The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea (4 page)

The delicacy of the situation.
The youth of a nation.
The toy shops of fame.
The old, fierce game.
Delirious applause.
Loyalty to the cause.
The smoke of a train.
The cornfield plain.
The wolf’s cup.
Farm boys strung up.
The heart a stone.
The years alone.
A photograph of a face.
The mercy of the human embrace.

The sack over his head.
His last minutes,
treated as a common dog.
A toilet, blood,
two smoking wires.
A memory of Cambridge,
soda water on the terrace,
a sleepy cat.
The sound of triggers
at the back of his head.
An open window.
Guns. A turtle-dove.

We expect a pattern,
but the only song
is a crazy noise
of philosophy and accident,
calamity and transformation,
a rare black comedy
of hideous things
and ragged lights
in an adjacent field.

So small a thing
that little room of sleep,
yet it was sealed to him.
He walked the empty street.
Hot breath of baking.
Garbage in the gutters.
A bicycle. The derelict
torches of the stars.

Sea-sick, light-headed,
the swell strong, the honeycomb
clouds scattering. Time
telescoped. Mere antique dust
her lovers now. She was a wolf,
exotic, reckless. Women
were like horses, to be broken.
The troubled girl with amber hair
that she had forced, the trembling
countess, Janet, picturesque
Miss Squire … That desperate
hot trust. Her heart poised
like a falcon for the swoop.
The wild relief of sex.

The English had the house under observation
and had come to certain conclusions.
It was done circumspectly so as not to alarm.
There was no evidence of human presence.
But what was the meaning of the distant bells?
That horrid certainty. The halted, faint notes.
Spilt lime. A spiral staircase. Light.
A door unlocked. Inside, rotting boards
and paper dropping from the walls, the odour
of a barber’s shop, the slow turn
of the monstrous gargoyle and that click,
as if a clock were running down.

The city sparkled in the sunlight
as a waiter brought the morning paper.
From it stared a face of … Oh,
it was ridiculous. Her nerves,
the doctor said, were frail.
He was civil, God be praised,
if whisky-scented. But … that man
was so familiar. His name was …
what? Beard, morning suit …
She hesitated. Something stirred
on the horizon, scarlet, blind,
immense. A distant groundswell.
One long blaze of men and women
kissed and rapturous, that roar
of thousands in the heart.

Almost dark. The last moraine.
Uplands, twilight, prospect.
Lights, cars, baggage.
You have had your dream
and felt the spell of ordinary
things made young again.
You can be mortal now.

Some want to know what happens
when the bent cop holds a switchblade
to the pimp’s throat. Some want
to see a horse the color of conkers
or hear the boom of fireworks
like carpets being beaten.
Others want to stand, invisible,
beside a bed as two men fuck,
or cheer when the little deaf girl
kicks the fat priest who is every
bully they have ever known.

But everybody wants to slip
their flesh off like a winter coat
and enter this familiar room
that smells of gas and beeswax,
where sunlight pours from the big window
and the freighters move continually
in the river’s mouth.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL
2006

Copyright © 2005 by Mark Haddon

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd, London, in 2005.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Earlier versions of some of these poems appeared in
Acumen, Boomerang, Reactions, Stand
magazine, and the
Evening Standard.
“Poets” and “The River-Car” were published in the Arvon International Poetry Competition Anthology 2000.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

eISBN: 978-0-307-49819-9

www.vintagebooks.com

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