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.
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.