In The Poetry

This is a group of poems is taken from my cycle about some of the people, seen from a child’s perspective, living in the lightly disguised village I call Waterslain – that’s an old Norfolk word meaning ‘flooded’. ‘Diz’, Sheila Disney, had a moustache and she used to catch her breakfast with her feet. She taught me to swim and she scared me stupid. ‘Shuck’ is a huge black dog – a Norfolk relative as it were of the Lancashire Skriker and the Warwickshire Hooter and the mythical Norse wolf, Fenrir. In ‘Beachcomber’ Aegir is the Norse god of the oceans, the Norse Poseidon.

Diz

Easterlies have sandpapered her larynx.

Webbed fingers, webbed feet:
last child of a seal family.

There is a blue flame at her hearth, blue
mussels at her board.
Her bath is the gannet’s bath.

Rents one windy room at the top of a ladder.
Reeks of kelp.

‘Suffer the little children,’ she barks
and the children – all the little ones -
are enchanted.

She has stroked through the indigo of
Dead Man’s Pool
and returned with secrets.

They slip their moorings. They
tack towards her glittering eyes.

Shuck

From saucer pulks
where pale light lingers longest
we made his eyes.

In this seedbed only think:
Dead Hands wave, Things worm,
marsh lights flicker.

We made his blood from arteries
obsidian in the moonlight,
his hair from shaggy sea-purslane.
His chains are chains of marsh mist.

Skriker, Hooter, Fenrir:
these are his blood-brothers.
We gave him the howl of wind
carried from Siberia.

And witnesses?
with terror or with damp black
earth, one way or another
he stops every mouth.

Beachcomber

Faithful as a wordfisher,
there he goes, old magpie of the foreshore!
Face chafed and chapped like driftwood.

Parcelled shapeless against
winds straight off the icecap
but look! agile even so, jumpy as a tick,
quick in his pickings.

Scoofs along the tideline scurf,
his oily sack full of consonants:
hunks of wax,
and seacoal, rubber ballast, cork,
sodden gleamings.

And swinging in that shoe-bag hitched
to his broad belt?
Ah! In there, sunlight and amber moonlight,
emerald and zinc and shell-pink,
Aegir’s vowels.

Idling

The way waves fold into themselves, sigh, then
play themselves out high on the foreshore,

a man draws and redraws the crescent contours
of the salt-woman he loves to draw to love.

Note from the Outside

Here are busy streets of fish,
dead tower-blocks squatted by gulls.

When they dropped me off at the wood’s edge
I was stammered by green,
I was torn to rags by the silence.
I walked like a bent pin,
stubbing my toes on the emptiness.

Remember that library book about the ocean?
You should see the night sky:
its buoys and lighthouses,
its flares and shipping lanes.

As a child my primary fantasy was living in the rain forest as an adult – I loved rain so much and I think it was an altogether sensual experience. I remember herding goose bumps sitting on my grandmother’s porch with a blanket and watching a storm approach and letting the chill go up my arm so far than chasing it back down. And it’s still one of the most sensual experiences in the world – so this is an idiotic poem about that.

Rain on Tin

If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain

of waiting under the eaves of an old house

at that moment

when it takes a form like fog.

It makes the mountain vanish.

Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up

only condensed and refined.
How many years since thunder rolled

and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin.
Brazil is where I wanted to live.
The border is not far from here.

Lonely and grateful would be my way to end,
and something for the pain please,

a little purity to sand the rough edges,

a slow downpour from the dark ages,

a drizzle from the Pleistocene.

As I dream of the rain’s long body

I will eliminate from mind all the qualities that rain deletes
and then I will be primed to study rain’s power,
the first drops lightly hallowing

but now and again a great gallop of the horse of rain

or an explosion of orange-green light.
A simple radiance, it requires no discipline.

Before I knew women, I knew the lonely pleasure of rain.

The mist and then the clearing.

I will listen where the lightning thrills the rooster up a willow

and my whole life flowing

until I have no choice, only the rain

and I step into it.

My wife and I went on a funicular railway from Lake Como to Brunate, and this is what happened.

Halfway up the mountain it stops. Slips back.
Judders. Slips again. ‘Scheisse!’ screams a Fraulein,
‘Scheisse!’ Word for word, you think exactly
the same in English. Two little maids in white dresses,
toting Prada bags, think the same in Japanese.
The wind rocks the cradle, but not gently.

No driver. No door handles on the inside.
Reassuringly there is a hammer for smashing
windows in case of emergency. But is this
an emergency, or just the run up to one?
Unsure of the etiquette, better wait until the carriage
bursts into flames or fills up with water.

‘Scheisse!’ It slides back down the track.
Stops. Slides again. Stops and sways dizzily.
The German girl is on the floor sobbing,
her husband unable to comfort her.
A Texan, the life and soul, makes a joke
about the Big Dipper, but nobody laughs.

A voice crackles over the tannoy. Pardon?
If it were writing it would be illegible.
Why are there no Italians on board? Obviously
they’ve heard the rumours. So what did it say?
‘Help is on its way’, or, ‘Emergency, you fools!
The hammer, use the bloody hammer!’

A power failure. Your lives hang on a thread
(albeit a rusty metal one circa 1888). A winch
turns and the long haul up begins. You hold
your breath. Twenty metres. Stop. Shudder,
and a sickening fall for ten. A tooth being
slowly drawn out and then pushed back in.

Should the cable break the descent will not be
death defying. The view below is breathtaking
but you have no wish to be part of it. Like the
muzzle of a mincing machine, the station waits
to chew you up and spit out the gristly bits
into the silver kidney bowl that is Lake Como.

An hour and a half later the tug-of-war ends
and the passengers alight heavily. The Brits to seek
an explanation. The Americans to seek compensation.
The Germans to seek first aid, and the Japanese,
seemingly unfazed, to seek a little shop that sells
snow-globes and model funicular railway sets.

This is a poem called ‘Wulf’, which is in fact a loose translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem, and the speaker in it is a woman

Wulf

1
They take it from me:
in the manner
of a gift

if danger moves in the earth
is the life given
is it love between us

2
Wulf: on that island
- I on this other

shut into fens, a bone
in the neck of a savage

if danger moves upon water
is the life given
is it love between us

3
In my mind we joined together:

as it rained, as
I was sad in the rain, as
he laid with me in his arms

into his shoulder
a joy given into me like sorrow

4
Wulf, Wulf,
it is not
at all hunger shaking my limbs
but that you do not journey

absent & yet
you fill me

5
They take it from me:
in the manner
of a gift

the spine of a feather, a cloud in the body

ai, it is
easily broken, what

was never at one:

you & I, Wulf, the one
with the other

& singing

Why Did the Jews Kill Jesus, Dad?

Why did the Jews kill Jesus?
‘Cos Jesus was a Jew!
A trouble-making rebel,
And stroppy with it too.

He argued with his betters
An’ ‘ung about with yobs,
Chastisin’ money-lenders
An’ lecturin’ the nobs.

They didn’t take that kindly,
No more they would today,
They fitted him up proper, son,
An’ chucked the key away.

The rabbis called on Pontius
To seize him to be tried,
An’ though old Pilate waffled,
They ‘ad him crucified.

Then one of his disciples,
(A clever git named Paul),
Created a religion,
Complete with Popes an’ all.

‘Course, both the Jews and Hayrabs
Are Semites to the core;
Their ancestor was Shem, son -
So when they ‘ave a war

It’s likely to be nasty!
A civil war, d’you see?
Now do yer bloody homework,
An’ let me eat me tea.

Well, the issue at stake was really fascism versus anti-fascism – I think after 1933 after Hitler came to power it became more and more clear that the whole of Europe was threatened by fascism which meant dictatorship, anti-semitism, censorship and lack of intellectual freedom and so therefore my generation was involved in trying to prevent this happening, not just politically, but also as writers because if fascism had overwhelmed Europe we anyhow would not have been able to write what we wanted to write, so that although really we were an un-political generation of writers our very survival as writers was involved in the anti-fascist cause…

…Well the foolish boy was just someone I saw [during the Spanish Civil War] lying between the lines, just a corpse really, who couldn’t be picked up because if you’d gone out and tried to take his body away, the stretcher bearers who did this would have been killed, whichever side it was. It’s called ‘Ultima Ratio Regum’ which means “the ultimate, or the final argument of kings” which was the legend I think Louis XIII or Louis IVX had embossed on the mouths of their bronze cannons.

Ultima Ratio Regum

The guns spell money’s ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.

When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.

O too lightly he threw down his cap
One day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.

Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive trees, O world, O death?

A Removal from Terry Street

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus U S Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

Emergency Haying

Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor
in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,

my arms strung
awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform.
Almost 500 bales we’ve put up

this afternoon, Marshall and I.
And of course I think of another who hung
like this on another cross. May hands are torn

by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced
by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat
is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended
on two points of pain in the rising
monoxide, recall the greater suffering.

Well, I change grip and the image
fades. It’s been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains
brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop,

but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed.
How is our last chance to bring in
the winter’s feed, and Marshall needs help.

We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales
to the barn, these late, half-green,
improperly cured bales; some weigh 100 pounds

or more, yet must be lugged by the twine
across the field, tossed on the load, and then
at the barn unloaded on the conveyor

and distributed in the loft. I help –
I, the desk-servant, word-worker –
and hold up my end pretty well too; but God,

the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands
are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe.
I think of those who have done slave labor,

less able and less well prepared than I.
Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony,
her father in the camps of Moldovia

and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers
herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands
too bloodied cannot bear

even the touch of air, even
the touch of love. I have a friend
whose grandmother cut cane with a machete

and cut and cut, until one day
she snicked her hand off and took it
and threw it grandly to the sky. Now

in September out New England mountains
under a clear sky for which we’re thankful at last
begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches

in their first colour. I look
beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills,
to the notch there the sunset is beginning,

then in the other direction, eastward,
where a full new-risen moon like a pale
medallion hangs in lavender cloud

beyond the barn. My eyes
sting with sweat and loveliness. And who
is the Christ now, who

if not !? It must be so. My strength
is legion. And I stand up high
on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say

woe to you, watch out
you sons of bitches who would drive men and women
to the fields where they can only die.