New and Selected Poems (29 page)
II THE ATLANTIC
Night after night he’d sat there,
Eighty-four, still telling the tale.
With his huge thirst for anaesthetics.
‘Time I were dead‚’ I’d heard. ‘I want to die.’
That’s altered.
We lean to a cliff rail
Founded in tremblings.
Beneath us, two thousand five hundred
Miles of swung worldweight
Hit England’s western wall
With a meaningless bump.
‘Aye!’ he sighs. Over and over. ‘Aye!’
And massages his temples.
Can he grasp what’s happened? His frown
Won’t connect. Familiar eagle frown –
Dark imperial eye. The ground flinches.
Mountains of dissolution
Boil cold geysers, bespatter us.
Tranquillizers,
Steroids, and a whole crateful
Of escapist Madeira, collided
Three evenings ago –
They swamped and drowned
The synapses, the breath-born spinnaker shells
Of consonants and vowels.
I found him
Trying to get up out of a chair,
Fish-eyed, and choking, clawing at air,
Dumbness like a bone stuck in his throat.
He’s survived with a word – one last word.
A last mouthful. I listen.
And I almost hear a new baby’s
Eyeless howl of outrage – sobered to ‘Aye!’
Sighed slow. Like blessed breath. He breathes it.
I dare hardly look at him. I watch.
He’d crept into my care.
A cursed hulk of marriage, a full-rigged fortune
Cast his body, crusted like Job’s,
Onto my threshold. Strange Dead Sea creature.
He crawled in his ruins, like Timon.
The
Times
Index was his morning torture.
Fairy gold of a family of dead leaves.
‘Why?’ he’d cried. ‘Why can’t I just die?’
His memory was so sharp – a potsherd.
He raked at his skin, whispering ‘God! God!’
Nightly, a nurse eased his scales with ointment.
I’ve brought him out for air. And the cliffs. And there
The sea towards America – wide open.
Untrodden, glorious America!
Look, a Peregrine Falcon – they’re rare!
Nothing will connect.
He peers down past his shoes
Into a tangle of horizons –
Black, tilted bedrock struggling up,
Mouthing disintegration.
Every weedy breath of the sea
Is another swell of overwhelming.
Meaningless. And a sigh. Meaningless.
Now he’s closed his eyes. He caresses
His own skull, over and over, comforting.
The Millmaster, the Caesar whose frown
Tossed my boyhood the baffling coin ‘guilty’.
His fingers are my mother’s. They seem astray
In quaverings and loss
As he strokes and strokes at his dome.
The sea thuds and sighs. Bowed at the rail
He seems to be touching at a wound he dare not touch.
He seems almost to find the exact spot.
His eyelids quiver, in the certainty of touch –
And ‘Aye!’ he breathes. ‘Aye!’
We turn away. Then as he steadies himself,
Still gripping the rail, his reaching stare
Meets mine watching him. I can’t escape it
Or hold it. Walt! Walt!
I bury it
Hugger-mugger anyhow
Inside my shirt.
Little Whale Songfor
Charles
Causley
What do they think of themselves
With their global brains –
The tide-power voltage illumination
Of those brains? Their X-ray all-dimension
Grasp of this world’s structures, their brains budded
Clone replicas of the electron world
Lit and re-imagining the world,
Perfectly tuned receivers and perceivers,
Each one a whole tremulous world
Feeling through the world? What
Do they make of each other?
‘We are beautiful. We stir
Our self-colour in the pot of colours
Which is the world. At each
Tail-stroke we deepen
Our being into the world’s lit substance,
And our joy into the world’s
Spinning bliss, and our peace
Into the world’s floating, plumed peace.’
Their body-tons, echo-chambered,
Amplify the whisper
Of currents and airs, of sea-peoples
And planetary manoeuvres,
Of seasons, of shores, and of their own
Moon-lifted incantation, as they dance
Through the original Earth-drama
In which they perform, as from the beginning,
The Royal House.
The loftiest, spermiest
Passions, the most exquisite pleasures,
The noblest characters, the most god-like
Oceanic presence and poise –
The most terrible fall.
On the Reservationsfor
Jack
Brown
I SITTING BULL ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
Who put this pit-head wheel,
Smashed but carefully folded
In some sooty fields, into his stocking?
And his lifetime nightshirt – a snarl
Of sprung celluloid? Here’s his tin flattened,
His helmet. And the actual sun closed
Into what looks like a bible of coal
That drops to bits as he lifts it. Very strange.
Packed in mossy woods, mostly ashes,
Here’s a doll’s cot. And a tiny coffin.
And here are Orca Tiger Eagle tattered
In his second birthday’s ragbook
From before memory began.
All the props crushed, the ceilings collapsed
In his stocking. Torremolinos, Cleethorpes –
The brochures screwed up in a tantrum
As her hair shrivelled to a cinder
In his stocking. Pit boots. And, strange,
A London, burst, spewing tea-leaves,
With a creased postcard of the Acropolis.
Chapels pews broken television.
(Who dumped these, into his stocking,
Under coal-slag in a flooded cellar?)
Pink
Uns
and a million whippet collars –
Did he ask for these? A jumbo jet
Parcelled in starred, split, patched Christmas wrappings
Of a concrete yard and a brick wall
Black with scribble
In his stocking. No tobacco. A few
Rabbits and foxes broken leaking feathers.
Nevertheless, he feels like a new man –
Though tribally scarred (stitch-tattoos of coal-dust),
Though pale (soiled, the ivory bulb of a snowdrop
Dug up and tossed aside),
Though one of the lads (the horde, the spores of nowhere
Cultured under lamps and multiplied
In the laboratories
Between Mersey and Humber),
He stands, lungs easy, freed hands –
Bombarded by pollens from the supernovae,
Two eyepits awash in the millennia –
With his foot in his stocking.
II NIGHTVOICE
My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes in dreams.’
Smohalla,
Nez
Percé
Indians
She dreams she sleepwalks crying the Don River
relieves its nine
circles through her kitchen her kids
mops and brooms herself a squeegee and not
soaking in but
bulging pulsing out of their pores the
ordure
déjà
vu
in Tesco’s makes her
giddy
She dreams she sleepwalks crying her Dad alive
dug up is being
pushed into a wood-burning stove
by pensioners who chorus in croaks
While Shepherds
Watched Their television gives her
palpitations
She dreams she sleepwalks crying all the dead
huddle
in the slag-heaps wrong
land wrong
time tepees a final
resting for the epidemic
solution every
pit-shaft a
mass-grave herself
in a silly bottle shawled
in the canal’s
fluorescence the message
of the survivors a surplus people
the words
washed off her wrists
and hands she complains keep feeling
helpless
She dreams she sleepwalks mainstreet nightly crying
Stalin
keeps her as an ant
in a formicary in a
garbage-can which is his private office
urinal she thinks her aerials
must be bent
Remembering how a flare of pure torrent
sluiced the pit muck
off his shoulder-slopes while her hands
soapy with milk blossom anointed
him and in their hearth
fingers of the original sun opened
the black
bright book of the stone
he’d brought from beneath dreams
or did she dream it
III THE GHOST DANCER
‘We are not singing sportive songs. It is as if we were weeping, asking for life –’
Owl,
Fox
Indians
A sulky boy. And he stuns your ear with song.
Swastika limbs, his whole physique – a dance.
The fool of prophecy, nightlong, daylong
Out of a waste lot brings deliverance.
Just some kid, with a demonic roar
Spinning
in
vacuo
, inches clear of the floor.
Half-anguish half-joy, half-shriek half-moan:
He is the gorgon against his own fear.
Through his septum a dog’s penile bone.
A chime of Chubb keys dangling at each ear.
Temenos Jaguar mask – a vogue mandala:
Half a Loa, half a drugged Oglala.
With woad cobras coiling their arm-clasp
Out of his each arm-pit, their ganch his grasp.
Bracelets, anklets; girlish, a bacchus chained.
An escapologist’s pavement, padlock dance.
A mannequin elf, topped with a sugarfloss mane
Or neon rhino power-cone on a shorn sconce,
Or crest of a Cock of the Rock, or Cockatoo shock,
Or the sequinned crown of a Peacock.
And snake-spined, all pentecostal shivers,
This megawatt, berserker medium
With his strobe-drenched battle cry delivers
The nineteenth century from his mother’s womb:
The work-house dread that brooded, through her term,
Over the despair of salvaged sperm.
Mau-Mau Messiah’s showbiz lightning stroke
Puffs the stump of Empire up in smoke.
Brain-box back to front, heart inside out,
Aura for body, and for so-called soul
Under the moment’s touch a reed that utters
Out of the solar cobalt core a howl
Bomblit, rainbowed, aboriginal:
‘Start afresh, this time unconquerable.’
from
RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY
Rain-Charm for the Duchyfor
H.R.H.
Prince
Harry
After the five-month drought
My windscreen was frosted with dust.
Sight itself had grown a harsh membrane
Against glare and particles.
Now the first blobby tears broke painfully.
Big, sudden thunderdrops. I felt them sploshing like vapoury petrol
Among the ants
In Cranmere’s cracked heath-tinder. And into the ulcer craters
Of what had been river pools.
Then, like taking a great breath, we were under it.
Thunder gripped and picked up the city.
Rain didn’t so much fall as collapse.
The pavements danced, like cinders in a riddle.
Flash in the pan, I thought, as people scampered.
Soon it was falling vertical, precious, pearled.
Thunder was a brass-band accompaniment
To some festive, civic event. Squeals and hurry. With tourist bunting.
The precinct saplings lifted their arms and faces. And the heaped-up sky
Moved in mayoral pomp, behind buildings,
With flash and thump. It had almost gone by
And I almost expected the brightening. Instead, something like a shutter
Jerked and rattled – and the whole county darkened.
Then rain really came down. You scrambled into the car
Scattering oxygen like a drenched bush.
What a weight of warm Atlantic water!
The car-top hammered. The Cathedral jumped in and out
Of a heaven that had obviously caught fire
And couldn’t be contained.
A girl in high heels, her handbag above her head,
Risked it across the square’s lit metals.
We saw surf cuffed over her and the car jounced.
Grates, gutters, clawed in the backwash.
She kept going. Flak and shrapnel
Of thundercracks
Hit the walls and roofs. Still a swimmer
She bobbed off, into sea-smoke,
Where headlights groped. Already
Thunder was breaking up the moors.
It dragged tors over the city –
Uprooted chunks of map. Smeltings of ore, pink and violet,
Spattered and wriggled down
Into the boiling sea
Where Exeter huddled –
A small trawler, nets out.
‘Think of the barley!’ you said.
You remembered earlier harvests.
But I was thinking
Of joyful sobbings –
The throb
In the rock-face mosses of the Chains,
And of the exultant larvae in the Barle’s shrunk trench, their filaments ablur like propellers, under the churned ceiling of light,
And of the Lyn’s twin gorges, clearing their throats, deepening their voices, beginning to hear each other
Rehearse forgotten riffles,
And the Mole, a ditch’s choked whisper
Rousing the stagnant camps of the Little Silver, the Crooked Oak and the Yeo
To a commotion of shouts, muddied oxen
A rumbling of wagons,
And the red seepage, the smoke of life
Lowering its ringlets into the Taw,
And the Torridge, rising to the kiss,
Plunging under sprays, new-born,
A washed cherub, clasping the breasts of light,
And the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans,
And the Tamar, roused and blinking under the fifty-mile drumming,
Declaiming her legend – her rusty knights tumbling out of their clay vaults, her cantrevs assembling from shillets,
With a cheering of aged stones along the Lyd and the Lew, the Wolf and the Thrushel,
And the Tavy, jarred from her quartzy rock-heap, feeling the moor shift
Rinsing her stale mouth, tasting tin, copper, ozone,
And the baby Erme, under the cyclone’s top-heavy, toppling sea-fight, setting afloat odd bits of dead stick,
And the Dart, her shaggy horde coming down
Astride bareback ponies, with a cry,
Loosening sheepskin banners, bumping the granite,
Flattening rowans and frightening oaks,
And the Teign, startled in her den
By the rain-dance of bracken
Hearing Heaven reverberate under Gidleigh,
And the highest pool of the Exe, her coil recoiling under the sky-shock
Where a drinking stag flings its head up
From a spilled skyful of lightning –
My windscreen wipers swam as we moved.
I imagined the two moors
The two stone-age hands
Cupped and brimming, lifted, an offering –
And I thought of those other, different lightnings, the patient, thirsting ones
Under Crow Island, inside Bideford Bar,
And between the Hamoaze anchor chains,
And beneath the thousand, shivering, fibreglass hulls
Inside One Gun Point, and aligned
Under the Ness, and inside Great Bull Hill:
The salmon, deep in the thunder, lit
And again lit, with glimpses of quenchings,
Twisting their glints in the suspense,
Biting at the stir, beginning to move.