In The Poetry

Reading Midsummer Night’s Dream in Form 4B

Miss Manning rules us middle-class children
Whose fathers can’t afford the better schools
With blue, small, crow-tracked, cruel eyes.
Philomel with melody-a refrain
Summoning the nightingale, the brown bird
Which bruits the Northern Hemisphere with bells -
It could not live a summer in this heat.

Queen Titania, unaware of Oberon,
Is sleeping on a bank. Her fairy watch
Sings over her a lullaby,
The warm snakes hatch out in her dream.
Miss Manning is too fat for love,
We cannot imagine her like Miss Holden
Booking for weekends at the seaside
With officers on leave. This is not Athens
Or the woods of Warwickshire,

Lordly the democratic sun
Rides the gross and southerly glass.
Miss Manning sets the homework. Thirty boys
Leave the bard to tire on his morning wing;
Out on their asphalt the teams for Saturday
Wait, annunciations in purple ink,
Torments in locker rooms, nothing to hope for
But sleep, the reasonable view of magic.
We do not understand Shakespearean objects
Who must work and play: that gold stems from the sky:
It poisons 1944. To be young is to be in Hell,
Miss Manning will insulate us from this genius,
Rock the ground whereon these sleepers be.

Elsewhere there is war, here
It is early in an old morning, there is pollen
In the air, eucalyptus slipping past
The chalk and dusters – new feelings
In the oldest continent, a northern race
living in the south. It is late indeed:
Jack shall have Jill, all shall be well,
Long past long standing eternity,
Eastern Standard Time.

This poem is set in the Lake District, which is in the north-west of England, where the hills are called ‘fells’, and it was written in memory of Dr Robert Woof, the director of the Wordsworth Trust.

The Light Fell

The weather was confused all day
so who can say why it was just then
the light fell that way -

the sun riding low, burnishing
for a minute, no more, the tops of the hills
against a curtain of cloud, ashen with rain and snow.

Or why it was then the deer chose to show their faces,
lift their heads from grazing, step near, pause
before coming on again.

‘Oh human life, mysterious,’ I heard a woman say,
‘not gone, oh no, not gone. There’s electrics you know.
I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it to be so.’

And as the light fell drew our eyes, a thinning seam of amber
compressed between the land and sky,
I could believe it too.

That your guiding hand had motion still
and influence among these hills, to light the Crag and Michael’s Vale
just so, according to your will.

And as the soil hit the wood and the gathered crowd moved,
pressed arms, said what they could, wished well and farewell,
that it was just as much you as the still lowering sun

that threw one flank of the valley dark
and left the other lit,
to illustrate, as the land here always did,

what we’d but sensed within ourselves.
How at once and from the very same source,
a light could rise, as the same light fell.

My eighth book, Marriage, contained two sequences; the first was very loosely based on the relationship between the painter Pierre Bonnard and his lifelong companion and model Marthe de Meligny. I came to see that the sequence is concerned, as are many of Bonnard’s paintings, with what lies beneath the surfaces of the quotidian, what I call the mysteries of domesticity, and with the unsettling intensity with which an artist focuses on his subject. This is from the sequence, ‘Marriage’.

I perch on a ‘Bauhaus-style’ chrome and raffia
stool as you drop your knife and pause to consider
this fish and its fistula,

this fish with its deep deformity, its head like a cosh,
its raw flank and blood-brown eyes,
its lips of lopsided blubber,

this fish we are having for supper.
You laid out cold cash
to have them deliver this fish, close-packed in ice,

a glacier coelacanth preserved against all the odds,
as if some throw of the dice, some coin
turning a thousand years to come down heads,

had brought to the marble slab in our kitchen
of all kitchens this fish, sporting
its jowly truncheon-lump of sorbo rubber

and the great wet ulcer opening beneath its backbone.
As you start again, flensing good from bad, you let spill
a viscous flub of gut that slips

from your wrist to the marble, where it spells
out the hierogram most often linked
with the once in a lifetime, miraculous

descent of the goddess, her gills
crisp enough to cut as you trade kiss for kiss.
Flesh of her flesh, I’ll eat it if you will.

This is called ‘Morning News’ and it was written just about the time of the American pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

Morning News

Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread
and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches,
repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.
A cinder-block wall shared by two houses
is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen
sink and a cupboard, on the other was
a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs.

Glass is shattered across the photographs;
two half-circles of hardened pocket bread
sit on the cupboard. There provisionally was
shelter, a plastic truck under the branches
of a fig tree. A knife flashed in the kitchen,
merely dicing garlic. Engines of war
move inexorably toward certain houses

while citizens sit safe in other houses
reading the newspaper, whose photographs
make sanitized excuses for the war.
There are innumerable kinds of bread
brought up from bakeries, baked in the kitchen:
the date, the latitude, tell which one was
dropped by a child beneath the bloodied branches.

The uncontrolled and multifurcate branches
of possibility infiltrate houses’
walls, windowframes, ceilings. Where there was
a tower, a town: ash and burnt wires, a graph
on a distant computer screen. Elsewhere, a kitchen
table’s setting gapes, where children bred
to branch into new lives were culled for war.

Who wore this starched smocked cotton dress? Who wore
this jersey blazoned for the local branch
of the district soccer team? Who left this black bread
and this flat gold bread in their abandoned houses?
Whose father begged for mercy in the kitchen?
Whose memory will frame the photograph
and use the memory for what it was

never meant for by this girl, that old man, who was
caught on a ball field, near a window: war,
exhorted through the grief a photograph
revives. (Or was the team a covert branch
of a banned group; were maps drawn in the kitchen,
a bomb thrust in a hollowed loaf of bread?)
What did the old men pray for in their houses

Sometimes poems that were never intended for children get adopted by them. This next poem is one such poem, and it’s called ‘A Small Dragon’.

I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.
Think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it’s damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.

I fed it on many things, tried grass,
the roots of stars, hazel-nut and dandelion,
but it stared up at me as if to say, I need
foods you can’t provide.

It made a nest among the coal,
not unlike a bird’s but larger,
it is out of place here
and is mosttimes silent.

If you believed in it I would come
hurrying to your house to let you share this wonder,
but I want instead to see
if you yourself will pass this way.

This poem is called ‘Parkinson’s Disease’.

Parkinson’s Disease

While spoon-feeding him with one hand

she holds his hand with her other hand,

or rather lets it rest on top of his,

which is permanently clenched shut.

When he turns his head away, she reaches

around and puts in the spoonful blind.

He will not accept the next morsel

until he has completely chewed this one.

His bright squint tells her he finds

the shrimp she has just put in delicious.

Next to the voice and touch of those we love,

food may be our last pleasure on earth –
a man on death row takes his T-bone

in small bites and swishes each sip

of the jug wine around in his mouth,

tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt

this supper out of him. She strokes

his head very slowly, as if to cheer up

each separate discomfited hair sticking up

from its root in his stricken brain.

Standing behind him, she presses

her check to his, kisses his jowl,

and his eyes seem to stop seeing

and do nothing but emit light.

Could heaven be a time, after we are dead,

of remembering the knowledge

flesh had from flesh? The flesh

of his face is hard, perhaps

from years spent facing down others

until they fell back, and harder

from years of being himself faced down

and falling back in his turn, and harder still

from all the while frowning

and beaming and worrying and shouting

and probably letting go in rages.

His face softens into a kind

of quizzical wince, as if one

of the other animals were working at

getting the knack of the human smile.

When picking up a cookie he uses

both thumbtips to grip it

and push it against an index finger

to secure it so that he can lift it.

She takes him then to the bathroom,

where she lowers his pants and removes

the wet diaper and holds the spout of the bottle

to his old penis until he pisses all he can,

then puts on the fresh diaper and pulls up his pants.

When they come out, she is facing him,

walking backwards in front of him

and holding his hands, pulling him

when he stops, reminding him to step

when he forgets and starts to pitch forward.

She is leading her old father into the future

as far as they can go, and she is walking

him back into her childhood, where she stood
in bare feet on the toes of his shoes

and they foxtrotted on this same rug.

I watch them closely: she could be teaching him

the last steps that one day she may teach me.

At this moment, he glints and shines,

as if it will be only a small dislocation

for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

Until recently I lived in England’s Lane and opposite our flat there was a service wash, and sometimes I talked to the lady who was officiating. This is dedicated to her.

Urban Lyric

The gaunt lady of the service wash
stands on the threshold and blinks in the sunlight.

Her face is yellow in its frizz of hair
and yet she smiles as if she were fortunate.

She listens to the hum of cars passing
as if she were on a country lane in summer,

or as if the tall trees edging this
busy street scattered blessings on her.

Last month they cut a cancer out of her throat.
This morning she tastes sunshine in the dusty air.

And she is made alert to the day’s beauty,
as if her terror had wakened poetry.

There’s nothing especially advantageous about being a Scottish poet but it means you can rhyme ‘Bach’ and ‘loch’, and ‘moors’ and ‘conifers’, so we have one or two advantages.

Loch Music

I listen as recorded Bach
Restates the rhythms of a loch.
Through blends of dusk and dragonflies
A music settles on my eyes
Until I hear the living moors,
Sunk stones and shadowed conifers,
And what I hear is what I see,
A summer night’s divinity.
And I am not administered
Tonight, but feel my life transferred
Beyond the realm of where I am
Into a personal extreme,
As on my wrist, my eager pulse
Counts out the blood of someone else.
Mist-moving trees proclaim a sense
Of sight without intelligence;
The intellects of water teach
A truth that’s physical and rich.
I nourish nothing with the stars,
With minerals, as I disperse,
A scattering of quavered wash
As light against the wind as ash.

Overall, Bloodlines is a verse novel. It’s set in the 1860s in the American south, and it’s really about that time in America just before the Civil War when issues about abolition and about nationhood were being talked about. The narrator – his big thing is he refuses to die until a friendship breaks out between the races and of course it doesn’t really happen so he lives way into the 20th Century or at least a spiritual version survives.

Bloodlines – an extract

Africa in America. Catch a goat.
Take a sharp blade, rub it against stone.
Brace the goat and yourself and cut its throat.
Drain the blood into calabash, ignore the moan
of ropy liquid against the gourd; throw
sand on the spot to prevent dogs homing
in on that coagulating blood. Skin the carcass.
Stretch the skin over wood for one purpose.

It stinks and dries in an indirect sun.
The meat is ready for a pot, dying to be cured,
parcelled out to family and friends, the horns
ground into powder then mixed into a puree
with herbs, the feet for a broth (the scrotum
is a delicacy), the tongue peppered
for stew, the tail continues to whisk flies,
the hooves walk mountainous clouds in the sky.

Skin over wood. Hollow wood.
Stretched skin. Hands talk to heart.
Boneless hands. Thinking heart. A flood
of understanding comes to that part
of the wood beneath that skin about the good
imbued by hands coming down smart
on it, fluid fingers flowing above the skin,
flattering it with touch-talk, and it sings.

A continent in sound. Sound brings
a continent across the sky and sea.
A continent shaped by hands on skin
sacrificed by a goat who must have seen
his soul fluting, not on a heady mountain
ledge, but airborne, dragging this parachute free
of its moorings, relocating an archipelago
in sounds of souls no longer cargo.

Until goat talked it down to the ground,
coaxed it up through the soles of our feet
into our chest and our head and our tongue.
It is a lost, forgotten place, missing teeth
worried by our tongue, something we long
for, dream of, but won’t know if we meet.
The Africa we never got to know
sprung in the America we reap and sow.

Our heads spin with this posited place.
Our skulls resonate with our captured past.
It weighs our hearts, brimming all the spaces
between with all the things we feel we’ve lost.
Our flesh aches and only pains less when faced
with drum talk; drum bringing down the ghost
of Africa from dreams, down through history,
and up up up through flesh and blood stories.

When Tom first hears about Africa
he thinks slaves have circumvented their hurt
with their version of a heaven freer
than paradise because right here on earth,
until he listens to the drum concertina,
a continent into two hands, two hands worth
a continent; and if those hands are driven
by a body and soul then their art is heaven.

But the sea, the unassailable see,
where Time drowned and Africa floated,
both lost to slaves, both in water’s company,
leaves Tom feeling there’s a fishbone in his throat,
that Africa had never been, would never be
more than something stirred by the goat-
skin drum, a waking dream that lasts
only as long as the song of the drum blasts.

He fancies every flock heading for a trap,
their chevrons marking a winding road in air
erased by the sea, a road not on any map,
except that each heartbeat sends a chevron flair
radiating through his body, sketching this gap:
his head that is Africa tapers into a cadaver
that’s the sea; the rise and fall of his body,
a current in his veins; his neck is an estuary.

If he listens to the drum with flesh and bone,
and his African head, he finds his way back
to Africa through movement and tone.
The time he lost is measured out on the track
of his spine that buckles, curves, snaps, hones
itself to time and Africa and the ship’s deck
of the sea, now over him, shuffling its boards,
now under him, like a spine without a cord.

The sea holds still long enough for him to draw
a map. Air stirs without disturbing the markers
arranged by a migratory flock. Clouds crawl
across the tinged canvas stretched over-
head, a cartographer’s dream, all raw
in unbounded love of gradients and contours.
Night lights up the compass points that Tom
navigates by; the drum is his metronome.

His body twitches in recognition of the rhythm
of ship on sea and wind in sails; no land
in sight; not a hint of vegetation in the hymn
of that wind, nor in the reflection of sky and
sea in each other’s mirror held up for him
in a choreography Tom understands
fully but every time deliberately forgets
just to experience more deeply the next.

Stella lifts her dress above her knees
to free her legs for little kicks, stamps
and flicks of heel, instep and balls of feet.
She shakes bits of Africa from the damp
American soil that when dry frees
so much dust an African edifice jams
against the sky and Stella climbs its ladder
back through time to her ancestors.

[...]

Tom takes his cup with honey. Stella drinks
hers straight. It’s the tea of penury.
The tea of repentance. The tea of thanks
for surviving the nightmares to see
dawn, well, yes, dawn. For a time that stinks,
a time to forget, regret, this is the tea.
Drink it and maybe all your troubles
brewed and stewed in one cup can be gobbled.

She wakes with a dry mouth and sleepy
from her fitful slumber. That cup at that time -
for all its historical baggage – is the remedy.
The heat, the wet, the caffeine, the taste, combine
(no, stronger) conspire, each day to ready
her to face a life she’s more inclined
to skip, if she had the choice: suicide
is no option, life is for living, she decides.

Here’s a little quatrain called:

On Going Deaf

I’ve lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And deftly set it, like a snare.