The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea

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The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea Page 3

by Mark Haddon

But I would gladly change those bitter lines

  into a sweet song and strike out every harsh word

  if you would give me back your heart

  and be my lover.

  Miaow

  Consider me.

  I sit here like Tiberius,

  inscrutable and grand.

  I will let “I dare not”

  wait upon “I would”

  and bear the twangling

  of your small guitar

  because you are my owl

  andfoster me with milk.

  Why wet my paw?

  Just keep me in a bag

  and no one knows the truth.

  I am familiar with witches

  and stand a better chance in hell thanyou

  for I can dance on hot bricks,

  leap your height

  and land on all fours.

  I am the servant of the Living God.

  I worship in my way.

  Look into these slit green stones

  and follow your reflected lights

  into the dark.

  Michel, Duc de Montaigne, knew.

  You don’t play with me.

  I play with you.

  Woof

  I’m in the manger, sleeping.

  Let me lie.

  You bite me, everybody wants to know.

  I bite you, no one gives a damn.

  Why bark yourself

  and keep me in this hole?

  You let me slip,

  I fight, you call me off.

  I’d speak in Latin

  but I’d make a dinner of it.

  So let me return, as ever, to my vomit.

  All the guilty are in my house.

  I’m sick, tired, gone,

  the ugly girl, the ditched butt

  of every cigarette,

  every hard crust, every wasted evening.

  Sit. Fetch. Heel.

  I’m old. I cannot learn new tricks,

  but I will have my day.

  My star will rage

  and I will match you step for step

  in the midday sun

  and haunt you in this black coat

  through my watches of the night.

  I’m your best friend,

  but the more I get to know of you,

  the more I like myself.

  Gemini

  You did the Hippy-Hippy Shake.

  I messed with Mr. In-Between.

  Tonight you’ll hit the first three chords

  of “Crazy” and a thousand tiny

  lights will make you half-believe

  the sky has fallen at your feet.

  I’ll watch a documentary

  about the life of Cary Grant,

  then take a bath and go to bed.

  You’ll blunt the come-down with some sweet

  brown sugar in a five-star suite

  and wake from the recurring dream

  in which your third wife fucks the pool-boy,

  and see, across the bed,

  a tattoo stallion on the shoulder

  of a girl your daughter’s age

  and hope she’ll keep on faking sleep

  until you’re halfway to a strong

  black coffee and a cigarette

  in Mother Mary’s Bar ‘n’ Grill.

  I’ll read the Sunday magazines

  and find you bathing in that pop

  and glare of being seen you’ve lived with

  all your life, which burns and bleaches

  everything until the route you took

  and everyone you left behind

  have turned to vapour trail and backdrop.

  Did it have to be like this,

  the future like a fault in flint

  it took a hammer-blow to find?

  Did you feel a different North

  and peel away? Or was your gift

  to slip the leash of every story

  that we told ourselves to mend

  the absence that you left behind?

  This, for what it’s worth, is mine:

  I passed the bottle which said Drink Me,

  but you drank, and grew and grew

  until the town, your family

  and friends were all too small for you.

  And by the summer you were gone.

  I wake some nights at 5 a.m.

  and, shuffling to the window, see

  a figure standing on the gravel

  just outside the porchlight’s range

  and wonder what it is you want,

  to mock me, or make amends?

  To come inside, or take my hand

  and lead me to a black Mercedes

  purring on the hill? To get

  some measure of how many miles

  you’ve put between us, or how few?

  I feel the tug of gravity

  which everyone who knows you feels,

  but turn and potter back to bed

  and melt into that larger dark

  where you will always orbit, far out,

  lord of hearts and oceans, lit

  by sunlight borrowed from the far side

  of the world, bright satellite

  to this fixed earth, my counterweight,

  my twin, my necessary ghost.

  Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

  The day we met. This unexpected envelope.

  My San Francisco Mime Troupe T-shirt which you wore

  to potter in the flat, whose sleeve-trim matched

  Your eyes.

  That sleepless night.

  This sleepless night.

  The face I’ll wear to shake your hand and wish you well.

  The way I’ll feel when I do.

  “Paper Moon.” Our song.

  “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

  My Ella Live at Montreux which I hope he plays one night

  by accident and makes you cry.

  This honky-tonk parade.

  Dry Leaves

  Horace Odes 1:25

  Young men stumbling home from parties

  don’t throw pebbles at your windows now.

  You sleep till dawn and that busy door

  of yours now hugs the step. No one

  asks how you can sleep when they are dying

  all night long for love of you. Times change.

  You’re old and no one gives a damn.

  You’ll weep at all the men who have deserted you

  as gales from Thrace roar down

  that empty lane on moonless nights.

  The hot lust which sends mares mad

  will flare around your ulcerated heart

  and you’ll cry out at the young men

  who love the ivy and the dark green myrtle

  but who throw the dry leaves

  into the East wind, that bride of winter.

  Poets

  They are seldom racing cyclists

  and are largely innocent

  of the workings of the petrol engine.

  They are, however, comfortable in taxis.

  They are abroad in the small hours

  and will seek out the caustic blue liqueur

  that you purchased in Majorca

  for comedy reasons, and will rise late.

  There are whole streets

  where their work is not known.

  Spectacles,

  a father in the army

  and the distance to the next farm

  made them solitary.

  Their pets

  were given elaborate funerals.

  No one understands them.

  They are inordinately proud of this

  for they have shunned

  the brotherhood

  of the post room

  and the hair salon.

  They write a word

  and then another word.

  It is usually wrong.

  Their crossings out are legion.

  They sit in trains

  and pass through cotton towns at nightfall,

  con
scious of the shape of cranes

  on the violet sky

  and how the poured creamer

  pleats and billows in their coffee,

  and how both of these things

  whisper, softly, “Death.”

  Silver Nitrate

  The dead seem so authentic, posing beside

  traction engines in their practical jackets

  with their folk-songs and their knowledge of mushrooms.

  But they were just like us, vain about the trim

  of their moustaches and their Sunday shoes.

  They, too, had the dream about the dark house.

  Belonging is for horses. Home was always

  in the past. The Labrador, baked puddings,

  the long table in the orchard at Easter.

  Meanwhile, we’re stuck on this side

  of the glass, watching dead leaves turn

  slowly in the abandoned paddling pool,

  remembering that winter when the snow

  was so thick we built a cave

  of blue light in the center of the lawn.

  The Facts

  In truth, the dwarf worked in a betting shop

  and wore an orthopedic shoe.

  The ugly sisters were neither sisters nor, indeed, women,

  nor were they remotely interested in the prince.

  The plain librarian looked better with her glasses on,

  the bomb had not been fitted with a clock

  and when the requisitioned farm-truck shot

  the as-yet-uncompleted bridge it nose-dived

  into the ravine and blew up

  killing both the handsome sheriff

  and his lovable but stupid sidekick, Bob.

  The House of the Four Winds

  A decimation of the novel by John Buchan

  PROLOGUE

  Philosophic historian,

  chronicle that bleak night,

  the corncrakes, the explosives,

  the exact condition of the owl.

  Deliver judgement on the breakdown

  of the soul of the general manager

  and linger over that summer

  in the penitentiary. Alison,

  I have not forgotten the ginger

  cigarettes and Maurice’s face

  in repose. I was sick.

  You civilised that solitude.

  Fashion our private landscape

  out of the world’s howl.

  Write me a cure in poetry.

  Go far. Go too far.

  Find that glimpse.

  CHAPTER 1—HEAT

  The inn at Beechen.

  Hot rye-cheese and onion bread,

  a coarse red track

  through beet-fields and water-cress.

  No map, only moth and star

  and pine, the German weather

  pleasing but without glamour.

  The peasants laughed. He could not.

  Something was waiting for him,

  a little havoc of exquisite blue eyes,

  the kindness of puzzles

  and the quarrels of politicians.

  His heart spoke in an unknown tongue.

  CHAPTER 2—HUNT

  Daylight and velveteen morning,

  fried eggs and blue granite.

  His mind was a dark stone.

  Was there really a corpse?

  Might not the purpose of the devil

  be to break the plump and soft?

  He rested for ten minutes

  by the car factory

  where Said was burned.

  He had tasted the prince’s hand

  in Cairo. Bees, verbena,

  agapanthus, that hot breath.

  He had been filled. But after that?

  CHAPTER 3—FATE

  Strawberries, turquoise snowdrifts,

  satisfactory hot food, the same pumpkins

  drying on the shingle, green water.

  The afternoon enlivened by the thought

  of being unpleasant in the sulphur baths

  with her English friend. Letters

  to Bolivia, Uruguay, Scotland.

  The quiet cancelling-out of the soul.

  CHAPTER 4—DIFFICULT

  Meaning is nothing. Nothing.

  To understand you have to get down

  into the meadow of twinkling lights.

  CHAPTER 5—GONE

  The sun, the road, this earth,

  the body, food, sleep, questions,

  judgement, medicines,

  a rifle bullet, endless walks,

  the works of Walter Savage Landor,

  public houses, veal, goat, tea,

  good government, bad government,

  old mischief, new brooms,

  a woman shot against a wall,

  a deal, an aeroplane, the logic

  of events, that solemn river,

  a tombstone over the border.

  CHAPTER 6—RAIN

  They did not expect comfort.

  They turned and stood

  in the acetylene dazzle,

  the gentleman queer

  and the plain German dyke.

  Her car was in disrepair.

  He suggested coffee.

  “I know you.” “How?”

  “The prince. That evening …”

  Question. Answer. Bad news.

  His blue eyes had a light in them

  that scored the heart.

  CHAPTER 7—LESS

  The delicacy of the situation.

  The youth of a nation.

  The toy shops of fame.

  The old, fierce game.

  Delirious applause.

  Loyalty to the cause.

  The smoke of a train.

  The cornfield plain.

  The wolf’s cup.

  Farm boys strung up.

  The heart a stone.

  The years alone.

  A photograph of a face.

  The mercy of the human embrace.

  CHAPTER 8—MEND

  The sack over his head.

  His last minutes,

  treated as a common dog.

  A toilet, blood,

  two smoking wires.

  A memory of Cambridge,

  soda water on the terrace,

  a sleepy cat.

  The sound of triggers

  at the back of his head.

  An open window.

  Guns. A turtle-dove.

  CHAPTER 9—NIGHT

  We expect a pattern,

  but the only song

  is a crazy noise

  of philosophy and accident,

  calamity and transformation,

  a rare black comedy

  of hideous things

  and ragged lights

  in an adjacent field.

  CHAPTER 10—AURA

  So small a thing

  that little room of sleep,

  yet it was sealed to him.

  He walked the empty street.

  Hot breath of baking.

  Garbage in the gutters.

  A bicycle. The derelict

  torches of the stars.

  CHAPTER 11—BLOOD

  Sea-sick, light-headed,

  the swell strong, the honeycomb

  clouds scattering. Time

  telescoped. Mere antique dust

  her lovers now. She was a wolf,

  exotic, reckless. Women

  were like horses, to be broken.

  The troubled girl with amber hair

  that she had forced, the trembling

  countess, Janet, picturesque

  Miss Squire … That desperate

  hot trust. Her heart poised

  like a falcon for the swoop.

  The wild relief of sex.

  CHAPTER 12—ROPE

  The English had the house under observation

  and had come to certain conclusions.

  It was done circumspectly so as not to alarm.

  There was no evidence of human presence.
/>   But what was the meaning of the distant bells?

  That horrid certainty. The halted, faint notes.

  Spilt lime. A spiral staircase. Light.

  A door unlocked. Inside, rotting boards

  and paper dropping from the walls, the odour

  of a barber’s shop, the slow turn

  of the monstrous gargoyle and that click,

  as if a clock were running down.

  CHAPTER 13—HOME

  The city sparkled in the sunlight

  as a waiter brought the morning paper.

  From it stared a face of … Oh,

  it was ridiculous. Her nerves,

  the doctor said, were frail.

  He was civil, God be praised,

  if whisky-scented. But … that man

  was so familiar. His name was …

  what? Beard, morning suit …

  She hesitated. Something stirred

  on the horizon, scarlet, blind,

  immense. A distant groundswell.

  One long blaze of men and women

  kissed and rapturous, that roar

  of thousands in the heart.

  ENVOI

  Almost dark. The last moraine.

  Uplands, twilight, prospect.

  Lights, cars, baggage.

  You have had your dream

  and felt the spell of ordinary

  things made young again.

  You can be mortal now.

  Once Upon a Time

  Some want to know what happens

  when the bent cop holds a switchblade

  to the pimp’s throat. Some want

  to see a horse the color of conkers

  or hear the boom of fireworks

  like carpets being beaten.

  Others want to stand, invisible,

  beside a bed as two men fuck,

  or cheer when the little deaf girl

  kicks the fat priest who is every

  bully they have ever known.

 

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