by Glyn Maxwell
Someone at the door.
They burned the bright estate.
I know because I knelt and saw it
Smoulder in my grate.
Dear villages are theirs.
And eyes of the evicted women
Dab upon my chairs.
And, marching through the mist,
One with one door left to knock on
Starts to make a fist.
For men call it a war.
But all it ever is for us is
Someone at the door.
A Low God on Krafla
A god will prick the bellies of the clouds
To see what happens; one will set the fire
To melt the place, he knows that happens, one
Will make a fool of blood near where we come from,
But one will make a beeline for Krafla.
Rip bits off and smell them, put them back.
Look it’s easy. Crock bits off, they’re rotten.
Crumble them, how struck they are, how broken.
How young and old the earth got at Krafla.
Make a wish on smoke, nobody does that.
This is really ugly. You waltz up
And note it has a kind of grandeur. Look
That’s frankly puffin shit. This thing is Krafla.
This soil has never seen us and it’s screaming.
Refugee would be the least crap image.
Whatever unreported war threw up this,
Here it is, terranean on Krafla:
Black, fuming, cracking, photogenic, shitey
Grey souvenir for iffy middle children.
Pocket it, think better of it, bin it.
The lowest god you get is king of Krafla.
Turn yellow at his stink. He won’t show you
His fabulous lagoons so near at hand, though,
And green as heaven. Them you have to look for.
He’s not as proud of what was no trouble.
The Breakage
Someone broke our beautiful
All-coloured window. They were saints
He broke, or she or it broke. They were
Colours you can’t get now.
Nothing else was touched. Only our
Treasured decoration, while it
Blackened in its calm last night, light
Dead in it, like He is.
Now needles of all length and angle
Jab at air. They frame a scene
Of frosty meadows, all our townsmen
Bobbing here to mourn this,
To moan and wonder what would mount
And ride so far to grieve us,
Yet do no more than wink and trash,
Not climb down in here even.
Most eyes are on the woods, though,
Minds on some known figures,
At least until they too turn up here,
Sleep-white, without stories.
Things it could have done in here
It hasn’t done. It left it all
The way it was, in darkness first, now
This, the dull light day has.
We kneel and start. And blood comes
Like luck to the blue fingers
Of children thinking they can help,
Quick as I can warn them.
Hurry My Way
After the accident of rain all night,
The doctor’s fingers tapping on the body:
That window first, then this and twice at that
For anything, but I until I’m ready
Am hiding in the folds of a wet Friday.
So I won’t hurry your way. Hurry my way.
When work was handed out at morning break
In the watery warm school you also went to,
I drew the blank and blushed and had to make
The best of every silence I was sent to,
Trying to figure out a reason why they
Would always hurry their way. Hurry my way.
For thirty thousand noons is how it strings
Together, this, it’s really what you’re roped to.
The rest is folding and unfolding things
You see, and free an arm to make a note to
See more of, but it’s you against the tide. A
Wave is coming your way. Hurry my way.
And love was somewhere in the subterfuge
That suits it, but it had to come and get me.
The crowded room it glanced across was huge
And snow was falling by the time it met me.
It must have travelled each and every by-way,
And that’s what it calls hurry. Hurry my way.
Dark. I’ve not gone anywhere on this
Subterranean day, but if you’d seen it
You wouldn’t have done either. Happiness
Deters me from an ending, which may mean it
May have to make things harder soon. So I say
Whack on your winter coat and hurry my way.
Rio Negro
for Geraldine
As a boy awake in bed with a mum’s kiss
He wipes can clearly see the wedge of light
He needs will thin away from him, the darkness
Falls on the uncomprehending. Night
Swallows this observation, and this male,
Curled and sailing farther than it felt
Possible away from what felt whole,
Is stretching for a handhold on the world.
The Rio Negro, nothing for a view,
Its banks in blackness like whatever things
Nor and Neither are referring to,
Bats my breath away with its slow wings.
Too weak to say I miss you, I’ve about
The scope of what I started with, the sliver
Of matter immaterial without
What plumps for it in just so dark a river.
I’m glad you saw me. Now you’d see me shift
Gingerly to stern to watch a sky
Stubbed by that hot city that we left
Ten hours ago. I’m glad you caught my eye.
Macaws I saw stay in the mind. They soared
And tilted in the least of the old light,
Over the treetops. If you see this bird
A captive, it’s been scissored from the mate
It would have flown beside for sixty years.
My cabin-window’s black as the reply
Of rivers to the I and its ideas,
Eroding them to barely one, but I
At least am moving, like the Rio Negro,
Somewhere coming helplessly to light,
And even nothing, signing itself zero,
Is paying homage like a satellite.
For My Daughter
If I call this poem that, I have as new
A pattern of three words to learn as you
Have everything. The day you get the gist
Of what this is becoming you’ll have missed
The point you were. Then you’ll have reached the stage
You stay at, insofar as every age
In writing is a step along a shelf
Where words are stowed and weather like a self.
The height is dizzy but it stays the same
And the ladder gets there when you make a name
Of something I keep calling you. That date
We won’t forget, are bound to celebrate,
Like rain we needed after a long spell
Of what was blissful but incredible.
Under These Lights
in memory of Joseph Brodsky
You who had dared me out under these lights
Have left them alone I see now my eyes accustom.
Gone, though your voice is hung in the heights of the ballroom,
A flex of vowels slung on a crown of hooks.
You don’t have to love us now, and the leaves of books
Are flicking aloud on the lens of the first reade
r
To hear you from the future. I remember
That was the sound I heard, though you who made it
Were working a joke in then, like you’d decided
We knew you were only passing, weren’t local,
Were out to upset us somehow. That was that chuckle:
Something to do with oxygen, fair pain,
Oasis reached at last, though knowing each sign
One could survive was not a sign for home.
Edward Wilson
A dream of English watercolourists
all spread out on the hills: the sky is blue.
No breeze, nothing creative, not the least
exploratory dab. Then the same view
clouds and differs. Hills on the horizon
breed and open till the light has all
its colours boiling and there’s only Wilson,
sketching in a blizzard, with his whole
blood-sausage fist about a charcoal point,
grasping forever things in their last form
before the whiteness. A late English saint
has only eggs to save, himself to warm,
picturing Oriana. Lost winds
tug at the sketchbook. Shaded round, the eyes
Scott has to look at till tomorrow ends
are unenquiring and as blue as skies.
Valentines at the Front
Valentine’s Day anywhere the boys are,
Grouped around the sack that might as well be
Kicking like a caught thing, like a prisoner,
They sort it out so rapidly, then slowly.
They lean back amazed, then not at all amazed
At tissues ringed and arrowed to them. Plainly
This pattered here from home like a dim beast
Only the English feed. It would never guess
There is no place like home, and in home’s place
Are these who sit befuddled in a fosse,
Crumpling the colour white and the colour pink
Away like news of some far Allied loss
That’s one too many. Now they can only think
It’s rained so long the past has burst its sides
And spilled into the future in the ink
Of untold villages of untold brides.
My Grandfather at the Pool
in memory of James Maxwell (1895–1980)
This photo I know best of him is him
With pals of his about to take a swim,
Forming a line with four of them, so five
All told one afternoon, about to dive:
Merseysiders, grinning and wire-thin,
Still balanced, not too late to not go in,
Or feint to but then teeter on a whim.
The only one who turned away is him,
About to live the trenches and survive,
Alone, as luck would have it, of the five.
Four gazing at us evenly, one not.
Another pal decided on this shot,
Looked down into the box and said I say
And only James looked up and then away.
I narrow my own eyes until they blur.
In a blue sneeze of a cornfield near Flers
In 1969, he said Near here
It happened and he didn’t say it twice.
It’s summer and the pool will be like ice.
Five pals in Liverpool about to swim.
The only one who looks away is him.
The other four look steadily across
The water and the joke they share to us.
Wholly and coldly gone, they meet our eyes
Like stars the eye is told are there and tries
To see – all pity flashes back from there,
Till I too am the unnamed unaware
And things are stacked ahead of me so vast
I sun myself in shadows they cast:
Things I dreamed but never dreamed were there,
But are, and may be now be everywhere,
When you’re what turns the page and looks away.
When I’m what disappears into my day.
Letters to Edward Thomas
for Derek Walcott
1
Dear Edward, just a note to say we’re here
And nowhere could be better. And your key
Was where you said it would be, and the air
Is fresh with things you think, while looking kindly
On us intruders. Jenny says let’s wait,
You can’t be far away, while George of course
Has toppled into every single seat
To find his favourite. Five-to-one it’s yours
He’ll plump for, but Team Captain of the Cottage
Declares it’s not allowed. I’ve said we’re off
On a foraging expedition to the village
And that’s where we are now, or soon enough
We shall be. We can’t wait to see you, Edward.
We feel as if we have. I mean your home
Was breathing softly when we all invaded.
Not only air but breath, as in the poem
I treasure that you showed me,
Which clings and flutters in me like a leaf
And falls when I remember how you told me
You couldn’t write a poem to save your life!
Consider that thing done.
Here’s just a note to say we’ve been and gone.
2
Dear Edward, just a note to say your wood
Has summoned us away, as you yourself
Hinted it might. The horde has swooped and fed
And drunk (in George’s case three times) your health,
And Rose and Peter wouldn’t hear of sleep,
Said it was banished back to Hampstead, swore
No path would go untrodden, and no sheep
Untroubled by us – George said: ‘And no door
Of any inns unswung!’ and so we’re gone
A second time, though you’ll have no idea
I wrote a first time. Blame the evening sun
For luring us back out. We love it here
And only you are missing. What that does
Is make us lonely. True, for all my chatter.
A beauty-spot will do that. What it has
Is one thing missing. Ask me what’s the matter
Anywhere it’s beautiful
And there’s your answer. Long before it’s dark
You’ll hear us creatures rolling up the hill
In twos, to be the last into your Ark,
Or to be told by you
What things we missed, went by, lost, didn’t do.
3
Dear Edward, just a note to say today
The sun came up and scooped them up like eggs,
Our hearts, and set them fourteen miles away
And said now get there on your London legs –
So off we’ve gone, obedient, though sure
It’s nothing but an agency of you,
And so I pin this to the master’s door
In sure and certain hope you’ll be there too,
With all our hearts at journey’s end, in some
Vale of picnic-cloth. Last night we played
The word-games Adam taught to Eve, and some
Eve knew but never told him. Jenny made
A game of ‘Where was Edward?’ which I won
By saying you were walking and had paused
To hear two nightingales – and not gone on
Until you’d taught them singing. This had caused
The rumpus of all time
Amid the birds, which we could hear from here,
One saying, ‘Do we teach him how to rhyme?’
And all the rest as far as Gloucestershire
Going, ‘Yes, don’t you remember?’
George said you’d walked so far it was November.
4
Dear Mr Thomas, now it’s been so long
We lost your first name i
n the meadow grass
At dusk, when on a road we thought was wrong
We started recognising things. Your house
Then viewed us dimly. But you must excuse
The new meander in my messages,
And blame it on the elderflower juice
That George said would be choice with sandwiches
And seems so to have been. We all agree
We shall not leave tomorrow if our host
Insists on his invisibility,
And clears the table round us like a ghost
And seems to comment in the silences.
Rose and Peter have to leave, but George
Declares this week is cancelled, or his is.
Or so we can infer from how he snores.
I tried to start some games
But after walking longer than we’ve ever,
Who’s in the mood for folding up the names
Of ones we know in town? Who cares whose lover
Really cares for whom?
Our heads are bowed and spinning in the room.
5
Dear Edward, just a note to say I left
A quiverful all weekend, in the hope
You’d sit down at your table. Here we laughed
And lolled for what seemed ages, and sat up
For what seemed scarcely time at all, but only
To see grey dawn arrive and blush to find us
Watching, late enchanted into early.