A silvery migration.
Lifting the bedcovers and there
The scent of little bodies, their secretions
Their feet, bellies, mouths and hair
Animals overwintering for the season
Of a single night, and how the air
Surges into, under, like water through the horses
Of Augeas, cold on the sweet, fetid, bare
Skins, and that smell is fled contorted
With a small grimace out to the spare
Grey morning, all I embrace
Evaporating in the cool earth’s care
Less animal now the opening faces
Their clothes lie folded on the chair
Not yet awake, nor soon aware.
Out of Town
Out in the open fields go the good ghosts
The ones who released from heaven leap and croon
Who were locked to the old church beneath the bypass
Until their heartstones were piled to make more room
They come and go now like vapours through the grates
They come and go, released from mortal flesh and weight
And parade through the unsown fields of wild oats
And meadows of agrimony and clover
And reach a hill, the wedge end of a fell,
And this too the revelling ghosts fly over
All the better to reach the fingers of the town
The town’s sightless fingers groping for their own.
Ghosts like to find the middle point
The place where open country runs to ground
Amongst the out-of-town superstores
Allotments, cemeteries, stolen vehicle pounds
Where roads peter into ruts of ancient use
And owners turn unwanted house pets loose.
The blossoming of the end, the frayed flex of the beginning:
The pilgrim enters in, passes through and out.
The ghosts however go no further
The place of worship for the immaterial devout
Might be fixed here, by a vague averaging of town and field
On a site leasehold under offer / current yield
Or down a twitten, where the sad ghosts of weeds
Proliferate all the summer long
Where the walls are sprayed with piss and broken bottles
But morning is coated in silver light and song
And the snakehead streetlamps warm a gap
In the hoary canopies of each year’s cold snap
This is where the town fucks sincerely
Exhibits its most human shape
The ones who are destitute or nearly
The ones without an honest place to sleep
Come here and in the morning when the birds sing like crazy
They walk a few yards into the wet green and weep
But ghosts are beyond all human weakness
They throng to service stations as to holy wells
That wherever the world tips upon its axis
They won’t be nearer or further then from hell
The listless ghosts, unfreighted, aimless, flit
And need a wasteland to level their spirit.
I have met people who spend their nervous youth
In cities, fearing even the weather that blew
From empty places, beaches, heaths
And others, who gorged on wide skies, those too
When the time came, lifted up their souls and died
And in the hereafter craved the lonely divide
I know a few of us to whom the place is already sweet
Its copses of rusting cars, its pointless verge
The ache it puts in place of a deep heart
As this life and the one beyond converge
Here the poisoned Lethe trickles under weeds
That scatter, year after year, their unloved seeds.
No nearer to heaven here, or hell
No talk of salvation here, or ruination
All that can be done of both is done
The mind has made of both a desolation
And in this desolation at last a space
Where no-man’s-land might be an honest place.
A lorry driver sleeping in his cab
Two walkers wearing hats and carrying shells
The ghosts are in each blade of grass
Each blade of grass a heaven and a hell
The pilgrims come amongst them and pass through
And one looked much like me and one like you.
Amazing Grace
It was sweet, but so short
You’re not being honest, he said
And I was filled
But bent under the weight
Some bodily discomfort helps
I was lost, I’d know
Not honest, like that, repeating
The words, but I see now.
Grace, which precious, like to mercy
Falls, dissolves like snow
I wish something were forever
I was lost, I should know.
The shadows fret me, if I’m honest
Woman, you can fucking shut your
And all that folding and unfolding linen
Heart, be honest, hold your
Weeds grow often and are undaunted
By fingers scrabbling in the dirt
Amazing – graceless now, but living –
How the hell to fill a wretch like her.
Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer’s)
for A.W.
She walked then: pale and unbent
Frail as a cloud, filled with a cloud’s watered light
And all the ropes were gone, and the language unlearnt
And vital knots of past and future long untied.
There was once no sailing without the augur on board,
Who shaped each day and told what tumbled past,
Who sought the truth in feathered gore
Whilst others watched from the crow’s nest.
She too surveyed the calm, and was concerned:
What to make of all the signs, for the sea is rarely blank.
And there was a circling, a moment returned
When daughter was mother, and there the sun shrunk
And bent and was narrow at the line of sky
And still the clouds twisted and birds flew
All above at that time there was no end to life
And no end to other brightnesses at least as true
That seem like mirages now. For signs were massing
To display themselves in a common light:
They did all surely point to the one passing
Of pale day into paler night.
I can only be who I am
Said the storm as it drew its crow wings about the tree
The tree knew that smell
It flinched and held itself small and rigid
If it had gods it would ask them for mercy
Splintering its thousand green flags
In the storm’s great embrace
But the tree knows loneliness too
Learnt from the caterpillar and the bird
And godlessness, which is next to survival
And a hundred other small skills
Which are barely noticeable from the sky
But have counted for something grand
In the hill’s meadow-grass.
Remember we walked its grey trunk
Over the fluent stream
It gave us passage, but no word of what lay beyond
Moor
And for days it seemed she was climbing
Knees bloodied – as quick as she knew how
So that one said to another: hey Phil
Did you see how fast that girl was walking?
But as she herself could see nothing, she could not tell
It was just an endless effort of heather and fern
As rancid as closed windows and pencil shavings
And the red water tippling fr
om flush to ocean
So slowly fast her walking was but nothing
To its coronation dance. She had heard of men
Who married this place with its hares
And laid their heads on stones and begot
With water making utterance of its sifting
And shifting and spouting –
And after that chasing quivering throatful
All the women in the world were no more than
Spoons of cough medicine.
How well she knew her limits
Although she had jumped the golden trickling
Just like a boy, was as stupid as any man.
When he comes, she said, and takes the water
Over me, then what shall I be?
Faster and faster she goes, plaiting the fibres of grasses
Hoping the sky will take pity on her
Make a rapid stream of me that he might love me deeper
Put finger and thumb in me, and nape of neck
And break the lip of me with startled face
And we will be quite apart, and yet
Down in that city, shivering and shining with rain
He will long for the red halo, climbing his forehead
Clinging in drops to his shoulder, lifted in his hands
For certain downfall.
Prince’s
24 January 2011
Yesterday afternoon, one of the shortest of the year
When the hills were dark with a night not yet come
And the high street silent and all the doors closed
I learnt that Prince’s would soon be gone.
A haberdasher’s is hardly a terrible loss
It was not a place I ever went in much
Although I admired the near-redundant, near-extinct
Art of dressing the provincial shopfront
The quaint pre-war touches: how the ladies’ shirts
Were tied in pretty ribbons at their waists
And jaunty trilbies floated over dancing jackets
Bearing pockets of silken hanky points.
And often I have seen gentlemen cradling paper bags
Of slippers and shoes with new black heels
Slipping out from under the shop’s sun blind
And disappearing down the modern street
Thirty years now. I walked to school that way
Saw the seasons come and go in their displays:
Nightshirts hanging from green hoops in spring
Snowmen holding Christmas stockings in branched fingers
You would call it an ordinary shop on an ordinary street
And not somewhere the dream’s particles might lie.
The lady serving me lost her husband last year
She’s glad it’s over, she says, she needs more time.
I have not the wit to offer any comfort
The window unadorned reads ‘closing – end of line’.
How the fact of it can suddenly strike you
Yes, time is good, I say. I’m sure things heal with time.
But time flows down the high street like a river
Like the Spital, which exceeds its muddy confines
Each winter, and the rest of the long year
Whispers insistent at the back of the shopper’s mind.
I should be able to escape this honest town
There must be places where creation sings aloud
Can you not hear it? How its blasting trumpet-wind
Blows the streams back up to higher ground.
This next spring we will wade up the Spital river
And shrug the town from us, and leave it lie
How the stream narrows now and lightens
Its pulse grows feeble, its breath a tiny sigh –
In the window I see the yards of draper’s tape,
Which once knew the height of a body, its mortal breadth.
So night falls once again with the roaring of a river
Indifferent to its very depths.
Doggy Life
After Auden’s Musée des Beaux-Arts
I have my doggy life to consider
Others may do the falling from the sky
I make a home in the ripe corn
And count birds and insects yappily.
It is the very health of me
That matters – gleaming coat and fangs
And mind untroubled by psychosis
Beyond the usual things –
Yesterday, for instance, a magpie,
Several old and chewy balls
And a nameless mess I worry
Until my impatient owner yells.
The endless doggy acquisition:
Bones and feathers, piss and spit
The innocent horse’s whisking tail,
The innocent horse’s tumbling shit.
A dog like me lives by a camp
A dog like me licks hangman’s hands
That taste of sweat and hempen rope
And nicotine and scented soap.
On Beauty
Those children with their yellow-painted faces and tangled wreaths
Of green and berry and stick, they have waited
A thousand years to be born again, and here they are
Gracious and grateful, and still with impacted movement.
I call their legs shanks, because they are as slender as forearms
Their flesh is at one with their bone; their hair with their flesh
I ascribe to them no existential complaints, no nervous diseases
Constipation, chewed nails, hard skin, tooth decay, bad breath
Their soul is as large as their body, precisely,
Their body fit to glove such a splendid invisible organ.
I have cracked my glasses on a stone and I have a blister.
Lord, give me strength to protect these children
From the soldiers, ex-soldiers, arse-fuckers, shitmongers
The unclean, unwashed, the simple, the hopeless, the West
With its bulbous self-determination, all those people who kiss
Death and say: I don’t know I don’t know all the while
From ice-creams, cheap sweets and tin signs that say: drink cola
And internecine wars and minefields, chemical spills, slicks
Shit, better to die than to live like that. Better to wander Lethe
In shadow, than paint yourself and gambol under the flawed sun.
Asylum
You say the old masters never got it wrong,
But when Goya painted the death of the imagination
It was a lost dog against a usurious yellow sky
And the dog, a hapless creature who had drawn itself
Ten miles on two legs, stared in amazement
To see the man who once fed him from his plate
Reduced to this.
So I felt this week, the vile soil and everything upon it –
The beggar guest kicked from the table
Before his own dog, and even the honest unpicking
Of art performed nightly and in seclusion.
Like any Penelope my armour is resignation
Although I thought I would lift the bow myself
And draw.
By the morning he is gone
And what to make of this?
The prostitutes hang from a beam like mice
The suitors are piled unburied in the yard.
And some say that it is now much better
And others, that it is worse.
So order was restored
I stared in amazement
Song of the Seagull
Ukrainian folksong
Woe, woe, woe to the seagull
Seagull, O poor unhappy bird
She who wove her nest, laid her eggs
By the well-trod road.
Where some young travelling merchants
Stopped to rest and graze their oxen
And chased the gull away,
Stole her little ch
ildren.
The seagull rose and there she circled,
Then down to the road she hurtled
To the damp, cold earth she falls,
To the men she calls.
‘O most kind and noble merchants,
Still so young, no more than children
Give back my little chickens,
My own little children.’
‘No, you shall not ever see them,
Nor fold them close, no, I’ll not yield
For you’ll gather them about you
And fly off to the field.’
‘I will never fly away,
I’ll stay here, oh I will stay
Here to watch over your oxen,
To mind my little children.’
‘Fly, unhappy seagull, fly
To the far green hills, fly
For your children’s necks are broken
And in my pot they lie.’
‘My children’s slim necks are broken,
Dead in your pot they lie,
Then may your oxen sicken
Sicken all and die.
‘May you know no journey’s end
May your travels last forever
For my children are dead,
Lost to me forever.’
Shepherds
Late June the ghosts of shepherds meet on the hills
And one has his crook with its musket barrel hook
One carries a Bible, and all wear the smock
And listen out for the little bells and the canister bells
Worn by the sheep and the big cattle, carried by the wind
Which shapes the hawthorn into mermaid’s hair and open book.
There are those who died on the hills, and those who died in their beds,
The haloed, who wear a flame about them, were
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