Poems

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.

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...

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.

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.

after Humphrey Spender’s ‘Dominoes’ Near as dammit to Orwell’s ideal, this,or at least his pub’s essential qualities:no radio or piano; the quiet blissof talk and its vital communality;good honest beer; uncompromisinglyVictorian in its architecture;tobacco smoke like a light fog on the sea.These barmaids know each Bolton regularby name. A southern foreigner, Spenderfelt out of place in worktown’s dark-bricked streetsbut found an everyday poetry here:his photographs candid, unfussy, discreet.Take this domino game between working men:each making their move, until they start again.

Do you remember the feelingof how things appearedwhen you went home earlyfrom school, alone? I had a sense ofthis is how the world iswhen I’m not in it. Hedges and houses seemed new –more themselves, differentto 7.20 hedges, and home-time houses,as though they weren’t expecting me back so soon. Brick and leafbreathed, or seemed tofill their molecules more easily,at ease with each other. I would wonder, withoutthe words to wonder:we are all former friends, one bodyof space dust, mingling. I walked the seven minutes or so,from bus stop to door,through the still village,marking off milestones: here’s the church clock face,the pub, the friendly horsecoming up to the fence and a dog bark or birdsongwould announce themselvesas the main playersin our place.

11 April 1876, Hobart, Tasmania – There is but one survivor of the Tasmanian race still alive, her name is Mrs or Queen Truccanine, she lives here ‘en famille’, the kind people who have taken her under their protection for some years get a government grant of £60 to help defray the expenses of her keep. I believe it’s a common practice of visitors to go and inspect her, but we didn’t know till we had left & she kicked the bucket a fortnight after. (From the journal of Victor Emmanuel Smyth) Can I describe her, whose voice is so long gone  whose language is remaindered in the wind whose mother British sailors stabbed to death whose sisters were enslaved and sold for sex   whose uncle British soldiers shot.

after Humphrey Spender’s ‘Scout Parade’ Each day has its care, but each care has its day a proverb proclaims from a church billboard as a scout parade files through its archway. Half these young men look solemn, half bored, caught between the effort and the reward of endeavour; the same way today they’d seek out their tribe online, feeling ignored by institutions twenty times as staid, committed to doctrines wholly displayed. Or choose to look again: see uncertain boys finding their way; how for all the charade community is less brick-heavy burden than the self’s solid foundations, come what may: each day has its care, but each care has its day.

An island is one great eye gazing out the poet once said, an image I like  for its stubbornness, solitude’s drought holding firm before the garrulous strike of water’s insistence. Say you hike the fell of yourself to this clear summit, become its focused pupil, childlike to rediscover the wholly private needn’t mean the selfish or desolate. Night blurs, as fields of waves far around vanish, replaced by clear-eyed planets and stars opened to all without a sound. Lie down, till down is up and up down, you’ll find yourself verb instead of noun.