by Graham Mort
eggs, coffee, watching a tumult of birds
a dirt-brown warthog forage
in dirt. A barefaced go-away bird
was here yesterday, high in
the acacia tree, silhouetted in my
shady memory of the forest
where water buffalo wallowed to kill their
fleas, a family of mongoose
scarpered, a black-bellied bustard ran;
at night a bush baby stared
at the flashlight, astonished from the dark.
Now, breakfast with the weaver
birds, the flycatcher’s looping flight, the
girl who never smiles dancing
on a patch of mud that rain has smoothed
her arms raised in a lake
swimmer’s trance to surface through
this dream at last, swinging
hands and hips to a skipping beat;
only her feet don’t move
their bare-toed print pressed deep.
I catch the kingfisher’s split
ray of light again and know it’s joy
I’m seeing, that it’s complete
and entering her face like sleep.
Catheterised
Propped in the last bed on the ward
you exalt a bag of clearing piss the way
you once did wine from garden canes;
miraculous, racked off to clarify, tasting
Sunday’s Cana of lost country lanes.
Things surprise you now: a ward
half-full of boys you knew at school
half-full of blokes from Bangladesh
then this old woman shuffling in to stare
at you, whispering, I know that face.
You tell us how she came one night
when wind strummed wires and windows
taut with sleet, fussed with your tray of
magazines, then like a mill girl back
at work felt at the cotton of your sheet.
All her absences flying to the night
she soothed you like a child perturbed
by rain and hail, then wept for someone
gone away from her – you try to rub
her stolen kiss away but fail.
Scared in the skewed time of the ward
you smile, say, Now I know that lass
how once you’d let a sparrow trapped inside
her classroom free and how it panicked like
a troubled mind against the glass.
Imaginary
A bird is calling, nocturnal
hoarse and unidentifiable;
a mythic owl, its face of
frost, its yellow eye looping
over allotments, smashed
cold frames, the fallen
asteroids of marrows
gleaming there. Telephone
wires droop under slurred
rain and conversation: the
call comes again, parched
under the drifted cumulous
of sleep, the husks of our
bodies shelled from night’s
imaginaries, its fabulous
love-making and Oedipal
dreams. We hear it closer
now, each note scalding its
beak with some worn out
premonition as we thresh
and turn, unthink the day
heads pillowed in these darkest
hours, rehearsing not-being;
eternity; supine, snoring through
a rictus mask, alternately
tragic or smiling at the huge
nullity that we can only
apprehend as life or its
simulacrum or endless
night where a bird’s cry grows
nearer, more vindictive
under a blazing stellar sky.
Turbary Road
A week after the thaw
three feet of snow still slump
at the gate;
tracks where a tractor
sloughed, walkers went on, a
pheasant stepped.
The river’s silver noose
glinting down Kingsdale; Scots
pine ragged as
crow calls. The hush
of water everywhere and mist’s
dove-throated grey.
Hill flanks daubed with
remnant snow; a waller and his
wall-eyed dog
making good what slipped
under frost, the heft of sheep
huddling out the
worst winter in twenty.
This is where they sledged
turves to feed
hovel and alehouse
hearths, burning the caked
moor before
coal pits deepened.
We were here this time
last year when
I was still sick
still wavering from life
and everything
held the gasp of
spring though we hardly
knew why.
Now it’s all here to dig
and lay down again: the river’s
blue shift
snowdrops, a red-backed
hawk gone from my hand
paper’s drift.
Manchester
Star-blind under the heat of city lights
your fractured planes reflect in glass where
naked mannequins spend these nights
their sexless thighs and boyish chests unsullied.
Sodium glitters in pavements’ kristallnacht –
but for the grace of watered beer, music hall
mongrel blood, the mills’ tireless engendering.
They came, they come, will come: remembering
Rome, Ukraine, Lagos; mourning Wicklow
Gujarat, Guangzhou; keening for Uist, Guyana
Sierra Leone; sorrowful for Catalunya and
Salonica; lonely for other rivers pouring them
to further shores, for skies that spill them
light as seed. You’re every migrant’s halfway
home, spun from the need of their imagining
metropolis of that fatal, imprecise desire. They
pour to your crucible: sweatshops, mills
and manufactories, your crusted slag of languages
clay pressed to countless million bricks, cordage
of timber, waterways, road stone, railway steel
baptismal canals of dye and filth, electricity
radio waves and rainfall brought from Derbyshire
hills to quench your sullen foundry of the
self. We came as if to rest and could not leave –
the moors touchable, soft as cotton waste;
barges climbing locks from terraced streets; the
anvil, bench, the kiln, pit and lathe, insomniac
frames chattering their broadcloth to swaddle
all of empire. Tonight, neon melts winter
streets, hums in tower blocks, lights a stainless
artistry, the museum of docks; trees bare of
their leaves on Deansgate where grand pianos
gleam, prows cast on sacramental rain.
You broke us, each generation; your yeomen
cut us down, forbidding trade and bread;
you were meagre, denied us everything except
exhausted milk of our mothers’ breasts
inhuman architecture, night shifts’ unending toil
flat speech, abundant alcohol, picture houses
the wormhole of your libraries. Now you’re
impossible to own or to renounce; you
burn as a wafer, a chancre’s unholy shibboleth
on my tongue; you itch in all my veins
arsenic of smoke’s slow violence. I was born
in you one August noon and dream you
half a lifetime later: your fable of sunsets
behind mills that wore out work;
the moon’s promissory
horn, its emblem
of Earth’s otherness that took me away
from you to endlessly return. Yet, come the
end, what end there’ll be to know is
here for sure, what we’ll toil to learn
again is love, its dirt of ingrained truth
that all human beauty is impure.
Nocturne
The globe light shines
a whey-faced moon
drowned in igneous rock
this rented apartment’s
bathroom floor, its sheen
of cool-veined granite.
A stray albino planet
nameless, sunk beyond
the mathematics of focus
or taxonomy; a full
moon’s orbital perfection;
tumour in a malignant
ocean-depth of stone
its tides pulling strands
of weed across your face.
These are emptied
moments; diminished
intervals, holy days
where we stare into
our old sickness of
longing and nothing
moves, yet the hours
swagger to fullness.
Now this touch of
ice on foot soles; the
light switch and its
closure; sensations
dimming in the lost
lives we came here to
find; this half-urgent
quest, these choked
elegies of elsewhere.
Voices chant in
crooked streets
comradely after beer
and the big screen
after the howl of the
lost game; they begin
a song to let it fall as
silence – only its strange
language familiar.
Merlin
A sheared titanium spline
grey blade edge flicked to air’s
thickened throat; all flickering
instants this airborne hallucination
hunched over winter gorse –
winged synapse-fire in the brain’s
core, a spark-point of striate
feathered memory stropped from
hand-tipped illustrations in
a book. I’m stumbling, eyes stung
hands slabbed, lips numb, feet
frost-knuckled, trudging snow
flecked heather to the road.
Sub-zero air slows blood’s murmur
the heart’s systole turgid and
half stilled. Swaledales are sculpted
by whetstoned easterlies
fleece-harried, hooves braced at
gravity, the quickening suction
of sky. Fells evaporate northward
under fallen mercury, under
vaporising purple-smoking ice.
The merlin swivels on planes
of bevelled air as if I’ve always
known it there, like someone
absent from my touch; the smallest
fiercest hawk, flown from
its fulcrum, its rapture of silence
and desire. Prying at the wind’s
seam, heat-sensing a hunger
grounded lark, it launches
this vision, suddenly dimensional
skimmed from the mind’s
template to kill here in heather
scant snow, gorse; then vanish
back onto the unturned page.
Callum at Loweswater
The boat hides in reeds, half-afloat, half-beached;
a red tongue in water’s throat, its yellow paddles
safely stashed, still wet with weed. Three years old
his idea is deeper than a lake’s rank sediments and
new as gold. His joy out-stares distance, hills’
sagging tents a storm has reached, the way the
valley’s fold takes water to its brim and tints it
blue. The lake is licking at the shore; the boy drags
the prow about, frowning at the scale of things
then leans from the stern as if to scan by heart
this epic setting-out he has to learn. His eyes are
clear meltwater grey, pure glacial flow; he
looks up at you and sings Go! Go! wanting to
chance high huffing clouds where green hills
and a lake of sky are twinned. The lake is ticking
at the shore; with involuntary grace a grebe is
nodding under violet shrouds. We watch him
play. The thought that we have sinned through
wanting more betrays your face; we’re spitting
bitter pips of the atom’s core. Callum’s idea zips
and skitters in his head reaching over shingle to
horizons that never settle in a line but pullulate
and seed the fusion/fission of internal
rhyme, waves breaking on a hull that pull every
thing towards them – life, half-life, forever –
through the camera’s single blink of time.
A Madhouse in Liguria
1955
The asylum is white-walled, the nuns
wimpled and calm, a line of shutters open
to the day as prayer books at matins.
Mild sun presses shadows into wooded
hills, the road appears as an elbow of dust
then levels at the viaduct’s puzzled steel.
The nuns shave their charges who babble
a mangled language, all spit and vowels;
they rock disconsolate or laugh weeping.
Pasquale stares with grey eyes, limpid
as a saint’s or anchorite’s beholding
the bright inner-logic of loneliness.
The razor trails blood, foam, specks of
bristle; Sister Agatha’s feet swell in laced
shoes and she tuts, holding his muscled
body lean as a hound’s. Candles glimmer
in the chapel, their columns of wavering
fire glide like owls or slowly pouring whey.
A bell tolls eight o’clock. Pasquale is
silent now, as if counting to something.
He will die today on the iron bed, face
sunk into the pillow. He came from the
war, from a hamlet with only chestnuts for
bread, for polenta, where two men died
as partisans, their names on the bronze
plaque at the river, their women widowed
by that current never stepped in twice.
In the street they pass with potatoes
with plums, with vino rosso, a hand
cart of hay or basket of flags, looking
to the shutters where captives cry
like birds, where women pass at the
windows and sun scours worn tiles.
The nun’s work is to right God’s work
to forgive absent-mindedness, forget
imperfection with their cool touch
perfect love, with boiled white sheets
coarse soap, thin soup, with wheaten
bread and prayer and sleep and song.
Not everyone here is always lost
though most are where future cannot
be reckoned. Days slip into nights’
perpetual past: dusky phantasms of
fathers scything hay, cows birthing;
a killed hog, the well’s drop and fear
of their own ghost echoing below.
Now mothers and sisters visit half
drunk on Saint’s Days when they
breathe the ward’s yeast of piss and
sweat, step from the nuns’ blessing
into sun’s fallen arc where a car
toils over the viaduct’s immaculate
arch, the river narrow here, far from
the source and hoarsely roaring.
IVF
That night, seen now
&nb
sp; through the flawed glass
of sleeplessness, is finger
wetted, half-full of miraculous
sudden grace, its goblet
of frozen air ringing at the
very pitch of memory.
How quiet you sat after
clinic, the way I drove
empty and vengeful