New and Selected Poems (18 page)
Moors
Are a stage
For the performance of heaven.
Any audience is incidental.
A chess-world of top-heavy Kings and Queens
Circling in stilted majesty
Tremble the bog-cotton
Under the sweep of their robes.
Fools in sunny motley tumble across,
A laughter – fading in full view
To grass-tips tapping at stones.
The witch-brew boiling in the sky-vat
Spins electrical terrors
In the eyes of sheep.
Fleeing wraith-lovers twist and collapse
In death-pact languor
To bedew harebells
On the spoil-heaps of quarries.
Wounded champions lurch out of sunset
To gurgle their last gleams into potholes.
Shattered, bowed armies, huddling leaderless
Escape from a world
Where snipe work late.
Chinese History of Colden Water
A fallen immortal found this valley –
Leafy conch of whispers
On the shore of heaven. He brought to his ear
The mad singing in the hills,
The prophetic mouth of the rain –
These hushings lulled him. So he missed
The goblins toiling up the brook.
The clink of fairy hammers forged his slumber
To a migraine of headscarves and clatter
Of clog-irons and looms and gutter water
And clog-irons and biblical texts.
Till he woke in a terror, tore free, lay panting.
The dream streamed from him. He blinked away
The bloody matter of the Cross
And the death’s-head after-image of ‘Poor’.
Chapels, chimneys, roofs in the mist – scattered.
Hills with raised wings were standing on hills.
They rode the waves of light
That rocked the conch of whispers
And washed and washed at his eye.
Washed from his ear
All but the laughter of foxes.
Rhododendrons
Dripped a chill virulence
Into my nape –
Rubberized prison-wear of suppression!
Guarding and guarded by
The Council’s black
Forbidding forbidden stones.
The policeman’s protected leaf!
Detestable evergreen sterility!
Over dead acid gardens
Where blue widows, shrined in Sunday, shrank
To arthritic clockwork,
Yapped like terriers and shook sticks from doorways
Vast and black and proper as museums.
Cenotaphs and the moor-silence!
Rhododendrons and rain!
It is all one. It is over.
Evergloom of official titivation –
Uniform at the reservoir, and the chapel,
And the graveyard park,
Ugly as a brass-band in India.
Sunstruck
The freedom of Saturday afternoons
Starched to cricket dazzle, nagged at a theorem –
Shaggy valley parapets
Pending like thunder, narrowing the spin-bowler’s angle.
The click, disconnected, might have escaped –
A six! And the ball slammed flat!
And the bat in flinders! The heart soaring!
And everybody jumping up and running –
Fleeing after the ball, stampeding
Through the sudden hole in Saturday – but
Already clapped into hands and the trap-shout
The ball jerked back to the stumper on its elastic.
Everything collapsed that bit deeper
Towards Monday.
Misery of the brassy sycamores!
Misery of the swans and the hard ripple!
Then again Yes Yes a wild YES –
The bat flashed round the neck in a tight coil,
The stretched shout snatching for the North Sea –
But it fell far short, even of Midgley.
And the legs running for dear life, twinkling white
In the cage of wickets
Were cornered again by the ball, pinned to the crease,
Blocked by the green and white pavilion.
Cross-eyed, mid-stump, sun-descending headache!
Brain sewn into the ball’s hide
Hammering at four corners of abstraction
And caught and flung back, and caught, and again caught
To be bounced on baked earth, to be clubbed
Toward the wage-mirage sparkle of mills
Toward Lord Savile’s heather
Toward the veto of the poisonous Calder
Till the eyes, glad of anything, dropped
From the bails
Into the bottom of a teacup,
To sandwich crusts for the canal cygnets.
The bowler had flogged himself to a dishclout.
And the burned batsmen returned, with changed faces,
‘Like men returned from a far journey’,
Under the long glare walls of evening
To the cool sheet and the black slot of home.
Curlews
I
They lift
Out of the maternal watery blue lines
Stripped of all but their cry
Some twists of near-inedible sinew
They slough off
The robes of bilberry blue
The cloud-stained bogland
They veer up and eddy away over
The stone horns
They trail a long, dangling, falling aim
Across water
Lancing their voices
Through the skin of this light
Drinking the nameless and naked
Through trembling bills.
II
Curlews in April
Hang their harps over the misty valleys
A wobbling water-call
A wet-footed god of the horizons
New moons sink into the heather
And full golden moons
Bulge over spent walls.
For Billy Holt
The longships got this far. Then
Anchored in nose and chin.
Badlands where outcast and outlaw
Fortified the hill-knowle’s long outlook.
A far, veiled gaze of quietly
Homicidal appraisal.
A poverty
That cut rock lumps for words.
Requisitioned rain, then more rain,
For walls and roof.
Enfolding arms of sour hills
For company.
Blood in the veins
For amusement.
A graveyard
For homeland.
When Men Got to the Summit
Light words forsook them.
They filled with heavy silence.
Houses came to support them,
But the hard, foursquare scriptures fractured
And the cracks filled with soft rheumatism.
Streets bent to the task
Of holding it all up
Bracing themselves, taking the strain
Till their vertebrae slipped.
The hills went on gently
Shaking their sieve.
Nevertheless, for some giddy moments
A television
Blinked from the wolf’s lookout.
The Canal’s Drowning Black
Bred wild leopards – among the pale depth fungus.
Loach. Torpid, ginger-bearded, secret
Prehistory of the canal’s masonry,
With little cupid mouths.
Five inches huge!
On the slime-brink, over bridge reflections,
I teetered. Then a ringing, skull-jolt stamp
And their beards flowered sudden anemones
All down the sunken cliff. A mad-house thrill –
The stonework’s tiny eyes, two feet, three feet,
Four feet down through my reflection
Watched for my next move.
Their schooldays were over.
Peeping man was no part of their knowledge.
So when a monkey god, a Martian
Tickled their underchins with his net rim
They snaked out and over the net rim easy
Back into the oligocene –
Only restrained by a mesh of kitchen curtain.
Then flopped out of their ocean-shifting aeons
Into a two-pound jam-jar
On a windowsill
Blackened with acid rain fall-out
From Manchester’s rotten lung.
Next morning, Mount Zion’s
Cowled, Satanic majesty behind me
I lobbed – one by one – high through the air
The stiff, pouting, failed, paled new moons
Back into their Paradise and mine.
Cock-Crows
I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits –
Tidal dawn was splitting heaven from earth,
The oyster
Opening to taste gold.
And I heard the cock-crows kindling in the valley
Under the mist –
They were sleepy,
Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron.
Then one or two tossed clear, like soft rockets
And sank back again dimming.
Then soaring harder, brighter, higher
Tearing the mist,
Bubble-glistenings flung up and bursting to light
Brightening the undercloud,
The fire-crests of the cocks – the sickle shouts,
Challenge against challenge, answer to answer,
Hooking higher,
Clambering up the sky as they melted,
Hanging smouldering from the night’s fringes.
Till the whole valley brimmed with cock-crows,
A magical soft mixture boiling over,
Spilling and sparkling into other valleys
Lobbed-up horse-shoes of glow-swollen metal
From sheds in back-gardens, hen-cotes, farms
Sinking back mistily
Till the last spark died, and embers paled
And the sun climbed into its wet sack
For the day’s work
While the dark rims hardened
Over the smoke of towns, from holes in earth.
Mount Zion
Blackness
Was a building blocking the moon.
Its wall – my first world-direction –
Mount Zion’s gravestone slab.
Above the kitchen window, that uplifted mass
Was a deadfall –
Darkening the sun of every day
Right to the eleventh hour.
Marched in under, gripped by elders
Like a jibbing calf
I knew what was coming.
The convicting holy eyes, the convulsed Moses mouthings –
Mouths that God had burnt with the breath of Moriah.
They were terrified too.
A mesmerized commissariat,
They terrified me, but they terrified each other.
And Christ was only a naked bleeding worm
Who had given up the ghost.
Women bleak as Sunday rose-gardens
Or crumpling to puff-pastry, and cobwebbed with deaths.
Men in their prison-yard, at attention,
Exercising their cowed, shaven souls.
Lips stretching saliva, eyes fixed like the eyes
Of cockerels hung by the legs,
As the bottomless cry
Beat itself numb again against Wesley’s foundation stone.
Alarm shouts at dusk!
A cricket had rigged up its music
In a crack of Mount Zion wall.
A cricket! The news awful, the shouts awful, at dusk –
Like the bear-alarm, at dusk, among smoky tents –
What was a cricket? How big is a cricket?
Long after I’d been smothered in bed
I could hear them
Riving at the religious stonework
With their furious chisels and screwdrivers.