I am floating on heather again. A fleece unshorn for fifty years slips off me, rolls down the hill. Its tumbleweed won’t stop till the village where Gary and Bill wait for me and Emmy unlocks the corrugated hall and Stahl repairs his Morris outside Nancy’s shop. It’s early May. The bleating fields and the drone of Glyn’s tractor rise. The sunlight brims with larks. I am not the man I became but inside a song, a dazzling stream, the laughter of friends on the breeze.
Om – OMG! The cosmos sings! A few can hear its soft wild background murmur, its love song from the wild frontier. Then wonder shades to worry, as Earth, distressed, gets warmer. We share forebodings with our friends. We start to say we’re sorry, we say we’ll make amends.
What’s day to a miner? Shovels and picks. Ten fathoms deep the mind plays tricks. Like: I’m lying in bed with the sun flooding in. I’m married to a bright young thing in a yellow dress. She sings to me. I pull her close. My hands are clean. My hands aren’t clean. We dream the day then rise at dusk to claim our pay with coated hands. Example two: above the cart, a chink of blue waving like a tiny flame that somehow knows me, calls my name and guides us to a richer seam. Shovel, pick, shovel, pick, the sun’s a ghost, the light’s a trick – yet who’s to say the light’s not true? The mind does what it has to do to save itself from total dark.
Who were they kidding? Themselves for their sins? Or the man with a tripod calling say cheese to these old fashioned guests with their fixed wooden grins in the coffin shaped shadows of pollarded trees? Sometimes they seem no further away than the lift of a veil or the drop of a hat or the time it might take for the bride’s bouquet to hang in the air before being caught while the groom, exposed, not ready yet, is cupping his hand after cadging a smoke from his rakish best man whose waved cigarette is flourished around another blue joke, tasteless, unsavoury, so un-PC that the dead all around laugh uproariously.
Listen, and you’ll hear the tick of the poem’s stuttering heart; its breathless gush. But notice how it becomes sullen now, dragging its feet; refusing to play, until something catches its eye — a swift, perhaps, dividing the sky, its belly and beak skimming the surface of a river. It longs to tell you how swifts can live as long as twenty years; how we find it impossible to tell the sexes apart, and (as you knew) how it sleeps on the wing. How quickly the poem forgets itself, because now it has become the swift itself, piecing together its nest of words, glued with saliva, travelling a world without touching the ground.
Coming back from the doctor, you have little to say. Treading the sorrowful stones of the Galgenstraat, our view across the Ij impeded by a new apartment block on the site of the fearful gibbet where Rembrandt van Rijn observed Elsje Christiaen tied to its arms, she was barely sixteen and you complain of the cold, leaves turning, autumn sun spattering the narrow street, three young girls playing hockey, long legs, long honey coloured hair, rosy cheeked and out of breath, ‘Dangerous, they could be killed!’ I turn but you’re not listening, looking more like your old self suddenly, quite cheered up.
I rode a bike at speed with letters and cheques, tickets and fines, the dying art of pen. I carried the word of commerce and law, money and verse. A mad dash thick with smog, deadly with car. I rode at metal and juggernaut bus, the copper with a truncheon, prodding. Then a rest on a bench or an alley by a church, as I read about frogs and wounded gods, the bear with a bone dig a hole through a wall. Riding on the Strand, watching for the vans and the hitman cabs, I thought about wind in a stand of pine. How the pike hang gold in a pond at dusk. The city roar gone for a line on a page.
I think writing poems is about tracking downWho you are when completely alone.Not being assessed by anyone, Not answering to anyone. It’s about the part of you that doesn’t belong,The One who has no place in the World,The One with a foothold in Eternity. The One who cannot be foundIn the files of a single Government Department. The One who can’t even be bothered to have an Identity! It’s about the possibility of a myriad completed souls,Instead of all these broken hearts, afflicted minds,And crestfallen, disused selves. It’s like looking for Bigfoot or the Yeti:Something forgotten and left behind,Making its odd whistling sound. Or the Snow Leopard; rare, threatened,Living carefully above the Snow Line. It’s like stepping off the edge of the world.
Meanwhile, a man leaves his bed to comfort a child who has had a bad dream. Look, he says, carrying her to the window – nearly morning. Shall we go downstairs? One-handed, fills the kettle, flips it on, his daughter pressed against his shoulder, warm. Breakfast, clothes, brush teeth and hair, a ride to nursery, back upstairs, pause at the window. Empires closing down.
Half-truths present themselves complete as memories write fainter. Keep this in mind: that’s when we meet the mind whose grasp is greater, retouching like a painter the smudges all the world can see, the freedom in our data, our mind too data-free. Well-being gleams along its scale.
for Zoya (b. 1926) The past is an undigested meal. Small things trap us, she says. How a girl can pop out to search for bread and be gone for twelve years. That washing dead bodies becomes routine. Dreams come thicker now, like smoke from the transport train to Nazi Germany – rib-cage to rib-cage with fellow Russians, pissing and shitting together. She indulges in petits fours, talks Putin, Ukraine – her politics a jumble of loyalties. In her head she walks with Palestinians over bomb craters, a ghosthood imposed by the dead who won’t lie still. Like Papa, missing in the Gulag, appearing the night she gave birth to her son: Zoyechka, be clear what you want, then do it.
She says, well you look great now you’ve lost so much weight, looking up the Lower Clapton Road where a black zigzag of a ravine stretches from the chemist on the corner to the doner where they sell rum baba, and she adds, you could even wear shorts, while my bra strap bites into the nub of my shoulder bone newly appeared and my astonished and astonishing baby also looks up the Lower Clapton Road, wondering how the thirty-eight bus will cope with that ravine, as clearly there is no way around it, that’s for sure.
I emptied my drawers and cleared the flat. I sleep on an inch-thick mat. Want this. Want that. Not any more. I dream in black and white. Colour distracts me. You only need to own three T-shirts, exactly. I dream in light. Throw your books in the dirt and light the fire. Watch the flames climb higher, higher, higher… It will not hurt.
Here’s dominion, and the reek of borders. This is my walk alone behind the guard on the high, snow-bound edges of Iran, the roads mud rivers thundering down drains. In the hot offices of Manila an unsmiling clerk from the Department of Immigration and Deportation takes my passport. I am lifting my face to a bright light, empty with submission, having been so often silently watched, so often pinned to the revolving chair. My father turns between the grains of sand on a small disc of beach, lying concealed from all eyes at the bottom of the cliff.
The streets looked foreign and the night was short And pointed to a situation tense, But how else can experience be thought When there is nothing else you could report Than empty boulevards where lights condense Where streets looked foreign and the night was short, When everything looked futile, nothing taught You that your driving round made little sense, But how else can experience be thought? And how else can experience be caught Except by making it a picture, whence The streets looked foreign and the night was short? Perhaps this methodology would sort Things out, reality being no defence, But how else can experience be thought?
We bought it down the car boot sale, not much of a risk for three quid. While I was paying the mother, the teenage daughter ran her thumb over the screen a final time. We’re back today with stuff to sell, David more than two feet taller. It’s been pitched at three quid again. Every time someone picks it up, we glance at each other and wince.
Parkinson’s My left arm, apt and agile, has the knack Of swinging with a youthful nonchalance. My right is stiff. My right hand shrinks and claws, Reluctant to lift cups or open doors. It’s the deft fingers of my left that dance Over the keyboard, while the right hangs back. My left side’s young, my right is getting old. The two time periods are not meant to meet And yet these hands can touch. My different ages Are like a photo album’s facing pages. The right side feels the theft of what was sweet. The left cannot ignore what is foretold.
(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.