Glyn Maxwell
One Thousand
Nights and Counting
Selected Poems
PICADOR
in memory of my friend
Matthew Burrows
and my cousin
Simon Powell
Contents
My Turn
Just Like Us
Drive To the Seashore
The Albatross Revolution
Flood Before and After
Mattering
The Pursuit
Tale of the Mayor’s Son
We Billion Cheered
The Eater
Sport Story of a Winner
Plaint of the Elder Princes
Rumpelstiltskin
Out of the Rain
Helene and Heloise
The Ginger-Haired in Heaven
Garden City Quatrains
Invigilation
Love Made Yeah
Stargazing
Watching Over
The Sentence
Either
The Margit-Isle
The Sarajevo Zoo
The People’s Cinema
The Sightseers
From Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun:
Cine
The Horses’ Mouths: Pyrois
The Horses’ Mouths: Eous
The Horses’ Mouths: Aethon
A Scientist Explains
Clymene’s Coda
The Horses’ Mouths: Phlegon
The Wish
Someone at the Door
A Low God on Krafla
The Breakage
Hurry My Way
Rio Negro
For My Daughter
Under These Lights
Edward Wilson
Valentines at the Front
My Grandfather at the Pool
Letters to Edward Thomas
And Indians
On a Devon Road
Dawn on the Midi
From Time’s Fool
‘When the train stopped I started and woke up’
‘In recollection what descended then’,
‘At times there’s little mystery to how’,
‘They are assembled in the room’
Playground Song
The Sea Comes in Like Nothing But the Sea
The Nerve
Gatekeepers on Dana
The Leonids
Haunted Hayride
The Game Alone
Refugees in Massachusetts
The Flood Towns
A Hunting Man
The Year in Pictures
The Only Work
The Poem Recalls the Poet
Hide and Seek
The Surnames
A Promise
A Child’s Wedding Song
One of the Splendours
The Snow Village
From The Sugar Mile
Granny May at the Scene
Harry in Red Sunshine
Sally Tying Her Sister’s Shoe
Robby Stretching His Legs
Sally Playing Patience
Home Guard Man Breathless
The Old Lad
Forty Forty
A Play of the Word
One Thousand Nights and Counting
Flags and Candles
Rendition
The Tinsel Man
Mandelstam
Element It Has
Dust and Flowers
Anything but the Case
Empire State
Kaspar Hauser
Cassandra and the King
Hometown Mystery Cycle
Thinking: Earth
It Too Remains
Dream-I-Believe
A Walk by the Neva
Cassandra
My Turn
I have been so enchanted by the girls
who have a hunch, I have been seen
following them to the red and green
see-saws. There have been a few of them
I recognised. I have been recognised.
I have stood on the roundabout and turned.
I have swung, uselessly, not as high as them.
Then seen the parents coming, and the rain
on rusty and unmanned remaining things.
I have calculated west from the light cloud.
Cried myself dry and jumped
back on the roundabout when it had stopped.
Started it again, in the dark wet,
with my foot down, then both my feet on it.
Just Like Us
It will have to be sunny. It can rain only
when the very plot turns on pain or postponement,
the occasional funeral. Otherwise perfect.
It will have to be happy, at least eventually
though never-ending and never exactly.
Somebody must, at the long-last party,
veer to the side to remember, to focus.
All will always rise to a crisis,
meet to be shot for a magazine Christmas.
It will also be moral: mischief will prosper
on Monday and Thursday and seem successful
but Friday’s the truth, apology, whispered
love or secret or utter forgiveness.
It will have to be us, white and faulty,
going about what we go about. Its
dark minorities will stay minorities,
tiny noble and gentle, minor
characters in more offbeat stories.
Its favourite couple will appear in our towns,
giving and smiling. Their tune will be known
by all from the lonely to the very young
and whistled and sung. It will all be repeated
once. Its stars will rise and leave,
escaping children, not in love,
and gleam for a while on the walls of girls,
of sarcastic students beyond their joke,
of some old dreadful untimely bloke.
It will have to be sunny, so these can marry,
so these can gossip and this forgive
and happily live, so if one should die
in this, the tear that lies in the credible
English eyes will be sweet, and smart
and be real as blood in the large blue heart
that beats as the credits rise, and the rain
falls to England. You will have to wait
for the sunny, the happy, the wed, the white. In
the mean time this and the garden wet
for the real, who left, or can’t forget,
or never meant, or never met.
Drive To the Seashore
We passed, free citizens, between the gloves
of dark and costly cities, and our eyes
bewildered us with factories. We talked.
Of what? Of the bright dead in the old days,
often of them. Of the great coal-towns, coked
to death with scruffy accents. Of the leaves
whirled to shit again. Of the strikers sacked
and picking out a turkey with their wives.
Of boys crawling downstairs: we talked of those
but did this: drove to where the violet waves
push from the dark, light up, lash out to seize
their opposites, and curse to no effect.
The Albatross Revolution
1
The Residence was coddled by the light
of albatrosses, many of them silent.
The summerhouse had had a green door then,
which banged and banged and shut, and the relevant
daughters of their Highnesses were to be seen
nowhere – probably putting on a pl
ay
or, at that flashpoint of the century,
heading somewhere new, reluctantly.
2
The albatrosses having flown inland,
the green door flew open. The daughters and
the friends they had were two groups that were not
there, and starlings were a small group that was,
though not for long. The lawn was wide and cold
with all these new commotions, and the sea
licked at the bony ankles of the cliff
as if it was their Highnesses. It rained.
3
Somebody laughed hysterically when
the full whiteness of the Residence
exposed itself to all – the random all
who shoved each other out of the forest now.
The starlings jabbed in the orangery.
The albatrosses did something different
elsewhere, the details quite available.
There was some sour cream in the Residence.
4
There were some bottles in the sea. The cliff
had stood ten centuries of them, and would,
to be honest, stand twenty centuries more.
Men climbed the chimneys of the Residence
even as podgy womenfolk exchanged
recipes involving cheese and sour cream.
And they flew flags, the men. And starling crap
made constellations on the cold wide lawn.
5
It rained. Whatever the flag meant, it sulked
or, at that flashpoint of the afternoon,
resulted in all sorts of things. The cream
was put to its sour use. The Residence
was multi-purpose, snaps of albatrosses
hung all about. The air grew dark and green
as uniforms, and, catapulting out
of a high window, the Albatross-Man.
Flood Before and After
It reeled across the North, to the extent
that even Northerners cried ‘This is North!’
and what would you have said, to see a sky
threatening the children with great change?
Extraordinary clouds! Spectaculars!
There was the Dimden family, in their barn.
And long, quite vertical rain, the three horizons
hunched, different formulations, browns
and oranges. Then the unlucky Greens
running with their sons to find their sons.
The scarecrow and the crow, they did okay,
getting dark together, but unfrightened.
Fists of clouds! Genii of glamour!
Not to mention thunders – not again!
There stand the Dimdens, safe for once and sad.
The Greens have found their sons! Now for their daughters.
But out goes the lightning, giant’s fork
into a mound of chilli, steaming there
and where’s it gone? Into the open mouth,
barn and all, flavours and seasonings!
Cuddle in the rain, old favourites.
There goes a Noah, borrowing a plank.
Little slow to move, we thought. It ends
with tangles, the new rivers, and the sunshine
formally requesting a rainbow. Granted.
The creaking and excusing back to work.
A valuable man was lost in it.
That was in the paper, with the picture.
All the Northern correspondents went
reading to the telephones, all cold,
which brought the dry onlookers from the South,
gaspers, whistlers, an ambassador
and leading lights to mingle with the hurt.
The clouds were diplomats of the same kind,
edging over to exonerate
and praise. And then the royal son arrived,
helicoptered down on a flat field,
glancing up at the sky through the whup of blades,
attending to the worried with a joke.
Hell, I don’t know what – we were all cold.
The landscape looked an archipelago.
The Dimdens finally twigged, the Greens were found
beating the Blooms at rummy, in a cave.
All were interviewed and had lost all.
All saluted when the helicopter rose.
Only some came up the knoll with us
to check our options. Only two of those
saw, as I did, Noah’s tiny boat
scarcely moving, at the edge of sight
the crow and the scarecrow were rowing it.
Mattering
But the next day I was a hood with teeth,
and the red leaves were ankle-deep. Utter,
gaping memento mori to myself –
Alas! To cherish these things so – bobbing.
And this I memorised: if, in a yard,
you swear you see something, it’s nothing but
another guileless chemical moment. –
When the bonfire-smoke mourned into the sky
forgetting murders, I was holding out:
my hands were these accomplishers, but blue,
distressed with what was animal in them
and wouldn’t stop its mattering. ‘Alas’ –
an old word on an old cloud, like my God
when I was frowning at a picture-book.
The Pursuit
Running through woods he came to the wrong wood,
the round wood. And he stopped there like a man
would in a sudden temple, and his own blood beat
on the cocked side, his hurt side, his red portside.
Running through trees like a deer, victimised,
a sprinter, of a minority, he passed
on into blacker greens and deep betweens,
lost to sight. We shrugged the Home County shrug.
‘Running,’ muttered those who report and wait:
‘through woods,’ added by them with a hunch and pencil:
‘heart beating fast,’ attested by the cadets:
‘from here,’ thrice-underlined by those from here,
he was seen. The relevant people looked for him,
I know, because their vans were parked on the rim
of the right wood, and they took their torches with them,
and left their maps and their furry animals hanging.
‘Running through woods, heart beating fast, from here?
Let’s go.’ The reconstructed Xerox faces
appeared on walls from here to the uncrossable
M110, and it was said
the outer elms came back to life when the wire
linked them, to politely counsel Don’t,
and in the ring of fire the rare and common,
darting, hopping, slithering, trudging, dragging
towards life-leasing coldness, from the smoke,
met in the heart of the wood and stared and were doomed.
It was said in the crackle and crack the stars went out.
The birds alone took life and the news away.
In the dry filth of the aftermath the drivers
found belongings, bagged and took them and waited.
Then radioed superiors on the rim.
But he ran elsewhere, though a red X was him.
Tale of the Mayor’s Son
The Mayor’s son had options. One was death,
and one a black and stylish trilby hat
he wore instead, when thinking this: I love.
The town was not elaborate. The sky
was white collisions of no special interest
but look at the Mayor’s son, at the bazaar!
‘I’ve seen her once before . . . ’ Her name was this:
Elizabeth. The Mayor’s son was eighteen,
his mind older than that but his mouth not.
And had no options. ‘Hey, Elizabeth!’
I could say what was sold in the bazaar,
I could be clearer on the time of day,
I could define Elizabeth. I shall:
every girl you ever wanted, but
can’t have ’cause I do. She was twenty-one.
‘Hi, – ’ the name of the Mayor’s son? Anything.
‘Let’s get something together!’ someone said.
‘The Mayor’s son out with Lisa!’ someone gossiped.
The afternoon, about to be misspent,
stirred coffee with its three remaining fingers:
‘They are sugar-crazy, they are milk-lovers
and they won’t last.’ Some things about the town:
blue-printed in the days of brown and white
and laid down one fine evening, late July.
Musicians lived there, painters, people who
did murders they’d mulled over, councillors
for other towns, golfers, golfers’ widows,
widows of chip-eating carcasses
dipping their chips and watching, wannabes
who are by now and has-beens who aren’t yet,
people, ex-people, exes, seven mates
of mine, no friends of yours, not you or me,
a footballer, a brothel-keeper, linesmen,
a Cabbage Patch Doll buying her own home,
a band of Stuart Pretenders, a fire-hose
on a motorbike frequenting the one club,
and the man himself. No, strike him, he just left.
Divide the town into eleven parts,
throw ten of them away and look at this: