from town and our life here. It seemed to us
it was all farm to the start of the next farm.
It was selling its things to everyone whose plans
had ground to a stop on the road that afternoon.
Round here if you stop long enough then boom –
tall women come in cardigans and jeans
and everything’s a stall. Car-passengers,
grey and fit and buckled in there, lifers,
all turned back to their sentences, but whatever
opens unexpectedly to strangers
possessed us, so we slowed, and stopped. The haycart
was both the farthest and the first of things
we saw, beyond the gift-shop selling pumpkins
for luck, and ghosts and Indians for mascots.
So instead we ambled up towards the sign,
making an M with Alfie’s arms, Maxwells,
past pumpkin heaps and jars on the haybales,
towards the horse and cart and the haycart man.
He handed the children on and the mothers on,
and cleared a space for three, till it felt to us
like the gap was suddenly waiting for us, and this
intervened. And the look on the haycart man
intervened. So did the scope of the field,
stretching away from Saturday like a hand,
out into Massachusetts, towards England,
into the past, and from it. The air filled
with cold and we chose pumpkins at a stall.
Two, and two toys for Alfie. There was a card
explaining what their dollar for the cart
would get them: it would get them a ghost tale,
some spookiness in daytime. It had rolled
by then, that wagon. I could see its pale
brown halted speck from the highway, as if hell
were littleness, and they were being told.
The Game Alone
The Purple School and its sworn enemy
contend again. I sidle in among those
seeing it: alumni of the Purple,
and opposite numbers – literally, each class
in Magic Marker: womenfolk of ’70
proffer pies in frilled tents, in an oval
round the patterned field. I stroll a lap
in coat and scarf along the generations,
’80, ’64, grey men in sportswear,
already smiling at the leading question,
and thirty autumns pass as they look up
to hear announcements crackling from somewhere.
One mascot’s like a man, one’s like a bull.
The man’s huge plaster head is done to look
colonial, bewigged; he’s on the side
of everyone I’m sitting with, for luck,
while they deride him over there, they howl
and make bull horns, bent fingers to the head.
The Purple flag flies here. Both sides of course
are cheer-led by those girls and by this brute
who stomps along the stand in a tracksuit,
bellowing at the old folks to support.
Below, the game goes on and a side scores.
I think of asking how and decide not;
it suddenly feels like asking television,
though television knows. In fact I change,
stroll round, become a White-on-Scarlet guy,
why not. Our chant is going up – ‘Revenge!’ –
and a row of girls, all blonde and loyal and frozen,
try joining in just as it dies away.
I notice, when the game is in its times
of rest (again), that this whole bank of people
is gazing out across the churning river,
at a world where what is white is coloured purple,
but otherwise all’s well. A fresh face beams
to see its twin, souls gladden with a shiver.
From far away, from that wide field away,
the bucket-headed mascot from the past
turns all the rest to background. It’s a game,
you want to say when seeing him, when faced,
and your skull small. The stands and hills and sky
go darker than expected in the time,
for there’s a light that it can seem the game
alone is generating. A great cheer
on mine – the bull side – and it almost ends,
with the old-timers wobbling up to roar,
vocabulary boiled down to a name,
and it does end, when thirty-seven seconds
vanish from the screen – a voice confides,
they’re running down the clock – far over there,
the crowd leaps up, and over here it sits.
The field lets go its lines; it doesn’t care
who scampers on to form the ring of weeds
around a violet mushroom-crop of helmets,
or the off-white and muddy red melee
disintegrating to some weary boys
bareheaded between parents. Now it’s cold
and finished. Down among the beaten guys
three girls are searching. All their jerseys say
ATHLETICS in the dusk. They find and hold
their treasures, 45, 8, 84,
and try to speak that body language, bowed
dismay, though in a secret swirl of joy
to be the one despondent at his side.
The winners melt away and can have more.
The losers hold the field. Too suddenly
for some, here comes the Purple flag, the guy
is taunting us – not us, I mean my side –
by streaming it below our wooden stand,
lording it with something not quite pride,
more personal, all his. As he runs by,
this White-on-Scarlet, talking with a friend,
shoots out a hand that gets it, jerks the cloth
half off its stick, and stops him in his track.
I’m very near. The victor is amazed
that happened and is grinning but in shock,
his eyes wondering What now? They are both
lost for an act. The third one’s realised,
and, setting free the flag, averts a scene.
So the bearer wanders on, unsure, long fields
between him and his home. No one close by
knows quite what’s to be done with what he feels;
they file away in time, treading the green
homewards, passing strangers on the way,
contemporaries from the long-rivalled school,
or their own schoolmates who were in the future.
All things have been exchanged, and I can’t see
by now who’d cheered for what. It seems much darker
than anyone could play in. A tall girl
is carrying the bull mask by the eye,
and as I look back nothing in the stands
can stay. Things seem to drain in unison
down the field and chuckle through the gates,
things tilted from the world. The feeling’s gone;
I’m left with it. I scribble with blue hands
and head home through a car park, by fog lights.
Refugees in Massachusetts
Everyone had to leave in a bloody hurry.
No one had to come here. Those that did –
the ones who should be sorry were not sorry.
The ones who shouldn’t be
run restaurants or laundromats or serve you
shyly in the mall. Exquisite hands
show you your change. Or chattily they drive you
when you’re too tired to say,
when all the diddy icons on the dashboard
tremble. It’s your town and not your town
when you leave tips for them. What’s barely whispered
where they meet is true:
they might encounter
him from the old world,
who came at night, who giggled at their papers . . .
Might see him smoking by the baseball field,
padding towards the diner,
lip-reading in the library. That man
escaped here, he too sobbed or stared ahead,
made landfall; he eats pretzels in the line.
They are aware he’s there
both when he is and isn’t there. No crimes
will stick in the new life. There is no court
in session for the narratives and claims
their voices split to make,
no angles to examine. There are times
they jump and times they clasp. There is a wood
they come to in a downpour, or have dreams
they come to in a downpour.
The Flood Towns
At the midnight of the August day appointed,
a thousand or so
remaining inhabitants of the doomed towns
popped champagne
at the abrupt cessation of town business,
of community
in any legal sense, the last agreement
being that spree
till two o’clock, when all at once car headlamps
lit the hillside.
And in the morning those who had been ready
were gone,
leaving behind eight ragged families
with nowhere else
to be, and these it would have been who heard
the very first
tinkering of rain upon the rooftops,
or saw its fingers
spot the windows, sniffed it through the door
opened to save
the washing, and perhaps it did sound different,
the rain this time,
not because it was fiercer, more aware
than former rain,
but because it fell for hours in the hearing
of folk who knew
none in heaven or earth with any stake
in stopping it.
A Hunting Man
Nothing but snow about. A hunting man
set out from his own truck and his sleeping son,
who followed him, found no one, and was found
five days later frozen to the ground.
His father had been nothing but a fool.
He went about his chores, he went to school
for nothing, and he waited in his truck.
The days were featureless and the nights black
he drove into. He hunted in that place,
he camped there in the trees, he heard the ice
shifting in the branches. ‘Not the best,’
his sister told a lady from the press,
‘the thing he did,’ and chatted on the path.
But he’d assured her that his Christian faith
prevented him from carrying out his will.
A judge considered thirty days in jail
appropriate for manslaughter. The man
dissented, and some yards from where his son
was found he shot himself. Nothing but snow
about, nothing but trees, nowhere to go.
Peace is as poor a word for what he has
as Silence is for what it signifies.
Justice softens to sweet nothings here.
Love holds its own, admit it, as before.
The Year in Pictures
For the Year-in-Pictures feature,
that annual old favourite,
the man behind the night desk
was dealing with five thousand
possibles at high speed,
a speed at which his blond head
was shaking and his fingers
propelling off so many
the air was never empty
of the white-backed and numbered
snapshots as they fluttered
earthward in succession.
The Only Work
in memory of Agha Shahid Ali
When a poet leaves to see to all that matters,
nothing has changed. In treasured places still
he clears his head and writes.
None of his joie-de-vivre or books or friends
or ecstasies go with him to the piece
he waits for and begins,
nor is he here in this. The only work
that bonds us separates us for all time.
We feel it in a handshake,
a hug that isn’t ours to end. When a verse
has done its work, it tells us there’ll be one day
nothing but the verse,
and it tells us this the way a mother might
inform her son so gently of a matter
he goes his way delighted.
This is for him, the writer, him I term
the creature of two feet, for he’d present
his face two feet away. He made a warm
glow to see by, willing and well-meant,
but not, I’d have to say, for the long haul.
Things he began were things I’d have to end,
I sensed immediately. When I recall
the touch of what he did with his near hand
the mood comes over me, but the mood goes,
and that reminds me too. November days
the thought of him resolves into a voice
that states it matters now – so does the wind,
but neither moves a muscle of my face
before it dies as if it read my mind.
Hide and Seek
Of all the things to win at. There I am,
Immobilised except for my young gut,
Which does its jellyfish and does its clam
Because you’ve come to double-check the hut:
And the relief is evangelical
That I can breathe again and show my face,
Until all other faces show that all
Are found and mine was the last hiding-place.
Then many draw to it as to a shrine,
In glum approval, jealous but sincere,
That of the silences you favoured mine,
And the last thing that mattered mattered here.
The Surnames
for Matthew Bell
There being no word to hand without its hole for light,
its origins, its loss as I set eyes on it,
there being nothing that had come to nothing else,
I took the recollected way to school and back.
It was a clear day, in that it felt cleared for this,
and hedges neat and hedges ragged passed me by.
The streets were lanes again, the houses cottages,
my life so far a daydream of a life ahead,
my life ahead at home in what had gone before,
my hands in pockets for a mile of afternoon.
These afternoons are gifted but are left alone
to dabble in the sun. The thing they leave to dry
is their own town in childhood and its look in age.
Each cottage brought a name and surname into mind.
Each surname brought a face and a recalled event
that made it catch my eye, hang like a coat of arms
a moment. At the pace I walked, the pace at which
they slip the mind, the surnames might instead have been
white crosses in a formal line, where proper nouns
and silence meet and all that comes of it are flowers.
A Promise
I made my child a promise, so a weight
was passed to her. I saw how carefully
its power was handled, that it lit the thoughts
around it, and I felt it warm her talk
and urge the hours along. Since I, like you,
no longer know a word like that, the light
she gained was lost to me. It didn’t mean
I’d let her down – I didn’t – but I seemed
to b
e aligned with those who might in time,
as if I’d somehow set coordinates.
A Child’s Wedding Song
Thumb and finger make a ring
to see the future through.
I can see the world through it,
only the world and you,
only the world and you alone.
If I should break this ring,
where will I find you in the world
though I find everything?
One of the Splendours
The bloom between blue-pink and cherry-pink
on our north wall was new, began, was out –
one of the splendours made to make us think
it’s time to learn some names. We’d done without
since coming here in winter, in the grey.
The bird with the three semi-tones, the bird
that seems to be half air, the butterfly
that seems to be half everything but word –