Selected Poems (18 page)

I come towards you and am naked too,

and, being naked, feel my nerves react

to the pliant give and snap of spider thread,

snagged on a nipple, sliding on my sweat,

pinged on a whisker, snapped against my head –

the night survivor loosened from the net.

Though impossible to hear I sense each ping

as of an instrument too tautly strung

with notes too high for human voice to sing

and, in any case, not heard if ever sung,

and maybe like that air of Socrates,

I hope he played at least once with some skill,

transposed beyond our ken into high keys

I can’t hear now, and know I never will.

For all that unseen threads break on my face,

for all these cordons of cobweb caress

I walk towards you and don’t change my pace

feeling each broken thread one stricture less

against my passage to the world of day.

I can only know the last one when it breaks.

You can’t see them ahead, and anyway,

I have to scan the ground for rattlesnakes.

I wonder as I walk still half awake

if the trees that baked a bit long in the boot

and we’d planted in the dark would ever take

and if we’d ever taste their hoped-for fruit.

I pass what’s become in 12 months gut-high pine

planted last summer in a long close row

as our few acres’ demarcation line

and I will what’s still a hedge to grow less slow,

and be tall enough to mask the present view

of you watering the saplings as you spray

rainbows at fig-trees planted 2-1-2

and both of us still nude at break of day.

A morning incense smokes off well-doused ground.

Everywhere you water rainbows shine.

This private haven that we two have found

might be the more so when enclosed with pine.

A smell comes off my pencil as I write

in the margins of a sacred Sanskrit text.

By just sufficient candlelight I skim

these scriptures sceptically from hymn to hymn.

The bits I read aloud to you I’ve Xed

for the little clues they offer to life’s light.

I sit in mine, and you sit in your chair.

A sweetness hangs round yours; a foul smell mine.

Though the house still has no windows and no doors

and the tin roof’s roughly propped with 4 × 4s

that any gale could jolt, our chairs are fine

and both scents battle for the same night air.

Near Chiefland just off US 129,

from the clapboard abattoir about a mile,

the local sawyer Bob displays his wares:

porch swings, picnic tables, lounging chairs,

rough sawn and nailed together ‘cracker’ style.

The hand I shake leaves powerful smells on mine.

Beside two piles of shavings, white and red,

one fragrant as a perfume, and one rank

and malodorous from its swampland ooze,

Bob displayed that week’s work’s chairs for me to choose.

I chose one that was sweet, and one that stank,

and thought about the sweet wood for a bed.

To quote the carpenter he ‘stinks o’ shite’

and his wife won’t sleep with him on cypress days,

but after a day of cedar, so he said,

she comes back eagerly into his bed,

and, as long as he works cedar, there she stays.

Sometimes he scorns the red wood and works white!

Today I’ve laboured with my hands for hours

sawing fenceposts up for winter; one tough knot

jolted the chainsaw at my face and sprayed

a beetroot cedar dust off the bucked blade,

along with damp earth with its smell of rot,

hurtling beetles, termites in shocked showers.

To get one gatepost free I had to tug

for half an hour, but dragged up from its hole

it smelled, down even to the last four feet

rammed in the ground, still beautifully sweet

as if the grave had given life parole

and left the sour earth perfumed where I’d dug.

Bob gave me a cedar buckle for my belt,

and after the whole day cutting, stacking wood,

damp denim, genitals, ‘genuine hide leather’

all these fragrances were bound together

by cedar, and together they smelled good.

It was wonderful the way my trousers smelled.

I can’t help but suppose flesh-famished Phèdre

would have swept that prissy, epicene,

big-game hunting stepson Hippolyte,

led by his nose to cedar, off his feet,

and left no play at all for poor Racine,

if she’d soaped her breasts with
Bois de Cèdre
.

If in doubt ask Bob the sawyer’s wife!

Pet lovers who can’t stand the stink of cat

buy sacks of litter that’s been ‘cedarized’

and from ancient times the odour’s been much prized.

Though not a Pharaoh I too favour that

for freighting my rank remains out of this life.

Why not two cedar chairs? Why go and buy

a reeking cypress chair as a reminder,

as if one’s needed, of primeval ooze,

like swamps near Suwannee backroads, or bayous,

stagnation Mother Nature left behind her

hauling Mankind up from mononuclei?

Cypress still has roots in that old stew

paddling its origins in protozoa,

the stew where consciousness that writes and reads

grew its first squat tail from slimy seeds.

I’d’ve used it for the Ark if I’d been Noah,

though cedar, I know you’ll say, would also do.

This place not in the
Blue Guide
or in
Fodor

between the Suwannee River and the Styx

named by some homesick English classicist

who loved such puns, loathed swamps, and, lonely, pissed

his livelihood away with redneck hicks

and never once enjoyed the cedar’s odour,

or put its smoke to snake-deterrent use

prescribed by Virgil in his
Georgics
III

with
chelydrus
here in the US South

construed as the diamondback or cottonmouth

which freed him, some said, from his misery.

Others said liquor, and others still a noose.

And, evenings, he, who’d been an avid reader

of the
Odyssey
and
Iliad
in Greek,

became an even avider verandah drinker

believing sourmash made a Stoic thinker

though stuck with no paddle up Phlegethon’s creek,

and had no wife with clothes chest of sweet cedar.

But you bought one at Bob’s place and you keep

your cotton frocks in it, your underwear,

and such a fragrance comes from your doffed bras

as come from uncorked phials in hot bazaars,

and when you take your clothes off and lie bare

your body breathes out cedar while you sleep.

That lonely English exile named the river,

though it could have been someone like me, for whom,

though most evenings on the porch I read and write,

there’s often such uneasiness in night

it creates despair in me, or drinker’s gloom

that could send later twinges through the liver.

Tonight so far ’s been peaceful with no lightning.

The pecan trees and hophornbeams are still.

The storm’s held off, the candleflame’s quite straight,

the fire and wick united in one fate.

Though this quietness that can, one moment, fill

the heart with peace, can, the next, be frightening –

A hog gets gelded with a gruesome squeal

that skids across the quietness of night

to where we’re sitting on our dodgy porch.

I reach for Seth Tooke’s shotgun and the torch

then realize its ‘farmwork’ so alright

but my flesh also flinches from the steel.

Peace like a lily pad on swamps of pain –

floating’s its only way of being linked.

This consciousness of ours that reads and writes

drifts on a darkness deeper than the night’s.

Above that blackness, buoyed on the extinct,

peace, pure-white, floats flowering in the brain,

and fades, as finally the nenuphar

we found on a pewter swamp where two roads ended

was also bound to fade. The head and heart

are neither of them too much good apart

and peace comes in the moments that they’re blended

as cypress and cedar at this moment are.

My love, as prone as I am to despair,

I think the world of night’s best born in pairs,

one half we’ll call the female, one the male,

though neither essence need, in love, prevail.

We sit here in distinctly scented chairs

you, love, in the cedar, me the cypress chair.

Though tomorrow night I might well sit in yours

and you in mine, the blended scent’s the same

since I pushed my chair close to your chair

and we read by the one calm candle that we share

in this wilderness that might take years to tame,

this house still with no windows and no doors.

Let the candle cliché come out of the chill –

‘the flickering candle on a vast dark plain’

of one lone voice against the state machine,

or Mimi’s on cold stairs aren’t what I mean

but moments like this now when heart and brain

seem one sole flame that’s bright and straight and still.

If it’s in Levy County that I die

(though fearing I’d feel homesick as I died

I’d sooner croak in Yorkshire if I could)

I’ll have my coffin made of cedar wood

to balance the smell like cypress from inside

and hope the smoke of both blends in the sky,

as both scents from our porch chairs do tonight.

‘Tvashti’, says this Indian Rig Veda,

‘hewed the world out of one tree,’ but doesn’t tell,

since for durability both do as well,

if the world he made was cypress wood; or cedar

the smell coming off my pencil as I write.

‘
My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words
.’

Arthur Scargill,
Sunday Times
, 10 Jan. 1982

Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard

to find my slab behind the family dead,

butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard

adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.

With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short

of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite.

That’s two peers already, of a sort,

and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit,

whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,

causes the distinguished dead to drop

into the rabblement of bone and rot,

shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.

Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned

luggage cowhide in the age of steam,

and knew their place of rest before the land

caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.

This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s

the place I may well rest if there’s a spot

under the rose roots and the daffodils

by which dad dignified the family plot.

If buried ashes saw then I’d survey

the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,

and left, the ground where Leeds United play

but disappoint their fans week after week,

which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem

and taking a short cut home through these graves here

they reassert the glory of their team

by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.

This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.

Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.

One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT

sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.

Far-sighted for his family’s future dead,

but for his wife, this banker’s still alone

on his long obelisk, and doomed to head

a blackened dynasty of unclaimed stone,

now graffitied with a crude four-letter word.

His children and grand-children went away

and never came back home to be interred,

so left a lot of space for skins to spray.

The language of this graveyard ranges from

a bit of Latin for a former Mayor

or those who laid their lives down at the Somme,

the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer,

how people ‘fell asleep in the Good Lord’,

brief chisellable bits from the good book

and rhymes whatever length they could afford,

to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!

Or, more expansively, there’s LEEDS v.

the opponent of last week, this week, or next,

and a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses

on the team or race that makes the sprayer vexed.

Then, pushed for time, or fleeing some observer,

dodging between tall family vaults and trees

like his team’s best ever winger, dribbler, swerver,

fills every space he finds with versus Vs.

Vs sprayed on the run at such a lick,

the sprayer master of his flourished tool,

get short-armed on the left like that red tick

they never marked his work much with at school.

Half this skinhead’s age but with approval

I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.

No one clamoured in the press for its removal

or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.

These Vs are all the versuses of life

from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White

and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,

Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

class v. class as bitter as before,

the unending violence of US and THEM,

personified in 1984

by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,

East/West, male/female, and the ground