by Paul Farley
in the pitch-shift of an aircraft going over;
or waiting for weekends to come around like picture cards
in a spongy bar-room deck, looking for a kink
in a pool cue rolled on baize and calling this wisdom
and they did all the oiky things: pointing at big buildings
as they entered the city shouldering sticks with bundles
of ugsome clobber tied to the end, enjoying
this simple leverage, saying ‘God bless Dick Whittington’,
and finding rented lodgings above mobile phone outlets,
having all the makings of home about their persons,
typically: toothbrush, steel comb, two pouches of counterfeit
tobacco, roll-on deodorant, ancestral gall stone,
and these and other possibles were laid on the candlewick
like a full kit inspection or a shakedown in those bridewells
they left off their CVs before starting on Mondays,
before breaking their promises to the man with the keys
about leaving it like they found it, true to form,
and nobody considered the oiks alone
on their first nights, too frightened to go out and explore,
switching the oik-box on to take blue communion
with every other oik in oik-lodgings all over old oik-land
where oik was spoken and oikiness general.
Treecreeper
On the telegraph post
that weeps creosote
and gathers a moss
as it once did in life,
on a mast that’s played host
to the corposant
and creaks in a gale
as it once did in life,
on the flagpole that stands
in a rootstock of stone
and flies the colours
as it once did in life,
see the treecreeper’s ghost
as it spirals and probes
and finds our blindside
as it once did in life.
Quadrat
After the disaster he went to inspect
a certain patch of rock between the tides.
Oiled guillemots were getting all the headlines,
barrels of ink being spent on their black feathers
while limpets and sea snails went by the by,
the small print of the shoreline. Big surf boomed
and echoed off the stacks. He scratched four corners
to make a window on a glassy mudstone
and started counting what was clinging on there
in summer, when it baked blue at low water,
in winter, when it shone glossy as the ravens
that hijacked one another in the wind,
heading home to tabulate the numbers
in a kitchen where a Rayburn and a storm lamp
provided light and shelter enough for study.
A slow newsroom. The scholar’s habitat.
No crossword, horoscope, or game of chess
on the beach with Death, or even noughts and crosses,
just a census of who lives at one address,
what’s happening in the constellation Quadrat,
no op-ed column or gastropod gossip
of mantled ears pressed to the world’s wall,
just the act of having drawn a line around things
and a willingness to take whatever’s found there,
the spill long having sailed the front pages
and dispersed into the archives and the footnotes,
and why he stuck it no one knew, until one day
he handed on his solar paper round
to a poet. Big mistake. I’ve let things slide.
The data set crumbled while I stayed home
to polish the words. The window washed away.
And that was the last entry, and this is the poem.
Gannet
for J.H.
Starved on a diet of distance,
of optic specks and crumbs,
but snarled in monofilament
one flapping bird becomes
a feast in close-up—blue
kohled eyes, sharp carbon-steel
beak—till one of us threw
their coat over, and it fell still.
A blacked-out budgerigar
denied the basic privileges
of cuttlebone and mirror
dreams of colonial perches
and pigeons shelved in lofts
survive the darkness system
by picturing the lost
cliff roosts that once held them.
Sightseers film the event:
us cutting free a bird.
The pictures are being sent
to social platforms, shared
and liked. Samurai swan
tempered far out to sea,
you can look now, we’ve all gone
back to our sad gannetry.
Saturday
This whole long-lagging, muzzy, mizly morning . . .
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Every day is Saturday.
We wake slowly, unhitched from the week.
A plane drones high above the house.
The post comes late. Monday has gone,
its inch-deep sheets of rainwater
on bus shelter roofs, its faces below
that gaze into the day before last,
its kids in playgrounds forming up
and filing through the unchained doors.
Tuesday is nowhere to be found,
the week’s waiting room with its magazines
called Saturday, its tongue and groove,
its dinnertimes and post office queues.
Wednesday, half closing day, has drawn
the shutters down on itself, the midweek
sump, its skiver’s moon, its halfway
point and cigarette break round the back.
You remember Thursday? Its rentman’s knock,
its pint after work, its lolling asleep
on a stranger’s shoulder on the last bus.
Though Friday, for all its faults, still stands
in the memory as the triumphal arch
into Saturday, till they knock it down.
The working week gone west, cut loose
like a city from its port. But wait:
we’re missing our day of rest, and can’t
even bring ourselves to say its name.
Every Saturday used to end. Then came
a whining vacuum, a muzzy head,
deserted streets. We rise in praise.
Give thanks. That nightmare is over. All
our tomorrows will be Saturdays.
Great Black-Backed Gull
The tide keeps bringing everything you need.
The tip is like a slowed down sea to gulls
who trawl behind the trucks or dip in strong
kinking glides above the ribbons and shreds
of dross, the spume and swell.
Taken to see Jaws
at the ABC, the robot great white shark
made us jump, but later came the slower thought
of real great whites cruising the seas of the world
while I lay in bed. What we are dealing with here
is a perfect engine, an eating machine . . .
Now, a landfill lubber with binoculars,
I pick out great blacks from the smaller gulls
above the waste where, fathoms deep, the shark
still swims among the wreckage of who we were
forty summers ago. They’re such powerful birds
and the tide keeps bringing everything they need.
Beach
It was one thing to visit them, to follow the file of people from the car park down onto the beach, a half mile to the scene, though even with the tape and media it wasn’t like a crime, more a sand fair, or a circus if the big top had blown away in a gritty wind and all the animals had
died, leaving a sweet scent under a big sky, the attraction of scale, a sudden sacred landscape of soft monoliths you couldn’t get your head round, the circling and approach from every angle by souvenir hunters with their hacksaws like leaf-cutters in a two-lane ant line, the protesters who’d been with aerosols and defiled their flanks or spoken truth to power—take your pick—and the dogs mad with discovering the big stink at the centre of the universe,
and it was another to crawl inside one, past the clickbait teeth and under the fatberg head, into the chambers of a gut as slow to cool as a furnace bed, and so a snug—if greasy—shelter, lit by your phone with no signal, all purely voluntary, no lots having been cast or storm endured at sea, seeking to get as far as possible from being a core customer, from traditional big players and broad narratives, a place outside arborescent hierarchies and the general drift towards consumer-driven content, to spend a night imagining dives, going deep, falling eventually into a single cycle of sleep and a lonely sonar dream, sensing daybreak from the gull-fest outside, a faint commotion through the walls of meat, and with no need to tickle any ribs, or set fire to the coracle you didn’t bring, emerge un-spat back into the day, the world exactly how you left it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to the editors of Areté, Eighteen Bridges, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement and Wild Court, where some of these poems have previously been published.
‘The Sloth’ first appeared in the pamphlet Cold Vision (Hexham Book Festival); ‘Gentian Violet’ was commissioned by the Arden Bloomsbury Shakespeare 400 project (in response to Sonnet 99) and included in On Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Bloomsbury); ‘Positioning’ was written at the invitation of Catherine Marcangeli/Bluecoat on the fiftieth anniversary of The Mersey Sound; ‘Saturday’ accompanied the photographs of Tom Wood in Termini (Éditions GwinZegal); ‘Moss’ was written for Colin Riley’s song cycle In Place; and ‘Great Black-Backed Gull’ has been recycled from Tim Dee’s book Landfill (Little Toller).
‘Quadrat’ is loosely founded on Richard Pearce’s long observations, and I’m grateful to him for our visit to Porth Mear on the north Cornish coast. ‘Moorhen’ owes a debt to Colin Tudge’s The Day Before Yesterday.
I’m grateful to Matt Haw, Warren Mortimer, Carole Romaya, Kate VerSprill, and my editor, Don Paterson.
About the Author
Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published four other collections of poetry with Picador, most recently The Dark Film (2012). His other books include Edgelands (with Michael Symmons Roberts, 2011), and he has also edited a selection of John Clare’s poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a frequent broadcaster, he has received numerous awards including Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
ALSO BY PAUL FARLEY IN PICADOR
The Dark Film
Tramp in Flames
The Ice Age
The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You
Selected Poems
First published 2019 by Picador
This electronic edition first published 2019 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5290-0981-1
Copyright © Paul Farley 2019
Jacket design: Neil Lang, Picador Art Department.
Cover art: Greensleeves, 2017 by Hurvin Anderson
© Hurvin Anderson. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019.
The right of Paul Farley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Visit www.picador.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.