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The Map and the Clock

Page 36

by Carol Ann Duffy


  In the open door.

  The lit fire. A quick mouthful of ale.

  We push the Merle at a sea of cold flame.

  The oars drip honey.

  Hook by hook uncoils under The Kame.

  Our line breaks the trek of sudden thousands.

  Twelve nobbled jaws,

  Grey cowls, gape in our hands.

  Twelve cold mouths scream without sound.

  The sea is empty again.

  Like tinkers the bright ones endlessly shift their ground.

  We probe emptiness all the afternoon,

  Then pause and fill our teeth

  With dependable food, beef and barley scone.

  Sunset drags its butcher blade

  From the day’s throat.

  We turn through an ebb salt and sticky as blood.

  More stars than fish. Women, cats, a gull

  Mewl at the rock.

  The valley divides the meagre miracle.

  GEORGE MACKAY BROWN

  Money

  Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

  ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?

  I am all you never had of goods and sex.

  You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

  So I look at others, what they do with theirs:

  They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.

  By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:

  Clearly money has something to do with life

  – In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:

  You can’t put off being young until you retire,

  And however you bank your screw, the money you save

  Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

  I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

  From long french windows at a provincial town,

  The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

  In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

  PHILIP LARKIN

  Water

  If I were called in

  To construct a religion

  I should make use of water.

  Going to church

  Would entail a fording

  To dry, different clothes;

  My liturgy would employ

  Images of sousing,

  A furious devout drench,

  And I should raise in the east

  A glass of water

  Where any-angled light

  Would congregate endlessly.

  PHILIP LARKIN

  Going, Going

  I thought it would last my time –

  The sense that, beyond the town,

  There would always be fields and farms,

  Where the village louts could climb

  Such trees as were not cut down;

  I knew there’d be false alarms

  In the papers about old streets

  And split-level shopping, but some

  Have always been left so far;

  And when the old part retreats

  As the bleak high-risers come

  We can always escape in the car.

  Things are tougher than we are, just

  As earth will always respond

  However we mess it about;

  Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

  The tides will be clean beyond.

  – But what do I feel now? Doubt?

  Or age, simply? The crowd

  Is young in the M1 café;

  Their kids are screaming for more –

  More houses, more parking allowed,

  More caravan sites, more pay.

  On the Business Page, a score

  Of spectacled grins approve

  Some takeover bid that entails

  Five per cent profit (and ten

  Per cent more in the estuaries): move

  Your works to the unspoilt dales

  (Grey area grants)! And when

  You try to get near the sea

  In summer …

  It seems, just now,

  To be happening so very fast;

  Despite all the land left free

  For the first time I feel somehow

  That it isn’t going to last,

  That before I snuff it, the whole

  Boiling will be bricked in

  Except for the tourist parts –

  First slum of Europe: a role

  It won’t be so hard to win,

  With a cast of crooks and tarts.

  And that will be England gone,

  The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

  The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

  There’ll be books; it will linger on

  In galleries; but all that remains

  For us will be concrete and tyres.

  Most things are never meant.

  This won’t be, most likely: but greeds

  And garbage are too thick-strewn

  To be swept up now, or invent

  Excuses that make them all needs.

  I just think it will happen, soon.

  PHILIP LARKIN

  I Was Not There

  The morning they set out from home

  I was not there to comfort them

  the dawn was innocent with snow

  in mockery – it is not true

  the dawn was neutral was immune

  their shadows threaded it too soon

  they were relieved that it had come

  I was not there to comfort them

  One told me that my father spent

  a day in prison long ago

  he did not tell me that he went

  what difference does it make now

  when he set out when he came home

  I was not there to comfort him

  and now I have no means to know

  of what I was kept ignorant

  Both my parents died in camps

  I was not there to comfort them

  I was not there they were alone

  my mind refuses to conceive

  the life the death they must have known

  I must atone because I live

  I could not have saved them from death

  the ground is neutral underneath

  Every child must leave its home

  time gathers life impartially

  I could have spared them nothing since

  I was too young – it is not true

  they might have lived to succour me

  and none shall say in my defence

  had I been there to comfort them

  it would have made no difference

  KAREN GERSHON

  The Boasts of Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd

  Sunday, skilled in zealous verse I praise the Lord.

  Monday, I sing in bed to my busty Nest,

  ‘Such whiteness you are, pear blossom must be jealous.’

  Tuesday, scholar Gwladus. Not to love her is a sin.

  My couplets she pigeon-coos when I thrust to woo her

  till her pale cheeks flush like rosy apple skin.

  Wednesday, Generys. Dry old hymns I steal to please her.

  Then with passion fruit in season I kneel to ease her.

  Thursday, Hunydd, no hesitating lady, she.

  One small cherry-englyn and she’s my devotee.

  Friday, worried Hawis, my epic regular.

  She wants no baby, she’s gooseberry vehement

  till sugared by my poetry of endearment.

  Saturday, I score and score. One tidy eulogy

  and I’m away – I can’t brake – through an orchard

  I adore. O sweet riot of efflorescence,

  let her name be secret for her husband’s sake,

  my peach of a woman, my vegetarian diet.

  O tongue, lick up juices of the fruit. O teeth

  – I’ve all of mine – be sure my busy tongue keeps quiet.

  DANNIE ABSE

  Epithalamion

  Singing, today I married my white girl

  beautiful in
a barley field.

  Green on thy finger a grass blade curled,

  so with this ring I thee wed, I thee wed,

  and send our love to the loveless world

  of all the living and all the dead.

  Now, no more than vulnerable human,

  we more than one, less than two,

  are nearly ourselves in a barley field –

  and only love is the rent that’s due

  though the bailiffs of time return anew

  to all the living but not the dead.

  Shipwrecked, the sun sinks down harbours

  of a sky, unloads its liquid cargoes

  of marigolds, and I and my white girl

  lie still in the barley – who else wishes

  to speak, what more can be said

  by all the living against all the dead?

  Come then all you wedding guests:

  green ghost of trees, gold of barley,

  you blackbird priests in the field,

  you wind that shakes the pansy head

  fluttering on a stalk like a butterfly;

  come the living and come the dead.

  Listen flowers, birds, winds, worlds,

  tell all today that I married

  more than a white girl in the barley –

  for today I took to my human bed

  flower and bird and wind and world

  and all the living and all the dead.

  DANNIE ABSE

  The Lost Woman

  My mother went with no more warning

  Than a bright voice and a bad pain.

  Home from school on a June morning

  And where the brook goes under the lane

  I saw the back of a shocking white

  Ambulance drawing away from the gate.

  She never returned and I never saw

  Her buried. So a romance began.

  The ivy-mother turned into a tree

  That still hops away like a rainbow down

  The avenue as I approach.

  My tendrils are the ones that clutch.

  I made a life for her over the years.

  Frustrated no more by a dull marriage

  She ran a canteen through several wars.

  The wit of a cliché-ridden village

  She met her match at an extra-mural

  Class and the OU summer school.

  Many a hero in his time

  And every poet has acquired

  A lost woman to haunt the home,

  To be compensated and desired,

  Who will not alter, who will not grow,

  A corpse they need never get to know.

  She is nearly always benign. Her habit

  Is not to stride at dead of night.

  Soft and crepuscular in rabbit–

  Light she comes out. Hear how they hate

  Themselves for losing her as they did.

  Her country is bland and she does not chide.

  But my lost woman evermore snaps

  From somewhere else: ‘You did not love me.

  I sacrificed too much perhaps,

  I showed you the way to rise above me

  And you took it. You are the ghost

  With the bat-voice, my dear. I am not lost.’

  PATRICIA BEER

  Scotland

  It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,

  when larks rose on long thin strings of singing

  and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.

  Greenness entered the body. The grasses

  shivered with presences, and sunlight

  stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.

  Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,

  the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’

  cried I, like a sunstruck madman.

  And what did she have to say for it?

  Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves

  as she spoke with their ancient misery:

  ‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’

  ALASTAIR REID

  The Child’s Story

  When I was small and they talked about love I laughed

  But I ran away and I hid in a tall tree

  Or I lay in asparagus beds

  But I still listened.

  The blue dome sang with the wildest birds

  And the new sun sang in the idle noon

  But then I heard love, love, rung from the steeples, each belfry,

  And I was afraid and I watched the cypress trees

  Join the deciduous chestnuts and oaks in a crowd of shadows

  And then I shivered and ran and ran to the tall

  White house with the green shutters and dark red door

  And I cried ‘Let me in even if you must love me’

  And they came and lifted me up and told me the name

  Of the near and the far stars,

  And so my first love was.

  ELIZABETH JENNINGS

  My Grandmother

  She kept an antique shop – or it kept her.

  Among Apostle spoons and Bristol glass,

  The faded silks, the heavy furniture,

  She watched her own reflection in the brass

  Salvers and silver bowls, as if to prove

  Polish was all, there was no need of love.

  And I remember how I once refused

  To go out with her, since I was afraid.

  It was perhaps a wish not to be used

  Like antique objects. Though she never said

  That she was hurt, I still could feel the guilt

  Of that refusal, guessing how she felt.

  Later, too frail to keep a shop, she put

  All her best things in one long narrow room.

  The place smelt old, of things too long kept shut,

  The smell of absences where shadows come

  That can’t be polished. There was nothing then

  To give her own reflection back again.

  And when she died I felt no grief at all,

  Only the guilt of what I once refused.

  I walked into her room among the tall

  Sideboards and cupboards – things she never used

  But needed: and no finger-marks were there,

  Only the new dust falling through the air.

  ELIZABETH JENNINGS

  A Bird in the House

  It was a yellow voice, a high, shrill treble in the nursery

  White always and high, I remember it so,

  White cupboard, off-white table, mugs, dolls’ faces

  And I was four or five. The garden could have been

  Miles away. We were taken down to the green

  Asparagus beds, the cut lawn, and the smell of it

  Comes each summer after rain when white returns. Our bird,

  A canary called Peter, sang behind bars. The black and white cat

  Curled and snoozed by the fire and danger was far away.

  Far away for us. Safety was life and only now do I know

  That white walls and lit leaves knocking windows

  Are a good prison but always you have

  To escape, fly off from love not felt as love,

  But our bird died in his yellow feathers. The quick

  Cat caught him, tore him through bars when we were out

  And I do not remember tears or sadness, I only

  Remember the ritual, the warm yellow feathers we put

  In a cardboard egg. What a sense of fitness. How far, I know now,

  Ritual goes back, egg to egg, birth to burial and we went

  Down the garden softly, two in a small procession,

  And the high clouds bent down, the sky pulled aside

  Its blue curtains. Death was there or else

  Where the wise cat had hidden. That day we buried our bird

  With a sense of fitness, not knowing death would be hard

  Later, dark, without form or purpose.
/>   After my first true grief I wept, was sad, was dark, but today,

  Clear of terror and agony,

  The yellow bird sings in my mind and I say

  That the child is callous but wise, knows the purpose of play.

  And the grief of ten years ago

  Now has an ancient rite,

  A walk down the garden carrying death in an egg

  And the sky singing, the trees still waving farewell

  When dying was nothing to know.

  ELIZABETH JENNINGS

  When I am Reading

  When I am reading

  the literature of my people

  I think,

  We have no Homer

  no poet as great as that,

  at all as great as that,

  in that way

  in that marvellous way.

  But now and again I read

  about a particular girl

  who died of love

  in a ragged dress

  or an eagle will rise

  crying, I was eating

  noble dead soldiers

  who were lying on a battlefield.

  And now and again there will sail

  on the sea towards Canada

  ships with salt sails,

  songs that are white with pain.

  IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

  Owl and Mouse

  The owl wafts home with a mouse in its beak.

  The moon is stunningly bright in the high sky.

  Such a gold stone, such a brilliant hard light.

 

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