Wolf Tongue
Page 13
in heather and gorse
with gleaming braid-pins
and her letters of consent.
Preferred my blade
to the slow business of books.
You can’t kill a man
with a word.
For these admissions
of course I do
expect an extra
stroke or two.
*
This is where I bathed.
This is where I never shaved.
Proud of my long hair, combed in the manner
which sent her swooning.
Bladebreaker Finnbar and swooning Siobhan.
And here is the psalter
and here the blood-fine:
I dragged him from a monastery
and made his spirit mine.
God, my holiness, justice
was a button to be undone.
Her buttons, Lord of my
terrifying punishment.
And here are the pipes,
architect of undoing,
here are the pipes
by the fireside laid.
Play the pipes
for my undressing.
Press me forward
to be flayed.
*
Here are the books she left by in a hurry.
The brooches and beads and the cloakclasp jar.
Her hurry to wander from lethal moments,
from the looms of slaughter built by Finnbar.
Here soft woollen garments which clothed her leanly,
the plover-green plaids for the honeymoon walk.
Here she almost wasted in confinement speechless.
Here she wanted for the slow tunes and easy talk.
For I was and am an haughty chief, used more to harpstrums
than slow breathing from a woman’s lips.
I turned the filidh from the hearth and battle wrecks,
cut down foemen’s heads from chariot wheels.
Who was my appledawn bride is now the plaintiff
sorely gathered in with her grievance deep.
She’ll take me to the Judgement Mound
where for my offences many against the kindred
I shall rightly be impaled or strung by fires.
My own satires shall be turned against me, my courage
diminished, and magic gone from the streams and wells.
My own mead hall forgotten from the songs.
For this and all my other aches and pains inflicted,
apply your justice well. I expect the judgement:
to be driven from the tribe and to be denied.
To be belittled in the dust of my days.
Who was my bride in maythorn blossom days,
who was my bride from down the Finglas road.
Who was my bride the pride of Fingal’s clan.
Who was my joyous love broken and gone.
Taut-cord-binder, leg-shackler, ankle-twister, knee-crusher
of mornings when I am vulnerable most, rack-winder
you alone are witness to the grievous loss experienced here:
my misery, brehon, dogs gone from the warm hall.
Listen, man: she hadn’t done her best things yet.
Who was noontide clover-bee buzzing of days,
who was my bride. Who was gladsome gatherer
of seeds and stems in the nooky garden shades.
Who was the harbinger of pea-pod wine, noblesse oblige
who sometimes fixed her lips for queenly love-paint war.
Hark, stern one, when you have gathered your forces
and gathered me in, remember I loved her uninterrupted.
This is where we lay together, exhausted and true.
This is where we strayed beyond normal in the bedroom twining.
This is where we spent the peewit days in silence solemn and grave.
This is where we woke each day to a heatherglad beginning.
Those windless woodsmoke mornings, I wooed like a hound,
sniffing her traces. Jawking and lapping her laughter lines.
Harsh one, I was tranced by her magic stillness.
Your hardness-to-come, I would dance before her nakedness
and not feel the soul of my face burn like a brand
in an erasure of embarrassment for once in my life.
She weaved me, magistrate, to the tune of her willingness,
to the songs of her yesness, to her bosom of sighs.
I listened there to the little heart that pounded.
I listened to the North Sea in her stone-blue veins.
I wondered there at the whimsical mouse-murmurings
as her blood-ebbs turned tide with the moon.
Opening of her lids was like the rising of larks
in the blue slowness of a stubble-burning day.
She would stretch out her arms, disgrace-fetcher,
and I would lose my identity for hours on end,
displacing my power and delight in power, and my desire
for the wrecking of other men and the tormenting of tribes.
We would twinkle to the hearth, bearded one, and
wrap ourselves in the rags of our fortune.
Beast, she would purr, beast-enfolder, when I tickled
the physical appointments she treasured most.
O tip-toe she was to the water-butt for laving
those delightful cherishments, those little nut-browns.
And those breeze-bronzed curvings, and those angled
by bone paler because they do not see the sun.
And those tendons, designed by her long-hour stretching
of legs for the basket-gatherings when summer came on.
Quick command she had of shyness uncontrolled. Her
stutters were a charm to me even in the halted speech
employed by her to wave away my wanting. For her
alone I would desert the unsheathing of blades.
I’ll never see another like her all of my days.
If I sleep alone forever she’ll never come back.
Her cloakclasp shining in starlight at the edge of an ocean.
Her plaid flapping in the southern wind at the world’s rim.
1986
HELLHOUND MEMOS
(1993)
for Terry Kelly and Nicholas Johnson
I got to keep movin’
I got to keep movin’
blues falling down like hail
U m m m m m m m m m m m m
blues falling down like hail
blues falling down like hail
And the days keep on worrying me
there’s a hell hound on my trail
hell hound on my trail
hell hound on my trail
ROBERT JOHNSON
[1]
Sunk in my darkness at daylight.
Rain on lamb’s oily wool
my anointment.
Sunk in my darkness in my cracked
braindrain.
Daydawn lies here spastic as anything.
Knockings, roarings, sounds arrive
from one more planet you have not been to.
Not one child leaps up to say bravo!
Sunk in my darkness, weeping in trimmed maythorn
by petrol stations. They want my discount, my
coupon crystal goblet.
My phlegm, your phlegm.
Weak-kneed sunk in my blueness, my sun
your sun. My fuck-up, your fuck-up.
My rain, your rain.
All aboard and welcome.
[2]
Sunk at my crossroads, hellhounds baying
broken from chains, lips, jaws
slavering with death notice, rape
on my left and right, filthy money, yellow Jerusalem.
I’d walk in there, turn the tables, rinse
the crowd with phlegm, make their shoes walk.
Swag wings at the con machines, blister
fingers of the three
lemon fools. Sing mad,
merle mad, trill a bone, door stance finally
with contre-jour, say what next ammonite, how
is oxygenation, where’s your Elvis lipcurl now?
[3]
Me the multiplex moron, multigenerational
multiplicity, many-fingered man with a violet
shell suit, stolen BMW and a rack of E. I’m here!
I used to be nowhere, now I’m all over the place.
I’ve had the garlic and thyme, the purging flax, blood and bone.
I’ve been to bed with the black pudding. Keep it.
I’m the only jackpot chancer on the job, estate joy-rider
extraordinaire. Bored in the listless
summer, when the boys in blue are in Marbella
I waft in or rev as is my nature, contrary to
council or ecclesiastical denial, and open up these
stolen microwaves. I turn them on and breathe.
I don’t care what the damage is. Or the waste.
I enjoy the flames. I can scorch a line, a beautiful
blue and true line through the hull of your lives
and must say I like it better so. I adjust my visor
accordingly. Cut, cut, cut. It’s my dark, dark memo,
almost a badge. I groove in the magenta heat, I lean
into it. I don’t erect headstones, Hosanna those
sky-blue heavens in the fairy tales. I deliver.
Into a permanent darkness for the rest of your days.
I come down like slate-grey rain. That’s all. No God available.
[4]
(for PBS one day early)
The very low odour tough acrylic formula
of B&Q Safe Paint with satin gloss finish
is venal. Civilisation too good a word for it.
Percy, why won’t anyone leave us alone? Pass
The 10-litre can of Professional Obliterating Paint,
please. Pass the zinc-plated wing nuts, the spur
budget gold effect bracket and inspiration shelf.
Not to mention the Zamba Wall Shelving with Tool Rack
Hardbeam I am for both of us against the intrusions.
Bysshe, tush, fash not, two hundred is nothing.
Wait until two thousand, then we’ll justly explode!
The very floodlit light of heaven has already been
sold, as you predicted. Nothing to attract you
but the chard and sprouting broccoli. The rest is trash.
Babble, babble, babble. Slick, stink, stink.
Happy birthday, wake up, let’s drown together!
[8]
Now that the vast furtherance of widespread publicity
for the degree course in how to be a complete nobody
twice over if you’re lucky has won a number of awards
it is altogether time to nip under the plover’s wing
and sleep. It is time to hug the lamb and mushroom.
It is time to pluck the rosemary, the rue, the swaying dill.
O we will sleep and rest there. We shall be most quiet.
Lord I know ye will find me a place in a lonnen where
I can curl sockless, no matter where the sun is, beyond
any future scars, far from fire, far from phlegm and
any fame, please. So much I need darkness to surround my head.
Though I am bent, straighten me.
[9]
God bless you little girl the lean dry hand
wrote on her forehead as the knife went in.
[10]
Today we walk by love
BLISS CARMAN
Trouble on all sides today up and down:
Palms of my feet, soles of my hands.
No rain on lambs’ wool, no anointment under the elder tree.
Wealth of sickness streaming.
Four fingers over my right eye, I don’t want to see it.
But you con it with freak sight, provoked all my life,
eyes hammered by destruction winds.
Sunlit laurels I am not fit to wear
winking reflections like Aidan’s fingernails.
Alone without lipstick she said in the lit doorway:
I cannot speak in cogent sentences but still you will not
terrify me.
I have seen all of the films and you are not worse than them.
I have been to the top of the cairn for you, northern prince,
and I died every inch of the way.
I listened to the piper and it made me sick.
Nothing will bring me back: no herbal verbals, no award-winning
regional disease, coal mines for example.
No sex with wet hair. No gin and talc.
I’ll just wash and go.
[11] Linda Manning Is a Whore
She moves in tumult.
ROBERT HUGHES BENSON
Wisdome flew upon me tonight like a bat’s wing.
I was at Dunton roundabout
shaking hands with Robert Johnson and the Jesus Christ Almighty.
I could hear the elderberries crying dew.
I was going to ferment them into maniac milk.
Bubbles everywhere.
O my knees broke and I sank to my feet.
I ploated the stupid sky for even daring to wake up,
honked on the moon, slapped a pizza margherita
in the sun’s face, saying: Quench in my hart the flames
of badd desyre so foolishly addressed.
Who can blot out the Crosse I heard her say.
Batter my eyelids, knock me down, I will be an usurpte towne
all by myself, betrothed to an enemie, made by men’s hands
to kiss the lips of another: Some glue-sniffer sprawled
unconscious in Hood Street.
I am a woman, no chief dignitie for me.
[13] Shaking Minds with Robespierre
Levellers and prince-fingerers quartered in the heather.
Once I was an antirrhinum with a hot dry position.
Now I’m disposable with a seedbed of debatable facts.
I can hear the hellhounds carping and crapping
all over the cairn and the law. Suddenly
one will flame out
from shook foil to fang a breast.
I ruck
and roll the house
but that snot-streaming bitch
rides my well-punched eyelids up and down
and fills my spleen with gall.
I miss my stew-bearing Mary,
cusloppe stains upon her hand-made hem.
O to be a snowflake, whipped in by easterlies,
soaking gardens and allotments until the lupin and peony seeds
descend;
I want to be bright shining
as cuticles in the Dunton nursery.
Bright as Aidan’s eyes.
Yet once more I am taxed
as hounds paw leek flags and onion beds,
scarring the enriched loam, eager to run.
Tonight we try Sarah Ferguson.
I must collect my papers and go.
[18] Wringing the Shingle
I’ll be down at the dock in the morning.
The brisk cutlets of the breakers
flash contrast to the sky.
Foam wringing the shingle is from the strange mouth
of Anne Sexton.
She was at the bayside chemist last night.
Robert’s long gone, up at three, leaving his queen of spades,
down the highway to the next county fair.
There’s a glass of poisoned whiskey waiting for him
and it won’t be from a white man’s hand.
The ambulance will be slow.
He’ll be plain stiff chocolate toes turned up on the slab
just like Bessie.
Pinned again to the wire, eyes clammed.
Raven hair blown and burned. Charred to the follicle.
Wristblood glued to
the Nazi connection.
Zip done up.
Laughter lasting as long as she loved him.
She walked Poland with ten league eyes.
Sexton toppled in tonight
crashing into the doctor’s blue swivel chair.
We fed her stomach to the drain
and walked her home.
[19]
The darkness fell, and all the glory vanished.
AUGUSTA THEODOSIA DRANE
Vapour rises from the ducts and flues, ashen and feathered
against the Batman cape sky like smoked bone, ascending
wounded inside the theoretical bruising, burdened
with the small matter of mankind and the grit
in its windows and eyes, which are silver and aquamarine
here in the Fauvist metropolis.
The world with hate and envy raging
surveys its wild forsaken hoots, and the lanceolate leaves, still
fragrant, ready for the pan, are quivering under the fjord blasts tonight.
Sleet penetrates the weave.
Chapped fingers play the bottleneck
at Gallowgate crossroads
where we have lost Robert Johnson to some deep connection
down the hellhound trail
passing Anne Sexton details of the Christmas late chemist rota.
Beneath the blue star are bilious pools of maniac milk.
Yet once more we enter the falsedom in scarlet and gold,