by Mark Haddon
They will not come back. The road is hard
and no one wants to listen to the stories
they will have to tell. But when the steel market
crashes and the orchard is paved over
and the bailiff’s men are playing blackjack
on the stairs they will be waiting for you
at the bottom of the frozen lake.
A Tally Stick
The bark is notched six times, one notch
for every cow left in the pound,
then split, the cowman and the poundman
taking half each, so that when
the cowman comes to claim his stock
six cows are led out from the pound
though neither of the men can count.
Connemara, 1610:
A cowman spreads his hands and watches
as a priest names all his fingers.
He starts to count potatoes, hens,
the steps across his single field
whose blades the Lord alone can sum.
Then pausing at the gate one night
he thinks of seven. Not trees. Not dogs.
Just seven. Like The Plough
before God put the stars in.
The Model Village
Today an old man had a stroke
and crushed the signal box.
You can’t ignore that kind of thing.
But on the whole
I try to see the visitors
as clouds or hills.
I am an old man
and I have learnt my lesson.
Only small things matter.
But the young are different.
They hear the talk of Birmingham
and Weston-super-Mare
and listen to the songs
of love and loss
on picnic radios
and dream of slipping
through the ticket office
after dark
in search of telephones
and discotheques
and Chinese restaurants,
a world where games of football
can be won
and lost,
where roads run to the ocean
and the ocean runs
forever.
They will understand in time.
Sit still for long enough
and everything will come to you.
We got a helicopter last year,
strung on fishing line
above the plastic lake.
This year we got our first
black residents.
(The Pattersons were overpainted.)
But the cows still graze,
the brass band still plays
Hearts of Oak,
the town clock
still reads
ten to two.
And when the night comes down
I sit beneath the awning
of the hardware store
and watch the universe contract
to thirty homes, a loop of railway
and fifty billion stars.
New Year’s Day
I walk on powdered
shell for three miles
to the spur’s blunt head
where, each year,
something of the ocean
slows and falls
and turns into a yard of land,
and something of the emptiness
we spin through
silts and settles
so that we can walk
a little further
out into the fog.
Average Fool
Horace Odes 1:6
The poet Varius can celebrate
your victories in high-flown verse.
Your bravery. The deeds done
by daring forces under your command.
By sea. On horseback.
I never write about that kind of thing, Agrippa;
grand themes like the black anger
of Achilles who refused to back down,
the homicidal family of Pelops
or the voyages of shifty Ulysses.
Poetic honor and my muse,
whose only weapon is the peaceful lyre,
won’t let me blunt the praise
of either Caesar or yourself
with my ineptitude.
Who, in any case, could find the words
for Mars dressed in his steel tunic,
Meriones black with Trojan dust,
or Diomedes who teamed up with Athena
and became an equal of the gods?
Unscarred by love myself,
I write of banquets, and of wars
where girls stab young men
with their fingernails. Or if a little scarred,
then no more than the average fool.
Bushings
They lie discarded in the long grass
between the lighthouse and the kyle,
a yard of snipped-off wire
knotted round their necks.
At one end a white-washed room,
the fog of Woodbines, a terrier
and the fastness of the Norwegian Sea
running in a mildewed frame.
At the other, tanning salons,
the Winter of Discontent, banana fritters
and Saturday Night Fever.
Between them, humming in the cable,
buried under gales and static,
the lonely birthday greetings, requests
for Tunnock’s teacakes and a claw hammer,
the bump and crackle of a coal fire,
the final maydays and the silence after.
Midas
You rarely hear the prologue—
where ants are marching from the window
to the crib, each one carrying
a grain of wheat to feed the infant king,
the meaning of the story still unwrapped,
the picture fresh as water in a clay jug
or a hot loaf not yet frozen solid
by the king’s greed.
Thunderbirds are Go
The island of the billionaire philanthropist
was made of plastic and his wonderful machines
were only toys. True, there were moments
when the colors brightened as we cut away
to focus on a tea cup or a herd of antelope
in flight, and everything seemed real.
But they were shots from other films,
rapidly replaced by trees and skies
which looked like trees and skies but never quite rang true.
We had our brief adventures then relaxed
beside the pool, while in his mountain lair
our nemesis the foreign villain licked his wounds.
We filled the sky with vapor trails.
We braved the flaming rig and nursed the stricken jet
back home. We held our nerve and everyone was saved.
Now everything is real. This bungalow. The early train.
We mow the lawn and smoke a cigarette
and sit here waiting for the call that never comes.
Great White
Shark attacks were rare in Chapel Brampton.
I should have been afraid of pedophiles,
leukemia or Neil Billingham
who lost his right eye when he lit
a can of underarm deodorant.
But when I lay awake at 2 a.m.
as headlights swept the Solar System
wallchart and the cooling pipework
shifted in the floorspace, something else
was moving through the dark beneath the bed.
Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand
pounds of muscle powering a hoop
of butcher’s knives. The only animal
that ate its weaker siblings in the womb.
Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.
And just as pious Catholics once fondled
strips of cloth soaked in the hot fat
of mar
tyrs, I’d run my hand across
that photo of the fisherman from Cairns,
his belly opened like a can of plum tomatoes.
Even now, in lakes and rivers,
or ten yards off the beach at Swanage,
I remember what’s inside us all
and sense, behind my back,
that grey torpedo entering the shallows.
Rings
Horace Odes 1:9
Look at soaring Mount Soracte
brilliant with driven snow,
the overburdened forest
and the streams in chains.
Thaliarchus, drive the cold away
by heaping kindling on the fire
then pour a generous double-handled
Sabine jar of vintage wine.
The gods will do the rest. They’ll calm
the gales wrestling with one another
on the boiling ocean. Then the cypress
and the old ash will be still again.
Forget tomorrow. Cherish everything
chance gives to you today.
You’re young, boy. Dance and love
while sour old age holds off.
Move quietly and hunt the squares
and courtyards at the hour of dusk
for squeals of laughter which betray
the young girls hiding
in the darkest corners.
Then slip the rings and bracelets
from their arms and fingers.
They’ll complain. But not much.
Black
It comes as a surprise to find that hell
is the same house you’ve lived in these nine years.
Two orange stains beneath the kitchen taps,
birdsong in the yard, those floral curtains.
But you’re not at home. Not by a long way.
That fist of wet meat in your chest
will not let you forget. The seconds pass,
as slow as that frozen age before the child
hits the red bonnet of the skidding car.
You light a Marlboro from the dog-end
of the last. Outside, shoppers and workmen
swim through their day like dolphins, ignorant
of how they do this stupid, priceless trick
you once knew. The phone rings. Your cigarette smoke
does its poisonous little ballet.
The Penguin
Cotswold Wildlife Park, Burford
It’s all too much. The white rhinoceros,
The common shoveler, the Cuban tree frog.
A whole world and every part of it
a short walk from the tea-room.
Pushchairs. Cornettos.
A basin of blue concrete
and a Humboldt penguin tumbling
in three feet of dirty water.
If only we could slip inside those eyes
and find our way back
to the pack-ice in the Weddell Sea.
Instead we move on to the gibbons.
The daylight hammers on and off.
Mountains explode,
bleeding black smoke downwind.
Tides pulse on the coast.
Tracks radiate
from settlements, leaping
the firebreaks of gorge and firth
to seed another, then another.
Forests burn.
Fields. Pipelines. Roads.
The brief nights
blaze like lava.
Lines blur. The lava cools.
Green takes it all back.
Forests thicken. Tides pulse.
The daylight hammers on and off.
Days
Horace Odes 1:11
Leuconoë, stop examining your
Babylonian horoscopes
and wondering what kind of death
the gods have got in mind for us.
We’ll never know. Accept it.
This winter pummeling the ocean
on the pumice rocks of Tuscany
may be our last.
Or not. Be sensible and pour the wine.
This life’s too short for longing
and the clock spins as we speak.
Days come and go. Hold on to this one.
The River-Car
The way it’s parked, nose-down between the wet rocks
in the leaf-light of the gorge, water pouring
through the windscreen and the tires blown;
as if the naiads put their fairy horses
out to grass and cruised the night in silver Escorts.
Or as if three boys from Hebden Bridge
grew bored and stole a car and drove it halfway
to the moors, grew bored again, then rolled it
from the muddy track and watched it hammer
through the trees until it came to rest
a hundred yards below. And as the echo
died away, the car they drove in dreams
kept floating downstream and the boys they’d never be
rode every bend of starlit water to the ocean.
Galatea
That first ripple in the marble.
Her hand on his wrist like a tame bird.
Her eyes opening. The big skylight,
the white-washed walls, the brace of chisels.
A baby’s mind inside a woman’s body,
playing Peep-Bo with a nurse, then bathed
and toweled dry and taken to his bedroom
as a sweetmeat when the guests have gone.
Christmas Night, 1930
The party’s over. Downstairs the monsters
of cigar-smoke and society-talk
coil and uncoil among the tissue paper
and the tangerine peel.
This was your room once. The crib.
The mirror. Your painting of a flower.
Only the initials on the shaving kit
connect you to the man that you’ve become.
In the kitchen your mother’s ghost
soaps the greasy plates and hauls
the turkey carcass to the pantry
so that she can scrub the table clean.
In the black square of the window
it hovers again. Dog or deer.
The animal that terrified you once.
But you can hear what it’s saying now.
So take the curtains. Take the bowl
with blue stripes and the white cloth
on the dresser. Take the silence.
This is all you’ll ever need.
Step across the sill and walk
into a night where the trees
are on fire and the stone church
dances on the dark.
Lullaby
for Edith (1908–2003)
and her great-grandson, Zack (2003–)
Starlight, star bright
Lie in this cradle of night
and sleep tight
Sea shell, sea swell
Ring the church bell
for all is well
Sundown, sunrise
Nothing dies
so close your eyes
The Twilight Zone
I’m in a tailback near Basingstoke,
pondering the sad-dog brakelights
of the V-reg Nissan up ahead,
thinking how we never got
the jet-packs or the protein pills
and how they’d be as unremarkable
as radios or Teflon. I’m thinking
of the way time runs just fast enough
to keep us entertained, but not so fast
we spend the whole day dumbstruck
by the fact that we can clone a sheep
or eat a mango in the Wirral.
Late October 1978.
We’re smoking in The Friar’s Grill
and playing with the cool, rotating cover
of my newly purchased Led Zep III
when, apropos of nothing, Nigel says
that Mr. Rothermere’s dead.
&n
bsp; And sure enough, we find out later
that he died as we were talking,
falling down the stairwell of the school
we’d left five years before.
When we hear the news
we feel like hunters from the lowlands
of the Congo hearing Elvis Presley
on a Walkman, petrified
to think what devilry could squeeze
him into such a small box.
Which is when the sad-dog brakelights
of the Nissan just ahead go out,
the tailback dissolves, I put the Golf
in gear and boldly go to Basingstoke.
The Short Fuse
Horace Odes 1:16
More gorgeous daughter of a gorgeous mother,
burn my poems if they injured you,
or hurl them out into the Adriatic.
Nothing churns the human heart like anger:
not Apollo when inspiring the priestess
in the shrine at Delphi,
neither Cybele nor drunken Bacchus
nor his cymbal-banging followers.
And nothing, not the sword of Noricum,
not the ship-devouring sea, not wildfire,
not the terrifying storm of Jupiter himself
descending, holds it back.
They say Prometheus was forced
to use a part of every animal
when making Man, and put the short fuse
of the savage lion in our guts.
Anger brought Thyestes to his grisly end
and goads all conquerors to raze
great towns and arrogantly plough
their walls into the earth.
Don’t let yourself be swept away. The same fire
burned in me when I was young, and wrecked
those golden days by driving me to write
those poems in the white heat of the moment.