by Glyn Maxwell
Ankles cool with the splash of her sister’s dive:
I wave and smile and sigh.
And so goes on the fall of a man alive,
And twenty-five, and the wetness and the brown
Hairs of my shin can agree, and I settle down.
‘Already the eldest – suddenly – the problems.
The other scribbles faces.’ I had heard
Staccato horrid tantrums
Between earshot and the doorbell, held and read
Heloise’s letters in chancery
Script to her dead grandmother, to me,
To nobody. They have a mother and father,
And love the largest pandas in the whole
World of Toys. The other
Sister rang from Italy and was well,
But wouldn’t come this time. ‘She’ll never come.
She has a home. They do not have a home.
Stretching out in her shiny gold from the pool,
Heloise swivels, and sits and kicks
Then reaches back to towel
Her skinny shoulders tanned in a U of lux-
Uriant material. Helene
Goes slowly to the board, and hops again
Into the dazzle and splosh and the quiet. Say,
Two, three miles from here there are heaps of what,
Living things, decay,
The blind and inoculated dead, and a squad
Of coldly infuriated eyeing sons
Kicking the screaming oath out of anyone’s.
Cauchemar. – We will be clear if of course apart,
To London again, me, they to their next
Exotic important spot,
Their chink and pace of Gloucestershire, Surrey, fixed
Into the jungles, ports or the petrol deserts.
I try but don’t see another of these visits,
As I see Helene drying, Heloise dry,
The dark unavoidable servant seeming to have
Some urgency today
And my book blank in my hands. What I can love
I love encircled, trapped, and I love free.
That happens to, and happen to be, me,
But this is something else. Outside the fence,
It could – it’s the opposite – be a paradise
Peopled with innocents,
Each endowed with a light inimitable voice,
Fruit abundant, guns like dragons and giants
Disbelieved, sheer tolerance a science –
Still, I’d think of Helene, of Heloise,
Moving harmless, shieldless into a dull
And dangerous hot breeze,
With nothing but hopes to please, delight, fulfil
Some male as desperate and as foul as this is,
Who’d not hurt them for all their limited kisses.
The Ginger-Haired in Heaven
Sometimes only the ginger-haired in Heaven
can help me with my life. The flock of blondes
is sailing by so painlessly forgiven,
still blinking with love no one understands,
while the brunettes float thinking by the rushes
long after what they chose, long reconciled,
and here, the fair and sandy, all their wishes
half-granted them, half-wish them on a child.
Only the ginger-haired remember this, though:
this sulk and temper in the school of time,
this speckled hope and shyness at a window
as sunlight beats and blames and beckons. I’m
not coming out. They won’t come out of Heaven,
or not until with auburn in the blood
two mortal tempers melt together. Even
then we might stay here if you said we could.
Garden City Quatrains
First day of school. A boy looks through a pane.
This is the end of freedom, not a visit.
The King’s Cross–York–Newcastle–Scotland train
Slams through Welwyn Garden and I miss it.
*
1880. This asthmatic geezer
Home from Nebraska batters down a map.
Says Bernard Shaw, ‘What’s that there, Ebenezer?’
‘Hush,’ says Howard, ‘I think I’ve found a gap.’
*
Woods were north. The south was all my schools.
East was alien housing, west I knew.
Start of a poet. All the rest is false
Or true extrapolations of the view.
*
A Martian Votes in Welwyn-Hatfield
Inhabitants converge upon a shed
One by one all day, to make a cross.
Outside their homes some show their feelings: red
For really cross, yellow for fairly cross.
*
Before the night begins, my friend and I
Stop outside the autobank. I run
To take out forty quid. We drive away.
‘Out stealing from yourself again, eh Glyn?’
*
They lost their nerve in 1970.
‘It’s neither Welwyn, a garden, nor a city.’
They thought up ‘Howardstown’ and ‘Waverley’
Since nothing had these names and they were pretty.
*
Western Garden Citizen, I stand
At midnight in the east and say, ‘I’m lost.’
But I’m starting to get to know the back of my hand,
At the cost of moving on, which is no cost.
*
Small hours. The tots are in their cots. The old
Are in their homes. The thin Nabisco towers
Snore the malt. Two strangers have and hold,
And, as in real places, something flowers.
*
Who’s in the kitchen? London, the life and soul
You weary of, flirtatious, loud, and hot.
A young well-meaning man is in the hall.
He’s got his gift and bottle. What have you got?
Invigilation
There was barely a one among them who thought he needed
The three whole hours allowed. After say two,
Big papers started to bloom. I went out to collect them.
Divested of their petals the candidates each
Sank back dead with a sigh and the clock went suddenly
Still, unsure who was asking what, so it just
Went if they weren’t looking, and not if they were.
I, having cruised this test in another life,
Saw rhombuses in my name and coloured them in.
Until as there always is there was only one,
One in the light, on the spot, while the rest of them stared
In exasperation escalating to anger,
Not that after their answers a slower answer
Was worming across a space, but that that answer
Was nudging the world and it was too late to right it.
Love Made Yeah
First and zillionth my eyes meet eyes
unturnable from, unstarable in.
Whoever was marched from the Square of my reason
and to what court, I don’t give a hyphen,
va t’en to the King!
Our drapeaux are waving and what’s in the offing
but tears, tribunals and unwelcome aid?
Nothing but glorious, jealous, incredulous,
bibulous, fabulous, devil’ll envy us
love made, love made!
‘Yeah,’ but you’ll say, with the press of the planet,
‘Look how it turns out: the heroes felled
in the upshot, the oiliest climb of the customary
bourgeois fuckers as easy as muttering
argent, ackers, geld . . . ’
Uh-huh, sans doute. But here at the heart
of the movement I trust my hand in another!
So CNN tells me I’m odds-on to cop it?
That ain’t news, guys, I did arrive here<
br />
via a mother.
No, when the Square is still again, but
for some oligarchy or puppet or shah,
and I’m banged up and on trial in slippers
for following, wishing on, crediting, catching
her my star –
don’t do the pity. All right, do the pity,
but that won’t happen, believe it from me!
Her eyes are as hot as one needs to ignite
the cave in the human guy. I am hers,
friends, I am history!
Stargazing
The night is fine and dry. It falls and spreads
the cold sky with a million opposites
that, for a moment, seem like a million souls
and soon, none, and then, for what seems a long time,
one. Then of course it spins. What is better to do
than string out over the infinite dead spaces
the ancient beasts and spearmen of the human
mind, and, if not the real ones, new ones?
But, try making them clear to one you love –
whoever is standing by you is one you love
when pinioned by the stars – you will find it quite
impossible, but like her more for thinking
she sees that constellation.
After the wave of pain, you will turn to her
and, in an instant, change the universe
to a sky you were glad you came outside to see.
This is the act of all the descended gods
of every age and creed: to weary of all
that never ends, to take a human hand
and go back into the house.
Watching Over
Elated by ourselves, we shift and slip –
Mouths open with the memory of a kiss –
Parting in two for sleep, and if it’s mine
Then that was it, that break above, and now
It’s yours I wake to witness your unknowing
Our time and all you know.
Some ancient will,
Though night is safe and quiet here, commands
You be watched over now, and, to that end,
Exacerbates the wind and whipping rains,
Or amplifies the howls of animals
To make my waking watchful and tense,
Though for a thousand miles there is no mind
To hurt you, nor one raindrop on the wind.
The Sentence
Lied to like a judge I stepped down.
My court cleared to the shrieks of the set free.
I know the truth, I know its level sound.
It didn’t speak, or didn’t speak to me.
The jury got the point of her bright look,
The ushers smoothed her path and bowed aside,
The lawyers watched her fingers as she took
Three solemn vows, her lipstick as she lied.
She vowed and lied to me and won her case.
I’m glad she won. I wouldn’t have had her led
However gently into the shrunken space
I’d opened for her. There. There now it’s said,
Said in this chamber where I sleep of old,
Alone with books and sprawling robes and scent.
With all I have, I have no power to hold
The innocent or the found innocent.
Either
A northern hill aghast with weather
Scolds and lets me hurry over.
Someone phoned to tell my father
Someone died this morning of a
Stroke. The news has tapped me with a
Stick. I vaguely knew his brother.
No one knows where I am either.
Now I’m lost. I don’t know whether
This road runs along the river
Far enough. I miss my lover,
Town and all the south. I’d rather
Die than be away forever,
What’s the difference. Here’s another
Field I don’t remember either.
The Margit-Isle
for Patrick Howarth
The boy had died. We knew that right away.
‘Es gibt kein Luft,’ I said. On a cold day
We should have seen his breath as a cone of mist.
I was proud I’d used some German words. We stood
In a park in Budapest.
Some passers-by
Did just that with a glance. The German fat guy
Shrugged and went his way. An escort-girl
Alone came up and stooped and touched and didn’t
Go for a short while.
It was 2 pm.
Nothing happened. ‘The police are going to come,
And we’ve no papers,’ I fretted. Patrick said,
‘They won’t ask anything,’ and an ambulance
Came and no one did.
They hauled him up.
His anorak hood fell back. Our little group
Saw now he was a girl. She could have died
Of drugs or cold, stabwound or rope or rape.
Least bad was suicide.
They drove away.
We’ll never know a thing. We spent the day
In the tight conspiracy of private shocks.
A clerk in police HQ would make some notes
And slide them in a box.
A year and a half
And I’d do this, predictably enough.
In Hungary perhaps they shed some light
On why she died, but light shed on a death
Is not what I call light.
I was waiting.
To bring some writer’s thinking to the writing.
Of what it was to chance on the fresh dead
In public in broad daylight in the middle
Of where we are. Instead
It’s ended up as dry as a lucky stone,
Something to carry around and feel. Move on.
The Sarajevo Zoo
Men had used up their hands, men had
offered, cupped, or kissed them to survive,
had wiped them on the skirts of their own town,
as different men had shinned up a ladder and taken
the sun down.
One man had upped his arms in a victory U
to a thousand others, to show how much of the past
he did not know and would not know when he died.
Another’s joke was the last a hostage heard
oh I lied
which did win some applause from the bare hands
of dozing men. And others of course had never
fired before, then fired, for the work of hands
was wild and sudden in those days
in those lands.
For men. For the women there was
the stroke, the ripping of hair, the smearing of tears,
snot, and there was the prod of a shaking man,
or with fused palms the gibbering prayer
to the U.N.
The nothing they had between those palms was
hope and the yard between surrendering palms
was hope as well. Far off, a fist in the sky
was meaning hope but if you prised it open
you saw why.
The hands of the children here were wringing themselves
hot with the plight of animals over there,
and drawing them in their pens with the crimson rain
of what men do to each other on television
crayoned in.
But hands continued to feed the demented bear
who ate two other bears to become the last
bear in the Sarajevo Zoo. And they fed him
when they could, two Bosnian zoo-keepers
all autumn.
Today I read that that time ended too,
when fifteen rifles occupying some thirty
hands got there and crept in a rank on knees
towards the smoke of
the blown and stinking cages
and black trees.
Trees were what you could not see the starving
beasts behind, or see there were now no beasts,
only the keepers crouching with their two lives.
Then winter howled a command and the sorry branches
shed their leaves.
The People’s Cinema
As blank as scripture to a ruling class
Discussed in hells they do not think exist,
Cracked and abandoned to the slicing grass
And disabusing dust,
A movie screen shows nothing in a morning mist.
Here’s where the happy endings were never had,
Or, like the long and lonely, never shown.
No one rode to the rescue of who was good,
No star was born, none shone,
No dream came true, or fun began, or life went on.
Classical outside. Like a Parthenon
Or meant to be, but more as if that mother
Had quite disowned this worn and woebegone
Shell of light. Its father