Poems

Just to say there was one small deer standing alone in a dry field. We’ve passed it now.

I used to think some people were beyond your sphere Of influence and lived in a partitioned world. Silly of me. No one is beyond the sun’s light – How could they be? And we all drink water And breathe the same air and use the same tired words. I used to think some people were beyond your sphere And would be right to feel outraged at featuring, With their intelligence, in unsought prayer. Silly of me. No one is beyond the sun’s light; Most livers love the sun, confess to it And train their lives to track its wanderings. I used to think some people were beyond your sphere Of influence, as if they’d been assembled Separately, set up to feed upon themselves. Silly of me.

(22 November 1915) Four bombardiers were on their wayTo a small village in the rearLayers of dust had turned them greyThey’d joined up earlier that year They quietly spoke of other yearsAnd gazed at the vast plain aheadA shell coughed near the bombardiersNot one so much as turned his head Their talk was all of yesterdayTomorrow seemed a waste of breathThey held to their ascetic wayThis constant discipline of death Guillaume Apollinaire & Velimir Khlebnikov: Birds, Beasts and a World Made New was published by Pushkin Press on 15 August.

My brother in the evenings, long after his death, would take a corner seat and sigh under his breath. Yes, sigh, and mutter things that I could almost hear. Then, like a painted house, he faded over years until his image and his whisper both were one. There was a final dream, when this small talk was done. I walked along a hall where all the recent dead were triaged on a stony floor, and cupped his head as gently as my dreaming arms would harbor him. But couldn’t stop the fear that trembled on his skin. An endless row of people tended those they loved: there was no canopy, or sky, or stars above, or walls enclosing us – the dead just simply lay, until the dream had said the thing it came to say.

(after Saint-Amant) Mastered by laziness and melancholy,I dream in bed like a boneless hare en croûtestewing in its own juice, a delicate brute,or like old Don Quixote in his holy rage. I don’t care a hoot for the latest cause,the count palatine and his royal descent,but consecrate a hymn to the indolentmood in which my soul’s interred, these rare languors. Such is seclusion’s blissful sweetness, it seemsthe action I spurn will be repaid in dreams –already they’re distending this paunch of mine – yet I loathe work so much that, with one blue eyestill closed and one hand beneath the sheets, friend, Iwas barely able to reach my final line.

A man walks the black soil of a reaped field. He pauses to kneel and parse the earth for old coins or unearthed aluminium. He is twenty-two. He is fifty-eight. He’s not a man but a child with a dog. He’s my boss. He’s a gamekeeper, he’s a bailiff at my door. Three buzzards form an ellipsis in the sky, then the scene changes. There’s snow on the ground. Stars in the damp night. I can see his breath. The man is my father, and he walks the perimeter of hedgerow like a sentry, halting occasionally to scrape a hole in the hoarfrost with the heel of his steel capped boot. I never see what he buries. I’ve never seen his face. He’s outlived his failures or he hasn’t. He casts no shadow in the moonlight.

holds no truck with comparisons. Holds no truck with anything  much besides sunlight and dust swirls and the breezy clip -clop-clip of heels upon endless parquet. The Second Longest  Corridor does not deceive itself. Knows there are sidelong glances, spindly remarks (also-ran, windy thing) from those who  complain that it drags on so — can’t take a hint, can’t just politely  trail off. (The Second Longest Corridor has never trailed off.)  Wends its way along and down and past and up, watching  the unkind comments disperse around its furthermost bend.

Two tables pushed together, the beer coming in timely and convivial rounds. A song, a chorus joined and hilarious failures at games we played. And then you plucked from the air an offence in a foreign theatre of war and I caught in your group-beguiling tone, the note of the Commissar prepared to burn a village, its music halls and fields of play.

‘Mais il fut flottant, mon berceau’ – Corbière Sleep, sleep, my floating boy!A plunge of Northern gannets ridesthe air above your head; collideswith silver fish that shoal below.Let these ravens’ krok-kroksooth and lull you as you rock –sleep, sleep, my floating boy!Sleep, sleep, my floating boy!The herring-hunting humpbacks soundand ring their bubble nets aroundyour cradle as it pitches inthe waves. Their underwater howlswill take the place of Breton owls –sleep, sleep, my floating boy! Sleep, sleep, my floating boy!As sailors pass, you’ll hear them callto keep the timing as they haulthe anchor up from choppy seas.Accompanied by wave and spray,they sing out ‘haul-two, haul-belay’ –sleep, sleep, my floating boy!