Selected Poems (6 page)

and my longing for you now is just as bad

at England’s northern edge for nightingales

as those White Nights last year in Leningrad,

where, packed for my flight back, thick curtains drawn

but night too like full day to get much kip,

I wanted you to watch with me from bed

that seamless merger of half dusk and dawn,

AURORA, rosy-fingered kind, and battleship

whose sudden salvo turned the East half red.

Winter false dawns woke me:
thud! thud! thud!

Lorries loaded with chipped ice and not quite four!

Felt-swathed babushkas stooping to chip more –

Leningrad’s vast pool of widowhood,

who also guard the Rembrandts and rank Gents,

who stand all day with stern unbending gaze

haloed with Tsars’ crowns and Fabergés,

their menfolk melted down to monuments.

It’s their eyes make me shy I’ve fallen for

a woman who they’d chorus at
nyet! nyet!

and make me edgy walking here with you

between the statues
VERITAS
,
HONOR
,

and
PSYCHE
whom strong passion made forget

conditions of darkness and the gods’ taboo.

Shuffling in felt goloshes saves the floor

from the unexpected guests of history

who queue all day to see what once was for

the fruits of just one bonsai family tree.

IUSTITIA
and
POMONA
in their crates.

Come winter and the art, all cordoned off,

’s wired to a
US
import anti-theft device

and opened only for researching prof.

and
patineur
from Academe who skates

those ballrooms patterned like cracked Baikal ice

buffing the princely parquets for the few

who’ll see them reproduced in some review.

Watch that elegant glissade as he yahoos

into the soundproof pile of overshoes.

on my birthday, 30 April

A silent scream? The madrigal’s top note?

Puking his wassail on the listening throng?

Mouthfuls of cumulus, then cobalt throat.

Medusa must have hexed him in mid-song.

The finest vantage point in all of Prague’s

this gagging gargoyle’s with the stone-locked lute,

leaning over cherries, blow-ups of Karl Marx

the pioneers ’ll march past and salute.

Tomorrow’s May but still a North wind scuffs

the plated surface like a maced cuirass,

lays on, lays off, gets purchase on and roughs

up the Vltava, then makes it glass.

The last snow of this year’s late slow thaw

dribbles as spring saliva down his jaw.

‘These human victims, chained and burning at the stake, were the blazing torches which lighted the monarch to his nuptial couch.’

(J. L. Motley,
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
)

Fish gnaw the Flushing capons, hauled from fleeced

Lutheran Holland, for tomorrow’s feast.

The Netherlandish lengths, the Dutch heirlooms,

That might have graced my movements and my groom’s

Fade on the fat sea’s bellies where they hung

Like cover-sluts. Flesh, wet linen wrung

Bone dry in a washerwoman’s raw, red,

Twisting hands, bed-clothes off a lovers’ bed,

Falls off the chains. At Valladolid

It fell, flesh crumpled like a coverlid.

Young Carlos de Sessa stripped was good

For a girl to look at and he spat like wood

Green from the orchards for the cooking pots.

Flames ravelled up his flesh into dry knots

And he cried at the King:
How can you stare

On such agonies and not turn a hair?

The king was cool:
My friend, I’d drag the logs

Out to the stake for my own son, let dogs

Get at his testes for his sins; auto-da-fés

Owe no paternity to evil ways
.

Cabrera leans against the throne, guffaws

And jots down to the Court’s applause

Yet another of the King’s
bon mots
.

O yellow piddle in fresh fallen snow –

Dogs on the Guadarramas … dogs. Their souls

Splut through their pores like porridge holes.

They wear their skins like cast-offs. Their skin grows

Puckered round the knees like rumpled hose.

Doctor Ponce de la Fuente, you,

Whose gaudy, straw-stuffed effigy in lieu

Of members hacked up in the prison, burns

Here now, one sacking arm drops off, one turns

A stubble finger and your skull still croons

Lascivious catches and indecent tunes;

And croaks:
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
.

Pray God be with you in your lust
.

And God immediately is, but such a one

Whose skin stinks like a herring in the sun,

Huge from confinement in a filthy gaol,

Crushing the hooping on my farthingale.

O Holy Mother, Holy Mother, Ho-

ly Mother Church, whose melodious, low

Labour-moans go through me as you bear

These pitch-stained children to the upper air,

Let them lie still tonight, no crowding smoke

Condensing back to men float in and poke

Their charcoaled fingers at our bed, and let

Me be his pleasure, though Philip sweat

At his rhythms and use those hateful tricks

They say he feels like after heretics.

O let the King be gentle and not loom

Like Torquemada in the torture room,

Those wiry Spanish hairs, these nuptial nights,

Crackling like lit tapers in his tights,

His seed like water spluttered off hot stone.

Maria, whose dark eyes very like my own

Shine on such consummations, Maria bless

My Philip just this once with gentleness.

The King’s cool knuckles on my smoky hair!

Mare Mediterraneum, la mer, la mer

That almost got him in your gorge with sides

Of feastmeats, you must flush this scared bride’s

Uterus with scouring salt. O cure and cool

The scorching birthmarks of his branding-tool.

Sweat chills my small breasts and limp hands.

They curled like foetuses,
maman
, and cried.

His crusted tunics crumple as he stands:

Come, Isabella
. God
is satisfied
.

‘Correct your maps: Newcastle is Peru!’

(John Cleveland)

‘Venient annis saecula seris,

Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum

Laxet & ingens pateat tellus,

Tethysque novos detegat orbes,

Nec sit terris ultima Thule.’

(Seneca,
Medea
, 375–9)

For defending in our Civil Wars

the King’s against the better cause,

Newcastle got its motto:
FORTIT-

ER TRIUMPHANS DEFENDIT
.

After Nigeria and Prague I come

back near to where I started from,

all my defences broken down

on nine or ten
Newcastle Brown
.

A sudden, stiff September breeze

blows off the sea along the quays

and chills us; autumn and I need

your shoulder with a desperate need.

A clumsy effort at control,

I faff with paper chips and coal,

and rake out with elaborate fuss

one whole summer’s detritus.

A good draught and the fire roars

like muted Disney dinosaurs,

and last week’s Sunday paper glows

yellowish, its urgent prose,

like flies across a carcass, spreads

and fattens on the voiceless dead.

A picture shows lobbed mortar bombs

smashing down Onitsha homes.

The fire sucks in the first cold air

under the coverage of massacre.

The fire chatters, almost flies,

a full-fledged bird of paradise.

I lay down, dizzy, drunk, alone,

life circling life like the Eddystone

dark sea, but lighting nothing; sense

nor centre, nor circumference.

A life-long, sick sixpennyworth

of appalling motion round the Earth;

scared, moonrocketing till Pop-

eye and blurred planets stop;

Switchback; Helter Skelter; Reel;

the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Big Wheel,

its million coloured lightbulbs one

red halo like an empty sun.

The
Caterpillar
; Hunslet Feast;

one hand on my first woman’s breast;

darkness; acceleration so

we’re desperate with vertigo;

then chained in solitary
Chair-

o-planes
through whistling air

as all the known Leeds landmarks blur

to something dark and circular.

Venus, Vulcan, Cupid stare

out vacantly on City Square,

and
Deus iuvat impigros

above the bank where God helps those

who help themselves, declares

Leeds purposeful in its affairs.

Mercator; miles
, school chapel glass

transparencies to blood and brass.

And
Self Help
Samuel Smiles was said

to have waltzed round our first bed

in our partitioned ballroom flat

with hardly room to swing a cat.

Worthies! Loiners! O King Dick

Oastler and his rhetoric,

and William Hey, the first to show

syphilis
in utero
.

O highlife crocodiles that went

round one palm tree in the bare cement!

The dizziness! That spiral stair

up St Vitus’s Cathedral; there

the golden cockerel and great Prague

before us like a catalogue;

slides. Bloodless mementos, all

Time-Life
International.

And now with vistas like Earl Grey’s

I look out over life and praise

from my unsteady, sea-view plinth

each dark turn of the labyrinth

that might like a river suddenly

wind its widening banks into the sea

and Newcastle is Newcastle is New-

castle
is
Peru!

Swirled detritus and driftwood pass

in state the 1880
Sas-

inena Cold Storage Co
.,

and Neptune gazes at the Tyne’s flow

seawards, where the sea-winds ‘boast

and bluster’ at the North East coast,

the sluggish Tyne meandering through

the staithes and shipyards of Peru.

Shadow girders faced with sun

shimmer like heaped bullion.

Commerce and contraceptives glide

and circle on the turning tide;

Plain, Gossamer
and
Fetherlite

and US
Trojan
, knotted tight,

ferry their unborn semen, free

for ever from discovery.

Discovery! Slaves, now trains,

like
spirochetes
through dark brains,

tunnel the Andes, spiralling for zinc

and silver, gold and lead; drink

still makes me giddy; my mind whirls

through all my wanderings and girls

to one last city, whose black crest

shows all the universe at rest.

At rest! That last red flash

as life’s last ember turns to ash

and riddled dusts drop through the grate

around the heart. O celebrate,

as panic screws up each charged nerve

to cornering the next sharp swerve,

Earth, people, planets as they move

with all the gravity of love.

First this Victorian terrace, where

small scars of the last World War –

those wrought iron railings made

into shrapnel and grenade,

acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys,

victorious artillery –

are enough reminder that we brave

harsh opposition when we love.

This cluttered room, its chandelier

still spinning from the evening’s beer,

this poor, embattled fortress, this strong-

hold of love, that can’t last long

against the world’s bold cannonade

of loveless warfare and cold trade,

this bed, this fire, and lastly us,

naked, bold, adventurous.

Discovery! wart, mole, spot,

like outcrops on a snowfield, dot

these slopes of flesh my fingers ski

with circular dexterity.

This moment when my hand strays

your body like an endless maze,

returning and returning, you,

O you; you also are Peru.

And just as distant. Flashing stars

drop to the ashpit through the bars.

I’m back in Africa, at ease

under the splashed shade of four trees,

watching a muscled woman heave

huge headloads of dead wood; one bare leaf

for covering wilts in the heat,

curls, then flutters to her flat, cracked feet.

And round each complex of thatched huts

is a man-high cactus hedge that shuts

out intruders and the mortars thud

like a migraine in the compound mud.

Night comes, and as drunk as hell

I watch the heavens and fireflies, and can’t tell,

here at my Shangri-la, Pankshin,

where insects end and stars begin.

My fingerprints still lined with coal

send cold shudders through my soul.

Each whorl, my love-, my long life-line,

mine, inalienably mine,

lead off my body as they press

onwards into nothingness.

I see my grimy fingers smudge

everything they feel or touch.

The fire I laid and lit to draw

you downstairs to the second floor,

flickers and struts upon my bed.

And I’m left gazing at a full-page spread