plantlife, a yellow house, a pair of lovers,
uniting in their love deep opposites.
This Earth, and this Earth’s sterile satellite
won’t always be, like life and death, apart,
if Man’s destructive mind with Nature’s might
leaves the planet pitted lunar chart
with no one here to name its barren craters
after rainbows, or discoverers, or peace,
though there’ll be peace when Earth’s worst agitators
find in final dissolution their release.
Despite barricaded bolt-holes deep below
it’s often said that what will come off best
once, step by step, we’ve reached All-Systems-Go,
of all life on this Earth, ’s the lowliest:
these bugs tonight like high-roast coffee beans
that fling themselves at flames and self-destruct,
that blue wasp juicing bugs like tangerines,
fat bucking locusts jockeyed on and sucked,
these trawling spiders that have rigged their nets
halfway between our porchlamps and the night,
their dawn webs threaded with dew jewelettes
and hauls of flies caught lurching for our light.
A blundering beetle with black lacquered back
that dialled its liquidation to the spider’s limb,
embalmed in abseil/bell-pull, a stored snack
swathed in white cerements of sticky scrim.
Phoning that zero gets the spider quick.
Each leg’s in touch with 45 degrees
of laddered circle where the insects stick
on tacky wires their weaver walks with ease.
Even the love-bugs, randy and ridiculous,
coupling regardless of death close behind
could still be fucking after all of us
are merged in the molten mess made of Mankind.
Falling asleep to loud cicada chirrs,
to scuttling cockroach, crashing carapace,
the noises that I hear are our inheritors
who’ll know the Earth both B. and A. our race.
And underneath those floorboards of good heart
I think I hear the slither of a snake
and then the rodent prey the snake makes start.
Let’s forget about the world until we wake!
III
Each board of ‘tongue in groove’ ’s scored by a line
I measure insect movements by from bed.
A spider crossing long since scentless pine
racks its nightcatch on a slender thread.
The blowfly’s hawsered body still looks wet
though all night it’s been suspended in the dry.
It spins round, flashing, in the spider’s net
with shredded cockroach wings and antennae.
I knew I’d wake today and find you gone
and look out of the window, knowing where
you’d be so early, still with nothing on,
watering our new plants with drowsy care.
The night, already stripped of half its dark,
now with the rest sloughed off, ’s revealed as day,
and the sun already makes small rainbows arc
out of the hose’s nozzle drizzling spray.
Crunching the rusted needles that I strew
to stunt the weed growth on the paths we hacked
I come towards you and am naked too,
and, being naked, feel my nerves react
to the pliant give and snap of spider thread,
snagged on a nipple, sliding on my sweat,
pinged on a whisker, snapped against my head –
the night survivor loosened from the net.
Though impossible to hear I sense each ping
as of an instrument too tautly strung
with notes too high for human voice to sing
and, in any case, not heard if ever sung,
and maybe like that air of Socrates,
I hope he played at least once with some skill,
transposed beyond our ken into high keys
I can’t hear now, and know I never will.
For all that unseen threads break on my face,
for all these cordons of cobweb caress
I walk towards you and don’t change my pace
feeling each broken thread one stricture less
against my passage to the world of day.
I can only know the last one when it breaks.
You can’t see them ahead, and anyway,
I have to scan the ground for rattlesnakes.
I wonder as I walk still half awake
if the trees that baked a bit long in the boot
and we’d planted in the dark would ever take
and if we’d ever taste their hoped-for fruit.
I pass what’s become in 12 months gut-high pine
planted last summer in a long close row
as our few acres’ demarcation line
and I will what’s still a hedge to grow less slow,
and be tall enough to mask the present view
of you watering the saplings as you spray
rainbows at fig-trees planted 2-1-2
and both of us still nude at break of day.
A morning incense smokes off well-doused ground.
Everywhere you water rainbows shine.
This private haven that we two have found
might be the more so when enclosed with pine.
Cypress & Cedar
A smell comes off my pencil as I write
in the margins of a sacred Sanskrit text.
By just sufficient candlelight I skim
these scriptures sceptically from hymn to hymn.
The bits I read aloud to you I’ve Xed
for the little clues they offer to life’s light.
I sit in mine, and you sit in your chair.
A sweetness hangs round yours; a foul smell mine.
Though the house still has no windows and no doors
and the tin roof’s roughly propped with 4 × 4s
that any gale could jolt, our chairs are fine
and both scents battle for the same night air.
Near Chiefland just off US 129,
from the clapboard abattoir about a mile,
the local sawyer Bob displays his wares:
porch swings, picnic tables, lounging chairs,
rough sawn and nailed together ‘cracker’ style.
The hand I shake leaves powerful smells on mine.
Beside two piles of shavings, white and red,
one fragrant as a perfume, and one rank
and malodorous from its swampland ooze,
Bob displayed that week’s work’s chairs for me to choose.
I chose one that was sweet, and one that stank,
and thought about the sweet wood for a bed.
To quote the carpenter he ‘stinks o’ shite’
and his wife won’t sleep with him on cypress days,
but after a day of cedar, so he said,
she comes back eagerly into his bed,
and, as long as he works cedar, there she stays.
Sometimes he scorns the red wood and works white!
Today I’ve laboured with my hands for hours
sawing fenceposts up for winter; one tough knot
jolted the chainsaw at my face and sprayed
a beetroot cedar dust off the bucked blade,
along with damp earth with its smell of rot,
hurtling beetles, termites in shocked showers.
To get one gatepost free I had to tug
for half an hour, but dragged up from its hole
it smelled, down even to the last four feet
rammed in the ground, still beautifully sweet
as if the grave had given life parole
and left the sour earth perfumed where I’d dug.
Bob gave me a cedar buckle for my
belt,
and after the whole day cutting, stacking wood,
damp denim, genitals, ‘genuine hide leather’
all these fragrances were bound together
by cedar, and together they smelled good.
It was wonderful the way my trousers smelled.
I can’t help but suppose flesh-famished Phèdre
would have swept that prissy, epicene,
big-game hunting stepson Hippolyte,
led by his nose to cedar, off his feet,
and left no play at all for poor Racine,
if she’d soaped her breasts with Bois de Cèdre.
If in doubt ask Bob the sawyer’s wife!
Pet lovers who can’t stand the stink of cat
buy sacks of litter that’s been ‘cedarized’
and from ancient times the odour’s been much prized.
Though not a Pharaoh I too favour that
for freighting my rank remains out of this life.
Why not two cedar chairs? Why go and buy
a reeking cypress chair as a reminder,
as if one’s needed, of primeval ooze,
like swamps near Suwannee backroads, or bayous,
stagnation Mother Nature left behind her
hauling Mankind up from mononuclei?
Cypress still has roots in that old stew
paddling its origins in protozoa,
the stew where consciousness that writes and reads
grew its first squat tail from slimy seeds.
I’d’ve used it for the Ark if I’d been Noah,
though cedar, I know you’ll say, would also do.
This place not in the Blue Guide or in Fodor
between the Suwannee River and the Styx
named by some homesick English classicist
who loved such puns, loathed swamps, and, lonely, pissed
his livelihood away with redneck hicks
and never once enjoyed the cedar’s odour,
or put its smoke to snake-deterrent use
prescribed by Virgil in his Georgics III
with chelydrus here in the US South
construed as the diamondback or cottonmouth
which freed him, some said, from his misery.
Others said liquor, and others still a noose.
And, evenings, he, who’d been an avid reader
of the Odyssey and Iliad in Greek,
became an even avider verandah drinker
believing sourmash made a Stoic thinker
though stuck with no paddle up Phlegethon’s creek,
and had no wife with clothes chest of sweet cedar.
But you bought one at Bob’s place and you keep
your cotton frocks in it, your underwear,
and such a fragrance comes from your doffed bras
as come from uncorked phials in hot bazaars,
and when you take your clothes off and lie bare
your body breathes out cedar while you sleep.
That lonely English exile named the river,
though it could have been someone like me, for whom,
though most evenings on the porch I read and write,
there’s often such uneasiness in night
it creates despair in me, or drinker’s gloom
that could send later twinges through the liver.
Tonight so far ’s been peaceful with no lightning.
The pecan trees and hophornbeams are still.
The storm’s held off, the candleflame’s quite straight,
the fire and wick united in one fate.
Though this quietness that can, one moment, fill
the heart with peace, can, the next, be frightening –
A hog gets gelded with a gruesome squeal
that skids across the quietness of night
to where we’re sitting on our dodgy porch.
I reach for Seth Tooke’s shotgun and the torch
then realize its ‘farmwork’ so alright
but my flesh also flinches from the steel.
Peace like a lily pad on swamps of pain –
floating’s its only way of being linked.
This consciousness of ours that reads and writes
drifts on a darkness deeper than the night’s.
Above that blackness, buoyed on the extinct,
peace, pure-white, floats flowering in the brain,
and fades, as finally the nenuphar
we found on a pewter swamp where two roads ended
was also bound to fade. The head and heart
are neither of them too much good apart
and peace comes in the moments that they’re blended
as cypress and cedar at this moment are.
My love, as prone as I am to despair,
I think the world of night’s best born in pairs,
one half we’ll call the female, one the male,
though neither essence need, in love, prevail.
We sit here in distinctly scented chairs
you, love, in the cedar, me the cypress chair.
Though tomorrow night I might well sit in yours
and you in mine, the blended scent’s the same
since I pushed my chair close to your chair
and we read by the one calm candle that we share
in this wilderness that might take years to tame,
this house still with no windows and no doors.
Let the candle cliché come out of the chill –
‘the flickering candle on a vast dark plain’
of one lone voice against the state machine,
or Mimi’s on cold stairs aren’t what I mean
but moments like this now when heart and brain
seem one sole flame that’s bright and straight and still.
If it’s in Levy County that I die
(though fearing I’d feel homesick as I died
I’d sooner croak in Yorkshire if I could)
I’ll have my coffin made of cedar wood
to balance the smell like cypress from inside
and hope the smoke of both blends in the sky,
as both scents from our porch chairs do tonight.
‘Tvashti’, says this Indian Rig Veda,
‘hewed the world out of one tree,’ but doesn’t tell,
since for durability both do as well,
if the world he made was cypress wood; or cedar
the smell coming off my pencil as I write.
V.
‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.’
Arthur Scargill, Sunday Times, 10 Jan. 1982
Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard
to find my slab behind the family dead,
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.
With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short
of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite.
That’s two peers already, of a sort,
and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit,
whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,
causes the distinguished dead to drop
into the rabblement of bone and rot,
shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.
Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned
luggage cowhide in the age of steam,
and knew their place of rest before the land
caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.
This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s
the place I may well rest if there’s a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.
If buried ashes saw then I’d survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,
whic
h makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.
This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT
sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.
Far-sighted for his family’s future dead,
but for his wife, this banker’s still alone
on his long obelisk, and doomed to head
a blackened dynasty of unclaimed stone,
now graffitied with a crude four-letter word.
His children and grand-children went away
and never came back home to be interred,
so left a lot of space for skins to spray.
The language of this graveyard ranges from
a bit of Latin for a former Mayor
or those who laid their lives down at the Somme,
the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer,
how people ‘fell asleep in the Good Lord’,
brief chisellable bits from the good book
and rhymes whatever length they could afford,
to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!
Or, more expansively, there’s LEEDS v.
the opponent of last week, this week, or next,
and a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses
on the team or race that makes the sprayer vexed.
Then, pushed for time, or fleeing some observer,
dodging between tall family vaults and trees
like his team’s best ever winger, dribbler, swerver,
fills every space he finds with versus Vs.
Vs sprayed on the run at such a lick,
the sprayer master of his flourished tool,
get short-armed on the left like that red tick
they never marked his work much with at school.
Half this skinhead’s age but with approval
I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.
No one clamoured in the press for its removal
or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.
These Vs are all the versuses of life
from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,
class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,
Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,
East/West, male/female, and the ground
these fixtures are fought out on ’s Man, resigned
to hope from his future what his past never found.
Selected Poems Page 14