even their real name just the forename explorers gave their guide and interpreter, Suersaq, their interpreter and guide— in a moment of good humour perhaps or even with a vague sense that some gratitude was required since several times over he had saved their lives. They could not pronounce his real name and he did not tell them that the island already had one. A low and isolated rock-ledge, wrote Elisha Kent Kane which glaucous gulls have made their own peculiar homestead.
One day a man forgets a sea, a continent, a planet he forgets the features on his father’s face the prints of his own hand he forgets the flash of his eyes in another’s and the sound of water in his head he forgets the timbre of his own voice and the noise of his dreams that wakens everyone, but him he forgets the suit and the house he lived in the street and the city that forgot him forgets love, revelations, death: the mirror that no longer redeems his image A man will forget himself one day forget he has forgotten.
Don’t bother catching the Cathay Pacific Airbus. Cheaper to take off the back of a transistor radio and weld yourself to the circuit board.