by Paul Farley
Paul Farley
The Mizzy
Contents
Starling
Atlas
Poker
Accumulator
Goldcrest
Glorious Goodwood
Clever and Cold
Lark and Linnet
The Ship in the Park
The Mystery
Glade
Song Thrush
Water Nymph at a First Generation Magnox Storage Pond
Gentian Violet
Robin
The Green Man
Moorhen
Bananaquits, St Lucia
The Sloth
Critique of Pure Reason
Lunula
The Gadget
The Keeper of Red Carpets
Entry, 1981
Life During the Great Acceleration
Moss
Sparrowhawk
Adrenaline
Long-Eared Owl
Nightjar
Panic Attack, Tsukiji Market
Mistle Thrush
Hole in the Wall
Swing
Curlew
The Story of the Hangover
Positioning
Oiks
Treecreeper
Quadrat
Gannet
Saturday
Great Black-Backed Gull
Beach
Acknowledgements
This book is for Tim Dee
Starling
All I’ve ever done with my life
is follow the average course of the crowd
and witter on about my hole in the wall,
the place where I’m from, to any bird that would listen.
Ask anyone. They’ll all say the same.
Did he speak of his wall time, his time in the hole?
All through the winter gathering and roost
I spin my line. Others do the same.
All I’ve ever done with my life
is steer a flight among an old swarm
and soon I’ll be dead and the swarm will go on,
so thanks for allowing one starling a voice
but if I ‘brood in my hole in the wall’
and ‘keep one eye on the summer stars
viewed as from the bottom of a well’,
well, that’s only you in your human dark.
Atlas
It wasn’t a globe, it was the whole starry heavens,
but before I was sent to stand in the west
with the weight of the sky on my back
I did lift the northern hemisphere
and opened the equator a crack,
carefully, so the bottles inside
didn’t quake, for fiery swigs.
Clan Dew. Bristol Cream.
The world tilted, then
I closed the lid,
gigantic.
Poker
You’re told this deck was found
in some shattered bothy or croft
north of the Great Glen,
missing its six of diamonds,
shuffled and dealt to a soft
pliancy, greased with lanolin
and you’re told this deck lived behind
the bar in a barracks town
and came out to play most nights,
cut between the Falklands
and Iraq, its spring long gone,
dark-edged with mammal sweat
and you’re told this deck is the one
recovered from a halfway house
where fatty stalactites
grew in a microwave oven,
where a bottle of Famous Grouse
was brandished in a fight
and it might be a pack of lies
or it might be a sleight of hand,
and you can’t tell which is a bluff
because words are a good disguise
for holding nothing. I’ve found
that nothing is more than enough.
Accumulator
To think of him studying the form
on a Saturday morning, his close reading
of the racing pages,
the long hour
when we know better than to disturb him,
and to think of how it could be poems
he pores over, anything that adds
to the stock of available reality,
raw lyrics in the horses’ names,
the found poetry of lists; to think of him
caught in this huge attention; outside,
a world begins beyond our gate;
the letterbox holds its breath, the furniture
stands its ground, the bailiffs wait,
and this spell he casts
makes nothing happen
though sometimes all our silences
and heavy going are rewarded
when every door in the house yawns open
then slams in an unbroken sequence.
Goldcrest
The penny drops. You’ve only ever heard
the goldcrest, till you find one in a mist net
and the ringers show you how to handle a bird
not much bigger than a bumble bee—
who’d notice if you slipped it in your pocket
like a coin they use to balance up the scales?
Blown through starlight on an easterly gale
you weigh the Baltic States and the North Sea,
arrived from euro airspace into sterling
to circulate among the highest treetops
where they live right on the edge of human hearing,
and as we age and money comes to seem
the simple trap we fall into to dream
our days away . . . Just then the music stops.
Glorious Goodwood
Saturday. Under orders. Just before the house
turned upside down, just before the bites and stings
of horseflies, just before the hooves’ cadence,
a rise and fall that lasted about a minute.
There being only that, and no seeing beyond it.
A plague on our house, living from moment
to moment, blinkered down to a few furlongs,
then we were away, all gone, his mad dance
that could fill a house with silence or song
recorded only here, the television’s
fever broken, the house itself, all gone
while his horse is still running and the horseflies
still out for blood and in my blood, as once
forty years ago, up North on the South Downs.
Clever and Cold
It’s hard being clever and cold.
And I should know. Jack Frost came
to my childhood window one night and told
me: Look, from now on things won’t be the same.
Its great stillness is not merely a pose.
Not coming in from the cold, but cold coming in.
I try to keep warm but ever since
our little mind-to-heart, I’ve known
cold’s wider intelligence.
How all days should be crystal days.
You can see cold for yourself at work
in the shapes it makes
out of any January park:
fangs on the lip of the slide; a lid for the lake.
The sky is thinking hard before it snows.
You can see how frost hides from the sun,
keeping itself to the shadows
of walls and hedges. It has a mind of its own.
The sun can’t have everything its own way.
These are some of the things cold knows.
Lark and Linnet
So it happens the sun
and the tilt of the train
and a smell like stone drying
&n
bsp; and a faint song playing
align, and we’re back again
walking the Lanes
towards the Park
we enter through old iron gates
and though it takes the bite
of planetary gears
to place me here, the weight
of years,
I’ve learned it’s also light
as air and how to hold it
is to be held, until
given names, it disappears.
The Ship in the Park
Most parks harboured one, an inland mooring
but we don’t know that yet. This one is ours.
Skeletal steel, a biro or a blueprint
of a ship from central casting, drawing
the kids who’ve tired of the swing or spent
hours behind the wheels of burned out cars.
Galleon style. Old Spice. On a tide of tarmac
glittering with broken glass—as if some giant
bottle had been smashed and the ship slipped free
but couldn’t set sail from this dry dock—
a playground wind blew straight through it; a crescent
moon rose with no influence on this sea.
England’s Glory. We climb its empty frame
and fight over who’s captain. One keeps lookout.
The white flats loom like icebergs. A sheet of rain
twitches with sharks. Deep in a half term’s doldrums
we lie down in its hull like cargo, start
to smoke, or learn to drink Lamb’s Navy rum
and puke over the side. We ran aground
like that. The Cutty Sark. The Marie Celeste.
The Hispaniola. The Bounty. The Onedin Line.
All the ways we found to live and play in the past
on a riveted-to-the-spot, spot-welded sign
abandoned in a few moons, lost with all hands.
The Mystery
There’s a funfair in the small bones of my ears.
It’s pitched up in the deep olfactory bulb,
in the crosshairs of my eyes. It lights the marrow
of my long bones, with a hoop for every year
it turned this park into a diamond district,
each slow excited stride from ride to shy
beyond the goldfish that would grow a bib
of mould in time, beyond the smell of straw
and caramel and two-stroke generators.
Even the big wheel still turns inside me,
though the thing itself has long since gone for scrap,
and every bulb’s blown to an iron-grey dust.
You must still hang there in the moving night,
unaware this blank machinery
is doing such dark work, until a slight
catch in the throat and shiver passing through
which we call déjà vu. A thought like that
can swing one of two ways: either you feel
yourself the very centre of all things—
the girls laughing, the cinder toffee, the bulbs
like hot rivets holding the dusk around you—
or you can feel the cold all of a sudden,
a mouse inside a town hall clock’s movement
frozen before the iron strike of the hour,
and all at once the fluke, the joke, of being alive
lies open and exposed, a sheet-steel sky
shutting the furnace door on Wavertree,
the spoke that holds him pointing towards nothing,
an axle groan rising above the music.
And so he hangs there in the moving night,
knowing the big wheel has to set him down,
a stop/start through fifteen degrees of arc;
that the man who took his money will take his hand
like any boatman would; but he stays aboard
a while longer, for one more go around,
and leaves me standing in an empty park.
Glade
From the long loan book of recurring dreams,
the one where I’m opening the library
on Ladbroke Grove, entering the alarm
code, letting off a chain of lights,
making up a float, chasing out the cold
and a ring of chairs in a cove among
the shelves where I set fresh papers out
then shake a can of air freshener
and hang a mist in the air. I draw
the bolt and wedge open the door
and in they come. They’ve got no faces
any more, but their clothes are pigeon,
stock brick, plane bark, pavement greys.
They make a bee-line for certain chairs
and are surely most of them dead these days
but here they’re still studying furiously
as I guard the peace—I’m the one who’s asleep,
remember—from headlines to small print shares.
The silence deepens. The world turns.
I’ve never been happier in my work.
Song Thrush
One used to perch on its anvil
under the currant bush
in the corner of our yard, a
shady spot where we’d watch it bash
a snail like its gavel
and leave a broken home.
This stone was about the size
of an old dial telephone,
and sometimes the bird would stop,
snail still in beak,
and tilt its head to one side
as if it were listening into the shell,
as if it were a receiver that said
something back,
something so outrageous or stupid
it wanted to telegraph the fact
to us, a technique
students are taught at RADA,
a way to react
so we’d be able to tell
the caller had suddenly hung up.
Water Nymph at a First Generation Magnox Storage Pond
We hook up in the last places you’d look.
Flooded subways, lift well pools
where rain holes up, gazed-over gravelled shallows,
moss gardens on bus stop shelter roofs:
we’re found near waters just like these since Zeus
got us on zero hours contracts,
having deserted springs, dew ponds and tarns,
taken our severance, joined the queues
and tell our sob stories of meres and fens
long drained, filled in, paved over,
cry me a river. Some babble: new reservoirs
will create thousands of jobs; purists
sit on their arses, waiting for water features
to come to them. But if they’d take a cistern,
a temporary post beside a rain butt,
a bath plumbed into quickset for the cattle,
a leaky fridge condenser, hoof print, divot
or—sod it—a puddle, there’s always work to be had.
Lately in the kingdom of the blind
they’ve built these radioactive oubliettes
—keeping the lights on means having to forget—
and after two millennia of mills,
of aqueducts and sullen moats,
we gather in their background shine. Those clicks
are the echolocation of exiled nymphs.
Listen to this one. A century of gutters.
That one got stuck next to a dead man’s kettle.
Another slummed it by a whirlpool spa for years.
If you’re picturing pale skin and golden tresses,
my hair falls out in tufts. Maybe we’re turning mortal
from bathing alongside scrapped fuel rods,
old thunderbolts rusting and spent,
where water carries a charge and taste
like coins banked in a civic fountain’s silt,
or—this is going back—pools with the taint
of lead scrolls
scratched with binding spells or curses.
Words that would burn in air.
In this lido left to stagflate, I need only apply
myself to my reflection and there’s a post
for life, longer than a life: no wishes or spite
can outlast all this legacy sludge.
I’m inventorying the waste, just like I used
to count the flowering grasses
and clouds that lingered in those earliest springs
before I watched a world evaporate.
Gentian Violet
Finding a roadside gentian activates
a sunset clause in the laws of common sense:
as I’m about to nick it from this verge
the flower sends a little shock to my hand.
The rainbow runs to earth: beyond here
it’s all geophysics, worms, Pluto’s blue torch
in the body-scan, where flowers are the wounds
they once were gathered to heal, it’s a certain stain
in a sweetheart deal with bees, cut-flower scents
during the night feed on a ward, it’s the vein
that rises for a moment in your breast.
Now the flower blooms harder, the way a fire
in a city, seen from air support, shorts out
a block or two of power around itself
and cultivates more dark to flare against.
Robin
It’s not so much that robins follow us
more like they lead the way, going on ahead
like useless guides with not one word of our language
but fluent in flow and lode, flitting along
whichever way we walk, breaking into song
before we catch up, and they’re off again, a few yards
further into the future. We love them for this,
for spelling it out, for showing us where the edge
of the present moment is.
A breeze has shook
the holly or whitethorn and the robin has gone,
leaving me on the sky-puddled tarmac
straddling the powerlines, along the Black Path
that forked under a streetlamp, beside the White Bridge
where the open fields began and the smell of earth
was strong.
I’ve stood in all of these places
and a part of me stands there still, till a robin surfaces
and I follow it out, as I did then. Robin, lead on.
The Green Man