Selected Poems (9 page)

Uncle Joe came here to die. His gaping jaws

once plugged in to the power of his stammer

patterned the stuck plosive without pause

like a d-d-damascener’s hammer.

Mi aunty’s baby still. The dumbstruck mother.

The mirror, tortoise-shell-like celluloid

held to it, passed from one hand to another.

No babble, blubber, breath. The glass won’t cloud.

The best clock’s only wound for layings out

so the stillness isn’t tapped at by its ticks.

The settee’s shapeless underneath its shroud.

My mind moves upon silence and
Aeneid
VI.

Outside the whistled gang-call,
Twelfth Street Rag
,

then a Tarzan yodel for the kid who’s bored,

whose hand’s on his liana … no, back

to Labienus and his flaming sword.

Off laikin
’,
then to t’fish ’oil
all the boys,

off tartin
’,
off to t’flicks
but on, on, on,

the foldaway card table, the green baize,

De Bello Gallico
and lexicon.

It’s only his jaw muscles that he’s tensed

into an enraged
shit
that he can’t go;

down with polysyllables, he’s against

all pale-face Caesars,
for
Geronimo.

He shoves the frosted attic skylight, shouts:

Ah bloody can’t ah’ve gorra Latin prose
.

His bodiless head that’s poking out’s

like patriarchal Cissy-bleeding-ro’s.

‘There was only one more thing which had to be done, a last message to leave behind on the last day of all: and so he gathered up his strength in the midst of a long stretch of silence and framed his lips to say to me quite clearly the one word
Dictionary
.’

(
The Life of Joseph Wright
, 1858–1930)

I

Good parrots got good marks. I even got

a 100 in Divinity (posh schools’ RI),

learned new long words and (wrongly stressed)
harlót

I asked the meaning of so studiously.

I asked mi mam. She said she didn’t know.

The Classics/RI master hummed and hawed.

(If only he’d’ve said it was a pro!)

New words: ‘venery’, ‘VD’ and ‘bawd’!

Sometime … er … there’s summat in that drawer …

photograph foetuses, a pinman with no prick,

things I learned out laiking years before

they serialized ‘Life’ in the
Sunday Pic
.

Words and wordlessness. Between the two

the gauge went almost ga-ga. No RI,

no polysyllables could see me through,

come glossolalia, dulciloquy.

II

The
Funk & Wagnalls?
Does that still survive?

Uncle Harry most eloquent deaf-mute

jabbed at its lexis till it leaped to life

when there were Tory errors to confute.

A bible paper bomb that dictionary.

I learned to rifle through it at great speed.

He’s dead. I’ve studied, got the OED

and other tongues I’ve slaved to speak or read:

L & S dead Latin, L & S dead Greek,

one the now dead lexicographer gave me,

Ivan Poldauf, his English-Czech
slovník
;

Harrap’s French 2 vols, a Swahili,

Cabrera’s Afro-Cuban
Anagó
,

Hausa, Yoruba, both R.C. Abraham’s –

but not the tongue that once I used to know

but can’t bone up on now, and that’s mi mam’s.

III

The treasure found here on this freezing shore,

with last war tanktraps, and oil-clagged birds,

the morning shivery, the seawinds raw,

is the memory of a man collecting words.

Crushed scallops, washed up hard hats, shit, what fitter

thesaurus trove of trashes could he wish,

our lexicographer and
Doctor Litter
-

arum
netting a fine but unexpected fish?

His heart beat faster when a living mouth

(the jotting said a ‘fishwife’s’) used the old

and, for him forgotten in his flit down South,

border word
yagach
to describe the cold.

Though society’s not like the OED

and the future ’s just as yagach as the day,

I celebrate beside the same bleak sea

James Murray, and a scholar’s clarion call

that set those sharp speech combers on their way:

Fling our doors wide! all, all, not one, but all!

(Leeds Grammar School 1552–1952)

The grace of Tullies eloquence doth excell

any Englishmans tongue … my barbarous stile …

The tongue our leaders use to cast their spell

was once denounced as ‘rude’, ‘gross’, ‘base’ and ‘vile’.

How fortunate we are who’ve come so far!

We boys can take old Hansards and translate

the British Empire into SPQR

but nothing demotic or too up-to-date,

and
not
the English that I speak at home,

not Hansard standards, and if Antoninus

spoke like delinquent Latin back in Rome

he’d probably get gamma double minus.

And so the lad who gets the alphas works

the hardest in his class at his translation

and finds good Ciceronian for Burke’s:

a dreadful schism in the British nation
.

Bottomless pits. There’s one in Castleton,

and stout upholders of our law and order

one day thought its depth worth wagering on

and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder

and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.

Not even a good flogging made him holler!

O gentlemen, a better way to plumb

the depths of Britain’s dangling a scholar,

say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath,

now National Trust, a place where they got tin,

those gentlemen who silenced the men’s oath

and killed the language that they swore it in.

The dumb go down in history and disappear

and not one gentleman’s been brought to book:

Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr

(Cornish) –

‘the tongueless man gets his land took.’     

for Professors Richard Hoggart & Leon Cortez

I

α
αĩ, ay, ay! … stutterer Demosthenes

gob full of pebbles outshouting seas –

4 words only of
mi ’art aches
and … ‘Mine’s broken,

you barbarian, T.W.!’
He
was nicely spoken.

‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’

I played the Drunken Porter in
Macbeth
.

‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those

Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!

All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see

’s been dubbed by [Λs] into RP,

Received Pronunciation, please believe [Λs]

your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.’

‘We say [Λs] not [uz], T.W.!’ That shut my trap.

I doffed my flat a’s (as in ‘flat cap’)

my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great

lumps to hawk up and spit out …
E-nun-ci-ate
!

II

So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy

your lousy leasehold Poetry.

I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones

into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones,

dropped the initials I’d been harried as

and used my
name
and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz],

ended sentences with by, with, from,

and spoke the language that I spoke at home.

RIP RP, RIP T.W.

I’m
Tony
Harrison no longer you!

You can tell the Receivers where to go

(and not aspirate it) once you know

Wordsworth’s
matter/water
are full rhymes,

[uz] can be loving as well as funny.

My first mention in the
Times

automatically made Tony Anthony!

Among stooped getters, grimy, knacker-bare,

head down thrusting a 3 cwt corf

turned your crown bald, your golden hair

chafed fluffy first and then scuffed off,

chick’s back, then eggshell, that sunless white.

You strike sparks and plenty but can’t see.

You’ve been underneath too long to stand the light.

You’re lost in this sonnet for the bourgeoisie.

Patience Kershaw, bald hurryer, fourteen,

this wordshift and inwit’s a load of crap

for dumping on a slagheap, I mean

th’art nobbut summat as wants raking up
.

I stare into the fire. Your skinned skull shines.

I close my eyes. That makes a dark like mines.

Wherever hardship held its tongue the job

’s breaking the silence of the worked-out-gob.

Note
. ‘Gob’: an old Northern coal-mining word for the space left after he coal has been extracted. Also, of course, the mouth, and speech.

So when she hears him clearing his throat

every few seconds she’s aware what he’s raking

’s death off his mind; the next attack. The threat

of his dying has her own hands shaking.

The mangle brought it on. Taking it to bits.

She didn’t need it now he’d done with pits.

A grip from behind that seems to mean
don’t go

tightens through bicep till the fingers touch.

His, his dad’s and
his
dad’s lifetime down below

crammed into one huge nightshift, and too much.

He keeps back death the way he keeps back phlegm

in company, curled on his tongue. Once left alone

with the last coal fire in the smokeless zone,

he hawks his cold gobful at the brightest flame,

too practised, too contemptuous to miss.

Behind the door she hears the hot coals hiss.

I

Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead

we chew it slowly that last apple pie.

Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed.

We never could talk much, and now don’t try.

You’re like book ends, the pair of you
, she’d say,

Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare
…

The ‘scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,

only our silence made us seem a pair.

Not as good for staring in, blue gas,

too regular each bud, each yellow spike.

A night you need my company to pass

and she not here to tell us we’re alike!

Your life’s all shattered into smithereens.

Back in our silences and sullen looks,

for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between ’s

not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

II

The stone’s too full. The wording must be terse.

There’s scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it –

Come on, it’s not as if we’re wanting verse
.

It’s not as if we’re wanting a whole sonnet!

After tumblers of neat
Johnny Walker

(I think that both of us we’re on our third)

you said you’d always been a clumsy talker

and couldn’t find another, shorter word

for ‘beloved’ or for ‘wife’ in the inscription,

but not too clumsy that you can’t still cut:

You’re supposed to be the bright boy at description

and you can’t tell them what the fuck to put!

I’ve got to find the right words on my own.

I’ve got the envelope that he’d been scrawling,

mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling

but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.

for Jeffrey Wainwright

When Milton
sees
his ‘late espoused saint’

are we sure the ghost’s wife 1 or 2?

Does knowing it’s himself beneath the paint

make the Rembrandts truer or less true?

But your father was a simple working man,

they’ll say,
and didn’t speak in those full rhymes
.

His words
when
they came would scarcely scan
.

Mi dad’s did scan, like yours do, many times!

That quarrel then in
Book Ends II
between

one you still go on addressing as ‘mi dad’

and you, your father comes across as mean

but weren’t the taunts you flung back just as bad?

We
had
a bitter quarrel in our cups

and there
were
words between us, yes,

I’m guilty, and the way I make it up ’s

in poetry, and that much I confess.

I

Ethel Jowett died still hoping not to miss

next year’s
Mikado
by the D’Oyly Carte.