Selected Poems (13 page)

this year’s lawful lord and last year’s thief,

those warring centaurs, scratch their unscabbed sores.

But here, horned koodoo and okapi skulls,

the family’s assegais, a Masai shield,

the head of one of Chillingham’s white bulls,

this month’s
Tatler, Horse & Hound, The Field
.

Churned earth translucent Meissen, dusted Spode

displayed on Sundays for the pence it makes,

paintings of beasts they’d shot at or they’d rode,

cantered grabbed acres on, won local stakes,

once all one man’s debatable demesne,

a day’s hard ride from Cheviot to sea –

His scion, stretching back to Charlemagne,

stiff-backed, lets us put down 40p.

I

Ploughed parallel as print the stony earth.

The straight stone walls defy the steep grey slopes.

The place’s rightness for my mother’s birth

exceeds the pilgrim grandson’s wildest hopes –

Wilkinson farmed Thrang Crag, Martindale.

Horner was the Haworth signalman.

Harrison kept a pub with home-brewed ale:

fell farmer, railwayman, and
publican
,

and he, while granma slaved to tend the vat

graced the rival bars ‘to make comparisons’,

Queen’s Arms, the Duke of this, the Duke of that,

while his was known as just ‘The Harrisons’’.

He carried cane and
guineas
, no coin baser!

He dressed the gentleman beyond his place

and paid in gold for beer and whisky chaser

but took his knuckleduster, ‘just in case’.

II

The one who lived with us was grampa Horner

who, I remember, when a sewer rat

got driven into our dark cellar corner

booted it to pulp and squashed it flat.

He cobbled all our boots. I’ve got his last.

We use it as a doorstop on warm days.

My present is propped open by their past

and looks out over straight and narrow ways:

the way one ploughed his land, one squashed a rat,

kept railtracks clear, or, dressed up to the nines,

with waxed moustache, gold chain, his cane, his hat,

drunk as a lord could foot it on straight lines.

Fell farmer, railwayman and publican,

I strive to keep my lines direct and straight,

and try to make connections where I can –

the knuckleduster’s now my paperweight!

for Alistair Elliot

‘From Ispahan to Northumberland, there is no building that does not show the influence of that oppressed and neglected herd of men.’

(William Morris,
The Art of the People
)

Sand, caravans, and teetering sea-edge graves.

The seaward side’s for those of lowly status.

Not only gales gnaw at their names, the waves

jostle the skulls and bones from their quietus.

The Church is a solid bulwark for their betters

against the scouring sea-salt that erodes

these chiselled sandstone formal Roman letters

to flowing calligraphic Persian odes,

singing of sherbert, sex in Samarkand,

with Hafiz at the hammams and harems,

O anywhere but bleak Northumberland

with responsibilities for others’ dreams!

Not for the Northern bard the tamarinds

where wine is always cool, and
kusi
hot –

his line from Omar scrivened by this wind ’s:

Some could articulate, while others not.

(Newbiggin-by-the-Sea 1977)

for Robert Woof and Fleur Adcock

Though thousands traipse round Wordsworth’s Lakeland shrine

imbibing bardic background, they don’t see

nailed behind a shutter one lost line

with intimations of mortality

and
immortality, but so discrete

it’s never trespassed on ‘the poet’s’ aura,

nor been scanned, as it is, five strong verse feet.

W. Martin’s work needs its restorer,

and so from 1891 I use

the paperhanger’s one known extant line

as the culture that I need to start off mine

and honour his one visit by the Muse,

then hide our combined labours underground

so once again it might be truly said

in words from Grasmere written by the dead:

our heads will be happen cold when this is found.

W. Martin

paperhanger

4 July 1891

for Marcelino Dos Santos (Frelimo)

Dar-es-Salaam 1971

Frelimo’s fluent propagandist speaks

the cloven tongues of four colonial powers:

French and Spanish, Portuguese and ours,

plus Makonde
one
of Mozambique’s,

and swears in each the war will soon be won.

He speaks of ‘pen & sword’, quotes Mao’s phrase

about ‘all power’ the moment his guests gaze

on the 14–18 bronze with Maxim gun.

Dulciloquist Dos Santos, swear to them

whose languages you’ll never learn to speak

that tongues of fire at a 1000 rpm

is not the final eloquence you seek.

Spondaic or dactylic those machines

and their dry scansions mean that truths get lost,

and a
pravda
empty as its magazines

is Kalashnikov PK ’s flash Pentecost.

‘When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel as if all the works of some great writer had perished.’

(Theodore Roosevelt, 1899)

(i) John James Audubon (1785–1851)

The struggle to preserve once spoken words

from already too well-stuffed taxonomies

is a bit like Audubon’s when painting birds,

whose method an admirer said was this:

Kill ’em, wire ’em, paint ’em, kill a fresh ’un!

The plumage even of the brightest faded.

The artist had to shoot in quick succession

till all the feathers were correctly shaded.

Birds don’t pose for pictures when alive!

Audubon’s idea of restraint,

doing the Pelican, was 25

dead specimens a day for
one
in paint.

By using them do we save words or not?

As much as Audubon’s art could save a,

say, godwit, or a grackle, which he shot

and then saw ‘multiplied by Havell’s graver’.

(ii) Weeki Wachee

Duds doomed to join the dodo: the dugong,

talonless eagles, croc, gimp manatee,

here, courtesy Creation’s generous strong,

the losers of thinned jungle and slicked sea.

Many’s the proud chieftain used to strut

round shady clearings of dark festooned teak

with twenty cockatoo tails on his nut,

macaw plumes à la mode, rainforest chic.

Such gladrag gaudies safe in quarantine

and spared at least their former jungle fate

of being blowpiped for vain primitives to preen

now race a tightrope on one roller skate.

A tanned sophomore, these ghettoed birds’ Svengali,

shows glad teeth, evolved for smiling, as macaws

perform their deft Darwinian finale

by hoisting the Stars and Stripes for our applause.

(iii) Standards

in hopeful anticipation of the bicentenary of the national emblem of the United States of America,
Haliaaetus Falco Leucocephalus
, 1782–1982

‘The bald eagle is likewise a large, strong, and very active bird, but an execrable tyrant: he supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence, extorting unreasonable tribute and subsidy from the feathered nations.’

(William Bartram,
Travels
, 1791)

‘Our standard with the eagle stands for us.

It waves in the breeze in almost every clime.’

(The flag, not
Falco Leucocephalus

poised in its dying on the brink of time!)

Rejecting Franklin’s turkey for a bird that
flies

Congress chose the soaring eagle, called,

for its conspicuous white head, ‘the bald’.

Now the turkey’s thriving and the eagle dies!

When the last stinks in its eyrie, or falls slow,

when the very last bald eagle goes the way

of all the unique fauna, it won’t know

the Earth it plummets to ’s the USA.

But will still wing over nations as the ghost

on money, and the mountainous US Post.

much as sunlight shining through the British pound

showed PEACE with her laurels, white on a green ground.

for Teresa Stratas

The fosses where Caractacus fought Rome

blend with grey bracken and become a blur

above the Swedish Nightingale’s last home.

Somehow my need for you makes me seek her.

The Malverns darken as the dusk soaks in.

The rowan berries’ dark red glaze grows dull.

The harvest moon’s scraped silver and bruised tin

is only one night off from being full.

Death keeps all hours, but graveyards close at nights.

I hurry past the Malvern Hospital

where a nurse goes round small wards and puts on lights

and someone there’s last night begins to fall.

‘The oldest rocks this earth can boast’, these hills,

packed with extinction, make me burn for you.

I ask two women leaving with dead daffodils:

Where’s Jenny Lind’s grave, please?
They both say:
Who?

for Philip, Terry, and Will Sharpe and the bicentenary of the birth of Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)

All day till it grows dark I sit and stare

over Herefordshire hills and into Wales.

Reflections of red coals thrown on the air

blossom to brightness as the daylight fails.

An uncharred cherry flaunts a May of flames.

Like chaffinches and robins tongues of fire

flit with the burden of Creation’s names

but find no new apostles to inspire.

Bar a farmhouse TV aerial or two,

the odd red bus, the red Post Office van,

this must have been exactly Roget’s view,

good Dr Roget, the
Thesaurus
man.

Roget died here, but 90 when he died

of natural causes, twice as old as me.

Of his six synonyms for suicide

I set myself alight with safe suttee.

Among death-protected creatures in a case,

‘The Earth’s Endangered Species’ on display

at a jam-packed terminal at JFK,

killing time again, I see my face

with Hawksbill Turtle, scrimshawed spermwhale bone,

the Margay of the family
Felidae
,

that, being threatened, cost the earth to buy.

And now with scientists about to clone

the long-haired mammoth back from Soviet frost,

my reflection’s on the species the World’s lost,

or will be losing in a little while,

which, as they near extinction, grow in worth,

the leopard, here a bag and matching purse,

the dancing shoes that were Nile crocodile,

the last
Felis Pardalis
left on Earth,

the poet preserved beneath deep permaverse.

That the
Peppered Moth
was white and now is dark ’s

a lesson in survival for Mankind.

Around the time Charles Darwin had declined

the dedication of
Das Kapital
by Marx

its predators could spot it on the soot,

but Industrial Revolution and Evolution taught

the moth to black its wings and not get caught

where all of Nature perished, or all but.

When lichens lighten some old smoke-grimed trees

and such as Yorkshire’s millstacks now don’t burn

and fish nose waters stagnant centuries,

can
Biston Carbonaria
relearn,

if Man’s awakened consciousness succeeds

in turning all these tides of blackness back

and diminishing the need for looking black,

to flutter white again above new Leeds?

Silence and poetry have their own reserves.

The numbered creatures flourish less and less.

A language near extinction best preserves

the deepest grammar of our nothingness.

Not only dodo, oryx and great auk

waddled on their tod to t’monster ark,

but ‘leg’, ‘night’, ‘origin’ in crushed people’s talk,

tongues of fire last witnessed mouthing:
dark
!

Now when the future couldn’t be much darker,

there being fewer epithets for sun,

and Cornish and the Togoland
Restsprache

name both the animals and hunter’s gun,

celebrate before things go too far

Papua’s last reported manucode,

the pygmy hippo of the Côte d’Ivoire,

and Upper Guinea’s oviparous toad –

(or mourn in Latin their imminent death,

then translate these poems into
cynghanedd
.)

¶

‘The North begins inside.’

            (Louis MacNeice)

God knows why of all rooms I’d to choose

the dark one facing North for me to write,

liking as I do air, light and views,

though there’s air in the North Wind that rocks the light

I have to keep on, all year round, all day;

nor why, despite a climate I profess to hate,

and years spent overseas, I stay,

and, when I start to pack, procrastinate.

The North Wind’s part of it and when it blows

my shutters rattle and the front door slams

like memory shutting out half what it knows.

Here I poured huge passion into aerogrammes,

the lightest paper loaded with new hope

that made the old pain seem, on looking back,