I’m noting your scrubbed pink hands in the cabinet of fancy cakes,
loose and quick among the lemon meringues and cream puffs
and custard tarts, darting and brushing like carp in a glass tank.
O women, the soles of your feet on fire in your sensible shoes,
your fingers aflame, spitting and hissing under the grill.
You, madam, by the cauldron of soup – you didn’t hassle us,
just wiped the crumbs from under our genius poems,
me and the boy Smith, one toasted teacake between us,
eking it out through the dead afternoons, our early drafts
hallmarked and franked with rings of coffee and tea.
Women of the Merrie England, under those scarlet aprons are you naked?
Are you calendar girls? Miss July traps a swarm of steam in a jug
as perspiration rolls from the upper delta of her open neck
to where Christ crucified bobs and twists on a gold chain.
Miss April delivers the kiss of life to a Silk Cut by the fire escape.
Miss November, pass me the key to the toilets, please,
I won’t violate your paintwork, desecrate the back of the door
with crude anatomical shapes or the names of speedway stars.
I’m no closet queen in search of a glory hole for gay sex,
no smackhead needing a cubbyhole to shoot up –
one glass of your phosphorescing, radioactive orange crush
was always enough for me and the boy Smith, his mother
asleep at the wheel on the long drive back from Wales,
the airbag not invented yet – just a bubble in somebody’s dream.
Does he pay you a pittance in groats, King Henry, stuffing his face
with hare and swan, his beard dyed red with venison blood
and pinned with the fiddling bones of partridge and quail,
while you, O women of the Merrie England, his maids,
swab the greasy tiles with a bucket of rain and a bald mop
or check for counterfeit tenners under the sun-tanning light?
A tenner! – still two hours’ graft at the minimum wage.
Don’t let catering margarine ease off your eternity rings.
Don’t lose your marriages down the waste-disposal pipe.
Hang on to your husbands and friends – no sugar daddies or lovers
or cafetières for you, O women of the Merrie England,
no camomile or Earl Grey, just take-it-or-leave-it ground or char
served in the time-bitten cups my grandmother sipped from,
hooking the milky membrane aside with a spoon, watching it reform.
I’ve seen you nudging and winking. Look who just dropped in, you say,
The Man Who Fell to Earth, wanting tea for one and the soup of the day.
I take the window seat and gawp at the steeplejacks: all gone –
Kaye’s, the Coach House, Leeds Road, the White Lion and the Yards.
But you, under the mock Tudor beams, under the fake shields,
under the falsified coats of arms, you go on, you go on
O women of the Merrie England, O mothers of Huddersfield, O ladies!
SIMON ARMITAGE
A Private Bottling
So I will go, then. I would rather grieve over
your absence than over you.
– ANTONIO PORCHIA
Back in the same room that an hour ago
we had led, lamp by lamp, into the darkness
I sit down and turn the radio on low
as the last girl on the planet still awake
reads a dedication to the ships
and puts on a recording of the ocean.
I carefully arrange a chain of nips
in a big fairy-ring; in each square glass
the tincture of a failed geography,
its dwindled burns and woodlands, whin-fires, heather,
the sklent of its wind and its salty rain,
the love-worn habits of its working-folk,
the waveform of their speech, and by extension
how they sing, make love, or take a joke.
So I have a good nose for this sort of thing.
Then I will suffer kiss after fierce kiss
letting their gold tongues slide along my tongue
as each gives up, in turn, its little song
of the patient years in glass and sherry-oak,
the shy negotiations with the sea,
air and earth, the trick of how the peat-smoke
was shut inside it, like a black thought.
Tonight I toast her with the extinct malts
of Ardlussa, Ladyburn and Dalintober
and an ancient pledge of passionate indifference:
Ochon o do dhóigh mé mo chlairsach ar a shon,
wishing her health, as I might wish her weather.
When the circle is closed and I have drunk myself sober
I will tilt the blinds a few degrees, and watch
the dawn grow in a glass of liver-salts,
wait for the birds, the milk-float’s sweet nothings,
then slip back to the bed where she lies curled,
replace the live egg of her burning ass
gently, in the cold nest of my lap,
as dead to her as she is to the world.
*
Here we are again; it is precisely
twelve, fifteen, thirty years down the road
and one turn higher up the spiral chamber
that separates the burnt ale and dark grains
of what I know, from what I can remember.
Now each glass holds its micro-episode
in permanent suspension, like a movie-frame
on acetate, until it plays again,
revivified by a suave connoisseurship
that deepens in the silence and the dark
to something like an infinite sensitivity.
This is no romantic fantasy: my father
used to know a man who’d taste the sea,
then leave his nets strung out along the bay
because there were no fish in it that day.
Everything is in everything else. It is a matter
of attunement, as once, through the hiss and backwash,
I steered the dial into the voice of God
slightly to the left of Hilversum,
half-drowned by some big, blurry waltz
the way some stars obscure their dwarf companions
for centuries, till someone thinks to look.
In the same way, I can isolate the feints
of feminine effluvia, carrion, shite,
those rogues and toxins only introduced
to give the composition a little weight
as rough harmonics do the violin-note
or Pluto, Cheiron and the lesser saints
might do to our lives, for all you know.
(By Christ, you would recognise their absence
as anyone would testify, having sunk
a glass of North British, run off a patent still
in some sleet-hammered satellite of Edinburgh:
a bleak spirit no amount of caramel
could sweeten or disguise, its after-effect
somewhere between a blanket-bath and a sad wank.
There is, no doubt, a bar in Lothian
where it is sworn upon and swallowed neat
by furloughed riggers and the Special Police,
men who hate the company of women.)
O whiskies of Long Island and Provence!
This little number catches at the throat
but is all sweetness in the finish: my tongue trips
first through burning brake-fluid, then nicotine,
pastis, Diorissimo and wet grass;
another is silk sleeves and lip-service
with a kick like a smacked puss in a train-station;
another, the light charge and the trace of zinc<
br />
tap-water picks up at the moon’s eclipse.
You will know the time I mean by this.
Because your singular absence, in your absence,
has bred hard, tonight I take the waters
with the whole clan: our faceless ushers, bridesmaids,
our four Shelties, three now ghosts of ghosts;
our douce sons and our lovely loudmouthed daughters
who will, by this late hour, be fully grown,
perhaps with unborn children of their own.
So finally, let me propose a toast:
not to love, or life, or real feeling,
but to their sentimental residue;
to your sweet memory, but not to you.
The sun will close its circle in the sky
before I close my own, and drain the purely
offertory glass that tastes of nothing
but silence, burnt dust on the valves, and whisky.
DON PATERSON
The London Eye
Through my gold-tinted Gucci sunglasses,
the sightseers. Big Ben’s quarter chime
strikes the convoy of number 12 buses
that bleeds into the city’s monochrome.
Through somebody’s zoom lens, me shouting
to you, Hello! … on … bridge … ’minster!
The aerial view postcard, the man writing
squat words like black cabs in rush hour.
The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble.
You kiss my cheek, formal as a blind date.
We enter Cupid’s capsule, a thought bubble
where I think, ‘Space age!’ you think, ‘She was late.’
Big Ben strikes six. My SKIN .BeatTM blinks, replies
18.02. We’re moving anticlockwise.
PATIENCE AGBABI
from The Electric Poly-Olbion
Godspeed our flashy myths that last five minutes.
Godspeed the ‘Devil’s Christmas Tree’ at Widnes
where the river widens, turns to brainy channels,
Godspeed the Childe of Hale, whose famous long bones
lie in the churchyard children still walk miles
to see, escaping the estates in summer,
Godspeed the all night burn-off flame at Stanlow
and those who watched it from the opposite bank
claiming it was eternal, Godspeed men
who, six-foot-nine, could walk it at low tide,
Godspeed Runcorn and Legoland, Godspeed
the Weaver Navigation and a sky
the colour of a sandbank fat with water,
Godspeed the heavy metals, been and gone,
the fish ladders, the runs of river lymph,
Godspeed the pop and soul, the punk and glam
all been and gone and still the river runs,
the iron and limpet, cadmium and starfish,
the mighty waste, the flags flying at half-mast
in mourning for the North Atlantic Gulf Stream,
the mercury and medusae, zinc and winkles,
the sediment a tide file stretching back
to when records began, the paint-stripped, bleached out
afternoons of wanks and toxic dog-walks,
and somewhere out to sea the cold miracle,
the strange comportment of wind and saltwater
that cleans and lifts and moves back in to bless
hill sources once again, against the grain
of by-product and irony. Godspeed
the steady state that waits once men have left
the estuary to silvery skies and starlight
and skeins of waterfowl, and silent bridges.
PAUL FARLEY
Our Town with the Whole of India!
Our town in England with the whole of India sundering
out of its temples, mandirs and mosques for the customised
streets. Our parade, clad in cloak-orange with banners
and tridents, chanting from station to station for Vaisakhi
over Easter. Our full-moon madness for Eidh with free
pavement tandooris and legless dancing to boostered
cars. Our Guy Fawkes’ Diwali – a kingdom of rockets
for the Odysseus-trials of Rama who arrowed the jungle
foe to re-palace the Penelope-faith of his Sita.
Our Sunrise Radio with its lip sync of Bollywood lovers
pumping through the rows of emporium cubby holes
whilst bhangra beats slam where the hagglers roar
at the pulled-up back-of-the-lorry cut-price stalls.
Sitar shimmerings drip down the furbishly columned
gold store. Askance is the peaceful Pizza Hut …
A Somali cab joint, been there for ever, with smiley
guitar licks where reggae played before Caribbeans
disappeared, where years before Teddy Boys jived.
Our cafés with the brickwork trays of saffron sweets,
brass woks frying flamingo-pink syrup-tunnelled
jalebis networking crustily into their familied clumps.
Reveries of incense scent the beefless counter where
bloodied men sling out skinned legs and breasts
into thin bags topped with the proof of giblets.
Stepped road displays – chock-full of ripe karela,
okra, aubergine – sunshined with mango, pineapple,
lychee. Factory walkers prayer-toss the river of
sponging swans with chapattis. A posse brightens
on park-shots of Bacardi – waxing for the bronze
eyeful of girls. The girls slim their skirts after college
blowing dreams into pink bubble gums at neck-
descending and tight-neck sari-mannequins. Their grannies
point for poled yards of silk for own-made styles.
The mother of the runaway daughter, in the marriage
bureau, weeps over the plush-back catalogues glossed
with tuxedo-boys from the whole of our India!
DALJIT NAGRA
Another Westminster Bridge
go and glimpse the lovely inattentive water
discarding the gaze of many a bored street walker
where the weather trespasses into strip-lit offices
through tiny windows into tiny thoughts and authorities
and the soft beseeching tapping of typewriters
take hold of a breath-width instant, stare
at water which is already elsewhere
in a scrapwork of flashes and glittery flutters
and regular waves of apparently motionless motion
under the teetering structures of administration
where a million shut-away eyes glance once
restlessly at the river’s ruts and glints
count five, then wander swiftly
away over the stone wing-bone of the city
ALICE OSWALD
Liverpool Blues
The skyline in the moonlight, the river running thin,
my lover weeping lotus blossom for his next of kin.
The stars will tell their stories over Birkenhead and Cammell Laird’s.
In Berry Street, in Bold Street, in Princes Park and Princess Street
I’ve seen a girl I never knew and never thought to meet.
The Liver Birds have flown away, the cathedrals’ doors are closed.
To hospitals and factories, bars, clubs, churches, loony bins,
something is uneasy beneath the city’s restless din.
A woman has been murdered, yet no one says a word.
The homeless and the helpless, the workers on the street
have nothing left to live for, can only smell defeat.
My husband’s left his heart elsewhere, my love has been foreclosed.
We’re living in a borderland, somewhere between life and death,
losing ourselves in the search for a self.
It’s a country of our making, the c
ards are curiously dealt.
The helicopter spotlights buzz us, lights come flooding in,
even our bedroom’s no longer safe, we’re living on a pin.
We mouth our dreams in the telling dark, but nothing can be heard.
We mouth our dreams in the telling dark, but nothing can be heard.
We mouth our dreams in the telling dark, and only words are lost.
We mouth our dreams in the telling dark, still nothing can be heard.
DERYN REES-JONES
And They Call It Lovely Derry
And so, strangely enough, to Florida.
Twenty from our side of the River
Foyle and twenty more from the other,
lifted out of a ‘war-torn community’
to mix three weeks in a normal society.
That was the general idea.
When we arrived we were paired
and placed with a host couple, good
church people, settled and stable.
She was the first Prod I had ever met;
a small girl, pale and introvert, who wept
for home, then sniffed, and smiled.
The husband sat at the head of the table
holding forth, hot and bothered.
He couldn’t decide on the right word,
hmmed and hawed between Blacks and Coloured,
whatever, his point? They were bone idle,
wouldn’t accept the jobs they were offered.
The woman dreamed of having a child,
I took to the role of living doll
and would tolerate each morning’s session
under the rug of curling tongs.
I had never even heard of Racism.
We gave a concert on the last night,
The Map and the Clock Page 45