In The Poetry

Apologia pro Vita Sua

One night in Paris I saw glowing in a small shopwindow a page of Ren

White Vase

Two figures on a sofa, side by side,
The stench of bitter almonds, smoke and sweat;
A man who ate no meat lies with his bride.

Fresh tulips and narcissi cast aside,
A white vase tipped; a chiffon dress splashed wet.
Two figures on a sofa, side by side.

The room is hushed, its spell defies the tide
Of history – no servants enter yet.
A man who could not paint lies with his bride.

Her spittle flecked with glass and cyanide,
Her buckskin pumps beneath the blue banquette.
Two figures on a sofa side by side.

The brimstone face grown slack and glassy-eyed,
Its shattered skull concealed in sillouette.
A man who blamed the world lies with his bride.

Outside, the spring has come while worlds collide.
Here, blood and water drip in grim duet.
Two figures on a sofa, side by side:
A man who ate no meat lies with his bride.

Several poets, in different ways, have attempted to combine jazz and poetry. As a jazz musician myself – I’m a clarinettist – I relish the conversation set up by improvisation, and what one music critic has described as the “sound of surprise”. I feel that I know exactly what the pianist Earl Hines meant when he said that every time he played a familiar number he tried to find a new pattern of chord changes or a different route towards the resolution of the melody. ‘When you see me smiling, you know I’m lost,’ is what he once told an interviewer, and that for me just about says it all: the challenge, the risk, the stimulus of options. Or, to adapt a remark that E. M. Forster made about writing, “how do I know where I’m going, until I hear what I play?”

Fats

for John Lucas

Hammer those spatulate
ringed fingers, run

the vertiginous keyboard’s
length, a thumbnail

gliss, then chase
the accident, the chancy

modulation, grin
at each gain revealed

by loss, throw back
that massive head, become

pure joy, the love-struck
face of it, a kid again

to pump your pedal car
along its track of sound

while all the others step aside
to send you round the block,

then home in triumph
to the here, the now,

the leap to your applause
in bulk made nimble by the light

of music, in the shimmy
of your outsize suit,

and mercy, mercy
where did you get those shoes?

Billy McBone

Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which he mostly kept under his hat.
The teachers all thought
That he couldn’t be taught,
But Bill didn’t seem to mind that.

Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which the teachers had searched for for years.
Trying test after test,
They still never guessed
It was hidden between his ears.

Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which only his friends ever saw.
When the teacher said, ‘Bill,
Whereabouts is Brazil?’
He just shuffled and stared at the floor.

Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which he kept under lock and key.
While the teachers in vain
Tried to burgle his brain,
Bill’s thoughts were off wandering free.

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.

The Waste Land

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon fr

The Waste Land

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid – troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carv

A lot of what writing poetry is about is about paying attention. And this poem comes out of me being in the bathroom and noticing a spider in the bathtub in a little tangle of hair and then sort of expanding on that and trying to draw some meaning from it.

An Epiphany

I have seen the Brown Recluse Spider

run with a net in her hand, or rather,

what resembled a net, what resembled

a hand. She ran down the gleaming white floor

of the bathtub, trailing a frail swirl

of hair, and in it the hull of a beetle

lay woven. The hair was my wife’s,

long and dark, a few loose strands, a curl

she might idly have turned on a finger,

she might idly have twisted, speaking to me,

and the legs of the beetle were broken.

‘Snakeshead Fritillaries’. These are waterside plants that grow beside the Thames in Oxford, and very famously in the gardens of Magdalene College, and Geoffrey Grigson – I remember reading about them before I was aware of the flowers – saying that everyone should walk once in a fritillary field before he died, and that the best position to look at fritillaries was when the sun was low in the sky and you kneel down and get the light of the sun through their petals, which is quite true. They’re called Snakeshead Fritillaries because with the dapple they are supposed to resemble the head of a snake. The fritillary has this, as I’ve remarked, this curious habit of coming out first with its head laying close to the ground before it begins to raise it on the stem, and when I first grew them in our garden, I didn’t know this habit of theirs, and I thought “Oh damn, the children have trodden on them, and there I’ve lost another precious thing.”

Snakeshead Fritillaries

Some seedlings shoulder the earth away
Like Milton’s lion plunging to get free,
Demanding notice. Delicate rare fritillary,
You enter creeping, like the snake
You’re named for, and lay your ear to the ground.
The soundless signal comes, to arch the neck -
Losing the trampled look -
Follow the code for colour, whether
White or freckled with purple and pale,
A chequered dice-box tilted over the soil,
The yellow dice held at the base.

When light slants before the sunset, this is
The proper time to watch fritillaries.
They entered creeping; you go on your knees,
The flowers level with your eyes,
And catch the dapple of sunlight through the petals.

People often ask me where I’m from, even in my own country – I seem to have a whole collection of strange anecdotes of people doing that. I’m going to sit down in a pub on a chair in London and this woman went “You cannae sit in that chair. It’s my chair.” And me saying to her, “Oh right, you’re from Glasgow aren’t you?” And she says, “Aye, how did you know that?” And I said, “I’m from Glasgow myself,” and she went, “You’re not are you? You foreign looking bugger!” So that kind of thing happens a lot, and it happens so often I decided I’d just write a poem about being black and Scottish.

In My Country

walking by the waters,
down where an honest river
shakes hands with the sea,
a woman passed round me
in a slow, watchful circle,
as if I were a superstition;

or the worst dregs of her imagination,
so when she finally spoke
her words spliced into bars
of an old wheel. A segment of air.
Where do you come from?
‘Here,’ I said, ‘Here. These parts.’