In The Poetry

The Pines of Rome

As ghosts of old legionaries, of the upright
farmers of that unbelievable republic,
the pines entail their roots among the rubble
of baroque and modern Rome.

Out by the catacombs they essay a contradiction,
clattering their chariot-blade branches to deny
the Christian peace, the tourist’s easy frisson,
a long transfiguration.

Look away from Agnes and the bird-blind martyrs,
the sheep of God’s amnesia, the holy city
never built, to the last flag of paganism
flying in mosaic.

Then say the pines, though we are Papal like the chill
water of the aqueducts, refreshment from a state
divinity, we know that when they tombed the martyrs
they ambushed them with joy.

Rome is all in bad taste and we are no exception
is their motto. Small wonder that Respighi, ‘the last Roman’,
adds recorded nightingales to his score The Pines
of the Janiculum.

And the scent of pines as we dine at night
among the tethered goats and the Egyptian waiters
is a promise that everything stays forever foreign
which settles down in Rome.

Therefore I nominate a Roman pine to
stand above my slab, and order a mosaic
of something small and scaly to represent
my soul on its last journey.

‘The Yellow Palm’ is a poem that really describes my experiences on Al-Rashid street in Baghdad when I was walking up and down Al-Rashid street in 1998. It’s a ballad, it’s an Audenesque kind of ballad with Audenesque rhymes.

The Yellow Palm

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I watched a funeral pass -
all the women waving lilac stems
around a coffin made of glass
and the face of the man who lay within
who had breathed a poison gas.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I heard the call to prayer
and I stopped at the door of the golden mosque
to watch the faithful there
but there was blood on the walls and the muezzin’s eyes
were wild with his despair.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I met two blind beggars
And into their hands I pressed my hands
with a hundred black dinars;
and their salutes were those of the Imperial Guard
in the Mother of all Wars.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I smelled the wide Tigris,
the river smell that lifts the air
in a city such as this;
but down on my head fell the barbarian sun
that knows no armistice.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I saw a Cruise missile,
a slow and silver caravan
on its slow and silver mile,
and a beggar child turned up his face
and blessed it with a smile.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
under the yellow palms
I saw their branches hung with yellow dates
all sweeter than salaams,
and when that same child reached up to touch,
the fruit fell in his arms.

Songs of a Quiet Woman

lurching delicate as a snow queen down this street of greys
unfocussed exactly enough to miss the businessmen
goggling at my stocking deciding
(as I twitch primly into the tram seat my handbag
nestled on my lap like a puppy) deciding
this will be a day of minor survivals:
etching a bloody mouth in fluorescent mirrors
or idly lacquering a hand of claws:
small weapons for a small war

*

there is one streetlight which always
blinks off whenever I walk near it
coming home late and secretarial
to the hint of cats and cooking -
silently inside me something flexes
something unsurprised

*

men of course lately they are kind to me
although an acid starting in my sweat
erodes me like an argument:
snatched by hesitation in a shop
eloquent and secret with the smell of him
I feel sureness swelling like a bruise
forcing blood into lips breathless and reverent
this pearl in the corruption of my belief

*

(yes please no trouble thankyou mother
it’s been a pleasure because I do not know
how to be angry or ugly mother -
granny addled with sherry under bombs
in Winchester never raised her voice
or said a word back to your father
no matter what woman or what insults:
her eighty year old skin is white and powdered
and now she pisses in the basin mother
and I know the proper way to lay tables)

*

to other things I turn the eye of god.
the tv’s gorgon eye has glazed me over
and nothing touches me at all:
not famine fire fear or revolution.
only a shellshocked child in Beirut
firmly stroked to stillness by a nun.
he stared at her with eyes as black as hunger.
I wept then for the simple magic of hands

*

the routine of coffee the complicity
of cigarettes and gossip
this gentle leaning over narrow tables
into the sly glass of recognition:
I know I am dishonest in my dress
(she says to me) I know I am dishonest
but all I ever knew was how to lie

I don’t speak English. I don’t even speak the French I was taught. Shoes aren’t les chaussures here. They’re les goddesses, l’eau is la flotte, le vin is le pinard. My head is inside out; English used to be in deep and French outside. I’ve stopped translating. I don’t think ‘let’s go’ and turn it into on y va. On y va is all I’ve got. And it’s the same with j’en sais rien, moi, and n’y'en a plus and ca y est. I don’t know what the English is doing. I think it’s dying. The French is pushing it out of its seat in the middle where it thought it was safe. It thought it was in charge and now it isn’t.

Getting Older

The first surprise: I like it.
Whatever happens now, some things
that used to terrify have not:

I didn’t die young, for instance. Or lose
my only love. My three children
never had to run away from anyone.

Don’t tell me this gratitude is complacent.
We all approach the edge of the same blackness
which for me is silent.

Knowing as much sharpens
my delight in January freesia,
hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say

as we lie close on some gentle occasion:
every day won from such
darkness is a celebration.

This poem is called ‘The Lammas Hireling’. It’s based on a story I heard when I was in Northern Ireland, out for a very late night walk, a local person pointed out a house he told me was where the local witches used to live, and in their tradition witches would change into hares, and when the father was dying, his family was very embarrassed because the father’s body was turning into a hare’s and this bloke told me the story said he attended the funeral and the last thing you could hear was the hare’s paws beating the lid of the coffin as they lowered it into the ground. Hare stories are sort of found all over England and Europe in fact. There’s one rhyme in this that I suppose it might be helpful for people to have pointed out, and that’s the one “to go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow, muckle care”- that’s from the Annals of Pursuit which is a North Country witches’ chant, restored by Robert Graves. “A cow with leather horns” is another name for a hare – if you think about it you’ll see why. The story is: a farmer gets a young man from a hiring fair, which is how labour was engaged well into the last century, and takes him home with him, and finds he’s got more than he bargained for.

The Lammas Hireling

After the fair, I’d still a light heart
And a heavy purse, he struck so cheap.
And cattle doted on him; in his time,
Mine only dropped heifers, fat as cream.
Yields doubled. I grew fond of company
That knew when to shut up. Then one night,

Disturbed from dreams of my dear late wife,
I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form,
Stock-still in the light from the dark lantern,
Stark naked but for the fox-trap biting his ankle.
I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns.
To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow,

The wisdom runs, muckle care. I levelled
And blew the small hour through his heart.
The moon came out. By its yellow witness
I saw him fur over like a stone mossing.
His lovely head thinned/ His top lip gathered.
His eyes rose like bread. I carried him

In a sack that grew lighter at every step
And dropped him from a bridge. There was no
Splash. Now my herd’s elf-shot. I don’t dream
But spend my nights casting ball from half-crowns
And my days here. Bless me Father, I have sinned.
It has been an hour since my last confession.

Fox

I needed fox Badly I needed
a vixen for the long time none had come near me
I needed recognition from a
triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes
fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said she had run through
I was in want of fox

And the truth of briars she had to have run through
I craved to feel on her pelt if my hands could even slide
past or her body slide between them sharp truth distressing surfaces of fur
lacerated skin calling legend to account
a vixen’s courage in vixen terms

For a human animal to call for help
on another animal
is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth
come a long way down
Go back far enough it means tearing and torn endless and sudden
back far enough it blurts
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child
pushed out of a female the yet-to-be woman

1998

Dear Bryan Wynter

1

This is only a note
To say how sorry I am
You died. You will realise
What a position it puts
Me in. I couldn’t really
Have died for you if so
I were inclined. The carn
Foxglove here on the wall
Outside your first house
Leans with me standing
In the Zennor wind.

Anyhow how are things?
Are you still somewhere
With your long legs
And twitching smile under
Your blue hat walking
Across a place? Or am
I greedy to make you up
Again out of memory?
Are you there at all?
I would like to think
You were all right
And not worried about
Monica and the children
And not unhappy or bored

2

Speaking to you and not
Knowing if you are there
Is not too difficult.
My words are used to that.
Do you want anything?
Where shall I send something?
Rice-wine, meanders, paintings
By your contemporaries?
Or shall I send a kind
Of news of no time
Leaning against the wall
Outside your old house.

The house and the whole moor
Is flying in the mist.

3

I am up. I’ve washed
The front of my face
And here I stand looking
Out over the top
Half of my bedroom window.
There almost as far
As I can see I see
St Buryan’s church tower.
An inch to the left, behind
That dark rise of woods,
Is where you used to lurk.

4

This is only a note
To say I am aware
You are not here. I find
It difficult to go
Beside Housman’s star
Lit fences without you.
And nobody will laugh
At my jokes like you.

5

Bryan, I would be obliged
If you would scout things out
For me. Although I am not
Just ready to start out.
I am trying to be better,
Which will make you smile
Under your blue hat.

I know I make a symbol
Of the foxglove on the wall.
It is because it knows you.

I once fell to contemplating, at Brook Cottage, our fine old plank door. It suddenly seemed significant, related to life and death. The cromlech in this poem is a prehistoric structure, stone uprights and a block of stone on top, looking rather like a doorway in, say, the open landscape of Wales. The door of the living room of our house opens directly into the landscape.

The Door

Too little
has been said
of the door, its one
face turned to the night’s
downpour and its other
to the shift and glisten of firelight.

Air, clasped
by this cover
into the room’s book,
is filled by the turning
pages of dark and fire
as the wind shoulders the panels, or unsteadies that burning.

Not only
the storm’s
breakwater, but the sudden
frontier to our concurrences, appearances,
and as full of the offer of space
as the view through a cromlech is.

For doors
are both frame and monument
to our spent time,
and too little
has been said
of our coming through and leaving by them.

Corpse

This is my body, me, splayed
on the road’s crown like a shot bird.

Back street. No cars. Men step
over me, dogs and crows investigate.

My eyes gape. Circuitry of soul
is broken. I am in an odd shape

- twisted star – a pose I could never
strike in life. Gymnastic, almost.

This double-jointedness in death
soon tightens as the muscles lock.

My face cracks in the sun.
My hands point up and down the street,

as if to say “I came from here,
and there was where I headed…”

Pregnant with its own ferment,
my gut swells a blue uniform.

I do not recall the battle, army,
cause. I cannot see a bullet-hole.

There is a voice nearby – not loud.
The sky – not bright – is green with storms.