by Glyn Maxwell
slouched across two places, a young man
and fast asleep or so it – oddly – seemed,
so suddenly he’d come. I hadn’t seen,
I calculated, any soul at all
in sixteen days, since from the slowing train
I saw one man with buckets by a well.
No one I ever saw again, and no one
ever on this train. It was not Hell
you know about. No one seen again,
no one in here, and no one speaking this,
the English language. This was not a tongue
they spoke in Hell. Theirs was a gibberish
devoid of rhyme or reason. But this one,
perhaps a student, in his early twenties,
appeared here when we stopped a while in rain.
And his empty book fell open as he snored,
and the pages leafed themselves until they came
decisively to a page that bore the word
Poems, bore the English word for poems,
Poems, and I weakened then and cried.
I didn’t even wake him with these moans
of bliss. They were the train, perhaps he thought,
grilling itself for stopping here. My hands
were shuddering to the page to be a part
of English, of these Poems, though I could see
he’d written nothing in it, or not yet –
the devils in me told me in my glee,
Blow me, it’s all coincidence and Poems
means in his world ‘Help!’ or ‘Edmund Lea,
I’ve come to nail a lid on all your dreams
of seeing home again!’ And then my fingers
reached the page and stuck there like names.
This woke him, and his book fell down between us.
[from Book 3: My First Poem]
In recollection what descended then,
that cold illuminated mist, remained
till Christmas, made a candle of each friend
emerging, disappearing in it, made
each smile a call to shelter; but in truth
it must have lifted on forgotten days
and let them by. What’s kept of it is breath,
that’s certain, fog-white utterance of gossip
overhead, a trade in rumour, myth,
complicity. The girls around the steps
at Record Time, Nick Straton sauntering by
in his hairy hooded coat, the talk of trips
gone bad in London, freakouts in the country,
nights of ill-lit deep emotional candour,
in blankets then, the sunrise ceremony,
drowsing. Christmas Eve in the town centre,
there they are – I see them clear as type –
Stan, Mendis, Russ, Nick Straton, and some other
name that’s gone. They’re slouched along a step
below the Great War monument; their breath
is white with cold or brown with smoke. ‘Slide up,’
Stan calls. ‘I’m Christmas shopping.’ ‘Catch your death?’
says Nick, thudding a fag from his gold pack
to point at me. I join them. ‘Hanging with?’
they’re asking me. Stan says, ‘We went electric,
Lea, we got a session round at Nick’s.
You hanging with?’ I smoke, the little frantic
sucks we used to take. ‘Lay down some tracks,’
they’re telling me. The Hunger was their band,
they started it one term, they played some gigs
at parties, we stirred drinks and stood around,
amazed at them for looking that like stars,
just standing there. They made a muddy sound
and no one danced. We saw their bright guitars,
their skilful hands, their amplifiers and cords,
the nonchalance, the chance . . . There are no chairs
in Nick’s garage, it’s dark, they crowd towards
the back for a band meeting. I’m alone;
I glide my hand along the chill bronze threads
of an idle bass guitar. The boy called Moon
rides up, he’s excellent. Nick doesn’t play,
he sings their songs, he sings in a low drone
I can’t decipher. Now the band is ready,
counting four and starting, such a noise –
I sit on a sagging box and wonder only
when on earth I can buy presents now, in these
last hours of Christmas Eve. A light goes on
in mid-song, in mid-song, that memory
I swear by, all six of them – Stan, Moon,
Nick, Russ, Dodge Mendis, and the drummer – each
in some way falters. Nick says through the song,
down the loud blasting microphone, ‘The switch,
the switch!’ Out goes the light again, and I,
I think he’s called the girl who’s come this witch,
this witch to break their spell? And I’m wondering why
and who it is until it is Clare Kendall
who stands there listening, so improbably,
Clare, who halts there, tinted by the purple
bulb they use for light, in her long coat,
Clare, who yawns and makes the cutting signal
past her throat. Nick Straton booms out, ‘What?’
at which she rolls her eyes, and since the track
is not about to finish, turns her head
and stretches through between Stan Burke and Nick
to where I’m watching this. I feel my side,
my right side seem to warm or somehow quicken
at how she sits quite near, and my left side,
I can recall it, seems so cold and dragged
I pity it. The Hunger play so loud
the noise is dreadful, but I recollect
these moments always as the purest silence . . .
Her scribble passed to me on a train ticket
suddenly in my hand: BIRTH OF A LEGEND.
Mine passed to her: DEATH OF A CHRISTMAS EVE!
Hers on a shop receipt: LET’S SAVE THE PATIENT . . .
The song cranks to a stop. ‘It’s better live,’
says Mendis as the drummer peters out,
and Nick’s complaining, ‘That ain’t long enough,
Staz, I got another verse.’ ‘Nah, mate,
my solo ends it,’ and they’re toe to toe,
while Russ asks, ‘Dig it, Lea?’ and I say, ‘Great,’
as Russ and Dodge are standing near us now,
dumb about the girl. ‘Jimi’s returned,’
she tells them, ‘but we’re going to have to blow.’
Nick hears this and stops arguing. ‘You can’t,
you got to stay.’ ‘I gotta wot?’ she wonders,
Dodge Mendis says, ‘The next track’s called “Burned”,
it’s about some crazy chick.’ ‘Oh really, Mendis,’
Stan’s now saying. ‘Anyone we know?’
Nick storms out. Through the small garage window
I see him looking back, and I know now
he really liked her, but it’s me she takes
back into town at dusk, it’s me somehow.
[from Book 5: Mallarea]
At times there’s little mystery to how
I felt, it takes you little to get there.
And should you want to, you can set out now,
take map and money and go anywhere
you never went in England, where a mall
spreads from the railway line. Should you want to share
further, only stand in that high hall,
look upward, be the only one to, stare
out the grey skylights, be the only still
contemplative creation to be there,
then say, with force and clarity, bright tones
to bring detectives running: I am where
I used to live. These people are my
friends.
This was my only home . . . This simple game
may help you picture me. Picture my hands
grasping the other shoulder to be warm,
my feet unsteady in a world at last
of many and on ground that stays the same;
picture me peering at it, see me pushed
past by accident, me chuckled at
for my old coat, observe me spun to rest
on a sun-yellow bench where Polly sat.
They’d lost me or I’d lost them in the crowd
around a band of drummers. There the beat
had got me swaying and I sang aloud
whatever words came by. Then when I looked
they’d gone. At least I’d found her. ‘I’m afraid,’
she said while doing lipstick, ‘that, in fact,
you’re really lost up here.’ What up here meant
I couldn’t tell. ‘If you was all an act,
if you was all an act or if you weren’t,
eachways it’s just as lost. I hate this place,
I done my shopping, Saturday I done it,
only time I could. It’s just for Woz
I thought I’d come here so he gets his done.
Get the last train to Dad’s.’ She lined her eyes
with a violet crayon: ‘Know what this is? Poison.’
[from Book 7: Demundo]
. . . They are assembled in the room
to film themselves and film me go away
into the place I go. I look for him,
Wasgood, my old friend, and see he’s there,
grinning at me with the welcome grin
of one oblivious, and I seem to care,
as I remember. I see all the girls
about the place, and it perfects the air
to see them smile. I envy the four walls
that each will see them when no curtain here
can hold the sky back from its meal of colours,
and I can feel my enemy, his copper
ice in my own pocket, the sour coins
he deals to me, the red-eye, the decliner.
That all around me is a site of bones
is not worth writing: writing will itself
defy it, fleshing out its broken lines
for all it’s worth. They formed a ring, the twelve,
when I was close to sleep. I heard the rain’s
sublime disinterest starting to dissolve
whatever would remain. I saw my hands
begin to rise, ten fingers outward, those
and these still seeing eyes, somehow to send
a word to the sad twelve – to shield my eyes
was all I thought my hands and eyes could do.
But that was wrong – I’d have friends recognise
the sight of them was dear; besides, no view
could frighten me. I made my hands embrace
in prayer and glanced above – I can’t see you,
I whispered so that no one heard – and last
my palms were upward-facing and my sight
was on each person till each realised.
And then my eyelids, with inhuman might,
began to roll the screens across. I heard
the hum of filming and a voice too sweet
to keep me conscious – Angel, say a word –
then I was waking, and my face could feel
a rash of air, iron smell, and I beheld
a flock of birds fly up and turn, then wheel,
dark on the sky, white on a passing field.
Playground Song
When over the playground once they came
to tag me It then dance away,
I danced away and to my shame
they’re waiting for me to this day.
When I was called to answer why
I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there.
All afternoon you hear them cry
explain this at an empty chair.
When Juliet confided whom
she loved and would I let him know,
light-heartedly I left the room,
forgot it till an hour ago.
And tiny things too late to do
have gone so far they can’t be seen
except at dusk by me and you,
and though I hide till Halloween
you never come, not even now
each hand has reached the other sleeve,
not even now the light is low
and green as you would not believe.
The Sea Comes in Like Nothing But the Sea
The sea comes in like nothing but the sea,
but still a mind, knowing how seldom words
augment, re-orders them before the breaker
and plays them as it comes. All that should sound
is water reaching into the rough space
the mind has cleared. The clearing of that mind
is nothing to the sea. The means whereby
the goats were chosen nothing to the god,
who asked only a breathing life of us,
to prove we were still there when it was doubted.
The Nerve
Somewhere at the side of the rough shape
your life makes in your town,
you cross a line,
perhaps
in a dusty shop you pause in, or a bar
you never tried, and a smell
will do as well;
then you’re
suddenly very far from what you know.
You found it as a child,
when the next field
to you
was the world’s end, a breeze of being gone.
Now it begins to give,
a single nerve,
low down:
it sags, as if it felt the gravity
at long last. You are chilled
to have been told
that way –
but you ought to recognise it, it’s the one
that may well fail one day,
fail utterly,
go wrong,
be Judas, while the others, without thought
of you, or of your pain,
show no sign,
are mute,
assume they’re safe with you. Treasure the nerve
suggesting otherwise;
treasure its dis-
belief:
it’s straining to see the outline of somewhere
inhospitable,
with other rules,
unfair,
and arbitrary, something to endure,
which nonetheless you spot,
contemplate,
start for;
where you will face the choices that the nerve
has suffered: to be plucked
and, for that act
of love,
to have brought the soldiers running; to lie low,
and, for that act of fear,
have perished years
ago.
Gatekeepers on Dana
The first act
of the first light in the east
is to make gatekeepers of those great twin pines
on Dana Street:
to find them,
the needs and fissures in them,
make heralds of them, the first of all to affirm
by their aspect
the emergency,
or chillingly to imply
the amplitude of what’s to come. When it’s gone,
what it is,
and you wonder
what cranks the shadows round
together like the beasts at a long feeding,
who, finishing,
move off,
don’t try to ask that pair,
because if you do they will ask themselves what gate
has he in mind,
then brush and murmur,
why would it need keeping?
shiver and hazard: Are you expecting something?
Tell all.
The Leonids
The corners of our eyes,
cold and alert to missing them, report
a flash, and in the breeze
we turn our heads
to where the stars are quiet.
It goes against the grain,
to understand what’s next is going to shoot
from anywhere. The brain,
seeing a thing
so like itself, falls flat.
Leonids. A word,
as if they had some source or destiny,
as if this utmost speed
they hurtle at
were theirs – towards, away –
and not our burning loop
that lights the dust they are. As if this date
were something that they keep,
appointment reached
neither too soon nor late,
but punctual to the end.
Leonids. Our word, our speed, our date,
bawls the affronted mind,
shaking the fixed
stars this way and that.
Haunted Hayride
At the near edge of the field, a dollar a shot,
the haycart waited with its horse and man,
handing the children on and their mothers on,
unhanding them to a place on a haycart seat,
swivelling for the next. The field was a farm
beginning by Route 9, a mile at most