In The Poetry

‘R-and-R Centre; An Incident from the Vietnam War’ – R-and-R being a “Rest and Recreation Centre” set up in countries near to Vietnam, neutral countries. A short holiday resort for GIs.

R-and-R Centre: An Incident from the Vietnam War

We built a palace for them, made of bedrooms.
We even tracked down playmates for them
(No easy job since prostitutes went out
When self-rule came). We dug a pool,
Constructed shops, and a hut for movies
With benches outside for the girls to wait on.
Serene House was what we called it.
We did our bit in that war.

Air America brought them from the battlefield.
We lifted the girls from the suburbs by buses:
Chinese, Indian, Malay, Eurasian,
Healthy and well-fed and full of play.

There were cameras in plenty, tape-recorders
And binoculars for the soldiers to buy
For the girls; for the girls to sell back
To the shops; for the shops to sell to the soldiers.

Serene House was near the varsity. The GIs
Strayed across the campus with Nikons and blank faces:
It was feared they might assault the female students.
They seemed scared of their own cameras.
They looked at nobody; nobody looked at them.
That violence down the road -
It was good for business, and we did our bit.
Otherwise it was a vulgar subject.

Once I found a GI in the corridor,
Young and dazed, gazing at the notice-boards.
The Misses Menon, Lee, Fernandez, Poh and Noor
Should report for a tutorial at 3 p.m.
Bringing their copies of The Revenger’s Tragedy …
If Mr Sharma fails to pass his essay up this week
He will find himself in serious trouble…
The Literary Society seeks help in cutting sandwiches …

He was still there thirty minutes later,
A stunned calf. I asked if I could help.
He shrank away: ‘It is not allowed to stand here?’
The corridor was dingy, walls streaked with bat shit,
somewhere a typewriter clacked like small arms.
‘Is there … would there be a … library?’
One of the best in fact in South-east Asia. -
I offered to show him. He trembled
with a furtive pleasure. His only licence
Was to kill, to copulate and purchase cameras.

What sort of books would he like to see?
Outside in the quad he was jumpy,
As if unused to the open. He glanced behind,
Then whispered. Yes, there was something …
Did I think …

What could he be after? The Natural History
of the Poontang, with Plates, by some defrocked
Medico called Aristotle? How to Get to Sweden
By Kon-Tiki through the Indian Ocean?

‘Would they have anything …’ A quick look
Round – ‘ … by Cardinal Newman, do you think?’
I left him in the stacks, the Apologia in his hands,
He didn’t notice when I went away.

Inside Serene House, in the meantime,
Girls galore (such lengths we went to!)
Lolled on the benches, played with binoculars,
Clicked their empty cameras, and groused.
The soldiers were happy to quit Vietnam;
Five days with us, and they were glad to go back,
Rest and recreation, they said, was too much for them.
We weren’t surprised when the Americans didn’t win.

Tune

When I came back from Europe late last year
a new tune kept running through my head.
It still recurs at odd times of the day,
haunting like a perfume or a face.
Its clean string of notes obsesses me.

I cannot write it down; I have no key.
I can’t translate it to another code.
I cannot even hum it to myself.
It has to sing itself inside of me.

I heard it first in Prague on Charles Bridge-
early summer evening, cloudless sky-
where exiles from a grey dictatorship
played their haunting high Andean
flutes among the rows of buskers waiting there.

Expatriates, tourists, dissidents, passers by-
an ancient tune of sorrow pierced with joy-
those refugees, those exiles far from home
playing their haunting high Andean flutes;
this place of wandering scholars, vagabonds.

I heard them two months later playing near
the market place at Cambridge in the rain:
their piercing flutes’ insinuating song-
its cry of joy, its almost desolation-
hungry for home and all its idioms.

This poem got written as the result of a conversation with an eight-year-old girl, Josephine Mackinnon, about Christmas trees. She said this: “If you don’t have a real tree, you don’t bring the Christmas life into the house.”

The Christmas Life

Bring in a tree, a young Norwegian spruce,
Bring hyacinths that rooted in the cold.
Bring winter jasmine as its buds unfold -
Bring the Christmas life into this house.

Bring red and green and gold, bring things that shine,
Bring candlesticks and music, food and wine.
Bring in your memories of Christmas past.
Bring in your tears for all that you have lost.

Bring in the shepherd boy, the ox and ass,
Bring in the stillness of an icy night,
Bring in a birth, of hope and love and light.
Bring the Christmas life into this house.

Snow Water

A fastidious brewer of tea, a tea
Connoisseur as well as a poet,
I modestly request on my sixtieth
Birthday a gift of snow water.

Tea steam and ink stains. Single-
Mindedly I scald my tea pot and
Measure out some Silver Needles Tea,
Enough for a second seeping.

Other favourites include Clear
Distance and Eyebrows of Longevity
Or, from precarious mountain peaks,
Cloud Mist Tea (quite delectable)

Which competent monkeys harvest
Filling their baskets with choice leaves
And bringing them down to where I wait
with my crock of snow water.

Shantung

It’s true that anyone can fall
in love with anyone at all
Later, they can’t. Ouf, ouf.

How much mascara washes away each day
and internationally, making the blue one black.
Come on everybody. Especially you girls.

Each day I think of something about dying.
Does everybody? do they think that, I mean.
My friends! some answers. Gently
unstrap my wristwatch. Lay it face down.

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.

Between Hovers

And not even when we ran over the badger
Did he tell me he had cancer, Joe O’Toole
Who was psychic about carburettor and clutch
And knew a folk cure for the starter-engine.
Backing into the dark we floodlit each hair
Like a filament of light our lights had put out
Somewhere between Kinnadoohy and Thallabaun.
I dragged it by two gritty paws into the ditch.
Joe spotted a ruby where the canines touched.
His way of seeing me safely across the duach
Was to leave his porch light burning, its sparkle
Shifting from widegeon to teal on Corragaun Lake.
I missed his funeral. Close to the stony roads
He lies in Killeen Churchyard over the hill.
This morning on the burial mound at Templedoomore
Encircled by a spring tide and taking in
Cloonaghmanagh and Claggan and Carrigskeewaun,
The townlands he’d wandered tending cows and sheep,
I watched a dying otter gaze right through me
at the islands in Clew Bay, as though it were only
Between hovers and not too far from the holt.

This poem is a love poem about a room and it’s called ‘We Are Living’.

We Are Living

What is this room
But the moments we have lived in it?
When all due has been paid
To gods of wood and stone
And recognition has been made
Of those who’ll breathe here when we are gone
Does it not take its worth from us
Who made it because we were here?

Your words are the only furniture I can remember
Your body the book that told me most.
If this room has a ghost
It will be your laughter in the frank dark
Revealing the world as a room
Loved only for those moments when
We touched the purely human.

I could give water now to thirsty plants,
Dig up the floorboards, the foundation,
Study the worm’s confidence,
Challenge his omnipotence
Because my blind eyes have seen through walls
That make safe prisons of the days.

We are living
In ceiling, floor and windows,
We are given to where we have been.
This white door will always open
On what our hands have touched,
Our eyes have seen.

The poet John Clare, I think, although his reputation has risen in recent years, but certainly for a long time it was much higher among Irish poets than it was among English poets. People know “Poor John Clare” is what he’s often called: an early success, and later madness, but I was reading one of John Clare’s notebooks; he used to collect tunes, as he said, from the Irish drovers on the road, and he had one tune in his notebook called ‘The Self Jig’, and a slightly prissy commentator had put a note saying “probably should be ‘Sylph’” – that’s S Y L P H – as it was obviously going to be a classical Greek reference. So I’ve used the translation of the word “sylph” that you get in Brewers for this poem. It’s a sonnet, as John Clare was so wonderful with sonnets, and is really about the asylum where he spent so many years.

Clare’s Jig

I’d collected a good jig called ‘The Self’,
but lilting it last night for Dr Bottle
he chided me, opined it should be Sylph,
which is Greek, like much he says, meaning beetle.
He chokes the same and gibbets butterflies,
now all your rich men’s fashionable rage.
My fellow inmates praise him to the skies,
and like a hawk he scans my every page,
the dumb morris of these poor whopstraw words.
When pressed, a melancholy Johnson said
‘Why Sir, we are a nest of singing birds!’
Well I hear boughs breaking inside my head
so listen till the music has to stop,
for like a tree, I’m dying from the top.