I can’t remember if this happened yet
but the King came in and cleared out all his pals and sat
with everything akimbo and said Do the bit
where I love you, little señorita, cut to it.
So I told him what had happened, I mean hadn’t yet,
and it was the longest time this man had ever sat
for anything. He roared I now believe that bit!
He wanted astonishment from me so I went for it.
I asked him if he’d got round to believing yet
that he’d be slaughtered where he stood. Or where I sat?
he chuckled, and I sat corrected. Just a bit,
he murmured, I’m the King, of course I’ll swing for it . . .
But I’m going to free you, girl! I wouldn’t do that yet,
I said, and someone came and served us as we sat
in lovely sunlight, then he dozed a little bit,
so I said, Your wife will kill you. He said, Go for it
mine angel. I do know, but didn’t quite know yet
if that meant her or me. My little black cat sat
on Agamemnon’s lap and bathed himself a bit.
She’ll kill you in your bath. Will you join me in it?
he giggled. You will love me, sir, I said, and yet
you’ll never have me. (This is the last time we sat
face to face.) ’Cause you won’t get it up. He bit
his nails and stood. You gypsy bitch you don’t know shit.
Hometown Mystery Cycle
for Claire Messud and James Wood
But I was one of the children told
they play the Creation on Applecroft Road
while Abel is battered on Barleycroft Lane
and if I go with him he’ll cop it again
at the top of Old Drive. If I stay with the Ark
I’ll have seen a good twenty-one Floods before dark,
but I know the place well as the front of my hand
so I watch it in zigzag and still understand.
The dawn’s coming up over Handside Green
as Hell’s being harrowed by Christ in sunscreen,
but another one rising by pulley-and-rope
at the corner of Mannicotts isn’t the bloke
who Thomas is gaping at over his eggs
on a little white trestle on wobbly legs
by the scout hut on Guessens. The stone’s rolled away
as slowly as you can roll papier-maché,
and Judas is keeping his anorak zipped
as he checks on his lines in a ragged old script.
Pilate is bicycling by. If we’re quick
we can leg it to Lazarus, set up our picnic,
still be in time for the beauty they’ve got to
assault with tomatoes till Jesus says not to.
Over the chimneys we hear as we hurry
the loudspeaker crackle the usual story
about a lost child, and we chuckle and say
You’ll be late to an angel we pass on the way.
We hop all the hedges of Attimore Street,
where a girl who got rid of me rinses His feet,
and it’s too much to take so I plod to the pool,
for the Slaughter of half my old nursery school,
but they lie there and giggle, they’re clearly okay,
to the fury of someone who’s ‘Herod today
and John tomorrow’ I joke to my mates
but they’ve spotted the Virgin in wraparound shades,
and we pass the Three Wise Men, muddled by props
in the shade of an alleyway down by the shops.
Afternoon tires of us, everyone tires;
I hang around people who hang around fires;
three mothers attempt to look vaguely surprised
He is striding already up Mandeville Rise;
but the little girl chosen Star-Girl for the day –
Has anyone seen her? – the drunken PA
is trying to be serious and nobody has.
The imbecile doing Balaam and his Ass
is playing for laughs so he’s not getting any.
Judgment is here, they’ve unloaded already.
Satan is making a meal of a yawn.
We rush up to God Hey we saw you at dawn!
So how’s the day been? and, to illustrate how,
He ploughs an old finger across an old brow
and puffs out His cheeks like we might blow away
but we don’t understand so we nod and we stay;
we are gravely observing the fools in their cart,
then they go and it’s quiet and He says Can we start?
to nobody really. Just one more to go,
but we’ve ticked every box so we’ve seen every show
and it’s chaos again as it is every year
with the carts in a ditch and Whose bloody idea
was this in the first place? somebody bawls
in the queue for the luminous-necklace stalls,
but he can’t really mean it, he has paper wings
his daughters deface with embarrassing things;
he’s played about every last role in the Cycle
(he’d never been Michael but now he’s been Michael)
and someone is holding a ladder that trembles
and someone has wound a great zero of cables
around his strong arm, and he stares in my eyes
as I say Weren’t you Peter? which yes he denies
and someone is binding the Cross to a Jeep
and someone is bearing a burden asleep
with a garland of foil and a cellophane star,
who, in other versions, is found in a bar
and in at least one is found stabbed in a pit.
You know your own villages: write your own shit.
I’ve never done much and I didn’t do this,
but you asked where I come from and that’s where it is.
Thinking: Earth
So I was thinking: Earth.
And I was earthed as any poet is
by the word alone in its own empty space.
Earth. How the word begins
with force, as breath
begins and its vowel lasts
as dreams do – or the pauses between numbers –
for as long as the brain can take it. How it closes
as the tongue steps to the teeth,
presses and rests
till the air is gone. Earth.
Seen only in its spot by pilots strapped
for oxygen, their exhalations trapped
inside a crystal ball,
some ghost of myth
foreshadowed in a scribble
on a cave-wall. My garden’s going south
by sixty miles a year, and the caught breath
of botanists – as strains
mutate, redouble –
itself would power a mill
when they next gasp. Between twin hegemons
of ice and sand we wait, where the mindful seasons,
autumntime, springtime,
lie down a while,
old exiled diplomats
whose answers were too intricate, too rich
for the liking of the tsar. Now on the edge
of deserts they endure
odd tête-à-têtes.
*
I fly above the earth
today, dreaming a moment when I’m old,
though living one undreamed-of as a child,
a sliver of pure luck,
freedom, health,
statistically safe,
and yet aghast and tethered by the fibres
to everything. We’ll chat to our dead forebears,
drawn to the life, on screens,
soon enough.
On we fly until,
brilliant and sleepy between meals,
we come to land on islands green as apples.
We chat on the horizon’s
infinity-pool.
At night on jet-black screens,
if, as we slither back in our own choosing,
we accidentally click on Channel Nothing,
we might just spot through crackle
of descending lines
what seems to be foul liquid
spreading over sand, but we’re aware
was taken from ten miles in the air,
and is a million people
run ragged.
*
Earth. I have a daughter.
Heaven’s what I say it is for her.
Telling her is all it is so far
for me. My only use
for the word forever
is in those conversations.
and now can’t seem to make the damn thing grow
anywhere, for patience
tries our patience.
That number on Times Square
plummets upward, digits to the right
are dim with speed. But the one on the far side
is locked at nil, as if
it thinks we’re there.
Graphs that all their lives
ran up and down like children now outreach
a lonely tentacle that leaves the page
to grope for something warm
where nothing lives.
And it’s been forty years,
eyeball to eyeball with the way we look,
blue and alone, bulb of a child awake,
wondering No, but what’s
behind the stars?
That casts me into space,
her father, the one opposite, old bloke
propped against a pillow on the dark,
helpless in the face of
her helpless face,
while, home on earth again,
scientists are furrowing their brows
so deep they are thought fools by folk who raise
hosannas to the sky
for Superman.
It Too Remains
You’ve gone. I mean you’re gone. You didn’t
have a say.
I don’t believe you’re anywhere and
while they pray
I picture you. The images push
forward one
to stand for all the rest, and when that’s
sort of done
a voice arrives, a tone of voice, a
certain note
I almost hear, can almost manage
in this throat.
And as of now that’s that and all I
feel is true
is you’re at peace. Whatever soul they’re
chanting to
once had a face and voice I gave it
and it too
remains at peace, only it’s now at
peace with you.
Dream-I-Believe
Dream-I-Believe I brought
out of the night still streaming
out It was real I was right!
Dream present still I could still
believe in, if I twisted
likelihood to serve it . . .
Dream that was gone I mourned
and quoted, sought and lingered
on sections to my liking.
Dream I had had depended
on puns, events, encounters
even to come to mind now.
I seemed to have held four faiths
by breakfast, and I’d packed them
fighting to their buses.
So I could sit exhausted,
stretching in the sunbeams
like my mother in the old days.
A Walk by the Neva
While the river gathers the many folds of its gown,
rises to sit and turns to stone,
the figureheads
on the rostral columns break out into brides
married in just a moment at the prow
of Vasilyesky Island. So
the city sails
in time: the buildings glide in parallels,
the giant dreams his dreams of Holland. Peter’s
work is always done and never,
never quite,
as another bridal party bustles into light
and the long white limos wait with their small bouquets,
of every tsar
in the sharp fortress on the farther shore.
The widest flow flows to a point, and here
there’s you, in a crumpled suit somewhere,
picking me out
of the line as a poet, there’s you on a party night
with your beautiful new bride This is my wife,
Mr Maxwell – the fact is, Joseph,
I didn’t know,
I thought you were having a laugh with a bloke and so
I stopped a waitress and said By the way here’s mine.
There’s a castle of drained pints in London
was it Highgate?
Hours of talk I don’t forget and do forget,
as the widest flow flows to a point. And here
I am, where you are never. The air
flutters the last
bride of the morning. I am the Wedding Guest
at we all know which wedding, always about
to follow the congregation out
into sunlight,
but held by something at the garden gate
until the lawn’s deserted and it’s dark.
When will it ever be fucking dark
in the month of June
in this town of yours? Never, and pretty soon.
The limo driver’s grinding a spotless shoe
on his dead cigarette and I knew you,
that’s all.
The bride is impatiently at the beck and call
of a cameraman. The tiles of the river are old
snapshots, silver and brown and curled,
moving and still,
rustling into the east, into the equal.
Cassandra
You. I won’t foresee for you one thing.
You staring into space, you moulding creatures.
You thinking if you stop it then the world ends.
Little old you, it does. Mine doesn’t, yours will.
But I won’t foresee for you, you won’t believe me.
You rub your eyes and write. You’ve not believed
life’s anything but a grin into the mist
for some time now, although you gasp at line-breaks
like something spoke to you. O it spoke to you.
I’m at your window now: I breathe the year
you’ll leave on the warm glass. Beyond my wild hair
blossoms the to-come but you’re so distracted,
you, by lips, by ways, you think like me –
wake with one face a sniff away forever,
speak the lines she speaks at the moment she
speaks these you speak and set your lips where she does,
then you’ll see nothing coming or becoming,
and all will be so well. – It will be well,
but I won’t let you hear that. If you hear it
you won’t believe it, there’s where our curses meet
like kisses. All will be well. You didn’t hear it,
you, therefore believe it, as your fingers
whittle at the keys to the bright screen,
as the windowpane goes cold and I move on,
trespassing away down your lawn,
over the wall and out across farmland.
Permissions acknowledgements
The publishers are grateful to the following for permission
to reproduce copyright material:
From Tale of the Mayor’s Son (Bloodaxe, 1990)
‘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’
From Out of the Rain (Bloodaxe, 1992)
‘We Billion Cheered’, ‘The Eater’, ‘Sport Story of a Winner’,
‘Plaint of the Elder Princes’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Out of the
Rain’, ‘Helene and Heloise’
From Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun (Faber, 1994)
‘Cine’, ‘Pyrois’, ‘Eous’, ‘Aethon’, ‘A Scientist Explains’,
‘Clymene’s Coda’, ‘Phlegon’
From Rest for the Wicked (Bloodaxe, 1995)
‘The Ginger-Haired in Heaven’, ‘Garden City
Quatrains’, ‘Invigilation’, ‘Love Made Yeah’, ‘Stargazing’,
‘Watching Over’, ‘The Sentence’, ‘Either’, ‘The Margit-Isle’,