Cusp

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