by Graham Mort
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE
www.serenbooks.com
The right of Graham Mort to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
© Graham Mort 2011.
ISBN: 978-1-85411-616-1 (EPUB edition)
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.
Cover photograph by Helen Brock.
Ebook conversion by Caleb Woodbridge.
for Maggie
Graham Mort
Cusp
Metalwork
Water’s gleam is pewter
the woods’ alchemical copper
bronze and gold stripped
from the trees’ base-metal
that iron-old assertion
showing through as frost scrapes
back what is rich, trivial
and new to some lost, deeper
trope. Everything becoming
something else: lamentation
hope, the river falling into
its own brass throat. Sea trout
and salmon – lashing silver
tongues that tease the weir all
night – wait unpronounced
in the lacquered pool where
drab trees reach and meld
across the straits below and
days of tainted foam go by
their dappled flux always unstill.
Now it’s seen me, the heron
will unweld: all elbows and knee
joints it ratchets the uncouth
contraption of itself into a
nickel-plated sky. Flight
seems a doubtful art, each
wing-beat provisionally
inventing height; everything
tentative, untested, proto-
typical, unreal – except its bright
steel dart, acetylene eye.
Dowser
In his gawky teens he was the butt
of wit: cack-handed, ginger, skenning
aflame with acne and a half-fledged Billy
Fury quiff. What marked him was the lore
of hidden depths, a wire swan dipping
on his palms, doing it for Woodbines or
Park Drive. Then full grown, runt-arsed
a hazel fork rearing in his fists; he could
dowse anything from lost drains to
old foundations’ buried lines of stone.
Too wayward for mill work or regiment
he never had a job, paid tax or pension;
he loved the ferret smell of cash. On
wet days they found him in taprooms
hunched over cadged pints, talking
elvers, ways to bait nightlines, trap moles
kill rats, lure eels with a drowned cat;
or he’d be darting it with lads from the
cattle mart, moleskin jacket adrift, one
eye closed to find treble six. He fished the
Greta for sea trout, poached salmon
from the Lune, kept a sawn-off 4-10 for
snaffling grouse, started a feud over a
man’s wife at Mallerstang, divined a Roman
well at Wray and when they dug it out
spat sour black water at his own face.
Once he found a dead girl for the police
face-down in a foot of peat that had the
dogs thrown. It got him into bother when
they found the gun and pheasants in his
van, when his Jack Russell bitch went
nuts and bit a copper’s hand to knuckle
bone. They let him be in the end seeing
as he could neither read nor write nor
hardly think ahead of himself; not more
than the next step, or the next, what with
all that was underfoot and unsaid.
Drought
It seemed a double vision: the
natural order split along a focal
plane, those white clouds piled
at Dunsop Bridge, May blossom
lush below, boiling from trees
occluding them, even shrouding
that fractured half-dead thorn
with life.
I drove through aisles of
cream mantilla lace; a deer
ran from its murder of young trees
a kestrel turned above a stricken
spire of ash, hedgerows babbled
foam – burst hydrants dousing
green fires in the bough – until
the car whined clear, revving
climbing, stalling, froth-specked
where the moor’s drift of khaki
grass began.
Then sunset’s welding torch
at the screen showing a
new elevation: ridges and rivers
roughcast in pollen-dusted
bronze where insect corpses pock
the glass like stammered rain
that fails us.
And below, ducking under
blossom that soaps each
slender branch’s arms, Lonsdale’s
wide groove pulls this tributary
down, draws out this moment the
way all things are instantly lived
and past and lie as unremembered
futures. Then we die, and they are
tides of a parched mind flooding
with old prophecies: those gulls
stacked above an empty farm, its
churns dry, its first miraculous
enamel bath a drinking trough, its
heaps of knackered chain and
seized pump.
Now the home run’s glimpsed
the soul’s metal bead aimed
at sunset’s rust-streaked filaments.
Lakeland hills darkening the
dazzle of scoured glass: Great Rigg
High Pike and Rydal Fell;
the west’s salt blister of sea.
Heysham’s squat power plant
its poisoned half-eternal fulmination
clear at last. Sheep glancing up
lambs afraid and suckling, bog
cotton guttering in its own pale
rumour of drought.
The Work of Water
We lie awake before
the day breaks its wafer of
light, before making love;
we listen to the rain, a panting
dove, to the work of water
washing away gardens, its
supplications, its drowsy
insinuations that say watercourse
valley, rill, stream, gulley, beck
and gill (our local word
for this world-over thing) –
all tributary to the hurried
flow of fingertips and breath.
The dove’s cry comes
again, through the flood’s
garbled pronunciations
pouring from the watershed’s
ridge to the arched spine
of the river bridge, deepening
with each moment of
rain, each drenched syllable
deliquescing on its tongues.
Before this flood of thirst
and touch, before there was
flesh and longing and
blood, there was rain, there
&nbs
p; was water perfecting
everything that speech would
find and fill and lose again:
river, rivulet, rill
valley, beck and gill.
Triora
The house overhangs
a valley of ruined vines
olive trees gone wild
in their silver capes.
Soil flows to the sea
to another century and
can’t be terraced back –
the river sucking its
mineral tang of sweat
to another tongue. That
fleeting baffle on the
balcony – its almost sense
of touch – is breath
of swifts’ wings, their
lungs eternal, their
blood’s fulminate of
oxygen stoking tiny
hearts molten in the
mindless fission of
everything: strega
their eyes black
keen as if they know
all history, all futures
in speed, in a spasm
of procreation on
the wing, their un
anchored forms
shearing seams of
air between the
valley and church
where their young
are learning this.
They scream in
diabolic gangs, their
high cries conjuring
newness, dazzling
as the foil of light
glancing on amethyst
between your breasts
that perspiration tries
to cool: I lick it from
my fingers – salt freckles
of your hot skin – half
expecting you to fly.
Siege
I watch ant columns enter as you sleep;
shouts of Castilian are fading in the street
as they advance to their redoubts; a
forward party’s raiding at your knee
their armour gleaming in faint light
that buckles in the shutters above me.
Night-heat brings them marching to
the bed and now a war is starting over you.
Oh, innocent America! Conquistadors
well led! On your shoulder skirmishers
advance to put your nipples to the
sword or arquebus or glittering lance.
Those mortars open up a breach close
to the dimpled back part of your knee
whilst elsewhere, courtiers in silken
hose fawn on the gravid queen who
cannot contradict their plot, but lays
more grubs, endures her royal lot.
You don’t wake to see them braid your
hair in ropes that bridge the opal of each ear.
I watch the conquest of your skin: that pair
of muleteers are bringing fresh supplies
those sappers following a vein of blue, that
sentry guards the closed lid of your eye.
My hand alone could clear these hoards
scatter your spine’s outriders, scouts and spies –
consign whole armies to the skirting boards.
Instead, I watch, conspire, betray
by stealth. There’ll be rich pickings at the
dawn: their booty, all your ransacked wealth.
Imposed, the naked wrong of war:
new customs, inquisitions, taxes, laws
proclaimed in vowels of a foreign tongue.
This wanton sally runs me close as I can
get: chief suspect, self-impeached voyeur
self-tortured whoreson of a hypocrite. I own
it all: how I let in these legions at the gate of
night to follow them. Be still. Endure.
Don’t anger them. Don’t wake. Not yet.
del Torrente Mandancio
Fish shadows over
gravel, their blockage
of light angelic.
Water warm against
sun-finned skin, their
haloes dark shivering
flames, their depthless
souls ghosting the
river bed.
Current, a veil
draping my hand;
my own emptied self
here beside me, its
omen cast into the element
solid as absence.
Winery Ghost
Sleep in the old winery
has us dozing under
vaulted stone – such
strength in curvature
time arching back to
time to begin again.
The oak bed creaks;
past vintages fume
sour as stifled air.
You wake me to hear
the winery ghost
our old friend, his
expirations quaintly
hoarse, shallow breath
after breath in clinging
heat where grasshopper
choirs pant; their winged
voices susurrate, infinitely
faint like sifting dust
or sediment descending
clouded glass to silence.
We hadn’t guessed yet
how I was gathering lees
to cramp all inspiration
so you nudged me
with a kind of joy to sense
the cleared wine of lost
summers, low wind in
vines, mottled leaves
jostling clogged veins
autumn edging near to
frost, sugar rising, each
golden orb tarnished
with rot, their noble last
chances transpiring the way
breath fogs a mirror.
Kano
Harmattan is eyelash grit, the eyeball
skinned; grey djinns writhing through
markets, minarets and alleyways where
the poor beseech us. Nothing ceases
or can: not hunger, not thirst, the Sahel
drifting south to bury city walls, lash
sand under our tongues where words
swirl: parched leaves, fugitive birds.
Sky is a grey anvil; sun a dim sledge
of heat; trees, grey wraiths. The
Imam’s voice turns us East, to the
day’s long custom, history, chance.
A beggar with no hands counts naira
in the stumps of his arms, somehow
holding and counting each dirty note.
His donkey waits stubbornly, kohl
eyed, frozen-hooved through these
seconds, their whirling aeons of dust.
Okada riders gather, stare in at me
laughing through this moment gifted
from the spinning grit of the universe:
that man counting his wealth in the
hurling veils of the Harmattan, here
in Kano city where our lives came this
close then moved apart as throttles
twisted out smoke and the lights changed
so trivially he never even looked at me.
Lake Mburo
The lake is mercury smooth
a wash of mist seeps from the softly
gullied green of hills; weaver
birds are knotting a new day
together, one that will never be
perfect enough for black-faced monkeys:
they call satirically, steal from
the campsite kitchen, flaunt powder
blue balls, show their scarlet
arseholes to the dawn. Congolese dance
music is tearing at the speaker
cones; hippos touch their nostrils
to the liquid metal of the lake;
fish eagles and pied kingfishers trace
themselves over still water;
a green-backed heron is practicing
stillness – death’s priest
ly
similitude. Last night we sat over
unchilled beers in a hail of
black beetles, a plague of lake flies
flocking at the single bulb.
We watched the hills fade, heard a
storm kick-start, saw brief
shocks of light lapping at the sky
then ate tilapia, hearing the sex
loosed throats of bullfrogs calling from
papyrus beds where crocodiles
lurched this afternoon and a goliath
heron stood straight as a reed
then raised itself in flight. Now we breathe
woodsmoke, wait for scrambled