Cusp

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