One Thousand Nights and Counting

by Glyn Maxwell

I can’t remember if this happened yet

  but the King came in and cleared out all his pals and sat

  with everything akimbo and said Do the bit

  where I love you, little señorita, cut to it.

  So I told him what had happened, I mean hadn’t yet,

  and it was the longest time this man had ever sat

  for anything. He roared I now believe that bit!

  He wanted astonishment from me so I went for it.

  I asked him if he’d got round to believing yet

  that he’d be slaughtered where he stood. Or where I sat?

  he chuckled, and I sat corrected. Just a bit,

  he murmured, I’m the King, of course I’ll swing for it . . .

  But I’m going to free you, girl! I wouldn’t do that yet,

  I said, and someone came and served us as we sat

  in lovely sunlight, then he dozed a little bit,

  so I said, Your wife will kill you. He said, Go for it

  mine angel. I do know, but didn’t quite know yet

  if that meant her or me. My little black cat sat

  on Agamemnon’s lap and bathed himself a bit.

  She’ll kill you in your bath. Will you join me in it?

  he giggled. You will love me, sir, I said, and yet

  you’ll never have me. (This is the last time we sat

  face to face.) ’Cause you won’t get it up. He bit

  his nails and stood. You gypsy bitch you don’t know shit.

  Hometown Mystery Cycle

  for Claire Messud and James Wood

  But I was one of the children told

  they play the Creation on Applecroft Road

  while Abel is battered on Barleycroft Lane

  and if I go with him he’ll cop it again

  at the top of Old Drive. If I stay with the Ark

  I’ll have seen a good twenty-one Floods before dark,

  but I know the place well as the front of my hand

  so I watch it in zigzag and still understand.

  The dawn’s coming up over Handside Green

  as Hell’s being harrowed by Christ in sunscreen,

  but another one rising by pulley-and-rope

  at the corner of Mannicotts isn’t the bloke

  who Thomas is gaping at over his eggs

  on a little white trestle on wobbly legs

  by the scout hut on Guessens. The stone’s rolled away

  as slowly as you can roll papier-maché,

  and Judas is keeping his anorak zipped

  as he checks on his lines in a ragged old script.

  Pilate is bicycling by. If we’re quick

  we can leg it to Lazarus, set up our picnic,

  still be in time for the beauty they’ve got to

  assault with tomatoes till Jesus says not to.

  Over the chimneys we hear as we hurry

  the loudspeaker crackle the usual story

  about a lost child, and we chuckle and say

  You’ll be late to an angel we pass on the way.

  We hop all the hedges of Attimore Street,

  where a girl who got rid of me rinses His feet,

  and it’s too much to take so I plod to the pool,

  for the Slaughter of half my old nursery school,

  but they lie there and giggle, they’re clearly okay,

  to the fury of someone who’s ‘Herod today

  and John tomorrow’ I joke to my mates

  but they’ve spotted the Virgin in wraparound shades,

  and we pass the Three Wise Men, muddled by props

  in the shade of an alleyway down by the shops.

  Afternoon tires of us, everyone tires;

  I hang around people who hang around fires;

  three mothers attempt to look vaguely surprised

  He is striding already up Mandeville Rise;

  but the little girl chosen Star-Girl for the day –

  Has anyone seen her? – the drunken PA

  is trying to be serious and nobody has.

  The imbecile doing Balaam and his Ass

  is playing for laughs so he’s not getting any.

  Judgment is here, they’ve unloaded already.

  Satan is making a meal of a yawn.

  We rush up to God Hey we saw you at dawn!

  So how’s the day been? and, to illustrate how,

  He ploughs an old finger across an old brow

  and puffs out His cheeks like we might blow away

  but we don’t understand so we nod and we stay;

  we are gravely observing the fools in their cart,

  then they go and it’s quiet and He says Can we start?

  to nobody really. Just one more to go,

  but we’ve ticked every box so we’ve seen every show

  and it’s chaos again as it is every year

  with the carts in a ditch and Whose bloody idea

  was this in the first place? somebody bawls

  in the queue for the luminous-necklace stalls,

  but he can’t really mean it, he has paper wings

  his daughters deface with embarrassing things;

  he’s played about every last role in the Cycle

  (he’d never been Michael but now he’s been Michael)

  and someone is holding a ladder that trembles

  and someone has wound a great zero of cables

  around his strong arm, and he stares in my eyes

  as I say Weren’t you Peter? which yes he denies

  and someone is binding the Cross to a Jeep

  and someone is bearing a burden asleep

  with a garland of foil and a cellophane star,

  who, in other versions, is found in a bar

  and in at least one is found stabbed in a pit.

  You know your own villages: write your own shit.

  I’ve never done much and I didn’t do this,

  but you asked where I come from and that’s where it is.

  Thinking: Earth

  So I was thinking: Earth.

  And I was earthed as any poet is

  by the word alone in its own empty space.

  Earth. How the word begins

  with force, as breath

  begins and its vowel lasts

  as dreams do – or the pauses between numbers –

  for as long as the brain can take it. How it closes

  as the tongue steps to the teeth,

  presses and rests

  till the air is gone. Earth.

  Seen only in its spot by pilots strapped

  for oxygen, their exhalations trapped

  inside a crystal ball,

  some ghost of myth

  foreshadowed in a scribble

  on a cave-wall. My garden’s going south

  by sixty miles a year, and the caught breath

  of botanists – as strains

  mutate, redouble –

  itself would power a mill

  when they next gasp. Between twin hegemons

  of ice and sand we wait, where the mindful seasons,

  autumntime, springtime,

  lie down a while,

  old exiled diplomats

  whose answers were too intricate, too rich

  for the liking of the tsar. Now on the edge

  of deserts they endure

  odd tête-à-têtes.

  *

  I fly above the earth

  today, dreaming a moment when I’m old,

  though living one undreamed-of as a child,

  a sliver of pure luck,

  freedom, health,

  statistically safe,

  and yet aghast and tethered by the fibres

  to everything. We’ll chat to our dead forebears,

  drawn to the life, on screens,

  soon enough.

  On we fly until,

  brilliant and sleepy between meals,

  we come to land on islands green as apples.

  We chat on the horizon’s

>   infinity-pool.

  At night on jet-black screens,

  if, as we slither back in our own choosing,

  we accidentally click on Channel Nothing,

  we might just spot through crackle

  of descending lines

  what seems to be foul liquid

  spreading over sand, but we’re aware

  was taken from ten miles in the air,

  and is a million people

  run ragged.

  *

  Earth. I have a daughter.

  Heaven’s what I say it is for her.

  Telling her is all it is so far

  for me. My only use

  for the word forever

  is in those conversations.

  Earth, I think we farmed that word from you

  and now can’t seem to make the damn thing grow

  anywhere, for patience

  tries our patience.

  That number on Times Square

  plummets upward, digits to the right

  are dim with speed. But the one on the far side

  is locked at nil, as if

  it thinks we’re there.

  Graphs that all their lives

  ran up and down like children now outreach

  a lonely tentacle that leaves the page

  to grope for something warm

  where nothing lives.

  And it’s been forty years,

  eyeball to eyeball with the way we look,

  blue and alone, bulb of a child awake,

  wondering No, but what’s

  behind the stars?

  That casts me into space,

  her father, the one opposite, old bloke

  propped against a pillow on the dark,

  helpless in the face of

  her helpless face,

  while, home on earth again,

  scientists are furrowing their brows

  so deep they are thought fools by folk who raise

  hosannas to the sky

  for Superman.

  It Too Remains

  You’ve gone. I mean you’re gone. You didn’t

  have a say.

  I don’t believe you’re anywhere and

  while they pray

  I picture you. The images push

  forward one

  to stand for all the rest, and when that’s

  sort of done

  a voice arrives, a tone of voice, a

  certain note

  I almost hear, can almost manage

  in this throat.

  And as of now that’s that and all I

  feel is true

  is you’re at peace. Whatever soul they’re

  chanting to

  once had a face and voice I gave it

  and it too

  remains at peace, only it’s now at

  peace with you.

  Dream-I-Believe

  Dream-I-Believe I brought

  out of the night still streaming

  out It was real I was right!

  Dream present still I could still

  believe in, if I twisted

  likelihood to serve it . . .

  Dream that was gone I mourned

  and quoted, sought and lingered

  on sections to my liking.

  Dream I had had depended

  on puns, events, encounters

  even to come to mind now.

  I seemed to have held four faiths

  by breakfast, and I’d packed them

  fighting to their buses.

  So I could sit exhausted,

  stretching in the sunbeams

  like my mother in the old days.

  A Walk by the Neva

  While the river gathers the many folds of its gown,

  rises to sit and turns to stone,

  the figureheads

  on the rostral columns break out into brides

  married in just a moment at the prow

  of Vasilyesky Island. So

  the city sails

  in time: the buildings glide in parallels,

  the giant dreams his dreams of Holland. Peter’s

  work is always done and never,

  never quite,

  as another bridal party bustles into light

  and the long white limos wait with their small bouquets,

  still as the marble case after case

  of every tsar

  in the sharp fortress on the farther shore.

  The widest flow flows to a point, and here

  there’s you, in a crumpled suit somewhere,

  picking me out

  of the line as a poet, there’s you on a party night

  with your beautiful new bride This is my wife,

  Mr Maxwell – the fact is, Joseph,

  I didn’t know,

  I thought you were having a laugh with a bloke and so

  I stopped a waitress and said By the way here’s mine.

  There’s a castle of drained pints in London

  was it Highgate?

  Hours of talk I don’t forget and do forget,

  as the widest flow flows to a point. And here

  I am, where you are never. The air

  flutters the last

  bride of the morning. I am the Wedding Guest

  at we all know which wedding, always about

  to follow the congregation out

  into sunlight,

  but held by something at the garden gate

  until the lawn’s deserted and it’s dark.

  When will it ever be fucking dark

  in the month of June

  in this town of yours? Never, and pretty soon.

  The limo driver’s grinding a spotless shoe

  on his dead cigarette and I knew you,

  that’s all.

  The bride is impatiently at the beck and call

  of a cameraman. The tiles of the river are old

  snapshots, silver and brown and curled,

  moving and still,

  rustling into the east, into the equal.

  Cassandra

  You. I won’t foresee for you one thing.

  You staring into space, you moulding creatures.

  You thinking if you stop it then the world ends.

  Little old you, it does. Mine doesn’t, yours will.

  But I won’t foresee for you, you won’t believe me.

  You rub your eyes and write. You’ve not believed

  life’s anything but a grin into the mist

  for some time now, although you gasp at line-breaks

  like something spoke to you. O it spoke to you.

  I’m at your window now: I breathe the year

  you’ll leave on the warm glass. Beyond my wild hair

  blossoms the to-come but you’re so distracted,

  you, by lips, by ways, you think like me –

  wake with one face a sniff away forever,

  speak the lines she speaks at the moment she

  speaks these you speak and set your lips where she does,

  then you’ll see nothing coming or becoming,

  and all will be so well. – It will be well,

  but I won’t let you hear that. If you hear it

  you won’t believe it, there’s where our curses meet

  like kisses. All will be well. You didn’t hear it,

  you, therefore believe it, as your fingers

  whittle at the keys to the bright screen,

  as the windowpane goes cold and I move on,

  trespassing away down your lawn,

  over the wall and out across farmland.

  Permissions acknowledgements

  The publishers are grateful to the following for permission

  to reproduce copyright material:

  From Tale of the Mayor’s Son (Bloodaxe, 1990)

  ‘My Turn’, ‘Just Like Us’, ‘Drive To the Seashore’, ‘The

  Albatross Revolution’, ‘Flood Before
and After’, ‘Mattering’,

  ‘The Pursuit’, ‘Tale of the Mayor’s Son’

  From Out of the Rain (Bloodaxe, 1992)

  ‘We Billion Cheered’, ‘The Eater’, ‘Sport Story of a Winner’,

  ‘Plaint of the Elder Princes’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Out of the

  Rain’, ‘Helene and Heloise’

  From Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun (Faber, 1994)

  ‘Cine’, ‘Pyrois’, ‘Eous’, ‘Aethon’, ‘A Scientist Explains’,

  ‘Clymene’s Coda’, ‘Phlegon’

  From Rest for the Wicked (Bloodaxe, 1995)

  ‘The Ginger-Haired in Heaven’, ‘Garden City

  Quatrains’, ‘Invigilation’, ‘Love Made Yeah’, ‘Stargazing’,

  ‘Watching Over’, ‘The Sentence’, ‘Either’, ‘The Margit-Isle’,