The Golden Mean (2 page)

The Skylark

‘Again and again it would try to hover
over that miniature meadow
 . . . 
'

Amber

Some wounds weep precious through the generations.

They glaze and harden, heal themselves into history.

What was mere sap matures like blood in air to darken

and burnish. To change into something useful, almost.

The Tsar had a whole room built from hurt but it was stolen

and buried. Sometimes the grim Baltic rolls the scars

to shape those jewels women love to wear; especially

treasured where they hold a thing that was living once,

something with quick, venated wings which happened

by and thought the wound looked beautiful and sweet

and that, like other wounds, it should be acknowledged

somehow and, if only for a moment, touched.

The Ghost Train

a twinned sonnet

Roy, this is how it finishes: we're riding Dante's Inferno together –

that cheapskate ghost train where Fred Hale hides from his killers

in
Brighton Rock
. I'm Fred, of course, and you're my friendly murderer,

my twin, the one doomed to be sitting alone when the car shudders

to a halt in the din and glare of a South Coast early summer.

This is what life is all about – cheap shocks and clapboard horrors

the whole scene clichéd and overblown – the way the two of us peer

down into the abyss beneath the rails: a seethe of black, impatient water

fretting the stanchions that hold us clear of purgatorial fire.

When you looked into my face, you looked into a mirror,

and smiled, and took my shoulder, held me safe, then pushed me over.

My eyes opened five minutes early, yours closed two decades late.

Is that the tide I hear behind us, or the ghost train's plywood thunder,

or the clutter clutter clutter of loose film clearing the gate?

John, you died two decades early, I was born five minutes late.

Two frames of the one short film – that's really all we were.

Now that one frame is cut, I'll carry back twice the weight –

your life folded in mine – to 1921. We're boys again – back in the foyer

of the Regent with Nanny. Valentino breaks her dusty heart four

times in a single week. We saw it here for the first time – the raw power

of film: that dance! Death galloping from the clouds, the Great War

breaking like a sea against their lives, and in the end,
The End
, a blur

of shadows between fresh graves, the audience all shiftless whispers.

A hundred times we sat in that immense, small dark, and breathed air

rich with smoke and sweat – the reek of a strange, new fire. Remember,

we filed out glazed and dumb with joy and dark – back to the trashy glare

of life going dimly on. John, next time we stumble out into the light together,

guess which of us will blink, and which will disappear?

The Steamer ‘Golden City'

after Eadweard Muybridge

A Testament

I was so young. I wanted to
experience
the world, so I stared
at the sun until my eyes burned hollow; kissed all the women I
could ever love until each kiss dwindled to water. Now hardly a day
passes but I find myself blundering into the sea; or gathering in my
arms an unspeakable fire.

The Lost Boy

im Alexander Glenday died November 4th, 1918

The Big Push

after Sir Herbert James Gunn, ‘The Eve of the Battle of the Somme'

Would you believe it, there's a bloke out there singing

‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day'
.

His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding

from the ears. The Boche are all but finished, apparently –

I heard they're packing old clock parts into trench mortars

now, for want of iron scrap. Some wag quips that next time he's

sentry and hears the plop of a
minenwerfer
tumbling over,

he'll not blow the alarm, he'll shout:
‘Time, gentlemen, please
 . . . 
'

We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid. Bravery

and cowardice are just two workings of the same fear

moving us in different ways. The 8th East Surreys

have been given footballs to kick and follow at Zero Hour;

it's to persuade them from the trenches lest their nerve fail

as they advance on Montaubon. I've watched men

hitch up their collars and trudge forward as if shrapnel

and lead were no worse than a shower of winter rain.

This afternoon a few of us went swimming in the mill dam

behind Camp. Just for a while to have no weight, to go drifting

clear of thought and world, was utter bliss. A skylark climbed

high over the torn fields on its impossible thread of song:

‘like an unbodied joy
.' I don't know why, but it reminded

me of the day we took over from the French along the Somme;

it was so tranquil, so picturesque, the German trenchworks crowded

with swathes of tiny, brilliant flowers none of us could name.

I believe if the dead come back at all they'll come back green

to grow from the broken earth and drink the gathered water

and all the things they suffered will mean no more to them

than the setting-in of the ordinary dark, or a change of weather.

Rubble

General term for a people who are harvested and reused

or broken. To be heaped randomly or roughly stored.

That which is held for common use. Infill. Of little worth.

Break them in different ways but they will always be the same.

Hold them in the dark; remind yourself why they should stay forgotten.

These days there is little interest in stones that bear names.

May they be piled up and given this title in common.

Let them take their place in the register of unspoken things.

May they never be acknowledged again.

Our Dad

The Iraqi Elements

after Zaher Mousa

This is the birth of Water:

Mist is when water dies so that it can be born again.

Sluggish rivers swither among the dead,

their banks overflowing.

Listen: those whisperings in the pipework

are all the refugees from thirst.

The inscription on the fountain's cup reads:

‘Drink, Hussain, and remember thirst.'

Their fathers: their fathers' gentle thirst,

like sand slowly pouring into blood;

heedless as a stone: a millstone that worries

its own reflection back to sand.

So they went off to war and when they came back,

no water for the ritual cleansing,

not one drop, so they washed themselves in graveyard dust.

*****

This is the birth of Air:

Weary angels revel in it: the sky is laced

with the gutturals of genies; those dark eyes

that glimpse the invisible smouldering in their veins.

Here you touch against breasts that breathed in childhood's loss.

Their women: their women are perfumed sadnesses;

their gaze carried away on the wind

bleached of all colour: their black clothes

abandoned – still in suitcases somewhere.

The women banked on hard graft and the smoking
tanur
,

but War won that bet, of course. War always does.

And when it was all over they breathed in the soot of a crow's wing;

the drift of fans through narrow rooms.

*****

This is the birth of Fire:

Soldiers trudge home from the front line.

Slivers of shrapnel glimmer inside them.

Here's a dead man with a cigarette in his pocket,

still alight – his last smoke.

Cancers flare and smoulder in the heads of children.

Their children: their children with happiness chalked into their faces –

if they were a pack of cards there wouldn't be any joker.

Their children are little crusts of bread dunked

in muddy kerbside puddles. Life will gobble them up.

In other countries children have footballs to play with, but not here,

no, in this country they used the children's heads as footballs.

*****

This is the birth of Earth: Feel this: feel the earth.

The Doldrums

after Zaher Mousa

I

II

III

The Golden Mean

The Grain of Truth