In The Poetry

The Hawk

On Sunday the hawk fell on Bigging
And a chicken screamed
Lost in its own little snowstorm.
And on Monday he fell on the moor
And the Field Club
Raised a hundred silent prisms.
And on Tuesday he fell on the hill
And the happy lamb
Never knew why the loud collie straddled him.
And on Wednesday he fell on a bush
And the blackbird
Laid by his little flute for the last time.
And on Thursday he fell on Cleat
And peerie Tom’s rabbit
Swung in a single arc from shore to hill.
And on Friday he fell on a ditch
But the rampant rat,
The eye and the tooth, quenched his flame.
And on Saturday he fell on Bigging
And Jock lowered his gun
And nailed a small wing over the corn.

Archie Bevan – Have you ever heard about the recitation of that poem at the school concert?

Mackay Brown – No.

Archie Bevan – Yes that was one of the ones . . .
Mackay Brown – Oh I see.
Archie Bevan – They even brought in a shotgun for the occasion!
Mackay Brown – Oh, made it realistic.
Archie Bevan – Much to the alarm of the natives!
Mackay Brown – Oh Lord.
Archie Bevan – They loved doing that one.

Serpentine

Those buried lidless eyes can see
the infra-red heat of my blood.

I feel the crack, the whisper
as vertebrae ripple and curve.

Days of absolute stillness.
I sleep early and well.

His rare violent hunger,
a passion for the impossible.

He will dislocate his jaw
to hold it.

My fingers trace the realignment
as things fall back into place.

Each season, a sloughed skin
intensifies the colours that fuse

with mineral delicacy at his throat.
Flawless.

Beautiful, simple,
he will come between us.

Last night you found his tooth
on your pillow.

This poem is called ‘Flamingo Watching, and it was written at a time when I thought that the ‘subtle’ needed defending, in poetry, I felt that, anything artful or subtle or sophisticated or elaborate or elaborated was suspect. It seems like things had to be rather plain and blunt and straightforward and, and chunky to be taken seriously.

Flamingo Watching

Wherever the flamingo goes,
she brings a city’s worth
of furbelows. She seems
unnatural by nature -
too vivid and peculiar
a structure to be pretty,
and flexible to the point
of oddity. Perched on
those legs, anything she does
seems like an act. Descending
on her egg or draping her head
along her back, she’s
too exact and sinuous
to convince an audience
she’s serious. The natural elect,
they think, would be less pink,
less able to relax their necks,
less flamboyant in general.
They privately expect that it’s some
poorly jointed bland grey animal
with mitts for hands
whom God protects.

This is a poem dating from 1984.

Prelude to a New Fin-de-Si

Blunden: It is odd but one or two of those which seem to me to cover all I’ve got to say in a way [Interviewer: yes] have come without any modification afterwards. Another is called ‘Report on Experience’.

Interviewer: I was going to mention just that poem – this was obviously a poem where you were excited, it comes with a kind of authority and I would have said that it took a lot of trouble to live it, perhaps, but not all that trouble to write.

Blunden: No for some odd reason it is given you now and again like Balaam’s Ass – as Coleridge might have told us – to speak.

Interviewer: I wish you would read ‘Report on Experience’ because it is one of your best-known poems and I don’t know how many people have actually heard you read it. Could you do that because it is in that book in front of you.

Blunden: It’s not all accurate, no – especially the first words – but I think my readers don’t mind about that.

Report on Experience

I have been young, and now am not too old;
And I have seen the righteous forsaken,
His health, his honour and his quality taken.
This is not what we were formerly told.

I have seen a green country, useful to the race,
Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,
Even the last rat and last kestrel banished –
God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,
Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.
I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;
She turned to harlotry; – this I took to be new.

Say what you will, our God sees how they run.
These disillusions are His curious proving
That He loves humanity and will go on loving;
Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.

In the 1920s before the dangers of radium were known it was used in all kinds of things from children’s toys to luminous paint. And this is the story of some women who worked in a New Jersey factory making clock faces.

The Innocence of Radium

With a head full of Swiss clockmakers,
she took a job at a new Jersey factory
painting luminous numbers, copying the style
believed to be found in the candlelit backrooms
of snowbound alpine villages.

Holding each clockface to the light,
she would catch a glimpse of the chemist
as he measured and checked. He was old enough
had a kind face and a foreign name
she never dared to pronounce: Sochocky.

For a joke she painted her teeth and nails,
jumped out on the other girls walking home.
In bed that night she laughed out loud
and stroked herself with ten green fingertips.
Unable to sleep, the chemist traced each number

on the face he had stolen form the factory floor.
He liked the curve of her eights;
the way she raised the wet brush to her lips
and, with a delicate purse of her mouth,
smoothed the bristle to a perfect tip.

Over the years he watched her grow dull.
The doctors gave up, removed half her jaw,
and blamed syphilis when her thighbone snapped
as she struggled up a flight of steps.
Diagnosing infidelity, the chemist pronounced

the innocence of radium, a kind of radiance
that could not be held by the body of a woman,
only caught between her teeth. He was proud
of his paint and made public speeches
on how it could be used by artists to convey

the quality of moonlight. Sochocky displayed
these shining landscapes on his walls;
his faith sustained alone in a room
full of warm skies that broke up the dark
and drained his blood of its colour.

His dangerous bones could not keep their secret.
Laid out for X-ray, before a single button was pressed,
they exposed the plate and pictured themselves
as a ghost, not a skeleton, a photograph
he was unable to stop being developed and fixed.

This is called ‘Red Boots On’. It has been set to music, it’s a very stomp-like little poem, but almost too much so for setting to music, really, you need a bit more freedom, I think, as a composer for these things to do a bit of portamento but this is pretty emphatic in its rhythms. In the late 1960s I taught at a little university in Canada, not so little now, called Brock, a university in St Catherine’s, and one winter of very heavy snowfall, my girlfriend was running down the street, and kicking up the snow wearing these new red boots of which she was very proud, and I thought that the red boots against the white snow were an almost filmic image of happiness, really. So it’s a four-square poem really about happiness which is something I find quite difficult to do. All the proper names in it, apart from hers, which is Mary Lou, are names of streets in the town.

Red Boots On

Way down Geneva,
All along Vine,
Deeper than the snow drift
Love’s eyes shine:

Mary Lou’s walking
In the winter time.

She’s got

Red boots on, she’s got
Red boots on,
Kicking up the winter,
Till the winter’s gone.

So

Go by Ontario,
Look down Main,
If you can’t find Mary Lou,
Come back again:

Sweet light burning
In winter’s flame.

She’s got

Snow in her eyes, got
A tingle in her toes
And new red boots on
Wherever she goes

So

All around Lake Street,
Up by St. Paul,
Quicker than the white wind
Love takes all:

Mary Lou’s walking
In the big snow fall.

She’s got

Red boots on, she’s got
Red boots on
Kicking up the winter
Till the winter’s gone.

A Sight for Sore Eyes

They wrap mountains round my eyes,
they say ‘look’ and it’s all what they say
where the colour, that’s another word is
deepest blue, and that’s the colour of
the wind, blowing this way, warm and dry
coming from the mountains, visibly.

I have eyes in the back of my neck
too, the sun is mumbling the day’s news
over my head. In so many words.
My morning bath was warm, out of a tap.
This garden is just one year younger
than I, ‘girdled round’ five years ago

with six-foot galvanised iron on
rimu posts, the sawn timber elsewhere
supports the Number 8 fencing wire
with one barbed strand, a little rusted.
The new vicarage is a ‘bungalow’,
the veranda faces north by west,

casements are fashionable magic
again, since the double-hung sash went
out, opening on the forms of pain, of
mumbled words, mountainously pronounced.
Too small to see over, I can thread
my line of vision through a nail-hole

in the iron. I give it a tug.
The mountains have shifted at their moorings,
shudder and heave clear. The biggest wind’s
in that quarter, it loosens the snows,
the Green Road is under water, old
Mr and Mrs Troon in a boat

are ‘taken out’ repeated in a dream
of the Troons, the Troons! What have I done?
What are the Troons doing ‘taken out’
in a boat in the dark up Green Road,
old and ugly and wet? The wind was
never so dry and warm or the smell

of sheep so sour or the dust so thick
in the macrocarpas. The mountains
are the colour of wind, the highway
north is a pillar of dust by day
half-blinding riders and dogs, westward
the river still rises. My mother

bathes my eyes with boracic, she ties
up torn dianthus, delphinium, phlox
wasted on the alluvium the storm-
waters have been scraping seaward since
the sun mumbled the first implanted
word. My mother grows it all from seed.

Mr. Bleaney

‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags –
‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits – what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways –
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

How we use the oral traditions to talk about politics, talk about love, talk about all sorts of things…

Song Of Chickens

Master, you talked with bows,
Arrows and catapults once
Your hands steaming with hawk blood
To protect your chicken.

Why do you talk with knives now,
Your hands teeming with eggshells
And hot blood from your own chicken?
Is it to impress your visitors?