The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea (2 page)

Which under-muscled, over-perfumed boy
is groping you on roses in your love-nest,
Pyrrha? Who’s inspired you to wash and cut
your honey-colored hair like this?

God knows how many times he’ll curse
the bad luck that made him love you,
and be flabbergasted by the force tens
blackening your little sea.

The idiot. He drinks your sunshine down
and thinks the wind will never change.
Those miserable men. You dazzle them
but no one ever ties up in your harbor.

As for me, you can read my story
on the temple wall: just another rescued
sailor who has offered up his sodden boots
to the great god of the sea.

Come, Muse, let us sing of Velcro,
teabags and the Tetrapak.
For these too are works of nature,
as deserving of our praise

as dawn light on the Half-Dome,
hare tracks in overnight snow
or a fine French derailleur,
and will join the astrolabe

and toasting fork in old films
and stand on plastic trivets in museums,
giving off that low hum
of the long dead.

Another werewolf night, the trees spastic
with wind and the dogs uneasy on their chains.
Three trolls wrestle with a bloody scrap
that will not die, the taverns roar and glitter
on the greasy quay and the Scissorman
chases the dragon down those little tracks
that promise daybreak by the sea, pistachio
cakes and minarets but curve, always,
back to that long night in the nursery.

The clock strikes twelve, and on the dirt road
where the shanties thin to marsh grass and burnt cars,
the music stops and tonight’s crocodile
of lost children melt into the dark.
They are ours now. You cannot touch them.

They will see you in bad dreams.
The smoke of October bonfires, a single
gunshot hurling rooks into a white sky
and you, at the French windows, ogling
the gardener’s boy while your niece makes a pig’s ear
of a Chopin Polonaise and the servants
bitch about you in the scullery.

But you will see them from the evening train,
raging in burned-out lots and under bridges.
You will see them in the corridors
of hospitals. You will see them hover
on the dark that pools in hotel rooms
and lying under blankets on the tarmac of the other carriageway, the broken glass

like snow and the lights flashing
like a black Christmas. You will see them
standing at your shoulder in the mirror.

They will not come back. The road is hard
and no one wants to listen to the stories
they will have to tell. But when the steel market
crashes and the orchard is paved over
and the bailiff’s men are playing blackjack
on the stairs they will be waiting for you
at the bottom of the frozen lake.

The bark is notched six times, one notch
for every cow left in the pound,
then split, the cowman and the poundman
taking half each, so that when
the cowman comes to claim his stock
six cows are led out from the pound
though neither of the men can count.

Connemara, 1610:
A cowman spreads his hands and watches
as a priest names all his fingers.
He starts to count potatoes, hens,
the steps across his single field
whose blades the Lord alone can sum.

Then pausing at the gate one night
he thinks of seven. Not trees. Not dogs.
Just seven. Like The Plough
before God put the stars in.

Today an old man had a stroke
and crushed the signal box.
You can’t ignore that kind of thing.

But on the whole
I try to see the visitors
as clouds or hills.

I am an old man
and I have learnt my lesson.
Only small things matter.

But the young are different.
They hear the talk of Birmingham
and Weston-super-Mare

and listen to the songs
of love and loss
on picnic radios

and dream of slipping
through the ticket office
after dark

in search of telephones
and discotheques
and Chinese restaurants,

a world where games of football
can be won
and lost,

where roads run to the ocean
and the ocean runs
forever.

They will understand in time.
Sit still for long enough
and everything will come to you.

We got a helicopter last year,
strung on fishing line
above the plastic lake.

This year we got our first
black residents.
(The Pattersons were overpainted.)

But the cows still graze,
the brass band still plays
Hearts of Oak,

the town clock
still reads
ten to two.

And when the night comes down
I sit beneath the awning
of the hardware store

and watch the universe contract
to thirty homes, a loop of railway
and fifty billion stars.

I walk on powdered
shell for three miles
to the spur’s blunt head
where, each year,
something of the ocean
slows and falls
and turns into a yard of land,
and something of the emptiness
we spin through
silts and settles
so that we can walk
a little further
out into the fog.

The poet Varius can celebrate
your victories in high-flown verse.
Your bravery. The deeds done
by daring forces under your command.
By sea. On horseback.

I never write about that kind of thing, Agrippa;
grand themes like the black anger
of Achilles who refused to back down,
the homicidal family of Pelops
or the voyages of shifty Ulysses.

Poetic honor and my muse,
whose only weapon is the peaceful lyre,
won’t let me blunt the praise
of either Caesar or yourself
with my ineptitude.

Who, in any case, could find the words
for Mars dressed in his steel tunic,
Meriones black with Trojan dust,
or Diomedes who teamed up with Athena
and became an equal of the gods?

Unscarred by love myself,
I write of banquets, and of wars
where girls stab young men
with their fingernails. Or if a little scarred,
then no more than the average fool.

They lie discarded in the long grass
between the lighthouse and the kyle,
a yard of snipped-off wire
knotted round their necks.

At one end a white-washed room,
the fog of Woodbines, a terrier
and the fastness of the Norwegian Sea
running in a mildewed frame.

At the other, tanning salons,
the Winter of Discontent, banana fritters
and
Saturday Night Fever.

Between them, humming in the cable,
buried under gales and static,
the lonely birthday greetings, requests
for Tunnock’s teacakes and a claw hammer,
the bump and crackle of a coal fire,
the final maydays and the silence after.

You rarely hear the prologue—
where ants are marching from the window
to the crib, each one carrying
a grain of wheat to feed the infant king,

the meaning of the story still unwrapped,
the picture fresh as water in a clay jug
or a hot loaf not yet frozen solid
by the king’s greed.

The island of the billionaire philanthropist
was made of plastic and his wonderful machines
were only toys. True, there were moments

when the colors brightened as we cut away
to focus on a tea cup or a herd of antelope
in flight, and everything seemed real.

But they were shots from other films,
rapidly replaced by trees and skies
which looked like trees and skies but never quite rang true.

We had our brief adventures then relaxed
beside the pool, while in his mountain lair
our nemesis the foreign villain licked his wounds.

We filled the sky with vapor trails.
We braved the flaming rig and nursed the stricken jet
back home. We held our nerve and everyone was saved.

Now everything is real. This bungalow. The early train.
We mow the lawn and smoke a cigarette
and sit here waiting for the call that never comes.

Shark attacks were rare in Chapel Brampton.
I should have been afraid of pedophiles,
leukemia or Neil Billingham
who lost his right eye when he lit
a can of underarm deodorant.

But when I lay awake at 2 a.m.
as headlights swept the Solar System
wallchart and the cooling pipework
shifted in the floorspace, something else
was moving through the dark beneath the bed.

Carcharadon carcharias.
Six thousand
pounds of muscle powering a hoop
of butcher’s knives. The only animal
that ate its weaker siblings in the womb.
Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.

And just as pious Catholics once fondled
strips of cloth soaked in the hot fat
of martyrs, I’d run my hand across
that photo of the fisherman from Cairns,
his belly opened like a can of plum tomatoes.

Even now, in lakes and rivers,
or ten yards off the beach at Swanage,
I remember what’s inside us all
and sense, behind my back,
that grey torpedo entering the shallows.

Look at soaring Mount Soracte
brilliant with driven snow,
the overburdened forest
and the streams in chains.

Thaliarchus, drive the cold away
by heaping kindling on the fire
then pour a generous double-handled
Sabine jar of vintage wine.

The gods will do the rest. They’ll calm
the gales wrestling with one another
on the boiling ocean. Then the cypress
and the old ash will be still again.

Forget tomorrow. Cherish everything
chance gives to you today.
You’re young, boy. Dance and love
while sour old age holds off.

Move quietly and hunt the squares
and courtyards at the hour of dusk
for squeals of laughter which betray
the young girls hiding

in the darkest corners.
Then slip the rings and bracelets
from their arms and fingers.
They’ll complain. But not much.

It comes as a surprise to find that hell
is the same house you’ve lived in these nine years.
Two orange stains beneath the kitchen taps,
birdsong in the yard, those floral curtains.
But you’re not at home. Not by a long way.
That fist of wet meat in your chest
will not let you forget. The seconds pass,
as slow as that frozen age before the child
hits the red bonnet of the skidding car.
You light a Marlboro from the dog-end
of the last. Outside, shoppers and workmen
swim through their day like dolphins, ignorant
of how they do this stupid, priceless trick
you once knew. The phone rings. Your cigarette smoke
does its poisonous little ballet.

It’s all too much. The white rhinoceros,
The common shoveler, the Cuban tree frog.
A whole world and every part of it
a short walk from the tea-room.

Pushchairs. Cornettos.
A basin of blue concrete
and a Humboldt penguin tumbling
in three feet of dirty water.

If only we could slip inside those eyes
and find our way back
to the pack-ice in the Weddell Sea.
Instead we move on to the gibbons.

The daylight hammers on and off.
Mountains explode,
bleeding black smoke downwind.
Tides pulse on the coast.

Tracks radiate
from settlements, leaping
the firebreaks of gorge and firth
to seed another, then another.

Forests burn.
Fields. Pipelines. Roads.
The brief nights
blaze like lava.

Lines blur. The lava cools.
Green takes it all back.
Forests thicken. Tides pulse.
The daylight hammers on and off.

Leuconoë, stop examining your
Babylonian horoscopes
and wondering what kind of death
the gods have got in mind for us.

We’ll never know. Accept it.
This winter pummeling the ocean
on the pumice rocks of Tuscany
may be our last.

Or not. Be sensible and pour the wine.
This life’s too short for longing
and the clock spins as we speak.
Days come and go. Hold on to this one.

The way it’s parked, nose-down between the wet rocks
in the leaf-light of the gorge, water pouring
through the windscreen and the tires blown;
as if the naiads put their fairy horses
out to grass and cruised the night in silver Escorts.

Or as if three boys from Hebden Bridge
grew bored and stole a car and drove it halfway
to the moors, grew bored again, then rolled it
from the muddy track and watched it hammer
through the trees until it came to rest

a hundred yards below. And as the echo
died away, the car they drove in dreams
kept floating downstream and the boys they’d never be
rode every bend of starlit water to the ocean.

That first ripple in the marble.
Her hand on his wrist like a tame bird.
Her eyes opening. The big skylight,
the white-washed walls, the brace of chisels.

A baby’s mind inside a woman’s body,
playing
Peep-Bo
with a nurse, then bathed
and toweled dry and taken to his bedroom
as a sweetmeat when the guests have gone.