bounce off the nails, they’ll say it’s no good
and in their white clothes they’ll swarm
all over the coffin-maker like angry ghosts.
There’s no need for it to be like this.
They could lend their tools to one another.
They could watch each other’s little shrines
in case the candle goes out. Instead they blow it out
and sourly scour the insides of another cheap
deal coffin for the common man.
How many golden coffins can anyone want?
Of those who appear at the alley-end,
they prefer the advance buyers. It takes know-how
to select a coffin for yourself.
‘In our family it’s cancer. Allow for shrinkage.’
‘Dropsy does us. Add it on to the width.’
Can a man know the shape of the wood
that will encase him? Can a woman
close her eyes and breathe in the scent of cedar?
These are the ones the coffin-makers like
to sit with by the spirit-lamp. For these they bring out
tea-plums, infuse Silver Needle
and drink before they do the measuring.
Time to compare wood-shavings,
rubbing their curls between the fingers. Meanwhile
man and wife from the flat upstairs
take their blue bird for a walk
to the evening park, still in its cage.
Inside out
Snug as a devil’s toenail embedded
in blue liass, plastic
in your movements as in dreams, you kick
for headiness at the rich
red walls that close on you like elastic.
But now they’ve shucked you out, bare-naked
in the devil’s kitchen, toes curled
flinching from chip scraps, ash,
lino sticky with beer tack,
the nail-on-nylon scrape of the cold world.
You are born, wed, dead, buried.
The wooden walls of your coffin
grip like hands, reassuring. You bang them
for joy that they’ll bang back, booming
that you’re hidden, hidden, hidden within.
The blessing
The halls are thronged, the grand staircase murmurous.
There’s a smell of close-packed bodies, lilac,
hair-gel and sweat. Handprints on the brass railings
fade like breath on a cold window.
Outside the city is stunned with snow.
There he is, just where he should be
by that leather-topped, deeply-scored table
where fortunes are lost and made. He explains,
and those at the back lean closer
to catch the ripple of laughter.
A joke, and the group dissolves
to stare, study, and point a finger.
He waits for them to catch up with him.
You need a guide, with so many rooms
and between them, so many turnings.
I am there too, but not speaking.
I wait while the paint peels,
alone with the pulse of a Matisse
and the sunlight beating full on us.
But perhaps I say this
as I see him hasten down another staircase:
‘You always had a blessing with you,
and you still have a blessing with you.
Keep moving. Go as fast as you can
and whatever I say, don’t listen.’
FROM
Bestiary
(1997)
For Stephen Mollett
and Stephanie Norgate
…I was at home
And should have been most happy, – but I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw
The greater on the less feeds evermore. –
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I far was gone.
Still am I sick of it, and tho’, to-day,
I’ve gather’d young spring-leaves, and flowers gay
Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,
Still do I that most fierce destruction see, –
The Shark at savage prey, – the Hawk at pounce, –
The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,
Ravening a worm…
Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds
Candle poem
(after Sa‘di Yusuf)
A candle for the ship’s breakfast
eaten while moving southward
through mild grey water
with the work all done,
a candle for the house seen from outside,
the voices and shadows
of the moment before coming home,
a candle for the noise of aeroplanes
going elsewhere, passing over,
for delayed departures, embarrassed silences
between people who love one another,
a candle for sandwiches in service stations
at four A.M., and the taste of coffee
from plastic cups, thickened with sugar
to keep us going,
a candle for the crowd around a coffin
and the terrible depth it has to fall
into the grave dug for everyone,
the deaths for decades to come,
our deaths; a candle for going home
and feeling hungry after saying
we would never be able to eat the ham,
the fruit cake, those carefully-buttered buns.
At the Emporium
He is the one you can count on
for yesterday’s bread, rolling tobacco
and the staccato
tick of the blinds
on leathery Wednesday afternoons.
He has hand-chalked boards with the prices
of Anchor butter and British wine.
He doesn’t hold with half-day closing.
He’s the king of long afternoons
lounging vested in his doorway.
He watches the children dwindle
and dawdle, licking icepops
that drip on the steps.
His would be the last face that saw them
before an abduction. Come in,
he is always open.
Next door
is the same as ours, but different.
Back to front stairs, and a bass that thuds
like the music of demolition
year after year, but the house
is still standing.
When we have parties they tense into silence,
though they are good at fighting.
After the last screech and slam, their children
play war on their scab of a lawn.
We are mirrors of one another,
never showing what’s real.
If I turn like this, quickly,
and look over the fence, what will I see?
He lived next door all his life
One year he painted his front door yellow.
It was the splash of a carrier bag
in the dun terrace,
but for the rest he was inconspicuous.
He went out one way and came back the other,
often carrying laundry and once compost
for the tree he thought might do in the back yard.
Some time later there was its skeleton
taking up most of the bin.
He passed the remark ‘It’s a pity’
when it rained on a Saturday,
and of a neighbour’s child he said ‘terror’.
He picked his words like scones from a plate,
dropping no crumbs. When his front door shut
he was more gone than last Christmas.
But for the girls stored in his cellar
to learn what it meant
to have no pity, to
be terror,
he was there.
Under the leaves
How rangy they are, and lean, these leaves
tasting and licking.
These leaves are leaping
the intersections of Crewe Junction
on the back of the September wind
shushing along the sidings.
This is a place of rust, where murder
spurts and dies down, where spikes
of stilettos lodge in the points.
Not pretty, not. What we saw
when we opened the binbag was not
a resurrection of leaves.
This is a country of policemen, slowly tramping
a line that doesn’t waver but vanishes
in teatime mist. Here the search
is begun, called off, resumed.
The tack of rain falling on plastic
will lead them home.
The surgeon husband
Here at my worktop, foil-wrapping a silver salmon
– yes, a whole salmon – I’m thinking
of the many bodies of women
that my husband daily opens.
Here he lunges at me in wellingtons.
He is up to his armpits, a fisherman
tugging against the strength of the current.
I imagine the light for him, clean,
and a green robing of willow
and the fish hammering upstream.
I too tug at the flaps of the salmon
where its belly was, trying to straighten
the silver seams before they are sewn.
We are one in our dreams.
The epidural is patchy, his assistant’s
handwriting is slipping. At eleven fifteen
they barb their patient to sleep, jot ‘knife to skin’,
and the nurse smiles over her mask at the surgeon.
But I am quietly dusting out the fish-kettle,
and I have the salmon clean as a baby
grinning at me from the table.
Fishing beyond sunset
The boy in the boat, the tip of the pole,
slow swing of the boat as the wash goes round
from other boats with lights on, heading home
to islands, from islands: anyway they come.
Thirty-four bass, small bass, not worth keeping.
See them in the water, the hang
of twice-caught fish playing dumb,
then the shake-off of air. The kickdown
always surprises you, makes your feet grip
on the planks of the boat. There is the line
disappearing into the sunset
or so it seems, but it is plumbed
by your finger, which sees nothing
but a breeze of line running through water.
Behind you a sheet of fire
does something to pole, to boat, to boy.
Hare in the snow
Hare in the snow cresting
the run of winter, stretching
in liquid leaps over the hill,
then the wind turns, and
hare stands so still
he is a freeze of himself, fooling
the shadows into believing
he is one of them.
Need
(a version from Piers Plowman: ‘The Pardon sent from Truth’)
I know that no one dare judge another’s need,
for need is our neighbour, blood to our bone:
the prisoner in Long Lartin, the poor of shantytown
bearing children, burdened by bad landlords,
struggling to scrape together what goes straight out
on rent, on never enough food for the children
who cry like crickets from hunger, night-long.
They slave while they’re sick with hunger,
wake in the damp of winter, crouch between wall and cradle
to rock the crying baby, their raw fingers
chapped with outworking, seaming denim
for half nothing, pitiful labour paid by the hour
which takes them nowhere, only to one more
half-hour’s heat on the meter, scraping and struggling,
working for nothing.
The misery of women in run-down hostels
the misery of the men crammed in with them
racked by the nothing that is all they have,
too proud to beg, to show they are slowly starving
withering away, their poverty hidden like AIDS,
a shame that must never be shown to their neighbours
a shame that has made strangers of neighbours
and hunger the only guest at all their meals.
The world has kicked into me the future
of children born into poverty’s welcome
to parents who have nothing but surplus labour,
empty hands, thoughts nobody wants.
Chips are their Sunday roast, dog-ends rolled up in Rizlas
damp down the parents’ hunger as they look on
while the kids eat baked beans and bacon.
By the State’s cold calculation
they could get by on carrots and bakers’ leavings.
Only love can help them.
These will not beg, but there are beggars
who shoot up everything they’re given
who have nothing at all wrong with them
who could perfectly well do a day’s work
who deserve no pity, no money, nothing.
Even if they collapse on the streets, coughing
from the come-back of ancient diseases
think nothing of it. Don’t be ashamed to walk past
with your wallet stuffed with credit cards
as the Bible says.
But yet. Look again. What about these beggars
who look perfectly all right, able to do a day’s work,
ought to be cleared off the streets – all that? And yet
some of them come from another world, or another time.
Care in the community is the cold calculation
that takes care of them. Stop. Look again.
They live by the phases of the moon
by an inner fire that will not leave them alone.
They are penniless as time and tide, wander with nothing
like the holy apostles, Peter and Paul.
They have no time for preaching or miracles
but they can speak in tongues if you listen,
and catch the wind of truth in the sails
of what seems like play.
God who can do anything
might have made them businessmen,
but instead he made them his own children
and sent them out with empty bank accounts
holey jeans and a blanket to wrap around them.
These secret disciples break all the rules but his,
the one rule that tells us to love, and give.
Think. You will even put up with poets
for the sake of their patrons, if these are rich men,
publishers who fancy culture, and keep a newspaper.
Think of the Lord of heaven who has sent his children
to be called madmen, and please him
if you can, by throwing some cash at them.
And think again. When you are begging
for God’s pardon, when the daylight after death
shines on your sins, think of them,
God’s secret children, born pardoned,
and what you did for them.
Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces
Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces
where I believe a mugger will not approach me
because so far no mugger has approached me
I stop to take breath.
The city exists by acts of faith
that we and our children are safe,
that the pounding wheels of cars will miss them,
that the traffic will s
top when the lights turn,
that parks will stay green, that money is not everything,
that the lime trees that line our streets are lopped and cropped
with the best of intentions,
that the orange glow of the streetlamps is moonlight
to that couple there, locked in each other, lost
in the city’s night-time suspension.
I should like to be buried in a summer forest
I should like to be buried in a summer forest
where people go in July,
only a bus ride from the city,
I should like them to walk over me
not noticing anything but sunlight
and patches of wild strawberries –
Here! Look under the leaves!
I should like the child who is slowest
to end up picking the most,
and the big kids will show the little
the only way to grasp a nettle
and pick it so it doesn’t sting.
I should like home-time to come
so late the bus has its lights on
and a cloud of moths hangs in their beam,
and when they are all gone
I should like to be buried in a summer forest
where the dark steps
blindfold, on cat foot-pads,
with the dawn almost touching it.
The scattering
First, the echo
at night, when I said