Wolf Tongue
Page 11
of her life
Below the Yacht pub
Ranter writing
with a stick in the mud:
My whole life pulp
Brock wouldn’t touch
Waiting for Sweeney’s
Irish misery
beamed in from a bough
Howth to Sandy Cove
ham radio
ham-fisted
wrong-footed
Beak to phone
(feint crackle):
I am in a burned-out building
Powerscourt House
fighting weeds
in the Japanese water garden
I have returned the architect
to Versailles
with his glass ideals
I have ordered the turning off of fountains
in the Alpine park
floodlights dimming
lights going out
Black Rock to Louth
giver of feathers
to Agincourt fletchers
arrows bedded
in the emerald sodpark
alone in my bonsai
reduced and reduced
feathered slave
to unreasonable demands
*
prayer in peltchest
where are you love
psalter protected by wings
keep me going, Lord
plaid laid by pipes
My feast, brother
palace of his making
My house, keep out
Lord
to be called lord
prince
standing right in a princedom
fisted vigour
and prayer
Cuthbert busy
with Codex
and the travelling flame
Howling at the stone in her
beak-songs
he lapped her edges with
he winged her water
the lost darling
words and letters
drifting on the wind
four for the condition
six for her name
*
tracking the spore
Charing Cross to Lee
last train down
the Dartford Loop
station blacked out
like Ranter
tripping, falling
down subway steps
welter of blood, sick
lost luggage in his fury
chin cleftsmote
blood matting feathers
music hall routine
key in lock
Stroll on, Bill
where’s me eyes
Who nicked
the lightbulb
Who pulled down
the permanent blind
Ranter upright
on the sofa
Bloodcake shirt
vomitbib drying
Courtesy of
London gin
Ranter
the lurcher
living in a friend’s bathroom
head intermittently down the pan
feint flush on his cheeks
spew-syphon in his beak
*
waking: This is not possible
*
Ranter
torn from his trust
threshed & broken
down in the granary
cracking pods
Rhiannon
black lambswool plaid
twinklefeet
turning
kidleather shining
striding
rock to rock
wanderer
never chain her
to family stones
she spat in my face
dewy nipples
dried in defiance
larking sunlight
caught her hair
black
as dragon breath
Breton madness
lighting her lips
fleetfoot Diva
showing quarter irons
sparking flint
above Ranter’s handwave
body and soul
a budded rose
ready to be opened
by kings
*
Ranter’s children
driven out
by D’Aubigny
foster fathers
for orphans
driven on by Mobray
Durham to Evesham, 1069
Ranter’s head
carved and set
beneath volutes, 1075
on the voissar
scratched on his neck
ROBERT MADE ME
grooved snout
separate from other men
women too high to touch
in 1100
I was a silent watcher
eight men hanging
at Bury St Edmunds
ropes and rings
knotted over pegs
gallows-man
in a scarlet gown
ruddy slippers
and black hose
pink fleurs de lys
invaded the psalter
1130
St Oswald’s, Gloucester
I slept for a year
and woke
winedrunk from day one
drinking from a costrel
from hostel to hostel
hating the French words
invading my books
driven out
by the wife’s dark looks
kicking dust and traces
with Wulfric and Harthacnut
jabbering Saxon verbs
the poetry of battle
blood on the words
which are Northern
Writing: I am Eadwine
Prince of scribes
*
Shivering primrose
and the wind’s dark beat
down his tunnel
Ranter’s grooved beaksnout
glowing in the dark
dark of his making
changing frequency
Ranter. Mad & brain-sick,
Captain Pouch, Plug rioter,
verb for rising, knotting ropes
in Spithead, offering wrists
for chains
slippery digits
in his oily duvet
banged to rights
shimmering rape
and the heart’s dark beat
And Ranter’s bride:
disappeared
over every horizon
praising civil disorder
singing for the sleepless
Chaucer in her lap
*
Ranter the leper
sheet on his back
hedgerow kingdom
ditch den rain
hole he sprang from
scattering stones
his head burst through
perforated eyes
shooting bloodleaks
noseglove squeezing
through the gap
arcing, twisting
punching grasshumps
rolling in rosehip
flaked on flags
teeth buried in clover
fists in thrift
pollen on eyelids
more gold than gold
bell on his neck
bell of her leaving
from the aching hole
flopped on the ground
bootless, without fable
molars mincing tilth
broken like he should be
Snipe Drumming
alone on Ranter’s Rock
gull-smeared woolsack
lochtide sunblade
falling to the far shore
under McCleod’s Table
like Ranter
exhausted with bringing light
Resentment
rising like liquor
pity of her silence
in little rooms
she made life
p
art of their neatness
No big swoops, she said,
in a fragment
in the village he loved.
snipe drumming
Ranter’s wet head
turning
inside the noise
Snizort streaming to saltwater
at Skeabost
Ranter diving
out of the sun
snipe drumming
Ranter’s Pool.
Otter.
Liquid like them
revolving
running windburned
refugee in exiled fiefdom
ewe-skull
picked from a ditch
bare to the bone
stripped by predators
endless wind
under the furnace of heaven
Ranter’s cot
under eves
Ranter’s bride writing:
Mill chimneys and derelict sites,
burning rubbish in back lanes,
high moors of mist and snowdrifts,
to the land of Bloodaxe and Bede
you fetched me from the city I loved.
Kiln-bricks piled high in a yard.
Men with flushed faces and women alone,
children scratting from door to door.
Families gathering in silent gangs.
I knew city sparrows and riverside
pigeons. You shewed me the curlew
in a far-off place I didn’t like much.
The people or their guttural tongue.
Their sudden warmth disarmed me.
Woman of shame
lover and friend
silence until autumn
when we may meet again
Drumming the wold
my man
wielding the world.
How you can
do this to
me I do
not know. A
woman of shame
it comes easily.
My family &
friends. Summer
joy
without burden
of loving
you, adrift
on riptides,
anger and spleen.
You were drunk.
I didn’t like
it much. No swoops
in me.
Now I’m here,
river
I love.
*
Ranter beneath The Plough,
Taurus, Orion, starring
a universe of chaos
hiding her with a cloakclasp.
More harpstrums than kisses.
More refugees than guests.
I travel in the dark
so you won’t know me.
*
This is hopeless.
Flexing
at field’s edge,
body at home
in this country,
small baggage
of history
flickering
between us
like the film
it is.
A lost world.
*
Skull teeming danger signs.
Ready for your wildest attack.
Seek wisdom. Would go to some
great man if I could.
Halfden or Bloodaxe or Bede.
Taking my hammer and books
leaving you alone.
Using my blade to furrow
I wouldn’t be happy.
Would long for the long cry
as the prow bit your sand,
flailing villages into welts
of widowhood. Blood on my blade
in rosehip and fern.
Time for books after the scourge.
Sit in my cell with a quiver
of pens, gold-leaf for the page.
Drawing maps, borders
wanting more than I had.
For wisdom return to myself
wearing pelt because I am wolf.
Wolfric my brother a hearty man.
Killed with my axe
and now he is in me.
I am not always stone
at the end of your
accusing finger.
But when I am
it is flint
for pruning & plunder
Thor’s thunder
driving my arm.
Ranter’s Reel
Phantom, phantom
bringer of dread
smiter of spar
head-tosser
cross-burner
drunk from day one
lolltongue wrapper
around any bone
the one of contention
bloody love battles
splitting her crystal
to smithereens
cheekpouch stormlord
billowing plaid
thumping his breastbone
grinding his axe
Saying: Look out
every scattered atom
on the dire pathway
And Ranter: They’re
all behind me
lost on the moors
but she isn’t
Crawcrook to Consett
the red desert
Wylam to Prudhoe
Bunting and Bewick
Corbridge to Hexham
pearl of his princedom
Catton to Allendale
hunting for meat
Rookhope to Dirt Pot
tunnel to tunnel
Hollywood Charlie’s
to the bend in the beck
Dove Pool to Allenheads
one mile in sleet
Fir Tree to Stanhope
boarded up schools
Alston to Nenthead
and back
greasy lustre
of surface fractures
back to his beck
stream for bathing
laving his back
broken by loping
from hedgebreak
and beck level
pinebough to pooledge
turned from his track
snared on the fell
beaters with sticks
county men, stocks
at their shoulders
snouting hounds
falcons on traces
hounded and hounded
midnight attacks
pebbles through windows
flogged in fields
for breaking a hoe
and answering back
Worming down
tunnels
of history
Ranter setting
his date: 1349
Blackheath, Ranter’s
proposing place
date of his emerging
so kept under like beasts
Recording on a slate in the rain:
Give me your hardest hardness
your bitterness, your spleen
Give me the harshest harness
thrown off by beasts used to your harm
your inability, your dreadful shame
your words untouched by human warmth
all liquid innuendoes and brittle salutes
quartz-tongue flint-heart, pass me
jagged qualities of your meanest acts
Your silence beginning with O
Broken stiles
littering the princedom
neglected ditches
clogged with clarts
locked-up chapels
where lamenting starts
sheepwire stapling
her fells and fields
wild Northumberland
hemmed in, stitched up
more dismay
for me and my fiefdom
Up in the crow’s nest
beak in a twist
Shrike talk:
I’m black grouse. I won’t fly.
Ptarmigan, one of the beak mob.
You can’t beat me up
I’m a big bird.
My heart a harvest
k
eep your threshers at bay.
I won’t have Massey Ferguson’s
rolling over me.
Stick your agrarian plan.
My body a soviet
but I’m not yours.
I’ll fly free.
I’m a beast of burden
I won’t move an inch.
When I’m not zigzagging
I’m a stick in the mud.
I’m a growler not growling
not doing my job.
I’m the hound with a dark stain
chained up in your yard.
If I’m to be whipped
then whip me now. Kill me
first, tied to a handrail
in the filthy street.