The Map and the Clock
Page 44
and the women of Mumbles Head
are one, a long line
over the slippery sea.
MAURA DOOLEY
The Numties
The parsnip Numties: I was a teenager then,
Collecting clip-together models
Of historical windsocks, dancing the Cumbernauld bump.
Satirical pornography, plant-staplers, nostalgiaform shoes
Were brochure-fresh. It was numty-four
I first saw a neighbour laughing in a herbal shirt.
Moshtensky, Garvin, Manda Sharry –
Names as quintessentially Numties
As Hearers and Bonders, duckponding, or getting a job
In eradication. Everything so familiar and sandwiched
Between the pre-Numties and the debouche of decades after.
I keep plunging down to the wreck
Of the submerged Numties, every year
Bringing back something jubilantly pristine,
Deeper drowned, clutching my breath.
ROBERT CRAWFORD
Song of a Wire Fence
Once I loved a woman
with barbed wire dreams
and scars ploughed into her skin.
She almost slept in my arms,
she almost slept in my arms.
And I sang her Dafydd y Garreg
and Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn
from the harps of Capel Curig
to the hooves of Synod Inn.
I gave her a young man’s stare
the night she read my palm,
my fingers ploughed her wild hair
and she almost slept in my arms,
she almost slept in my arms.
And I sang her Tros y Garreg
and Ar Hyd y Nos
from the floods of Pencarreg
to the sands of Ynyslas.
The song of a wire fence
crossed over a thousand farms
and love, she knew no distance,
she almost slept in my arms,
she almost slept in my arms.
PAUL HENRY
Pride
When I looked up, the black man was there,
staring into my face,
as if he had always been there,
as if he and I went a long way back.
He looked into the dark pool of my eyes
as the train slid out of Euston.
For a long time this went on
the stranger and I looking at each other,
a look that was like something being given
from one to the other.
My whole childhood, I’m quite sure,
passed before him, the worst things
I’ve ever done, the biggest lies I’ve ever told.
And he was a little boy on a red dust road.
He stared into the dark depth of me,
and then he spoke:
‘Ibo,’ he said. ‘Ibo, definitely.’
Our train rushed through the dark.
‘You are an Ibo!’ he said, thumping the table.
My coffee jumped and spilled.
Several sleeping people woke.
The night train boasted and whistled
through the English countryside,
past unwritten stops in the blackness.
‘That nose is an Ibo nose.
Those teeth are Ibo teeth,’ the stranger said,
his voice getting louder and louder.
I had no doubt, from the way he said it,
that Ibo noses are the best noses in the world,
that Ibo teeth are perfect pearls.
People were walking down the trembling aisle
to come and look
as the night rain babbled against the window.
There was a moment when
my whole face changed into a map,
and the stranger on the train
located even the name
of my village in Nigeria
in the lower part of my jaw.
I told him what I’d heard was my father’s name.
Okafor. He told me what it meant,
something stunning,
something so apt and astonishing.
Tell me, I asked the black man on the train
who was himself transforming,
at roughly the same speed as the train,
and could have been
at any stop, my brother, my father as a young man,
or any member of my large clan,
Tell me about the Ibos.
His face had a look
I’ve seen on a MacLachlan, a MacDonnell, a MacLeod,
the most startling thing, pride,
a quality of being certain.
Now that I know you are an Ibo, we will eat.
He produced a spicy meat patty,
ripping it into two.
Tell me about the Ibos.
‘The Ibos are small in stature
Not tall like the Yoruba or Hausa.
The Ibos are clever, reliable,
dependable, faithful, true.
The Ibos should be running Nigeria.
There would be none of this corruption.’
And what, I asked, are the Ibos’ faults?
I smiled my newly acquired Ibo smile,
flashed my gleaming Ibo teeth.
The train grabbed at a bend,
‘Faults? No faults. Not a single one.’
‘If you went back,’ he said brightening,
‘The whole village would come out for you.
Massive celebrations. Definitely.
Definitely,’ he opened his arms wide.
‘The eldest grandchild – fantastic welcome.
If the grandparents are alive.’
I saw myself arriving
the hot dust, the red road,
the trees heavy with other fruits,
the bright things, the flowers.
I saw myself watching
the old people dance towards me
dressed up for me in happy prints.
And I found my feet.
I started to dance.
I danced a dance I never knew I knew.
Words and sounds fell out of my mouth like seeds.
I astonished myself.
My grandmother was like me exactly, only darker.
When I looked up, the black man had gone.
Only my own face startled me in the dark train window.
JACKIE KAY
Mappamundi
Eh’ve wurkt oot a poetic map o thi warld.
Vass tracts o land ur penntit reid tae shaw
Englan kens naethin aboot um. Ireland’s
bin shuftit tae London, whaur
oafficis o thi Poetry Sock occupeh fehv
squerr mile. Seamus Heaney occupehs three
o thon. Th’anerly ithir bits in Britain
ur Oaxfurd an Hull. Scoatlan, Thi Pool,
an Huddersfield, ur cut ti cuttilbanes in
America, which issa grecht big burdcage wi
a tartan rug owre ut, tae shaw
Roabirt Lowell. Chile disnae exist.
Argentina’s bin beat. Hungary and Russia
haena visas. Africa’s editid doon ti
a column in Poetry Verruca,
whaur Okigbo’s gote thi ghaist
o Roy Campbill hingin owre um. Thi Faur East’s
faan aff – aa but China: thon’s renemmed
Ezra Poond an pit in thi croncit cage.
France disna get a luke-in:
accoardin tae Geoffrey Hill, plucky wee
Charles Péguy is wrasslin wi
this big deid parrot caad ‘Surrealism’ fur
thi throne o Absinthe Sorbet.
In this scenario Eh’m a bittern stoarm aff Ulm.
W. N. HERBERT
Elevation
3.2.11
Flying over Wales, suspended
high above, is to learn
how to love her; gliding slow,
&nbs
p; knowing her from this new angle.
Between the tease of mare-tail clouds,
her peninsula arm exposed,
sleeve eager, rolled-ready.
And look, beneath her collage of a dress,
the mystery of the mountain
elegantly stonewall-stitched.
And there, the furrows of unearthed slate
combed like the drag
of fingers through sand
and the small bright lakes
like enigmatic birth marks
glimpsed while lovers lock.
Tonight, nose pressed against the window,
your lips insist on reciting
the litany of place names,
‘Dyfi Junction, Cors Fochno …’
your breath a sacred shuffle across her body,
‘Dowlais, Penrhys, Gilfach Goch …’
And as she wraps her shyness with a veil of cloud,
the plane’s shadow
casts a cross below,
a timeless kiss on this love letter,
a hesitant vote for her future.
IFOR AP GLYN
translated by Clare Potter
Flood Before and After
It reeled across the North, to the extent
that even Northerners cried ‘This is North!’
and what would you have said, to see a sky
threatening the children with great change?
Extraordinary clouds! Spectaculars!
There was the Dimden family, in their barn.
And long, quite vertical rain, the three horizons
hunched, different formulations, browns
and oranges. Then the unlucky Greens
running with their sons to find their sons.
The scarecrow and the crow, they did okay,
getting dark together, but unfrightened.
Fists of clouds! Genii of glamour!
Not to mention thunders – not again!
There stand the Dimdens, safe for once and sad.
The Greens have found their sons! Now for their daughters.
But out goes the lightning, giant’s fork
into a mound of chilli, steaming there
and where’s it gone? Into the open mouth,
barn and all, flavours and seasonings!
Cuddle in the rain, old favourites.
There goes a Noah, borrowing a plank.
Little slow to move, we thought. It ends
with tangles, the new rivers, and the sunshine
formally requesting a rainbow. Granted.
The creaking and excusing back to work.
A valuable man was lost in it.
That was in the paper, with the picture.
All the Northern correspondents went
reading to the telephones, all cold,
which brought the dry onlookers from the South,
gaspers, whistlers, an ambassador
and leading lights to mingle with the hurt.
The clouds were diplomats of the same kind,
edging over to exonerate
and praise. And then the royal son arrived,
helicoptered down on a flat field,
glancing up at the sky through the whup of blades,
attending to the worried with a joke.
Hell, I don’t know what – we were all cold.
The landscape looked an archipelago.
The Dimdens finally twigged, the Greens were found
beating the Blooms at rummy, in a cave.
All were interviewed and had lost all.
All saluted when the helicopter rose.
Only some came up the knoll with us
to check our options. Only two of those
saw, as I did, Noah’s tiny boat
scarcely moving, at the edge of sight
below the line, and only I’d admit
the crow and the scarecrow were rowing it.
GLYN MAXWELL
Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead
On the civic amenity landfill site,
the coup, the dump beyond the cemetery
and the 30-mile-an-hour sign, her stiff
old ladies’ bags, open mouthed, spew
postcards sent from small Scots towns
in 1960: Peebles, Largs, the rock-gardens
of Carnoustie, tinted in the dirt.
Mr and Mrs Scotland, here is the hand you were dealt:
fair but cool, showery but nevertheless,
Jean asks kindly; the lovely scenery;
in careful school-room script –
The Beltane Queen was crowned today.
But Mr and Mrs Scotland are dead.
Couldn’t he have burned them? Released
in a grey curl of smoke
this pattern for a cable knit? Or this:
tossed between a toppled fridge
and sweet-stinking anorak: Dictionary for Mothers
M – Milk, the woman who worries …;
And here, Mr Scotland’s John Bull Puncture Repair Kit;
those days when he knew intimately
the thin roads of his country, hedgerows
hanged with small black brambles’ hearts;
and here, for God’s sake, his last few joiners’ tools,
SCOTLAND, SCOTLAND, stamped on their tired handles.
Do we take them? Before the bulldozer comes
to make more room, to shove aside
his shaving brush, her button tin.
Do we save this toolbox, these old-fashioned views
addressed, after all, to Mr and Mrs Scotland?
Should we reach and take them? And then?
Forget them, till that person enters
our silent house, begins to open
to the light our kitchen drawers,
and performs for us this perfunctory rite:
the sweeping up, the turning out.
KATHLEEN JAMIE
Blackwater
Where the coastline doubles up on itself
as if punched in the gut by the god Meander,
who likes to dabble in landscapes
but, with this one, lost his grip.
He muddled salt and sweet,
bent the creeks more than double,
loaded each distinction
till it burst its banks. Picture this:
an estuary where the eye can’t tell
sea from river, hill from valley,
near from far, first from last, in from out
– any one thing, in fact, from any other.
Where the stumps of Saxon fishtraps
butt up through the silt at low tide
like the rusted teeth in the wrecked head
of the god Yawn, who can’t keep his mouth shut,
not here, where the land spits out
its haul of the useless,
the shapeless, tasteless, nameless.
Where there has been nothing as clear
as the winter in which the goddess Inertia
hunkered down over Maldon
– the town hemmed in with skirts of ice.
The men of the saltworks and oyster pits,
bass fishers, whelk pickers, farmers and bargees
were hamstrung. Some set off
to find the first three miles in any direction
glass, their boats sleeved in glass,
glass hobbling their horses.
Where the vague men of the Dengie Peninsula
drove their marsh lambs a fortnight’s walk
to market and picked up a wife on the way:
an inland girl from a county town
whose clean lungs became damp rooms,
whose good skin leathered and would not cure,
whose blood was drunk by the god Stagnant
who came at night and took little sips
till her blackened soul left her body,
how else, but by way of water.
Where you think you’ve reached open sea
till something
catches in your throat
– fossil fuel and fish long out of water.
Where the goddess Stasis laid a path
towards the horizon, which seems not far
till you sidle, circle, give up, settle in
like the World War One submarines
docked in the shallows near Osea.
They grew so at home
that Stasis offered them the gift of life
as mud lumps on mud banks
who honk and puff their way off shore
to zoom, reborn, to the battle zone
(where Osea keeps watch on Ostend),
drawn to the mutating warmth
of Bradwell power station’s radiant pools.
Where they at last unplugged the glottal stop
in the throat of the god Moribund
and opened a wall to unravel the fields
where the borrow dyke lends itself to the polder,
mops up sticklebacks and sea lavender:
– bristling, stunted, salt and sweet.
Where the county arms are three cutlasses,
each with a bite taken out
by a bored god. Salt of earth,
they chew the matter over:
‘Whatever’s it all about, John?’
‘Whenever is it all going to end?’
LAVINIA GREENLAW
To the Women of the Merrie England Coffee Houses, Huddersfield
O women of the Merrie England Coffee Houses, Huddersfield,
when I break sweat just thinking about hard work, I think about you.
Nowhere to hide behind that counter, nowhere to shirk.
I’m watching you right now bumping and grinding hip to hip,