by Ros Barber
examples of the muted. And the boy
fathered by silence, slight and safely bred
to keep his trap shut. How the silence grows,
how it wraps around the house like sealing snow
though we are in the final day of spring.
Silence surrounds the men of deepest faith
and, listened to, may call a man to prayer.
I pray that no one follows us tonight;
that in England, rural keepers of the peace
are kept bewitched by corpse and candlelight;
I pray those men are instantly believed
who, having played my dark and murderous friends,
have stayed to stay the executioner’s hand;
I pray my soul’s absolved in all the lies
that tumble slick as herring from their tongues.
I pray, my friend, you’re warm and safe at home,
that doors remain unkicked and truths untold
and we have silence when the daylight comes.
NON-CORRESPONDENT
I have to write to someone. Not the page,
this featureless companion of the road,
this marker of my friendlessness, but flesh
my lips have kissed, a face my mind can shape.
And I choose you, my smart and cautious friend,
my almost love. With you, I’ll share all thought,
open my heart’s slammed door, so you may roam
among its chambers, sore with what you know,
when I am gone. Some unimagined date,
when I have found a grave I cannot flee,
this trunk will limp its way to the address
pasted inside the lid, and every word
I almost wrote to you will spill from me.
And you will know me, then. And know my wrongs.
That you may not reply: forgive me, Tom.
THE SHAPE OF SILENCE
I dream of Kent. I’m still at school, at King’s,
in Canterbury, where my starveling brain
unloaded intrigue from a feast of tongues
that massacre and war made refugees.
Canterbury, where I gorged myself
on knowledge, sharpened up my fledgling wit,
feeding on scholarship an inner flame:
some hot conviction that the world was mine.
Canterbury, from whose huddled roofs
bursts the substantial faith of a cathedral
whose spire aspires to heaven, but whose stones
have been a butcher’s block where holy men
were finished off for their beliefs. Vespers.
A whisper: You’re wanted. Shrinking low, I duck
official eyes and follow the message boy.
He guides me to a room whose door shuts fast.
And clear as sherry there is Robert Greene,
stroking his beard until it points to Hell.
He’s master now; the Duke of Chaos reigns.
Envy has whipped the light that shows it bare,
and jealousy has fashioned wisdom’s chains.
‘Pretending to be dead?’ A crow, he caws.
‘You’ll find death is uncomfortable at best.
You shouldn’t mock us with your parlour trick.’
He points me to the iron branks. ‘It’s yours.
Unless you’ll try a smoother punishment.’
I say I will. My legs are rendered stone
and cannot port me out of there. I’m led,
like calf to slaughterhouse, to inner rooms
where boys are gagged with bandages, and on
until we reach the library. ‘See this?’
He opens up a box whose gilded clasp
features initials not my own. ‘Your tongue
goes here,’ he says, and strokes the tongue-shaped mould
designed for it. The velvet’s bright as blood.
He turns to the shadows, shouting, ‘Cut it off!’
and in the glint of threatened knives, I wake,
a grey light creeping through a widow’s drapes.
Only my breathing saturates the dawn.
THE TRUNK
A hand on my shoulder startles me. ‘Excuse.
It’s best you leave before the dawn. This place.
Its people love the smell of something fishy.
They get up early too.’ She’s loosely dressed.
I’m at the desk, as though I never slept.
The blown-out candle’s stink is barely cold
and she is nursing a flame to light its wick.
‘I don’t need trouble. Whoever you are. It’s time.
You must depart.’ She shakes my arm. ‘Go! Vite!’
She’s woken the captain and his boy. In vests
they’re readying to shift my trunk downstairs.
Her parlour seems colder now, the fire out.
The candlelight insists it’s night outside,
only her rush suggesting otherwise.
‘Yesterday’s bread. Some cheese.’ She packs my bag
as if we are related. ‘Best I can do.
Go up the road six miles. My cousin’s house
is at the crossroads. He’s the farrier.
He’ll find a horse for you. Tell him Monique
will cook him a pie if he brings meat across.
Exactly those words, you understand?’
I’m stuck.
Her brittleness unnerves me, like the shock
of a morning wash. She shivers anxiously
as if the changed wind slipping beneath the door
hints at the distant stench of consequence.
Her eyes evasive, fearing mine might lock
hers to some dangerous bond of loyalty.
‘The trunk?’ I ask. The boy is sitting on it.
The captain yawns. And there I glimpse again
the stub that recommends him to the State.
‘I’ll send it on,’ she says, ‘as you instruct.’
Two footsteps on, I’ll be reduced to robes,
to paper, quill and ink, a change of clothes.
‘The trunk,’ I tell her, ‘anyone can look.
‘It’s just some books, some poems. If someone
– authorities – should need to open it,
they will find nothing. It is literature.
Send it to Mr Le Doux. At the sign of the bear
in Middelburg. There’ll be an angelot
if the inventory’s present still.’ She nods.
‘May God be with you.’
Now I’m alone outside,
feeling a pinch no dawn will warm away.
The captain and boy will shuffle off and slip
mooring ahead of mackerel coming in.
I set off inland, towards the brightening sky,
conscious of night behind. All England’s dark
that threatens to engulf me is a beast
crouched at my back. And then I remember you.
FORGE
The farrier is shoeing with a force
you’d only use on hoofs. He hammers in
a quarter-dose of good luck for the road,
then puts the fetlock down. ‘You wanting me?’
His mouth is battened straight, as if the lips
are still turned in to hold a row of nails.
My mind sets cold; it’s hard enough to trust,
and Monique’s ‘cousin’ might mean anything;
they hardly seem related. He’s a ‘friend’,
but not a friend of mine. He runs his eyes
across my scholar’s cloak, my library skin.
‘I’ve a message from Monique,’ I say. ‘She asked
if you would take some meat across for her,
and she’ll bake you a pie.’
‘That’s what she said?
Monique is full of promises. Last time
I did her a favour, she reneged her word.’
He snorts, and turns to wash hi
s spade-like hands
in a nearby bucket. ‘So you need a horse.
I hope you’re good for payment. Monique’s pies
are legendary. Like the phoenix, son.
They don’t exist.’ His apron is his towel.
Thinking me green, he guides me to the barn
and tries to palm me off with something slow.
‘A sturdy beast. You have some miles ahead?’
‘A few,’ I say. ‘But I don’t have a whip.’
‘Just so.’ He laughs. ‘For sturdy beasts and mules
have much in common. Some reluctance, no?’
My French needs greasing, but is adequate
to make him laugh. ‘Perhaps you’re after speed?
In case you’re set upon,’ he says, and shrugs.
‘It happens. The road attracts its travellers
and some are desperate.’ His eyes on me.
‘Some signs of life would do,’ I say. ‘This mare?’
‘Ten sovereigns.’
‘That’s too much!’
‘That’s what she costs.’
His arms across his chest, a barrier.
‘The price is made of many parts. She’s fast
as the man who sells her’s quiet. You understand.’
I understand that Monique’s words have cost
the doubled price of silence. So it goes;
life will be cheaper once I’ve disappeared.
I bargain for her tack to be thrown in.
The smell of leather as I saddle up
returns me briefly to my father’s shop:
the chatter of my sisters up the stairs
and hammered sunlight leant across the door.
‘You know the road to take? Towards Douai?
You have a scholar’s pallor,’ he explains.
‘The English scholars tend to go that way.
But you were never here,’ he adds. ‘Of course.’
She has no name. I call her Esperance,
blessing myself with hope.
Just after noon
we leave the Douai road and plod a stream
that cuts us easterly through woods; a route
less clock-predictable, should I be tracked.
Dear Nowhere-to-go, press on.
For at my back,
beyond La Manche, one destiny is crouched
still ready to spring: the cell, the lash, the rack,
the gibbet and noose. The vicious slice from throat
to belly; my intestines gentled out
by a dutiful executioner, my prick
hacked off and crammed into my mouth. Good miles
that keep me in my skin, my breath, my mind.
But every mile another mile from you.
CONJURORS
Watching my father at the last, I learnt
that love is a necessity of craft.
Who writes must love their pen and every mark
it makes upon the paper, and the words
that set their neighbours burning, and the line
that sounds against the skull when read again.
Elbows against a schoolboy’s desk, I learnt
the dead can be conjured from their words through ink,
that ancient writers rise and sing through time
as if immortal, the poet’s voice preserved
like the ambered insect some see as a scratch
but I’d imagine flying, brought to life.
And so to precious paper I commit
the only story I can never tell.
TOM WATSON
‘He’s come to Cambridge. Thomas Watson.’
‘Swear!’
‘I swear. Staying with some old friend of his.
He’s come to see your Dido.’
Christmas week.
Nineteen years old, and my first play is born
on a student stage fusty with Latin jokes.
Act One starts in an hour, the snow is thick
across the quad, and crunches underfoot
as Knowles and I make for the buttery.
‘You can’t be sure.’
‘The rumour’s sound. He’ll come.
He’ll love it, Kit.’
‘He’ll recognise those lines
where Dido dies. I robbed the pith from him.’
‘Be calm. He’ll take it as a compliment.’
Our names marked down, I take some soup and bread
but cannot eat. Across the darkened lawns,
the hall is tricked out as a theatre.
Boys are in face-paint; two in Roman gowns
are testing their breasts won’t slip. It’s too late now
to change a word of it. They’ve memorised
their entrances and exits, have the lines
under their breath. The night is with the gods.
The final speech. As Dido’s sister bolts
headlong into imaginary flames
a silence settles. Then the hall erupts.
A thief’s anxiety, worming its nest of holes
in the poet’s stomach, softens at the salve
of warm appreciation from a throng
of drunken students.
One man stands apart.
As others press to greet me, he leans in
to his friend, his eye on me and whispering
something that makes his neighbour splutter; not
at me, but at the sea of gowns he parts
entirely by the focus of his gaze.
Anticipation makes me blurt his name
in time with him as we are introduced.
He laughs. ‘Another Watson? A common name,
I grant you, but Tom too? It’s ludicrous.
I’ve met a dozen Toms this last half-day,
but not another Watson. Peace, my friend.
You’re Christopher Marley, and I’m very glad
to meet you. Quite an ambitious play for one
so young. You’ll come to town and sup with us?
Gobbo’s paying.’ He motions to his friend.
Some tankards later, his voice conducts a crowd
jesting at one particular Oxford don
who, ‘finding a student tying his laces together,
would correct the miscreant’s bows, and demonstrate
the best knot for the job, before he’d rise,
and be felled to the floorboards like a tree!’
The table laughs. His eyes are bright with it.
More beer is hailed as one of his friends chips in:
‘And Richard Harvey is another ass.
He wrote a book some years ago, predicting
the destruction of the world in eighty-eight.
The calamity will be fire and water mixed.
And what might that describe?’
‘His bowels perhaps,’
Watson suggests, ‘when none of it comes true.’
The table erupts, and as the beer arrives,
Tom Watson leans in closer to my ear.
‘Dim-witted Dick is rector to my friend.
His brother, Gabriel, is tutor here.
You know him?’
‘I have had the dubious pleasure.’
He smiles. ‘You’d circle the globe to see two men
more cursed and blessed with brains. Intelligence
is only for the gifted. Don’t you think?’
This question pierces me. His eyes, like hearths
to come in from the cold to. Do I think?
I haven’t said much since the second beer,
which tugs at me now to head out for the jakes.
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
His friends are lost
in jokes about the Harveys; all the air
around the two of us drawn in, enclosed,
as if his voice has conjured us a room.
His face is serious. ‘A lively wit
can only be ridden if it’s broken in.
You’ve heard that phrase? On
e privy councillor
I know is very fond of it.’
‘Lord Burghley?’
‘Sir Francis Walsingham. He has some work
for men with languages. If you like travel.
Delivering letters to the embassies.
Paris, and so on. Should I mention you?’
I hope I didn’t seem too puppy-keen;
my only other option was the Church.
A life outside the walls of academe,
adventuring in the service of the Queen,
a chance to move among the powerful
and commandeer material for my pen
was more like life than all my lives till then.
The gods forgive me if I wolfed the bait.
‘Discretion, though. Should you speak to anyone
about the possibility, it’s gone.’
Odd to recruit me there, a public place.
And yet, surrounded by the drunk and loud,
and cloaked in a fog of less important talk,
he carved us privacy. A gale of noise
proves safer to talk in than the queue to piss,
or a quiet street. Words travel far on air,
and leap on the back of silence, riding miles
beyond our sight. But lean in, sup a beer,
exchange a tale. And then rejoin the jokes.
Allude to nothing further: be, and wait.
Thus Watson’s first free lesson in the art
of espionage on Dido’s opening night:
the safest jewels are hidden in plain sight.
TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
This banished man is writing you a poem,
the only code I know that tells the truth,
though truth was both my glory, and my ruin,
the laurel, and the handcuff, of my youth.
London seduced me. Beckoned me her way
and spread herself beneath me, for a play.
‘They’ve never seen the like before.’ Applause,
a clapping swell like starlings after grain