The Golden Mean

Home > Other > The Golden Mean > Page 2
The Golden Mean Page 2

by John Glenday


  who cared notice that for a time,

  if only a moment, you were going somewhere.

  A Testament

  I was so young. I wanted to experience the world, so I stared

  at the sun until my eyes burned hollow; kissed all the women I

  could ever love until each kiss dwindled to water. Now hardly a day

  passes but I find myself blundering into the sea; or gathering in my

  arms an unspeakable fire.

  The Lost Boy

  im Alexander Glenday died November 4th, 1918

  November,and nothing said.

  The old worldwhittling down

  to winter.Ice on my tongue:

  its wordless,numbing welcome.

  We bloodybelieved in war

  once; we cheeredwhen our children

  sailed off forthe Front. But now

  all languagefails me. Listen:

  ‘Army FormB. 104.

  November1918.’

  ‘. . .a reporthas been received

  from the Field, France. . .. . . was killed in

  Action.’ There.Alexander

  has been killed –my couthie boy.

  Nineteen, lookedmore like fourteen.

  They told mehis howitzer

  was shattered –a shell ‘cooked off’

  in the breech,and the blast tore

  them apart.They were too keen

  of course, boysblown to pieces

  with that GreatWar days from won.

  Boom. And gone.I’m a blacksmith.

  I’ve seen whatwhite hot metal

  makes of flesh.My own wee Eck.

  I’m to blame.I was the fool

  who signed, andhim still far too

  young. Fifteen!His mother flung

  her mug atme, mute with rage.

  Each morningshe makes his bed;

  lays fresh clothesacross a chair.

  She’ll not speakhis name again.

  Her stare isa hard, black sloe.

  If fine rhymesrang like iron,

  hammered bright,hot with meaning

  they might weighmore in my heart.

  Brave songs don’tbring the dead home;

  they damn themto cross that dour

  black stream whereyon pale boatman

  waits and foulfoundries spit and

  silence istheir only song.

  When we goto his grave, I’ll

  bring sorrel,because I know

  the dead arealways drouthy –

  their dry mouthsclotted with dust.

  I’ll say sorryson, this plant

  slakes onlythe one, small thirst;

  may its briefwhite blossom

  linger uponyour grave, like snow.

  The Big Push

  after Sir Herbert James Gunn, ‘The Eve of the Battle of the Somme’

  Would you believe it, there’s a bloke out there singing

  ‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’.

  His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding

  from the ears. The Boche are all but finished, apparently –

  I heard they’re packing old clock parts into trench mortars

  now, for want of iron scrap. Some wag quips that next time he’s

  sentry and hears the plop of a minenwerfer tumbling over,

  he’ll not blow the alarm, he’ll shout: ‘Time, gentlemen, please . . . ’

  We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid. Bravery

  and cowardice are just two workings of the same fear

  moving us in different ways. The 8th East Surreys

  have been given footballs to kick and follow at Zero Hour;

  it’s to persuade them from the trenches lest their nerve fail

  as they advance on Montaubon. I’ve watched men

  hitch up their collars and trudge forward as if shrapnel

  and lead were no worse than a shower of winter rain.

  This afternoon a few of us went swimming in the mill dam

  behind Camp. Just for a while to have no weight, to go drifting

  clear of thought and world, was utter bliss. A skylark climbed

  high over the torn fields on its impossible thread of song:

  ‘like an unbodied joy.’ I don’t know why, but it reminded

  me of the day we took over from the French along the Somme;

  it was so tranquil, so picturesque, the German trenchworks crowded

  with swathes of tiny, brilliant flowers none of us could name.

  I believe if the dead come back at all they’ll come back green

  to grow from the broken earth and drink the gathered water

  and all the things they suffered will mean no more to them

  than the setting-in of the ordinary dark, or a change of weather.

  Rubble

  General term for a people who are harvested and reused

  or broken. To be heaped randomly or roughly stored.

  That which is held for common use. Infill. Of little worth.

  Break them in different ways but they will always be the same.

  Hold them in the dark; remind yourself why they should stay forgotten.

  These days there is little interest in stones that bear names.

  May they be piled up and given this title in common.

  Let them take their place in the register of unspoken things.

  May they never be acknowledged again.

  Our Dad

  After he’d passed over, she buried all his séance books.

  Said she was comfortable with the notion of the Afterlife

  but had no use for it on her parlour shelf. It felt worse

  than burning somehow – imagine words gasping for air,

  their loosened pages mouldering back to soil and dirt.

  In the thirties, he was a regular at Circle meetings in some

  North London suburb, but didn’t believe in an afterlife

  or the Spirit Realm, that sunlit somewhere after death.

  It was the showmanship he loved: all that cheerless

  determination, cotton wool and wire; all that nifty

  fiddling with lights. Let death be always nothing more

  than sleight of hand. One flurry of white doves

  and the earth-strewn dead spring back into our lives,

  gaping and astonished. Cue the applause. Amen to that.

  The Iraqi Elements

  after Zaher Mousa

  This is the birth of Water:

  Mist is when water dies so that it can be born again.

  Sluggish rivers swither among the dead,

  their banks overflowing.

  Listen: those whisperings in the pipework

  are all the refugees from thirst.

  The inscription on the fountain’s cup reads:

  ‘Drink, Hussain, and remember thirst.’

  Their fathers: their fathers’ gentle thirst,

  like sand slowly pouring into blood;

  heedless as a stone: a millstone that worries

  its own reflection back to sand.

  So they went off to war and when they came back,

  no water for the ritual cleansing,

  not one drop, so they washed themselves in graveyard dust.

  *****

  This is the birth of Air:

  Weary angels revel in it: the sky is laced

  with the gutturals of genies; those dark eyes

  that glimpse the invisible smouldering in their veins.

  Here you touch against breasts that breathed in childhood’s loss.

  Their women: their women are perfumed sadnesses;

  their gaze carried away on the wind

  bleached of all colour: their black clothes

  abandoned – still in suitcases somewhere.

  The women banked on hard graft and the smoking tanur,

  but War won that bet, of course. War always does.

  And when it was all over they breathed in the soot of a crow’s wing;
/>
  the drift of fans through narrow rooms.

  *****

  This is the birth of Fire:

  Soldiers trudge home from the front line.

  Slivers of shrapnel glimmer inside them.

  Here’s a dead man with a cigarette in his pocket,

  still alight – his last smoke.

  Cancers flare and smoulder in the heads of children.

  Their children: their children with happiness chalked into their faces –

  if they were a pack of cards there wouldn’t be any joker.

  Their children are little crusts of bread dunked

  in muddy kerbside puddles. Life will gobble them up.

  In other countries children have footballs to play with, but not here,

  no, in this country they used the children’s heads as footballs.

  *****

  This is the birth of Earth: Feel this: feel the earth.

  The Doldrums

  after Zaher Mousa

  I

  I’ll carry this wound like a wristwatch – look

  it’s bleeding the minutes away;

  but leaves no mark, no scar on Time

  though day wears day down into day.

  II

  Dear afternoon,

  I only glimpsed you as you sailed past my window

  and vanished forever, like that girl on the bus,

  that hopelessly beautiful girl.

  III

  No. My blood is nothing like the honest river

  glazing and slackening through the seasons.

  Think of a worn-out wall-clock with its dodgy weathers:

  faster and faster, then slower again, then . . .

  The Golden Mean

  I am to you

  as you are

  to us and

  we are to

  everything.

  The Grain of Truth

  Grows poorly in rich soil. Ripening

  demands an exceptional season.

  Blights more readily than us, even.

  Sow it, you’ll reap a fine harvest of sorrow.

  Each head clings grimly to husk and chaff,

  mills the stoutest millstone

  to a gritty pebble, kills all yeasts,

  sulks in the oven like its own headstone.

  So never offer me something

  I cannot refuse and expect thanks.

  Don’t bring me this gift then

  ask me why I cannot thrive.

  Northeasterly

  Driven by sleet and hail,

  snell, dour and winterly;

  it fills the unwilling sail,

  empties the late, green tree.

  Something unknowable

  lodged in the heart of me

  empties itself and fills

  Like that sail. Like that tree.

  Macapabá

  We rocked at anchor where the emptying

  river spreads its green hand.

  Ochre mud thickened the sea.

  On the second morning, slender boats

  from the forest; they brought birds

  the colour of watered oil,

  sallow fruit no one would taste

  and a leaf folded around a knot of gold

  broader than a clenching fist.

  Only a leaf for a sail

  and before us, look, the impossible ocean of it all;

  squall and storm;

  lash and flail;

  the unnavigable, the hungry, the whole perfect

  unstarred bleakness of the world,

  as though a dark

  we had always feared had grown real and cold and tidal,

  and the lifted

  green-black

  ragged face of its hand to pull us,

  pull us down,

  and what chance would you say we had,

  so small,

  only the two, my love, just me,

  just you,

  but give us a leaf for a sail, and suddenly, somehow,

  everywhere’s possible.

  Fetch

  Now that she is lost to us. Now that

  she has come back, restless.

  Now that we no longer believe in her,

  let her ribcage crumble

  with the bricks in the old warehouse

  that almost remembers;

  let her breath smell of iron scab,

  of diesel, of lime;

  let her skin be the bloom

  on oily setts, let her voice

  be loose sections of fencework

  shivering in the wind.

  Let her call out through last night’s dark

  towards today. Let her not be heard.

  Fetch II

  She’s so real you can hardly see her, printed

  like Christ’s face into cloth; the linen

  rehearsing his wounds while they rusted in the air.

  Her eyes turn from the empty warehouse

  to the winking lights on the dock, the salt-dark firth

  and the far hills brewing cumuli.

  Don’t be sad, she says, Don’t grieve for any of this.

  (her footsteps sweetening back to dust)

  This sort of emptiness could save us all.

  The Dockyard

  Buddleia does well here, at least.

  It thrives on flowers of sulphur, concrete dust,

  coiled swarf and radon’s heavy bloom.

  No wonder the petals gleam the utter blue

  of a welder’s flame. No wonder the blossom

  rusts so easily, a shiver in the grass-choked guttering.

  In summer, butterflies briefly linger here,

  all the colours of ash and earth and blood.

  See how they diminish towards cloud and light

  as their fragile clockwork unwinds through

  the onshore wind, high over the dual carriageway

  and corner shops, towards the hills.

  Fireweed

  I’m old enough to remember how dangerous

  they were, those steam trains butting the weather

  south of Forfar, heading for the big smoke.

  They would seed sparks among the dropped coals littering

  the ballast by the Seven Arches, sweetening the shale for weeds.

  Even as we speak the willowherb is hitching upwind

  through the decades; it feeds on old burnings,

  hungry for nitrogen. At Doig’s Farm, their purple heads

  crowd above watermint and nettle, or lean out over

  the slackwater pools to marvel at themselves – tall, aristocratic,

  raised out of last year’s waste, abandonment and fire.

  Monster

  ‘I have no doubt of seeing the animal today . . . ’

  I miss it all so much – family and everything.

  Father in that lab coat fathers wear;

  always too close, always too distant,

  always too keen. You may have heard –

  my mother was the product of unmentionable

  absences and storms; my siblings

  a catalogue of slack, discarded failures.

  We are all born adult and unwise;

  don’t judge me too harshly.

  Which of us was not cobbled into life

  by love’s uncertain weathers? Are we not

  all stitched together and scarred?

  Step forward any one of you who can say

  they are not a thing of parts.

  X Ray

  The grinning moon lies

  balanced on a haze of cloud,

  snagged in the thousand

  branches of a bare

  white tree. But these

  are nothing – nothing’s marks,

  pauses for thought,

  the interstices, the points

  at which something slowed

  and thickened as it made

  its way through her. Surely

  this speaks of a wilful

  hesitancy – interest even?

 
; For want of the proper science

  we should call that love.

  The White Stone

  when you take it

  in your hand

  it will weigh smooth

  and hard and cold

  as the heart once did

  long ago

  before it was first

  touched by the world

  British Pearls

  ‘Gignit et Oceanus margarita, sed subfusca ac liventia . . . ’

  (Tacitus Agricola 1:12)

  British pearls are exceptionally poor.

  They can be gathered up by the handful wherever

  surf breaks, but you’ll find no colour, no vitality, no lustre

  to them – every last one stained the roughshod grey

  of their drab and miserable weather.

  Imagine all the rains of this island held

  in one sad, small, turbulent world.

  I can hear them falling as I write. British pearls

  are commonplace and waterish and dull,

  but their women wear them as if winter were a jewel.

  The Constellations

  The trick is always to appear fixed,

  whatever happens. To hold the pattern

  we were born to, though its significance

  may be lost to us. Here is where we make

  our stand and our love will be defined not by

  touch or glance but by the distances

  mapped out between us. We’ll light

  everything that needs our light, steadfast

  as the stars we fell from, trusting

  in them through disaster and adversity,

  though we know in our hearts

  they are burning in their shackles, like us all.

  Lacerta

  Not the browbeaten old king,

  or his poor wife handcuffed to her capsized throne,

  or their sad and lonely daughter

  waiting in the darkness for her perfect monster.

  Not the dead swan nailed to its right ascension

  or those pointless feathers harnessed to a stallion.

  Grant me the bleakness of the northern sky

  and a yellow gaze that burns relentlessly

  and the scales and the claws and the flickering tongue

  of a constellation none of you can name.

  The Moon is Shrinking

 

‹ Prev