In The Poetry

Everyone knows that America is a continent but few Europeans realize the various and diverse parts of this land. The Saginaw Valley where I was born had been great lumbering country in the 1880s. It is very fertile flat country in Michigan and the principal towns, Saginaw and Flint, lie at the northern edge of what is now the central industrial area for the United States. It was to this region that my grandfather came in 1870 from Prussia where he had been Bismarck’s head forester. He and his sons started some greenhouses which became the most extensive in that part of America. It was a wonderful place for a child to grow up in and around – there were not only 25 acres in the town, mostly under glass and intensely cultivated, but farther out in the country was the last stand of virgin timber in the Saginaw Valley and elsewhere a wild area of cutover second growth timber which my father and uncle made into a small game preserve. As a child then, I had several worlds to live in which I felt were mine – one favourite place was a swampy corner of the game sanctuary where herons always nested. I put down one of my earliest memories in a poem about them.

The Heron

The heron stands in water where the swamp
Has deepened to the blackness of a pool,
Or balances with one leg on a hump
Of marsh grass heaped above a musk-rat hole.

He walks the shallow with an antic grace.
The great feet break the ridges of the sand,
The long eye notes the minnow’s hiding place.
His beak is quicker than a human hand.

He jerks a frog across his bony lip,
Then points his heavy bill above the wood.
The wide wings flap but once to lift him up.
A single ripple starts from where he stood

‘At the Grave of Asa Benveniste’ – Asa Benveniste was a Jewish poet from New York who spent the last years of his life in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire and when he died in the early 90s his widow, Agneta Falk, managed to fulfill his wish that he should be buried in Heptonstall churchyard and have a stone put on his grave. Heptonstall churchyard already has a poet’s grave, much visited and sometimes defaced. And this poem is dedicated to Fleur Adcock who visited the grave with me and to Agneta Falk.

At the Grave of Asa Benveniste

With Fleur Adcock and for Agneta Falk

Churchyard woman coming quickly from under the wall:
You’re looking for Plath. No question-mark.

no short way out of it but
follow the finger, stand
for a spell in the standing-place,

be seen, then duck off sidelong
to where under your stone
you’re remarked on less:

Asa, translucent Jew,
your eyebrows arched
so high as to hold
nothing excluded that might want in,

it’s proper to come your way
by deflection. Exquisite poet,
exquisite – will the language say this? -

publisher; not paid-up for a burial
with the Jews, nor wanting

to have your bones burned,
ground up and thrown, you’re here

in the churchyard annexe, somebody’s
hilltop field walled round, a place
like the vegetable garden of an old asylum,

lowered from the drizzle in the hour between
service and wake, inventions that made life
stand up on end and shake. The church

cleared for the People Show’s
deepest dignities, Kaddish
by Bernard Stone, alternate
cries striking the nave in brass -

Nuttall from the floor, from the rafters
Miles Davis. Your house filled up fast with stricken
friends muttering mischiefs up the stair
to the room where latterly
you’d lived mostly by the windows,

looking out, letting in, surrounded
by what used to be the bookshop stock,
priced up safe against buyers: I can’t have
anyone taking my good friends away from me.

Afloat on the mood all day, Judi
doing your looking out for you
for a spell. From the middle of the room
to the window and through it, steadily
up towards Bell House Moor. Downstairs,

barrelhouse music and booze. On. Everybody
freed to be with you in your house again, the clocks
seriously unhitched. And visible in the crush
through the dark afternoon, Ken Smith, suit
worn at a rakish angle, the face worn
lightly if at all. And on we go.

The stone’s as you asked for it:

FOOLISH ENOUGH TO HAVE BEEN A POET,
Asa,
your hat’s in the bathroom.

Another poem, really about aging. It’s called ‘Who’s Joking with the Photographer? Photographs of Myself Approaching Seventy”

Not my final face, a map of how to get there.
Seven ages, seven irreversible layers, each
subtler and more supple than a snake’s skin.
Nobody looks surprised when we slough off one
and begin to inhabit another.
Do we exchange them whole in our sleep, or
are they washed away in pieces, cheek by brow by chin,
in the steady abrasions of the solar shower?
Draw first breath, and time turns on its taps.
No wonder the newborn’s tiny face crinkles and cries:
chill, then a sharp collision with light,
the mouth’s desperation for the foreign nipple,
all the uses of eyes, ears, hands still to be learned
before the self pulls away in its skin-tight sphere
to endure on its own the tectonic geology of childhood.

Imagine in space-time irretrievable mothers viewing
the pensioners their babies have become.
“Well, that’s life, nothing we can do about it now.”
They don’t love us as much as they did, and
why should they? We have replaced them. Just as we’re
being replaced by big sassy kids in school blazers.
Meanwhile, Federal Express has delivered my sixth face -
grandmother’s, scraps of me grafted to her bones.
I don’t believe it. Who made this mess,
this developer’s sprawl of roads that can’t be retaken,
high tension wires that run dangerously under the skin?
What is it the sceptical eyes are saying to the twisted lips:
ambition is a clich

Tell of the Sad Derangement of the Mind

for Harold Pinter

Tell of the sad derangement of the mind.
The wheat is being harvested. The sun
Shines on the bales, unclouded, unconfined.
Work as brisk as hard is being done.
Cider’s drunk at night. Documents are signed.
The bedrooms warm. No licences on fun.
Tell of the sad derangement of the mind.
Tell of the sorrow nations cannot mend.

Tell of the sad derangement of the heart.
The wind is up and musical. The sky
Rolls over meadows, over cities, over cart
And Cadillac, the sanctum and the sty.
The blossom in the garden is not a thing apart.
Dinner’s in the oven. Friends are dropping by.
Tell of the sad derangement of the heart.
Tell of the sorrow when nations have to part.

Tell of the sad derangement of the soul.
The wine is on the table. The talk is fine.
There’s lamplight in the corner, the glowing coal,
Laughter from the kitchen, washing on the line.
Gourmets (fit to twist a knowing nostril) stroll
The happy halls. There’s music. Pass the wine.
Tell of the sad derangement of the soul.
Tell of the sorrow when nations lose control.

Tell of the sad derangement of the man.
Sleep is in the doorway, and the night
Closes behind it. The fondest lovers yawn,
Fold themselves in beds both neighbourly and right.
A sanctuary of starlight protects them as they scan
The inner world of dreams, before the morning light.
Tell of the sad derangement of the man.
Tell of the sorrow before the world began.

The Farrier

Blessing himself with his apron,
the leather black and tan of a rain-beaten bay,
he pinches a roll-up to his lips and waits

for the mare to be led from the field to the yard,
the smoke slow-turning from his mouth
and the wind twisting his sideburns in its fingers.

She smells him as he passes, woodbine, metal and hoof,
careful not to look her in the eye as he runs his hand
the length of her neck, checking for dust on a lintel.

Folding her back leg with one arm, he leans into her flank
like a man putting his shoulder to a knackered car,
catches the hoof between his knees

as if it’s always just fallen from a table,
cups her fetlock and bends,
a romantic lead dropping to the lips of his lover.

Then the close work begins; cutting moon-sliver clippings,
excavating the arrow head of her frog,
filing at her sole and branding on a shoe

in an apparition of smoke,
three nails gritted between his teeth,
a seamstress pinning the dress of the bride.

Placing his tools in their beds,
he gives her a slap and watches her leave,
awkward in her new shoes, walking on strange ground.

The sound of his steel, biting at her heels.

Catmint Tea

The cat and I are quite alike, these winter nights:
I consult thesauruses; he forages for mice.
He prowls the darkest corners, while I throw the dice
Of rhyme and rummage through the OED’s delights.

He’s all ears and eyes and whiskery antennae
Bristling with the whispered broadcast of the stars,
And I have cruised the ocean of a thousand bars,
And trawled a thousand entries at the dawn of day.

I plucked another goose-quill from the living wing
And opened up my knife, while Cat unsheathed his claws.
Our wild imaginations started to take wing.

We rolled in serendipity upon the mat.
I forged a chapter of the Universal Laws.
Then he became the man, and I became the cat.

Sun Pictorial

How formal and polite,
How grave they look, burdened with earnest thoughts,
In all these set-up sepia stills,
Almost as if, embarrassed and contrite
To be caught practising their fatal skills,
They’d stepped aside from slaughter for these other shots.

The American Civil War,
The first war captured by the photograph
In real time. Even the dead
Seem somehow decorous, less to deplore
The sump of blood to which their duty bled
Than to apologize, humbled, in our behalf.

We know how otherwise
It was. They knew it then. The gauche onset
Of murderously clumsy troops,
Dismemberment by cannon, the blown cries
Through powder smoke, mayhem of scattered groups
In close engagement’s pointblank aim and bayonet.

How far from then we’ve come.
The beauties of the Baghdad night still stun
Me: a blue screen where guns and jets
Unloose the lightnings of imperium-
Intense enough to challenge a minaret’s
Aquamarine mosaic in the blinded sun

At noon-and smart bombs fall
Through walls to wipe the city street by street.
Morning, and in the camera’s light
The formal corpses ripen. Who can recall
By day precisely what they watched last night?
Or find the unknown soldier in a field of wheat?

Being surplus, like the killed,
Millions of those old plates were simply dumped.
And in a modern version of ’swords
To ploughshares’, many were reused to build
Greenhouses, ranged and set in place as wards
Above the rife tomatoes as they blushed and plumped,

While, through the daily sun’s
Pictorial walls and roofs, the long, desired,
Leaf-fattening light fell down, to pore
Upon the portraits of these veterans
Until their ordered histories of the war
Were wiped to just clear glass or what the crops transpired.

My eldest brother is a doctor – I was a schoolboy when he was a medical student and one day he came back from working in the operating theatre in Cardiff when he was a dresser to a well-known brain surgeon by the name of Lambert Rogers. He came back as I say and told us a very strange story, a haunting story, and years passed and it still haunted me and eventually I put down what he said in this poem. You ought to know that brain surgery is done under a local anaesthetic – it was so since the First World War, this for blood pressure reasons. The operation in question took place in 1938 when they didn’t have the scanning devices they now have which can pick out a lesion in the brain very cleverly, whereas in the past sometimes a surgeon, searching for the tumour or whatever it was, broke down more brain tissue than was necessary. ‘In the theatre’ – a true incident.

In the theatre

‘Only a local anaesthetic was given because of the blood pressure problem. The patient, thus, was fully awake throughout the operation. But in those days – in 1938, in Cardiff, when I was Lambert Rogers’ dresser – they could not locate a brain tumour with precision. Too much normal brain tissue was destroyed as the surgeon crudely searched for it, before he felt the resistance of it…all somewhat hit and miss. One operation I shall never forget…’

Sister saying – ‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’
sister thinking – ‘Only two more on the list,’
the patient saying – ‘Thank you, I feel fine’;
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain.

If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;
more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path;
Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;
his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,
a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’

Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’ -
the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.

‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go – till the antique
gramaphone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow,’…leave…my…soul…alone…’
to cease at last when something other died.
And silence matched the silence under snow.

Birmingham River

Where’s Birmingham river? Sunk.
Which river was it? Two. More or less.

History: we’re on our tribal ground. When they
moved in from the Trent, the first English

entered the holdings and the bodies of the people
who called the waters that kept them alive

Tame, the Dark River, these English spread their works
southward then westward, then all ways

for thirty-odd miles, up to the damp tips of the thirty-odd
weak headwaters of the Tame. By all of the Tame

they settled, and sat, named themselves after it:
Tomsaetan. And back down at Tamworth, where the river

almost began to amount to something,
the Mercian kings kept their state. Dark

because there’s hardly a still expanse of it
wide enough to catch the sky, the Dark River

mothered the Black Country and all but
vanished underneath it, seeping out from the low hills

by Dudley, by Upper Gornal, by Sedgley, by
Wolverhamptom, by Bloxwich, dropping morosely

without a shelf or a race or a dip,
no more than a few feet every mile, fattened

a little from mean streams that join at
Tipton, Bilston, Willenhall, Darlaston,

Oldbury, Wednesbury. From Bescot
She oozes a border round Handsworth

where I was born, snakes through the flat
meadows that turned into Perry Barr,

passes through Witton, heading for the city
but never getting there. A couple of miles out

she catches the timeless, suspended
scent of Nechells and Saltley—coal gas,

sewage, smoke—turns and makes off
for Tamworth, caught on the right shoulder

by the wash that’s run under Birmingham,
a slow, petty river with no memory of an ancient

name; a river called Rea, meaning river,
and misspelt at that. Before they merge

they’re both steered straight, in channels
that force them clear of the gasworks. And the Tame

gets marched out of town in the policed calm
that hangs under the long legs of the M6.

These living rivers
turgidly watered the fields, gave

drink; drove low-powered mills, shoved
the Soho Works into motion, collected waste

and foul waters. Gave way to steam,
collected sewage, factory poisons. Gave way

to clean Welsh water, kept on collecting
typhoid. Sank out of sight

under streets, highways, the black walls of workshops;
collected metals, chemicals, aquicides. Ceased

to draw lines that weren’t cancelled or unwanted; became
drains, with no part in anybody’s plan.

I owe these two poems to human voices I heard at different times on NPR (National Public Radio). I tried to catch the flavour and in some cases the parlances of what they said. The first one was a woman whose language I didn’t know – her English was pretty fractured and it was immediately compelling because you couldn’t tell to what degree the facture of the English was a question of her command of the language or a question of the pressure of the event she was talking about.

Acts of God

I. Tornado

I said the people come inside.
They would be safe in the room.
So many of those people die.
You can see my guilt.

I could see
hands to a lady moving.
I knew the lady.
You can see my guilt.

Sometimes I want to run, to get
away from it. I ask forgiveness
night and day. I ask it from
the cemetery. I can never
dream this storm away.

It was over for maybe minutes.
Then it was never over.

II. Lightning

It pushed me backward, I could see
my friends go backward too,
as from a blast, but slowly,
very slowly, everything
was in a different time.

It burned inside my body.
I could feel my hands
curl up. My pocket got
on fire. I didn’t want to reach in there
and take a handful of the hot: my money hurt.

I’m different now forever. Put that fact
into your book. My hair used to be straight.
My eyes – you see? They’re gray as ash.
They used to be light blue. You live,

if you’re lucky, but take my word:
It changes how you look.