In The Poetry

Epithalamion

Singing, today I married my white girl
beautiful in a barley field.
Green on thy finger a grass blade curled,
so with this ring I thee wed, I thee wed,
and send our love to the loveless world
of all the living and all the dead.

Now, no more than vulnerable human,
we, more than one, less than two,
are nearly ourselves in a barley field -
and only love is the rent that’s due
though the bailiffs of time return anew
to all the living but not the dead.

Shipwrecked, the sun sinks down harbours
of a sky, unloads its liquid cargoes
of marigolds, and I and my white girl
lie still in the barley – who else wishes
to speak, what more can be said
by all the living against all the dead?

Come then all you wedding guests:
green ghosts of trees, gold of barley,
you blackbird priests in the field,
you wind that shakes the pansy head
fluttering on a stalk like a butterfly;
come the living and come the dead.

Listen flowers, birds, winds, worlds,
tell all today that I married
more than a white girl in the barley -
for today I took to my human bed
flower and bird and wind and world,
and all the living and all the dead.

One day walking in Argyll with my husband we encountered a wishing tree which surprised us a great deal because I didn’t know there were any in Scotland. I mean a tree people have bashed coins into for a wish or a desire – I knew they existed in Ireland but had never seen one in Scotland.

The Wishing Tree

I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland,

but in the fold
of a green hill,

the tilt from one parish
into another.

To look at me
through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron
in your own blood;

because I bear
the common currency

of longing: each wish
each secret visitation.

My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins; I draw

into my slow wood, fleur
-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania.

Beyond, the land reaches
toward the Atlantic.

And though I’m poisoned,
choking on the small change

of human hope, gently
beaten into me, look:

I am still alive;
in fact, in bud.

The easel of Mantegna

Empty-armed, like a soldier,
waiting for the deposition
still to happen, watching

as the rough skin is stretched
across the squat square ribs
and stapled, scraped

with a palette-knife, before
the morbid undertaking
of the gesso and the paint.

Or say instead, you always
were inclined to play
an active role in this,

our cruellest fiction: empty-
angled and pristine save
where you were brushed

with the death and cleansed
with the dizzy stench of spirit.
You are the awkward ladder,

the hallowed steps, the endless
air forever drifting through
the thin rafters of an unroofed

steeple – on or in or out of
whom the wide sound
of resurrection still remains

for us a thing we listen for
in silence:
untolled, unrunged.

I See You Dancing, Father

No sooner downstairs after the night’s rest
And in the door
Than you started to dance a step
In the middle of the kitchen floor.

And as you danced
You whistled.
You made your own music
Always in tune with yourself.

Well, nearly always, anyway.
You’re buried now
In Lislaughtin Abbey
And whenever I think of you

I go back beyond the old man
Mind and body broken
To find the unbroken man.
It is the moment before the dance begins,

Your lips are enjoying themselves
Whistling an air.
Whatever happens or cannot happen
In the time I have to spare
I see you dancing, father.

The Master of the Cast Shadow

Some painters leave shadow out. The Master hunts it
From the source of light to where the last
Faint filigree fingertip falls,
Unthinking as a sundial.

We each inherit our shadow, our ration of darkness,
That shrivels and spreads as light walks here and there.

They don’t see us, these sad mediaeval faces,
With their crosses, their rings, their daggers, their painted eyes.
They’re on the watch for various ugly kinds
Of early death
What they see is the weather,
For the weather warred over England,
As the roses slugged it out: fog at Barnet,
Snow at Towton, three suns at Mortimer’s Cross
In the open fighting season. Red Gutters
And Bloody Meadows are sprayed over counties.
They killed and killed and killed. Thirty thousand
In a morning. Where did they find the people?
So few around, so many of them butchered.
But some live on as the Master saw them,
Praying, or holding a naked broken sword.

Spinnings

We’ve come this way before -
haven’t we? – the lanes wet, deepening
the burgundy squelch

of leaves, and the hedges plotting
an articulate sky.
It’s all much closer now: the gravel path,

the spade lying by the open
barn, squints of spider floss tightening across
our eyes. Clues, yes, all of these –

but what about this wisp of blood, these
brittle tools? – ghosts
of a weather, your unfathomable skin?

Billie Holiday

and did it frighten you
that stench in the dark heart of the flower
you pinned behind your ear

and did your skull eat out through your beauty
every time they pressed their faces in you
seeing in your drowning face how their flesh collapsed inside you
and how the pure note hardened like a child
and wouldn’t give in you
even after everything was given

I’ve written a lot of poems about my ancestors – I’m fascinated by family history – and sometimes you get a story that’s passed down by oral transmission – you’re not quite sure who the person was, or exactly where it was set – you just know that it’s somebody in your family and that’s the case with this episode. I’ve called the poem ‘The Russian War’ which was what the people apparently referred to the Crimean War as, so it’s looking back to the Crimean War in the 1850s.

The Russian War

Great-great-great-uncle Francis Eggington
came back from the Russian War
(it was the kind of war you came back from,
if you were lucky: bad, but over).
He didn’t come to the front door -
the lice and filth were falling off him -
he slipped along the alley to the yard.
‘Who’s that out at the pump?’ they said
‘- a tall tramp stripping his rags off!’
The soap was where it usually was.
He scrubbed and splashed and scrubbed
and combed his beard over the hole in his throat.
‘Give me some clothes,’ he said. ‘I’m back.’
‘God save us, Frank, it’s you!’ they said.
‘What happened? Were you at Scutari?
And what’s that hole inside your beard?’
‘Tea first,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you later.
And Willie’s children will tell their grandchildren;
I’ll be a thing called oral history.’

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

I wrote these little rhymes as a sort of a joke – I didn’t mean them to be serious at all and I’m not sure I even meant them to be published. But I gave them my publisher and the wonderful Quentin Blake started illustrating them and I was absolutely astonished by their success.

Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

As soon as Wolf began to feel
That he would like a decent meal,
He went and knocked on Grandma’s door.
When Grandma opened it, she saw
The sharp white teeth, the horrid grin,
And Wolfie said, “May I come in?”
Poor Grandmamma was terrified,
“He’s going to eat me up!” she cried.
And she was absolutely right.
He ate her up in one big bite.
But Grandmamma was small and tough,
And Wolfie wailed, “That’s not enough!
I haven’t yet begun to feel
That I have had a decent meal!”
He ran around the kitchen yelping,
“I’ve got to have a second helping!”
Then added with a frightful leer,
“I’m therefore going to wait right here
Till Little Miss Red Riding Hood
Comes home from walking in the wood.”
He quickly put on Grandma’s clothes,
(Of course he hadn’t eaten those).
He dressed himself in coat and hat.
He put on shoes, and after that
He even brushed and curled his hair,
Then sat himself in Grandma’s chair.
In came the little girl in red.
She stopped. She stared. And then she said,

“What great big ears you have, Grandma.”
“All the better to hear you with,” the Wolf replied.
“What great big eyes you have, Grandma.”
said Little Red Riding Hood.
“All the better to see you with,” the Wolf replied.

He sat there watching her and smiled.
He thought, I’m going to eat this child.
Compared with her old Grandmamma
She’s going to taste like caviar.

Then Little Red Riding Hood said, “But Grandma,
what a lovely great big furry coat you have on.”

“That’s wrong!” cried Wolf. “Have you forgot
To tell me what BIG TEETH I’ve got?
Ah well, no matter what you say,
I’m going to eat you anyway.”
The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.
She whips a pistol from her knickers.
She aims it at the creature’s head
And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead.
A few weeks later, in the wood,
I came across Miss Riding Hood.
But what a change! No cloak of red,
No silly hood upon her head.
She said, “Hello, and do please note
My lovely furry wolfskin coat.”