New and Selected Poems (30 page)

‘Mad Laughter’, your sister – her grey perm

Rayed out in electrified frazzles.

But you were the backfiring

Heart of your double-humped,

Sooty, two hundred acres.

Alex cracked. Strabismic, pitiable,

Gawky, adopted Alex!

That morning on the stack – and you

In a Führer frenzy,

Your coalface vocabulary

Going up in one flame!

Alex never came back.

Where did you end up?

Chimpanzee, dangle-pawed,

Shambling, midget ogre. Jehovah

Of my fallen Eden.

Undershot, bristly jowl –

Chimpanzee. That dazzled scowl –

Chimpanzee. Shoulder wing-stumps

In the waistcoat bossed

And polished to metal –

Chimpanzee. Cap an oil-rag,

Chewing your twist,

Raw disintegrating boots –

Your free knuckles lay quaking

At ease on the mudguard

Or pointed out to me

The bright, startling, pretty

Shrapnel in the stubble.

Your spittle curse, bitten off

Among the unshaven silver,

You’d give me the damned farm!

Nothing too stubborn,

Ferguson brains, running on pink paraffin,

Up in the dark, head in the cow’s crutch

Under the throb of Dorniers,

Staring into the warm foam,

Hobbling with a bucket and a lantern

Under the sky-burn of Sheffield,

Breaking your labourers with voice –

A royal succession of Georges!

What was it all for?

Collapsing between the stooks,

Up again, jump-starting your old engine

With your hip-flask,

Hoisting the top-heavy stackyard

Summer after summer. How many horses

Worn to chaffy dust? How many tractors

Battered to scrap? What’s become of you? Nobody

Could have kept it up. Only

One thing’s certain. Somewhere

You rest.

The father capers across the yard cobbles

Look, like a bird, a water-bird, an ibis going over pebbles

We laughed, like warships fluttering bunting.

Heavy-duty design, deep-seated in ocean-water

The warships flutter bunting.

A fiesta day for the warships

Where war is only an idea, as drowning is only an idea

In the folding of a wave, in the mourning

Funeral procession, the broadening wake

That follows a ship under power.

War is an idea in the muzzled calibre of the big guns.

In the grey, wolvish outline.

War is a kind of careless health, like the heart-beat

In the easy bodies of sailors, feeling the big engines

Idling between emergencies.

It is what has left the father

Who has become a bird.

Once he held war in his strong pint mugful of tea

And drank at it, heavily sugared.

It was all for him

Under the parapet, under the periscope, the look-out

Under Achi Baba and the fifty billion flies.

Now he has become a long-billed, spider-kneed bird

Bow-backed, finding his footing, over the frosty cobbles

A wader, picking curiosities from the shallows.

His sons don’t know why they laughed, watching him through the window

Remembering it, remembering their laughter

They only want to weep

As after the huge wars

Senseless huge wars

Huge senseless weeping.

My mother in her feathers of flame

Grows taller. Every May Thirteenth

I see her with her sister Miriam. I lift

The torn-off diary page where my brother jotted

‘Ma died today’ – and there they are.

She is now as tall as Miriam.

In the perpetual Sunday morning

Of everlasting, they are strolling together

Listening to the larks

Ringing in their orbits. The work of the cosmos,

Creation and destruction of matter

And of anti-matter

Pulses and flares, shudders and fades

Like the Northern Lights in their feathers.

My mother is telling Miriam

About her life, which was mine. Her voice comes, piping,

Down a deep gorge of woodland echoes:

‘This is the water-line, dark on my dress, look,

Where I dragged him from the reservoir.

And that is the horse on which I galloped

Through the brick wall

And out over the heather simply

To bring him a new pen. This is the pen

I laid on the altar. And these

Are the mass marriages of him and his brother

Where I was not once a guest.’ Then suddenly

She is scattering the red coals with her fingers

To find where I had fallen

For the third time. She laughs

Helplessly till she weeps. Miriam

Who died at eighteen

Is Madonna-like with pure wonder

To hear of all she missed. Now my mother

Shows her the rosary prayers of unending worry,

Like pairs of shoes, or one dress after another,

‘This is the sort of thing‚’ she is saying,

‘I liked to wear best.’ And: ‘Much of it,

You know, was simply sitting at the window

Watching the horizon. Truly

Wonderful it was, day after day,

Knowing they were somewhere. It still is.

Look.’

And they pause, on the brink

Of the starry dew. They are looking at me.

My mother, darker with her life,

Her Red Indian hair, her skin

So strangely olive and other-worldly,

Miriam now sheer flame beside her.

Their feathers throb softly, iridescent.

My mother’s face is glistening

As if she held it into the skyline wind

Looking towards me. I do this for her.

She is using me to tune finer

Her weeping love for my brother, through mine,

As if I were the shadow cast by his approach.

As when I came a mile over fields and walls

Towards her, and found her weeping for him –

Able for all that distance to think me him.

‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…

At the top of your voice, where you swayed on the top of a stile,

Your arms raised – somewhat for balance, somewhat

To hold the reins of the straining attention

Of your imagined audience – you declaimed Chaucer

To a field of cows. And the Spring sky had done it

With its flying laundry, and the new emerald

Of the thorns, the hawthorn, the blackthorn,

And one of those bumpers of champagne

You snatched unpredictably from pure spirit.

Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester.

It must have sounded lost. But the cows

Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.

You went on and on. Here were reasons

To recite Chaucer. Then came the Wyf of Bath,

Your favourite character in all literature.

You were rapt. And the cows were enthralled.

They shoved and jostled shoulders, making a ring,

To gaze into your face, with occasional snorts

Of exclamation, renewed their astounded attention,

Ears angling to catch every inflection,

Keeping their awed six feet of reverence

Away from you. You just could not believe it.

And you could not stop. What would happen

If you were to stop? Would they attack you,

Scared by the shock of silence, or wanting more – ?

So you had to go on. You went on –

And twenty cows stayed with you hypnotized.

How did you stop? I can’t remember

You stopping. I imagine they reeled away –

Rolling eyes, as if driven from their fodder.

I imagine I shooed them away. But

Your sostenuto rendering of Chaucer

Was already perpetual. What followed

Found my attention too full

And had to go back into oblivion.

                                        Spain frightened you. Spain

Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,

The oiled anchovy faces, the African

Black edges to everything, frightened you.

Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.

The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.

You did not know the language, your soul was empty

Of the signs, and the welding light

Made your blood shrivel. Bosch

Held out a spidery hand and you took it

Timidly, a bobby-sox American.

You saw right down to the Goya funeral grin

And recognized it, and recoiled

As your poems winced into chill, as your panic

Clutched back towards college America.

So we sat as tourists at the bullfight

Watching bewildered bulls awkwardly butchered,

Seeing the grey-faced matador, at the barrier

Just below us, straightening his bent sword

And vomiting with fear. And the horn

That hid itself inside the blowfly belly

Of the toppled picador punctured

What was waiting for you. Spain

Was the land of your dreams: the dust-red cadaver

You dared not wake with, the puckering amputations

No literature course had glamorized.

The juju land behind your African lips.

Spain was what you tried to wake up from

And could not. I see you, in moonlight,

Walking the empty wharf at Alicante

Like a soul waiting for the ferry,

A new soul, still not understanding,

Thinking it is still your honeymoon

In the happy world, with your whole life waiting,

Happy, and all your poems still to be found.

Who modelled your head of terracotta?

Some American student friend.

Life-size, the lips half-pursed, raw-edged

With crusty tooling – a naturalistic attempt

At a likeness that just failed. You did not like it.

I did not like it. Unease magnetized it

For a perverse rite. What possessed us

To take it with us, in your red bucket bag?

November fendamp haze, the river unfurling

Dark whorls, ferrying slender willow yellows.

The pollard willows wore comfortless antlers,

Switch-horns, leafless. Just past where the field

Broadens and the path strays up to the right

To lose the river and puzzle for Grantchester,

A chosen willow leaned towards the water.

Above head height, the socket of a healed bole-wound,

A twiggy crotch, nearly an owl’s porch,

Made a mythic shrine for your double.

I fitted it upright, firm. And a willow tree

Was a Herm, with your head, watching East

Through those tool-stabbed pupils. We left it

To live the world’s life and weather forever.

You ransacked Thesaurus in your poem about it,

Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety

From its orphaned fate.

But it would not leave you. Weeks later

We could not seem to hit on the tree. We did not

Look too hard – just in passing. Already

You did not want to fear, if it had gone,

What witchcraft might ponder it. You never

Said much more about it.

                                           What happened?

Maybe nothing happened. Perhaps

It is still there, representing you

To the sunrise, and happy

In its cold pastoral, lips pursed slightly

As if my touch had only just left it.

Or did boys find it – and shatter it? Or

Did the tree too kneel finally?

Surely the river got it. Surely

The river is its chapel. And keeps it. Surely

Your deathless head, fired in a furnace,

Face to face at last, kisses the Father

Mudded at the bottom of the Cam,

Beyond recognition or rescue,

All our fears washed from it, and perfect,

Under the stained mournful flow, saluted

Only in summer briefly by the slender

Punt-loads of shadows flitting towards their honey

And the stopped clock.

                                          Evil.

That was what you called the head. Evil.

Your temples, where the hair crowded in,

Were the tender place. Once to check

I dropped a file across the electrodes

Of a twelve-volt battery – it exploded

Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.

Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed

The thunderbolt into your skull.

In their bleached coats, with blenched faces,

They hovered again

To see how you were, in your straps.

Whether your teeth were still whole.

The hand on the calibrated lever

Again feeling nothing

Except feeling nothing pushed to feel

Some squirm of sensation. Terror

Was the cloud of you

Waiting for these lightnings. I saw

An oak limb sheared at a bang.

You your Daddy’s leg. How many seizures

Did you suffer this god to grab you

By the roots of the hair? The reports

Escaped back into clouds. What went up

Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper

And the nerve threw off its skin

Like a burning child

Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you

A rigid bent bit of wire

Across the Boston City grid. The lights

In the Senate House dipped

As your voice dived inwards

Right through the bolt-hole basement.

Came up, years later,

Over-exposed, like an X-ray –

Brain-map still dark-patched

With the scorched-earth scars

Of your retreat. And your words,

Faces reversed from the light,

Holding in their entrails.