Poems

      Everyone around me doggedly refuses to understand that I have never been able to live in the reality of things and people …         Debussy – letter 8 July 1910, the piece L’Embarquement pour ailleurs still incomplete   I have joined the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society, fee 1 shilling.No boat needed and no history of a boat.   I am cast ashore, Emile, in Crail.Crail – en Ecosse – my friend, a name like the scraping of stoneswhere the wind pushes me forward and the streets lean up to me.Salt and seaweed, Emile, dampness and sand.   In the Society’s museum (a shed) I sawan ancient oboe encrusted with snails.What are we doing, my true friend, who Paris leans its ear to for something new?

From a photograph of Himmler taken by an unknown German soldier in Ukraine, summer 1941 In a meadow heavy with the scentof everything that bloomswithout anticipation of death,two Ukrainian peasant girls encounter the Reichsführer SS.Freed from their labours they smileand greet the slight bespectacled manwho appears benign, as he gently windsa thick grass stem around his finger.What a beautiful land, he opinesgranted you by the fortune of birth.But they don’t understand, just smile.Yes, one could settle here, keep pigs,and raise a strong German family...One nods hopefully, the other laughs and the adjutant holding his silver gloves praises their colourful headscarves.On iron crosses the July sun dances,blizzards of insects over high grasses.Farewell then, good luck!

take this moment beside the rapids, where sunlight clips the old weir wall, knowing itself to be only a faint replica of sunlight, not the sort found in other places, like Pisa or Nairobi, but without undue dismay at its shortcomings andinvisibly corpsing, here and there, as only the old style comics knew how, with little, hiccupy giggles incorporated seamlessly into their acts, which is what this bit of sun does out of glee, perhaps or relief to find itself; watery— yes, ravaged — sure, but hitting the black waters soundly and giddy with it. Going nowhere fast.

The art is on the floorso technically my feetare art. Watch your — says thecurator, too late. I’mrearranging atoms,I’m making something movehere, can’t you see? More verve,more discombobulation– more lifelike, don’t you think?The curator doesn’tthink. I disentangle.She announces a roundof applause for Tim, who’sgone home but who put outthe chairs and set up theaudio though the micboomed then bust and the chairs’configuration hastricked me into paddlingin the artist’s orna-mental pond. THANKS TIM! Iholler. The others clapneatly. I clap like Imean it, above my head.

The statues have been getting wetter and wetter.Always standing (they have no beds), they darkenIn the downpour. Even if we scrape the moss and lichenFrom their features as it comes, they won’t get better,But will grow more nimbus-like until the dayIt is impossible to be quite sure Who everybody is. The only cureFor being them is the persistent wayThey stay just as they are and let that leave them.Faces, drapery and fingers, allThat once looked liked ourselves, erodes or breaks,And none of this, we say, will ever grieve them.And yet they look so sad! Their bodies can recallSunshine on the stoneyard. The damp stone aches.

He was from the north and always right.Bet you come from some market town in Surrey, he muttered darkly over our first year Poor Law essays.I was dangerously short on street cred.   Gift-wrapping hardbacks in a mock-Tudor bookshopdeep in the privet-lands of suburbia, I ruminated tactics, just as Lenin must have donewhilst posing as a Finnish farmer.   As braziers burned up north, and people rioted, I suffered the nit-picking gaze of the manageress,whose laser eyes and bouffant blonde hair rang bells. Her fingers led baton-charges in and out of the till,   punishing my frequent errors. She called money, takings, taught us to divide and rule every copper, silver, noteinto its separate tray. I learnt to notice the agonizing drip, drip of profit seeping from unsold stock.

From The Years (Arc Publications, £8)   I can still see them all, as if they’d justgathered in red and grey for morning roll calland fifty-five long years had never passed.   Walwyn who says little and spends his spare timewinding wire round gaudy plumes to hookimaginary fish. Barnes from Tripoli plagued by   asthma who has a seraphic singing voice.Rana, the athlete from Nepal, now stocky butsomehow the same, exporting cigarettes   and tyres to China. Timmi, a gentle Yoruba,the tallest boy by far, who died of AIDSseven years ago, a famous photographer.   Griffin, hard to look at he was sounbearably beautiful, who once stopped me on the stairsand decided “You don’t like me, do you?

Muscle patterns that show satisfaction or delightas opposed to a disingenuous smirkhave been identified by the Laboratory of Human Interactionto provide more information about suicidal patientswho want to check themselves out of hospitalin order to take their own lives.   The best test for a genuine smileis to look at the eyebrow and watch for skin droop.The skin under the eyebrow is lowered only in genuine smiles.Unhappy feelings show through false smilesfor about one third of a secondin what we term ‘leakage’.

From The Years (Arc Publications, £8)     I came to tend – I lie – to visit the grave of a friendand found an ugly shrub with waxy leaveshad made the plot its home. Since my last attendance   ten years had passed – doing I can’t think what,except translate a dead man’s words – and nowthe whole granite headstone was obscured   by brambles and weeds and this excrescence.All overgrown. My friend had somehow ended upin a thicket of Cyrillic, the White Russian sector   who have cared a lot better for their lost ones.Or so you’d think if love were judged like that.Now that I’m older than he ever was,   in far worse nick than he would have been,I dimly sense how we’re the wrong way round.

The place was out beyond an old farmhouse,a path through woods,a clearing, sky; the others gathered close,bounded by what each of us withstood.The limestone scree tumbled down the hillsideintermittently, clouds covered the sun.I shook the crushed femur and fibulaof peppered ashes, watched them weightless glidelike spores, and faintly salt and taint the tongue,slow majesty of bone-dust candelabra.Your half-brothers, behind me, began to singin harmony –Christian, Bach – joining and gently weavinguntil they filled the improvised canopythat we, unchurched, brought to the blue hillside.