my fingers are free to wander (an invisible stitch
of desire): a country where nowhere is a deviation.
PANIC
Hitting Cuisines in the new IKEA,
besieged by hobs, I was paralysed
by the arrows on the floor.
This is the only way, they claimed,
through the rooms’ pretence
where couples were dimpling beds
with practice bottoms, yanking
at fairy-lights, stocking up on
what my mother would call,
as far as I remember, ‘sundries’.
I started to walk against them,
counter to the flow, knowing
those shelves only had books as a sop
to types like me who don’t
exist in the real world: solecistic
in the perfect grammar of hob and bed.
Incorrigible, I emerged in daylight
as someone might who, escaping
from a theatre’s fug mid-scene,
finds himself out on stage,
dazzled; pretending to be gratified
by his own applause.
CHECKING BLOOD PRESSURE
It’s the same old trick: making you think,
as the cuff goes on, that each puff up
to the squeeze and squeeze and squeeze
is a tender thing: the reassurance
of the bloated god with time
on his hands, a helpful hand on the arm,
a kind teacher’s touch:
not the blood cut off, the clasp
that’s overdone, or the relief when,
sighing in that same old rubbery way,
he is gone for another year, and it’s all
retrenchment behind the bonhomie.
MARGINALIA
History breathes in silence,
watched from afar. Ordericus Vitalis,
‘benumbed with winter frosts’,
lays down his weary, twelfth-century pen
in his Historia Ecclesiastica
I’m reading in Dean Church’s translation
from a Cambridge compilation of sources
dated (the soundless shell-bursts!)
1918. A long telescope
of scholarship, yet the bench
creaks as the old monk labours
over his letters in the cold.
The smews tuck in their wings
on the abbey’s frozen lake
where grey lags, blurred from wind,
say kark, kark. Their arrows soon
to puncture all that laborious
prose as usual, heralds
to ‘the soft air of spring’
and all that he would rather sing of
transfigured into leaf
before the gadfly heat
of summer, the wafts of dung,
the craving again for frosts.
IN COURT
Nîmes, December 2007
The accused turns her head and our eyes meet:
two bore-holes face me, ringed by fatigue. Le vide.
Manipulatrice. I feint a smile; the family don’t.
Always a terror, huge, built like a man. Even her son,
ashamed of his dad’s loose ways with the girls,
says he regrets what she did. A gruelling
July heat over three days, the neighbours
noticing a smell. From under the stairs,
newly sealed with a sheet of plasterboard
and a lick of paint, something leaked. A body
is mostly water, the judge declares. Did you
not know that? Or really think your
husband would simply shrivel and dry
like a fig? She whispers, ‘I did’. And the family
around me stir and smile (knowing her well),
while she stays put in her own leak-proof hell.
But you can see the logic in it, I think, as the witnesses
speak, sob, praise him like the lover he was,
no doubt, of several among them … the divorce
meant everything divided, from the little dream house
to the pool she’d dug, the neighbours said,
with her own bare hands. And what do you share with the dead,
who take nothing with them, and never return?
The logic of bare hands, that: or history’s slow burn.
PUNCTURED
The taut membrane, nail-splittable,
of my brother’s Fokker back in ’64:
ready for the maiden after months of until, now
waiting for him to take the bus from school.
Stretched so taut, tappable, like a drum. Such
temptation. All it would take was my only thought,
like later leg-overs separated from me
by the last and impossible distance of lunge.
ROADS THEMSELVES ARE SILENT
The motorway’s sough beyond the hill’s beech
is not motors so much as tarmac and rubber,
a word like indubitable over and over,
failure only in the skid’s squeal –
that tell-tale scar like a dark ladder.
And what if the urubu of wooden wheels,
the smack of the loose manhole cover
that keeps us awake, or the morse
after midnight of those lone high heels
might betray themselves to speech:
what would they say? That roads
themselves are silent; they make us
speak. Even the fervent pressure of pilgrims
on the bleak ways between dangerous wastes
leaves behind it – what? A silence.
Like that quiet of the museum
with its stretch of peat-pegged track,
dark from its bog and forlorn, as mute
as a rim-impression in Roman marble.
And what a frightening thought, that everything
is always on its way to somewhere else,
whatever route we pick – eternally
advancing to the promised goal
like armies whistling over the trapped
boots’ drum, their standards flapping,
their knees as one. Though silence
is following them, as well.
VOLUNTARY
North Wootton Common, Norfolk
Pools are spreadeagled
and the near marsh
suggests itself oozily under the grass, but a flock
of geese straddles
the raised pass
on which I’m heading
for the one gate
in the long alder-mess of hedge: I
hesitate and then
walk on, watching
the birds levitate
en masse into a clear
blue winter sky on a broken-harmonium
medley of cries
to shape, if vaguely,
their conventional V
and head towards the delta
I cannot see. A few separate like rebellious
adolescents,
flecks I track
across the sky’s screen
as if fretful for them,
until they wheel with a suitable insouciance
and join the group,
its wake already
dissolving in distance
(the flock’s shadow
bounced by the grass, grey as ash, less
uniform and swifter as it sweeps
over me and screens
the sun in a flash).
All but one, that is – who’s
doggedly travelling the other way, so completely alone
I could give it a name,
consider its fate.
I feel like shouting
out but can’t.
Tough luck swerves for no one: probability’s
the curve it pursues
until its dot
&nbs
p; assumes its own
extinction … a voluntary
exile, free at last – or condemned to a lonely
end in some oil-slicked
pool, garbage tip
or waste of choppy sea
I can so easily
imagine as I carry on regardless to the rusty gate,
its top cross-bar
garlanded with barbed wire,
its latch a palliative I cannot take.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following: Times Literary Supplement; Poetry Review; ATOL – Art Therapy Online; Alhambra Poetry Calendar; Love Poet, Carpenter – Michael Longley at Seventy.
‘Via’ and ‘Roads Themselves Are Silent’ were commissioned for broadcast by BBC Radio 3’s Between the Ears.
I am deeply grateful to the Estonian Writers’ Union for a grant towards the writing of this volume as well as generous accommodation at the Union House in Käsmu.
The brief quote in ‘Second Homers’ is from the last lines of ‘Rite and Fore-time’ in David Jones’s The Anathémata (1952).
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