Poems 1960-2000 (10 page)

Another poem about a Norfolk church,

a neolithic circle, Hadrian’s Wall?

Histories and prehistories: indexes

and bibliographies can’t list them all.

A map of Poets’ England from the air

could show not only who and when but where.

Aerial photogrammetry’s the thing,

using some form of infra-red technique.

Stones that have been so fervently described

surely retain some heat. They needn’t speak:

the cunning camera ranging in its flight

will chart their higher temperatures as light.

We’ll see the favoured regions all lit up –

the Thames a fiery vein, Cornwall a glow,

Tintagel like an incandescent stud,

most of East Anglia sparkling like Heathrow;

and Shropshire luminous among the best,

with Offa’s Dyke in diamonds to the west.

The Lake District will be itself a lake

of patchy brilliance poured along the vales,

with somewhat lesser splashes to the east

across Northumbria and the Yorkshire dales.

Cities and churches, villages and lanes,

will gleam in sparks and streaks and radiant stains.

The lens, of course, will not discriminate

between the venerable and the new;

Stonehenge and Avebury may catch the eye

but Liverpool will have its aura too.

As well as Canterbury there’ll be Leeds

and Hull criss-crossed with nets of glittering beads.

Nor will the cool machine be influenced

by literary fashion to reject

any on grounds of quality or taste:

intensity is all it will detect,

mapping in light, for better or for worse,

whatever has been written of in verse.

The dreariness of eighteenth-century odes

will not disqualify a crag, a park,

a country residence; nor will the rant

of satirists leave London in the dark.

All will shine forth. But limits there must be:

borders will not be crossed, nor will the sea.

Let Scotland, Wales and Ireland chart themselves,

as they’d prefer. For us, there’s just one doubt:

that medieval England may be dimmed

by age, and all that’s earlier blotted out.

X-rays might help. But surely ardent rhyme

will, as it’s always claimed, outshine mere time?

By its own power the influence will rise

from sites and settlements deep underground

of those who sang about them while they stood.

Pale phosphorescent glimmers will be found

of epics chanted to pre-Roman tunes

and poems in, instead of about, runes.

This is a story. Dear Clive

(a name unmet among my acquaintance)

you landed on my island: Mauritius

I’ll call it – it was not unlike.

The Governor came to meet your plane.

I stood on the grass by the summerhouse.

It was dark, I think. And next morning

we walked in the ripples of the sea

watching the green and purple creatures

flashing in and out of the waves

about our ankles. Seabirds, were they?

Or air-fishes, a flying shoal

of sea-parrots, finned and feathered?

Even they were less of a marvel,

pretty things, than that you’d returned

after a year and such distraction

to walk with me on the splashy strand.

Slightly frightened of the bullocks

as we walk into their mud towards them

she arms herself by naming them for me:

‘Friesian, Aberdeen, Devon, South Devon…’

A mixed herd. I was nervous too,

but no longer. ‘Devon, Friesian, Aberdeen…’

the light young voice chants at them

faster as the long heavy heads

lift and lurch towards us. And pause,

turn away to let us pass. I am learning

to show confidence before large cattle.

She is learning to be a poet.

They serve revolving saucer eyes,

dishes of stars; they wait upon

huge lenses hung aloft to frame

the slow procession of the skies.

They calculate, adjust, record,

watch transits, measure distances.

They carry pocket telescopes

to spy through when they walk abroad.

Spectra possess their eyes; they face

upwards, alert for meteorites,

cherishing little glassy worlds:

receptacles for outer space.

But she, exile, expelled, ex-queen,

swishes among the men of science

waiting for cloudy skies, for nights

when constellations can’t be seen.

She wears the rings he let her keep;

she walks as she was taught to walk

for his approval, years ago.

His bitter features taunt her sleep.

And so when these have laid aside

their telescopes, when lids are closed

between machine and sky, she seeks

terrestrial bodies to bestride.

She plucks this one or that among

the astronomers, and is become

his canopy, his occultation;

she sucks at earlobe, penis, tongue

mouthing the tubes of flesh; her hair

crackles, her eyes are comet-sparks.

She brings the distant briefly close

above his dreamy abstract stare

Our busy springtime has corrupted

into a green indolence of summer,

static, swollen, invisibly devoured.

Too many leaves have grown between us.

Almost without choosing I have turned

from wherever we were towards this thicket

It is not the refuge I had hoped for.

Walking away from you I walk

into a trailing mist of caterpillars:

they swing at my face, tinily suspended,

half-blinding; and my hands are smudged

with a syrup of crushed aphids.

You must be miles away by now

in open country, climbing steadily,

head down, looking for larks’ eggs.

Arranging for my due ration of terror

involves me in such lunacies

as recently demanding to be shown

the broad blue ovals of your eyes.

Yes: quite as alarming as you’d promised,

those lapidary iris discs

level in your dark small face.

Still, for an hour or two I held them

until you laughed, replaced your tinted glasses,

switched accents once again

and went away, looking faintly uncertain

in the sunlight (but in charge, no doubt of it)

and leaving me this round baby sparrow

modelled in feather-coloured clay,

a small snug handful; hardly apt

unless in being cooler than a pebble.

Half an hour before my flight was called

he walked across the airport bar towards me

carrying what was left of our future

together: two drinks on a tray.

Inside my closed eyelids, printed out

from some dying braincell as I awakened,

was this close-up of granular earthy dust,

fragments of chaff and grit, a triangular

splinter of glass, a rusty metal washer

on rough concrete under a wooden step.

Not a memory. But the caption told me

I was at Grange Farm, seven years old,

in the back yard, kneeling outside the shed

with some obscure seven-year-old’s motive,

seeing as once, I must believe, I saw:

sharply; concentrating as once I did.

Glad to be there again I relaxed the focus

(eyes still shut); let the whole scene open out

to the pump and separator under the porch,

the strolling chickens, the pear trees next to the yard,

the barn full of white cats, the loaded haycart,

the spinney…I saw it rolling on and on.

As it couldn’t, of course. That I had faced

when I made my compulsive return visit

after more than twenty years. ‘Your aunt’s not well,’

said Uncle George – little and gnarled himself –

‘You’ll find she doesn’t talk.’ They’d sold the farm,

retired to Melton Mowbray with their daughter.

‘Premature senility,’ she whispered.

But we all went out together in the car

to see the old place, Auntie sitting

straight-backed, dignified, mute,

perhaps a little puzzled as we churned

through splattering clay lanes, between wet hedges

to Grange Farm again: to a square house,

small, bleak, and surrounded by mud;

to be greeted, shown to the parlour, given tea,

with Auntie’s affliction gently signalled –

‘Her mouth hurts.’ Not my real aunt,

nor my real uncle. Both dead now.

I find it easiest to imagine dying

as like the gradual running down of a film,

the brain still flickering when the heart and blood

have halted, and the last few frames

lingering. Then where the projector jams

is where we go, or are, or are no longer.

If that comes anywhere near it, then I hope

that for those two an after-image glowed

in death of something better than mud and silence

or than my minute study of a patch of ground;

unless, like that for me, it spread before them

sunny ploughland, pastures, the scented orchard.

Your ‘wedge of stubborn particles’:

that silver birch, thin as a bent flagpole,

drives up through elm and oak and hornbeam

to sky-level, catching the late sunlight.

There’s woodsmoke, a stack of cut billets

from some thick trunk they’ve had to hack;

and of course a replacement programme under way –

saplings fenced off against marauders.

‘We have seasons’ your poem says;

and your letter tells me the black invader

has moved into the lymph; is not defeated.

‘He’s lucky to be still around,’ said your friend –

himself still around, still travelling

after a near-axing as severe,

it yet may prove, as yours at present.

I have come here to think, not for comfort;

to confront these matters, to imagine

the proliferating ungentle cells.

But the place won’t let me be fearful;

the green things work their usual trick –

‘Choose life’ – and I remember instead

our own most verdant season.

My dear, after more than a dozen years

light sings in the leaves of it still.

They will wash all my kisses and fingerprints off you

and my tearstains – I was more inclined to weep

in those wild-garlicky days – and our happier stains,

thin scales of papery silk…Fuck that for a cheap

opener; and false too – any such traces

you pumiced away yourself, those years ago

when you sent my letters back, in the week I married

that anecdotal ape. So start again. So:

They will remove the tubes and drips and dressings

which I censor from my dreams. They will, it is true,

wash you; and they will put you into a box.

After which whatever else they may do

won’t matter. This is my laconic style.

You praised it, as I praised your intricate pearled

embroideries; these links laced us together,

plain and purl across the ribs of the world…

Nor for the same conversation again and again.

But the power of meditation to cure an allergy,

that I will discuss

cross-legged on the lawn at evening

midges flittering, a tree beside us

none of us can name;

and rocks; a scent of syringa;

certain Japanese questions; the journey…

Nor for parody.

Nor, if we come to it, for the same letter:

‘hard to believe…I remember best his laugh…

such a vigorous man…please tell…’

and running, almost running to stuff coins

into the box for cancer research.

The others.

Nor for the same hopeless prayer.

The syringa’s out. That’s nice for me:

all along Charing Cross Embankment

the sweet dragging scent reinventing

one of my childhood gardens.

Nice for the drunks and drop-outs too,

if they like it. I’m walking to work:

they’ll be here all day under the blossom

with their cider and their British sherry

and their carrier-bags of secrets.

There’s been a change in the population:

the ones I had names for – Fat Billy,

the Happy Couple, the Lady with the Dog –

have moved on or been moved off.

But it doesn’t do to wonder:

staring hurts in two directions. Once

a tall man chased me here, and I ran

for no good reason: afraid, perhaps,

of turning into Mrs Toothless

with her ankle-socks and her pony-tailed skull

whose eyes avoided mine so many mornings.

And she’s gone too. The place has been,

as whatever office will have termed it,

cleaned up. Except that it’s not clean

and not really a place: a hesitation

between the traffic fumes and a fragrance,

where this evening I shall walk again.