Selected Poems (10 page)

For being her ‘male escort’ (9!) to this

she gave my library its auspicious start:

The Kipling Treasury
. My name. The date:

Tony Harrison             1946

in dip-in-penmanship type copperplate

with proper emphasis on thins and thicks.

Mi mam was ‘that surprised’ how many came

to see the cortège off and doff their hats –

All the ‘old lot’ left gave her the same

bussing back from ‘Homes’ and Old Folk’s Flats.

Since mi mam dropped dead mi dad’s took fright.

His dicky ticker beats its quick retreat:

It won’t be long before Ah’m t’only white!

Or t’Town Hall’s thick red line sweeps through t’whole street.

II

Their front garden (8 × 5) was one of those

the lazier could write off as ‘la-di-dah’.

Her brother pipesmoked greenfly off each rose

in summer linen coat and Panama.

Hard-faced traders tore her rooms apart.

Litter and lavender in ransacked drawers,

the yearly programmes for the D’Oyly Carte.

‘Three Little Maids’ she’d marked with ‘4 encores!’

Encore! No more. A distant relative

roared up on a loud bike and poked around.

Mi mam cried when he’d gone, and spat out:
Spiv!

I got Tennyson and Milton leather-bound.

The Sharpes came next. He beat her, blacked her eye.

Through walls I heard each blow, each
Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!

The Jowetts’ dahlias were left to die.

Now mi dad’s the only one keeps up his front.

III

Also the only one who shifts his snow

and him long past his three score years and ten.

You
try
to understand:
Their sort don’t know
.

They’re from the sun. But wait till they’re old men.

But if some from out that ‘old lot’ still survive

and, shopping for essentials, shuffle past,

they’ll know by your three clear flags that you’re alive

and, though you’ll never speak, they’re not the last.

Outside your clearing your goloshes slip.

The danger starts the moment you’re next door –

the fall, the dreaded ‘dislocated hip’,

the body’s final freeze-up with no thaw.

If you weren’t scared you’d never use the phone!

The winter’s got all England in its vice.

All night I hear a spade that scrapes on stone

and see our street one skidding slide of ice.

IV

All turbans round here now, forget flat caps!

They’ve taken over everything bar t’
CO-OP.

Pork’s gone west, chitt’lins, trotters, dripping baps!

And booze an’ all, if it’s a Moslem owns t’new shop.

Ay, t’
Off Licence,
that’s gone Paki in t’same way!

(You took your jug and bought your bitter draught)

Ah can’t get over it
, mi dad’ll say,

smelling curry in a pop shop. Seems all daft.

Next door but one this side ’s front room wi t’

Singers
hell for leather all day long ’s

some sort o’ sweatshop bi the looks on it

running up them dresses … them … sarongs!

Last of the ‘old lot’ still left in your block.

Those times, they’re gone. The ‘old lot’ can’t come back.

Both doors I notice now you double lock –

he’s already in your shoes, your next-door black.

I

Your bed’s got two wrong sides. Your life’s all grouse.

I let your phone-call take its dismal course:

Ah can’t stand it no more, this empty house!

Carrots choke us wi’out your mam’s white sauce!

Them sweets you brought me, you can have ’em back.

Ah’m diabetic now. Got all the facts.

(The diabetes comes hard on the track

of two coronaries and cataracts.)

Ah’ve allus liked things sweet! But now ah push

food down mi throat! Ah’d sooner do wi’out.

And t’only reason now for beer ’s to flush

(so t’dietician said) mi kidneys out.

When I come round, they’ll be laid out, the sweets,

Lifesavers
, my father’s New World treats,

still in the big brown bag, and only bought

rushing through JFK as a last thought.

II

Though my mother was already two years dead

Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,

put hot water bottles her side of the bed

and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.

He’d put you off an hour to give him time

to clear away her things and look alone

as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief

though sure that very soon he’d hear her key

scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.

He
knew
she’d just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.

You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,

in my new black leather phone book there’s your name

and the disconnected number I still call.

His home address was inked inside his cap

and on every piece of paper that he carried

even across the church porch of the snap

that showed him with mi mam just minutes married.

But if ah’m found at ’ome
(he meant found dead)

turn t’water off
. Through his last years he nursed,

more than a fear of dying, a deep dread

of his last bath running over, or a burst.

Each night towards the end he’d pull the flush

then wash, then in pyjamas, rain or snow,

go outside, kneel down in the yard, and push

the stopcock as far off as it would go.

For though hoping that he’d drop off in his sleep

he was most afraid, I think, of not being ‘found’

there in their house, his ark, on firm Leeds ground

but somewhere that kept moving, cold, dark, deep.

Last meal together, Leeds, the Queen’s Hotel,

that grandish pile of swank in City Square.

Too posh for me!
he said (though he dressed well)

If you weren’t wi’ me now ah’d nivver dare!

I knew that he’d decided that he’d die

not by the way he lingered in the bar,

nor by that look he’d give with one good eye,

nor the firmer handshake and the gruff
ta-ra
,

but when we browsed the station bookstall sales

he picked up
Poems from the Yorkshire Dales
–

’ere tek this un wi’ yer to New York

to remind yer ’ow us gaffers used to talk.

It’s up your street in’t it? ah’ll buy yer that!

The broken lines go through me speeding South –

As t’Doctor stopped to oppen woodland yat …

and

       
wi’ skill they putten wuds reet i’ his mouth.

Death’s elixirs have their own golden gleam.

I see you clearly: one good, failing eye’s

on morning piss caught clumsily ‘midstream’

it’s your first task of the day to analyse.

Each day dawns closer to the last
eureka
,

the urine phial held up to clouding rays

meaning all solutions in life’s beaker

precipitate one night from all our days.

Alchemists keep skulls, and you have one

that stretches your skin taut and moulds your face,

and instead of a star sphere for sense of space

there’s the transatlantic number of your son,

a 14-digit spell propped by the phone

whose girdling’s giddy speed knocks spots off Puck’s

but can’t re-eye dry sockets or flesh bone.

My study is your skull.
I’ll burn my books
.

The ogling bottle cork with tasselled fez

bowing and scraping, rolling goo-goo eyes is

gippo King Farouk, whose lewd leer says:

I’ve had the lot, my lad, all shapes and sizes!

One night we kept him prancing and he poured,

filtered through his brains, his bulk of booze.

The whisky pantaloons sans sash or cord

swashed dad to the brink of twin taboos.

As King Farouk’s eyes rolled, dad rolled his own:

That King Farouk!
he said, and almost came

(though in the end it proved too near the bone)

to mentioning both sex and death by name.

I wake dad with what’s left. King Leer’s stare

stuck, though I shake him, and his fixed Sphinx smile

take in the ultimate a man can bear

and that dry Nothingness beyond the Nile.

Capless, conscious of the cold patch on my head

where my father’s genes have made me almost bald

I walk along the street where he dropped dead,

my hair cut his length now, although I’m called

poet
, in my passport.

     When it touched my ears

he dubbed me
Paganinny
and it hurt.

I did then, and do now, choke back my tears –

Wi’ ’air like that you ought to wear a skirt!

If I’d got a violin for every day

he’d said
weer’s thi fiddle
? at my flowing hair

I’d have a whole string orchestra to play

romantic background as once more I’m there

where we went for my forced fortnightly clip

now under new, less shearing, ownership,

and in the end it’s that that makes me cry –

JOE’S SALOON’s become KURL UP & DYE!

Tugging my forelock fathoming Xenophon

grimed Greek exams with grease and lost me marks,

so I whisper when the barber asks
Owt on
?

No, thank you!
YES! Dad’s voice behind me barks.

They made me wear dad’s hair-oil to look ‘smart’.

A parting scored the grease like some slash scar.

Such aspirations hair might have for ART

were lopped, and licked by dollops from his jar.

And if the page I’m writing on has smears

they’re not the sort to lose me marks for mess

being self-examination’s grudging tears

soaked into the blotter, Nothingness,

on seeing the first still I’d ever seen

of Rudolph Valentino, father, O

now,
now
I know why you used
Brilliantine

to slick back your black hair so long ago.

That summer it was Ibsen, Marx and Gide.

I got one of his you-stuck-up-bugger looks:

ah sometimes think you read too many books.

ah nivver ’ad much time for a good read.

Good read! I bet! Your programme at United!

The labels on your whisky or your beer!

You’d never get unbearably excited

poring over Kafka or
King Lear.

The only score you’d bother with ’s your darts,

or fucking football …

   (All this in my mind.)

I’ve come round to your position on ‘the Arts’

but put it down in poems, that’s the bind.

These poems about you, dad, should make good reads

for the bus you took from Beeston into town

for people with no time like you in Leeds –

once I’m writing I can’t put you down!

I cried once as a boy when I’d to leave her

at Christmas in the fourth year of the War,

taken to Killingbeck with scarlet fever,

but don’t cry now, although I see once more

from the window of the York–Leeds diesel back

for her funeral, my place of quarantine,

and don’t, though I notice by the same railtrack

hawthorns laden with red berries as they’d been

when we’d seen them the day that we returned

from the hospital on this same train together

and she taught me a country saying that she’d learned

as a child:
Berries bode bad winter weather!

and don’t, though the fresh grave’s flecked with sleet,

and dad, with every fire back home switched on, ’s

frozen,

          and don’t,

                          until I hear him bleat

round the ransacked house for his long johns.

James Cagney was the one up both our streets.

His was the only art we ever shared.

A gangster film and choc ice were the treats

that showed about as much love as he dared.

He’d be my own age now in ’49!

The hand that glinted with the ring he wore,

his
father’s, tipped the cold bar into mine

just as the organist dropped through the floor.

He’s on the platform lowered out of sight

to organ music, this time on looped tape,

into a furnace with a blinding light

where only his father’s ring will keep its shape.

I wear it now to Cagneys on my own

and sense my father’s hands cupped round my treat –

they feel as though they’ve been chilled to the bone

from holding my ice cream all through
White Heat
.

I

The ambulance, the hearse, the auctioneers

clear all the life of that loved house away.

The hard-earned treasures of some 50 years

sized up as junk, and shifted in a day.

A stammerer died here and I believe

this front room with such ghosts taught me my trade.

Now strangers chip the paintwork as they heave

the spotless piano that was never played.

The fingerprints they leave mam won’t wipe clean