Selected Poems (5 page)

Then
Leeds
medic Rothery Adgie, dead at twenty six,

His barely legible wooden cross a bundle of split sticks.

Though mostly nineteen hundreds half the graves have gone

Succumbing like the men below to rains and harmattan.

But fine windborne sand and downpours can’t obliterate

BLAKEBOROUGH’S
(
BRIGHOUSE
) from the iron hydrant grate

Outside the Residence, and I’ve a sense of dismal pride

Seeing Yorkshire linger where ten Governors have died.

The same as in Nigeria, though the weather rots the cross,

There’s
HUNSLET
(
LEEDS
) in iron on an engine up at Jos.

Wintering house-martins flutter round MacCarthy Square

And bats from Mauritanian shops get tangled in your hair.

Sunset; six; the muezzin starts calling; church bells clang,

Swung iron against iron versus amplified
Koran
.

It’s bottoms up at sundown at the praying ground and bar,

Though I prefer the bottle to the Crescent and the Star,

The bottle to the Christians’ Cross, and, if I may be frank,

Living to all your Heavens like a woman to a wank.

And it’s a bottle that I’m needing as I get back to the boat

With a lump like coal or iron sticking in my throat.

Though I take several bottles, though I hawk like hell and cough,

It stays fixed like a lodestone Northwards as the boat casts off.

II

Sunday Scotsman Northwards, autumn trees all rusting up;

My fifth
Light Ale
is swashing in its BR plastic cup.

Coming back to England; there’s no worse way than this

Railroad North from London up to
Worstedopolis
.

Britannia, Old Mother Riley, bending down to pray,

The railway line’s the X-Ray of her twisted vertebrae.

I’m watching England rolling by; here a startled grouse

Shoots out from a siding, and there Sabbath-idle ploughs

Clogged in soggy furrows are seizing up with rain.

Life’s either still or scurrying away from the train.

Anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, perhaps the train’ll crash
.

Anxious, anxious, anxious, Doctor Adgie, there’s a rash

The shape of bloody Britain and it’s starting to spread
.

My belly’s like a blow-up globe all blotched with Empire red
.

Chancres, chancres, Shetlands, spots, boils, Hebrides,

Atlasitis, Atlasitis, British Isles Disease!

The rot sets in at Retford and the stations beyond;

Coffles of coupled, rusty coaltrucks chalkmarked
COND
.

But at each abandoned station shunned like a suicide

There’s that loveliest of flourishers, the purple
London Pride
.

Though why the ‘proud’ metropolis should monopolize weeds

Beats me, when we’ve got millions more all over mucky Leeds,

Springing up wherever life is teetering on the brink

Like pensioned-off yours truly’s pickled in his drink.

With a bit of help off Bitter, I can do it on my own.

They can stuff their pink
Somalgins
and their
Phenobarbitone
,

O those lovely bubs that almost touched black chin and shiny knees,

Leaping up and down to drumming like hoop-jumping Pekinese!

Ay, it’s a pity all that’s over. From now on every night

It’s
Whatsoever Thy Hand Findeth To Do, Do It With Thy Might
.

Anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, perhaps the train’ll crash
.

Anxious, anxious, anxious, Doctor Adgie, there’s a rash

The shape of bloody Britain and it’s starting to spread
.

My belly’s like a blow-up globe all blotched with Empire red
.

Chancres, chancres, Shetlands, spots, boils, Hebrides
,

Atlasitis, Atlasitis, British Isles Disease
.

Veni, vidi, vici
, Death’s cackling in my ear.

And there he is a Caesar with an earth-caked Roman spear.

Queer sorts of dozes these are, where I’m nodding off to dream

Of being chased by Caesars and I wake up with a scream.

Must be that pork-pie I’ve eaten or the British Railways Ale.

Night behind the window. My coaster’s tan gone deathly pale.

It’s
me!
It’s
me
the fauna’s fleeing. Nothing’ll keep still.

My adrenalin moves Nature now and not God’s heavenly will.

Lean closer as the darkness grows. My vision’s fogged by breath

Clouding up the window as life’s clouded up by death.

Anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, perhaps the train’ll crash

Anxious, anxious, anxious, Doctor Adgie, there’s a rash

The shape of bloody Britain and it’s starting to spread
.

My belly’s like a blow-up globe all blotched with Empire red
.

Chancres, chancres, Shetlands, spots, boils, Hebrides
,

Atlasitis, Atlasitis, British Isles Disease
.

Death’s chuntered in my ear-hole since I was thirty five,

And I’ve guffawed at his stories but I’ve kept myself alive

Long enough to get fed up of the same old, worn-out joke.

Death, piss off, you shaggy dog, you proper natterpoke!

Nay! Come on, Julius Seizure, you black, buck bastard come.

I can hear those muffled heartbeats like a Yoruba drum.

And see the curving shadow of the sinister drumstick,

A bit of whittling that depicts an old man’s drooping prick,

Poised above the tautened heart, on the point of being played,

Just once, just once, and then I join the goners’ masquerade.

Anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, perhaps the train’ll crash
.

Anxious, anxious, anxious, Doctor Adgie, there’s a rash

The shape of bloody Britain and it’s starting to spread
.

My belly’s like a blow-up globe all blotched with Empire red
.

Chancres, chancres, Shetlands, spots, boils, Hebrides
,

Atlasitis, Atlasitis, British Isles Disease
.

My transparent head and shoulders ringed with reading lights

Goes sliding over hillsides, graveyards, demolition sites.

I’m a sort of setting sun, all my light drawn in to shed

Only darkness on the living, only darkness on the dead.

Life the bright compartment between dark cattle trucks

Concertinaed in the crush like a bug between two books.

Night and silence, and the Scotsman rushing, second

Coupled to anxious, anxious
SE
cond
…
COND
…
COND
…
COND
…

I

Mother and daughter German refugees

were not much wanted in nineteen

forty five. She had to skivvy for rich Jews

in Manchester’s posh ‘Palestine’.

I never really could believe

her story of your being thrown out

by some, one
snowy
Christmas Eve,

for having real wax candles on your conifer,

their children shouting:
Kraut! Kraut!

until she brought the tea-chests out of store.

Then I saw the hotel towels, the stolen

London café spoons,

bits of half-eaten
Stollen
,

casserole and cooking pans

packed hot from the oven.

Kleptomaniac,

dear
Schwiegermutter
,

did you have to pack

a
lb Kosher butter?

I’ve seen her waltz

off with rare, bright plants she’s pinched

from Kew, but the good bed-linen

was her own, brought bunched

up in bundles from Berlin,

embroidered:
Mein Heim ist Mein Stolz
.

After 13 years she fished

out her treasures; none any use.

She gave us a perished

red-rubber douche.

II

After the wedding she insisted on

a head-and-shoulders photograph that just

got her
real
violets on your breast

but not your belly in.

She sang and spun round in a raven

black, hook-buttoned waitress dress.

She was in some sort of heaven,

Viennese with happiness,

her arms round everybody’s neck,

warbling from pre-war musicals,

and
Rů
-,
Rů
-,
Růženka Maria
, your name in Czech,

with cracked ecstatic trills. –

But dying uncle Bertolt

made his ’14–18 amputation tender

by stamping his tin foot, when he was told

you’d married an
Engländer
.

III

Else Crossfield, Dietzsch,

née Schubert –
British
bitch!

‘Frontiers oppress me … I want to wander as much as I like … to talk, even in a broken language, with everybody.’

(Yevtushenko, 1958)

Your fat, failed ballet dancer’s calves

Bulge left, right, left. I’m out of breath and stop

To get a peep in at the skirted halves,

Those pale four inches past the stocking top.

That sight’s more in my line. I’m not so sold

On all this Gothic and this old Baroque.

My fur hat tickles and I’m freezing cold.

I need a drink, a sit-down and a smoke.

I speak my one word of your language:
thanks!

Let’s kiss. You laugh and pivot on one toe

To point out Hus still preaching, Russian tanks,

And Kafka’s ball-less eyes caked up with snow.

I glance round for my tail. We met head-on

In one blind alley, face to face. We grinned

And nodded and went on. I hope he’s gone.

He’d shop us if he saw my bourgeois hand

Slide down the zip-line of your dress and pass

The vertebrae, your parted Party lips

Against my lips. Relax! No cause or class

Can take the pleasure from between your hips.

Astraea! Stalin’s chocolate-Santa-Claus-

like statue’s made piecemeal. Descend! Descend!

We’re human, young, and lustful, sick of wars.

I want this gorgeous red bird for my friend.

Descend like a snow maiden from the air.

Fill Chrysostom’s or Basil’s empty niche,

Crumple stiff Nelson in Trafalgar Square.

Hear masses shouting:
Goddess!
bosses:
Bitch!

We know you foreign Mata Hari whores
.

I’m tired of stone bodies. I want yours.

Security’s
embarrassing, bored noise

Booms in these cracked cupolas:
Avoid
,

Avoid glad eyes, come-hithers, girl’s or boy’s
.

Beware Caucasian and Mongoloid
…

Above all, please remember Gerald Brooke
.

O I could see the flags, red, white and blue,

And Red struck to half-mast for a fuck

Between a caught-out couple like us two.

Your body plumped by bread and dumplings strains

Against your imitation bearskin as you peer

Upwards at huge saints, your peach neck cranes

At some Church soldier launching a gold spear

Against the Turk. One lurking Infidel

Is herded by Christ’s army into Hell.

I’m tired. Natasha! Olga! Masha! Come

To my bugged bedroom. Leave mausoleum,

Church, museum be. Leave your clothes there – Cold War

Bashing its dead torches on our door.

Comrade, with your finger on the playback switch,

Listen carefully to each love-moan,

And enter in the file which cry is real, and which

A mere performance for your microphone.

for Jane Fonda,

Leningrad, 1975

Pickled Gold Coast clitoridectomies?

Labia minora in formaldehyde?

A rose pink death mask of a screen cult kiss,

Marilyn’s mouth or vulva mummified?

Lips cropped off a poet. That’s more like.

That’s almost the sort of poet I think I am.

The lips of Orpheus fished up by a dyke

singing ‘Women of Cuba Libre and Vietnam!’

The taste, though, taste! Ah, that could only be

(‘Women! Women! O
abajo
men,

the thought of it’s enough to make you come!’)

the honeyed yoni of Eurydice

and I am Orpheus going down again –

Thanks for the guavas soaked in Cuban rum.

(Monkwood, Grimley)

The hungry generations’ new decree

turns Worcester orchards into fields of sage.

Tipsy, courtesy cheap wine and EEC,

I hear, as unaware of ours as Keats’s age,

the same blithe bird but its old magic fails