by Don Paterson
with a kick like a smacked puss in a train-station;
another, the light charge and the trace of zinc
tap-water picks up at the moon’s eclipse.
You will know the time I mean by this.
Because your singular absence, in your absence,
has bred hard, tonight I take the waters
with the whole clan: our faceless ushers, bridesmaids,
our four Shelties, three now ghosts of ghosts;
our douce sons and our lovely loudmouthed daughters
who will, by this late hour, be fully grown,
perhaps with unborn children of their own.
So finally, let me propose a toast:
not to love, or life, or real feeling,
but to their sentimental residue;
to your sweet memory, but not to you.
The sun will close its circle in the sky
before I close my own, and drain the purely
offertory glass that tastes of nothing
but silence, burnt dust on the valves, and whisky.
The End
At round about four months or so
– the time is getting shorter –
I look down as the face below
goes sliding underwater
and though I know it’s over with
and she is miles from me
I stay a while to mine the earth
for what was lost at sea
as if the faces of the drowned
might turn up in the harrow:
hold me when I hold you down
and plough the lonely furrow
God’s Gift to Women
‘The man seems to be under the impression he is God’s gift to womankind,’ said Arthur. Cradling the enormous, rancid bunch of stock he had brought her, Mary reflected that the Holy Father could no more be depended upon to make an appropriate donation than any other representative of His sex.
G. K. Chesterton, ‘Gabriel Gale and the Pearl Necklace’
Dundee, and the Magdalen Green.
The moon is staring down the sun;
one last white javelin inches out
of Lucklawhill, and quietly floats
to JFK or Reykjavik.
Newport comes on with a click
like the door-light from an opened fridge.
The coal train shivers on the bridge.
The east wind blows into his fist;
the bare banks rise up, thigh and breast;
half-blue, cursing under her breath,
the muddy Venus of the Firth
lunges through the waterburn.
You come: I wish the wind would turn
so your face would stay like this,
your lips drawn up to blow a kiss
even now, at your martyrdom –
the window, loose inside its frame,
rolls like a drum, but at the last
gives out, and you give up the ghost.
Meanwhile, our vernacular
Atlantis slides below the stars:
My Lord’s Bank, Carthagena, Flisk
go one by one into the dusk.
So here we lie, babes in the wood
of voluntary orphanhood,
left in the dark to bleat and shiver
in my leaf-pattern duvet-cover,
and where Jakob or Wilhelm ought to
stencil in the fatal motto
your bandage has unscrolled above
our tousled heads. Still, we survive –
although, for years, the doctors led
us back along the trail of bread
as if it ran to our rebirth,
not our stepmother’s frozen hearth;
when they’d gone, she’d take us back
with big rocks in our haversacks
and twice as far in as before.
But I keep coming back for more,
and every second Wednesday
rehearse the aetiology
of this, my current all-time low
at twenty-seven quid a throw.
Ten years drawing out the sting
have ascertained the following:
a model of precocity –
Christ at one year, Cain at three
(a single blow was all it took;
the fucker died inside a week) –
I’d wed my mother long before
she’d think to lock the bathroom door,
as much a sly move to defraud
my father of his fatherhood
as clear the blood-debt with the gift
of my right hand; with my left
I dealt myself the whole estate
and in the same stroke, wiped the slate
of my own inheritance. Anyway,
as the semi-bastard progeny
of a morganatic union
(the Mother ranks below the Son),
I am the first man and the last:
there will be no title or bequest.
Once, to my own disbelief,
I almost took a second wife,
and came so close that others slurred
our names together as one word,
a word she gave, a word I took,
a word she conjured with, and broke.
So I filled the diary up again
with the absences of other men:
John’s overtime, Jack’s training-course,
returning in the tiny hours
with my head clear as a bullet-hole
and a Durex wrapped in toilet roll,
the operation so risk-free
I’d take my own seed home with me
and bury it deep down in the trash,
beside the bad fruit and the ash.
Thus the cross laid on my shoulder
grew light, as I grew harder, colder,
and in each subsequent affair
became the cross that others bear.
Until last night, when I found pain
enough to fill the stony grain
with that old yearly hurt, as if
I might yet burst back into leaf –
O my dear, my ‘delicate cutter’
pale phlebotomist, blood-letter –
the back of one, I came home drunk
to find you standing at the sink,
the steady eye of your own storm
feathering up your white forearm
with the edge of a Bic Ladyshave
and the nonchalance of a Chinese chef –
next month, when the scars have gone,
we’ll raid the bank and hit the town,
you in that black silk dress, cut low
enough to show an inch or so
of the opalescent hand-long scar
on your left breast. Your mother swore
that fumbling along the shelf,
you’d pulled the pan down on yourself;
but we could see her tipping out
the kettle in the carry-cot,
one eyebrow arched above your cries
as she watched the string of blisters rise
to the design that in ten years
would mark you her inferior,
when all it did was make the one
more lovely than its own dear twin,
as if some angel’d shot his come
as bright as lit magnesium
across your body as you slept.
And as you lie here, tightly happed
in the track-marked arms of Morpheus,
I only wish that I could wish
you more than luck as you delay
before that white-gloved croupier
who offers you the fanned-out pack:
a face-card. The fey and sleekit jack.
The frame yawns to a living-room.
Slim Whitman warbles through the hum
of a bad earth. The Green Lady cries
over the scene: you, compromised,
steadily drawing out the juice
of the one man you could not seduce,
his mouth drops open in its slot
and at the point you suss his groans
come not from his throat but your own,
it all goes monochrome, and segues
into the usual territory.
You get up from your knees, nineteen,
half-pissed, bleeding through your jeans.
Titless, doll-eyed, party-frocked,
your mother, ashen with the shock
at this, the regular outrage,
pretends to phone the orphanage,
gets out your blue valise, and packs
it tight with pants and ankle-socks
and a pony-book to pass the time
on the long ride to the Home.
And then the old routine: frogmarched
outside to the freezing porch,
you’d shiver out the hour until
she’d shout you in and make the call.
But in your dreams they always come,
the four huge whitecoats, masked and dumb
with their biros, clipboards and pink slips,
the little gibbet of the drip,
the quilted coat with one long arm,
the napkin soaked in chloroform,
the gag, the needle and the van
that fires you down the endless lane
that ends in mile-high chicken-wire
around the silent compound, where
a tower-guard rolls a searchlight beam
over the crematorium –
Enough. Let’s hold you in your dream,
leave the radio-alarm
mid-digit and unreadable,
under the bare bulb in the hall
one cranefly braced against the air,
the rain stalled like a chandelier
above the roof, the moon sandbanked
in Gemini. I have to think.
Now. Let us carefully assay
that lost soteriology
which holds Christ died to free himself,
or who slays the dragon or the wolf
on the stage of his presexual
rescue fantasy, makes the kill
not just for her flushed gratitude
but for his Father in the gods:
somewhere between His lofty blessing
and the virgin bride’s undressing
the light streams from the gates of heaven
and all is promised and forgiven.
Time and again I blow the dust
off this wee psychodrama, just
a new face in the victim’s role –
convinced if I can save her soul
I’ll save my own. It doesn’t work.
Whatever difference I make
to anyone by daylight is
dispatched in that last torpid kiss
at the darkening crossroads; from there
they go back to their torturers.
But if I could put the sleep I lose
over you to better use,
I’d work the nights as signalman
to your bad dreams, wait for that drawn-
sword sound and the blue wheelsparks,
then make the switch before the track
flicks left, and curves away to hell …
This once I can, and so I will.
The death-camp gates are swinging to
to let you leave, not swallow you.
They set you down upon a hill.
Your case is huge. Your hands are small.
The sun opens its golden eye
into the blue room of the sky.
A black mare nods up to your side. You
take her reins, and let her guide you
over the sky-blue, trackless heather
to the hearth, the Home, your real mother.
The Lover
after Propertius
Poor mortals, with your horoscopes and blood-tests –
what hope is there for you? Even if the plane
lands you safely, why should you not return
to your home in flames or ruins, your wife absconded,
the children blind and dying in their cots?
Even sitting quiet in a locked room
the perils are infinite and unforeseeable.
Only the lover walks upon the earth
careless of what the fates prepare for him:
so you step out at the lights, almost as if
you half-know that today you are the special one.
The woman in the windshield lifting away
her frozen cry, a white mask on a stick,
reveals herself as grey-eyed Atropos;
the sun leaves like a rocket; the sky goes out;
the road floods and widens; on the distant kerb
the lost souls groan and mew like sad trombones;
the ambulance glides up with its black sail –
when somewhere in the other world, she fills
your name full of her breath again, and at once
you float to your feet: the dark rose on your shirt
folds itself away, and you slip back
into the crowd, who, being merely human,
must remember nothing of this incident.
Just one flea-ridden dog chained to the railings,
who might be Cerberus, or patient Argos,
looks on, knowing the great law you have flouted.
Imperial
Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I’m frightened –
I covered her mouth with my own;
she lay in my arms till the storm-window brightened
and stood at our heads like a stone
After months of jaw jaw, determined that neither
win ground, or be handed the edge,
we gave ourselves up, one to the other
like prisoners over a bridge
and no trade was ever so fair or so tender;
so where was the flaw in the plan,
the night we lay down on the flag of surrender
and woke on the flag of Japan
On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him
for A.G.
from Advice to Young Husbands
No one slips into the same woman twice:
heaven is the innocence of its beholding.
From stroke to stroke, we exchange one bliss
wholly for another. Imagine the unfolding
river-lotus, how it duplicates
the singular perfection of itself
through the packed bud of its billion petticoats,
and your cock, here, the rapt and silent witness,
as disbelief flowers from his disbelief.
Heaven is the innocence of its beholding:
no man slips into the same woman twice.
14:50: Rosekinghall
The next train on Platform 6 will be the 14:50
Rosekinghall – Gallowshill and Blindwell, calling at:
Fairygreen – Templelands – Stars of Forthneth – Silverwells –
Honeyhole – Bee Cott – Pleasance – Sunnyblink –
Butterglen – Heatheryhaugh – St Bride’s Ring – Diltie Moss –
Silvie – Leyshade – Bourtreebush – Little Fithie –
Dusty Drum – Spiral Wood – Wandershiell – Windygates –
Red Roofs – Ark Hill – Egypt – Formal –
Letter – Laverockhall – Windyedge – Catchpenny –
Framedrum – Drumtick – Little Fardle – Packhorse –
Carrot – Clatteringbrigs – Smyrna – Bucklerheads –
Outfield – Jericho – Horn – Roughstones –
Loak – Skitchen – Sturt – Oathlaw –
Wolflaw – Farnought – Drunkendubs – Stronetic –
Ironharrow Well – Goats – Tarbrax – Dameye –
Dummiesholes – Caldhame – Hagmuir – Slug of Auchrannie –
Baldragon – Thorn – Wreaths – Spurn Hill –
Drown
dubs – The Bloody Inches – Halfway – Groan,
where the train will divide
Candlebird*
after Abbas Ibn Al-Ahnaf, c.750
If, tonight, she scorns me for my song,
You may be sure of this: within the year
Another man will say this verse to her
And she will yield to him for its sad sweetness.
‘“Then I am like the candlebird,”’ he’ll continue,
After explaining what a candlebird is,
‘“Whose lifeless eyes see nothing and see all,
Lighting their small room with my burning tongue;
His shadow rears above hers on the wall
As hour by hour, I pass into the air.”
Take my hand. Now tell me: flesh or tallow?
Which I am tonight, I leave to you.’
So take my hand and tell me, flesh or tallow.
Which man I am tonight I leave to you.
* Generic name for several species of seabird, the flesh of which is so saturated in oil the whole bird can be threaded with a wick and burnt entire
02:50: Newtyle
Of this white page, ask no more sense
than of the skies (though you may believe
the rain His tears, the wind His grief,
the snow His shredded evidence
that covers up the hill and cross,
the fallen hush, His own held breath)
but stare it down: the thawing earth
sustains a temporary gloss
from
THE EYES
a version of
Antonio Machado
Advice
My advice? To watch, and wait for the tide to turn –
wait as the beached boat waits, without a thought
for either its own waiting, or departure.
As I put it so well myself: ‘The patient triumph