The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, Page 2

  They will not come back. The road is hard

  and no one wants to listen to the stories

  they will have to tell. But when the steel market

  crashes and the orchard is paved over

  and the bailiff’s men are playing blackjack

  on the stairs they will be waiting for you

  at the bottom of the frozen lake.

  A Tally Stick

  The bark is notched six times, one notch

  for every cow left in the pound,

  then split, the cowman and the poundman

  taking half each, so that when

  the cowman comes to claim his stock

  six cows are led out from the pound

  though neither of the men can count.

  Connemara, 1610:

  A cowman spreads his hands and watches

  as a priest names all his fingers.

  He starts to count potatoes, hens,

  the steps across his single field

  whose blades the Lord alone can sum.

  Then pausing at the gate one night

  he thinks of seven. Not trees. Not dogs.

  Just seven. Like The Plough

  before God put the stars in.

  The Model Village

  Today an old man had a stroke

  and crushed the signal box.

  You can’t ignore that kind of thing.

  But on the whole

  I try to see the visitors

  as clouds or hills.

  I am an old man

  and I have learnt my lesson.

  Only small things matter.

  But the young are different.

  They hear the talk of Birmingham

  and Weston-super-Mare

  and listen to the songs

  of love and loss

  on picnic radios

  and dream of slipping

  through the ticket office

  after dark

  in search of telephones

  and discotheques

  and Chinese restaurants,

  a world where games of football

  can be won

  and lost,

  where roads run to the ocean

  and the ocean runs

  forever.

  They will understand in time.

  Sit still for long enough

  and everything will come to you.

  We got a helicopter last year,

  strung on fishing line

  above the plastic lake.

  This year we got our first

  black residents.

  (The Pattersons were overpainted.)

  But the cows still graze,

  the brass band still plays

  Hearts of Oak,

  the town clock

  still reads

  ten to two.

  And when the night comes down

  I sit beneath the awning

  of the hardware store

  and watch the universe contract

  to thirty homes, a loop of railway

  and fifty billion stars.

  New Year’s Day

  I walk on powdered

  shell for three miles

  to the spur’s blunt head

  where, each year,

  something of the ocean

  slows and falls

  and turns into a yard of land,

  and something of the emptiness

  we spin through

  silts and settles

  so that we can walk

  a little further

  out into the fog.

  Average Fool

  Horace Odes 1:6

  The poet Varius can celebrate

  your victories in high-flown verse.

  Your bravery. The deeds done

  by daring forces under your command.

  By sea. On horseback.

  I never write about that kind of thing, Agrippa;

  grand themes like the black anger

  of Achilles who refused to back down,

  the homicidal family of Pelops

  or the voyages of shifty Ulysses.

  Poetic honor and my muse,

  whose only weapon is the peaceful lyre,

  won’t let me blunt the praise

  of either Caesar or yourself

  with my ineptitude.

  Who, in any case, could find the words

  for Mars dressed in his steel tunic,

  Meriones black with Trojan dust,

  or Diomedes who teamed up with Athena

  and became an equal of the gods?

  Unscarred by love myself,

  I write of banquets, and of wars

  where girls stab young men

  with their fingernails. Or if a little scarred,

  then no more than the average fool.

  Bushings

  They lie discarded in the long grass

  between the lighthouse and the kyle,

  a yard of snipped-off wire

  knotted round their necks.

  At one end a white-washed room,

  the fog of Woodbines, a terrier

  and the fastness of the Norwegian Sea

  running in a mildewed frame.

  At the other, tanning salons,

  the Winter of Discontent, banana fritters

  and Saturday Night Fever.

  Between them, humming in the cable,

  buried under gales and static,

  the lonely birthday greetings, requests

  for Tunnock’s teacakes and a claw hammer,

  the bump and crackle of a coal fire,

  the final maydays and the silence after.

  Midas

  You rarely hear the prologue—

  where ants are marching from the window

  to the crib, each one carrying

  a grain of wheat to feed the infant king,

  the meaning of the story still unwrapped,

  the picture fresh as water in a clay jug

  or a hot loaf not yet frozen solid

  by the king’s greed.

  Thunderbirds are Go

  The island of the billionaire philanthropist

  was made of plastic and his wonderful machines

  were only toys. True, there were moments

  when the colors brightened as we cut away

  to focus on a tea cup or a herd of antelope

  in flight, and everything seemed real.

  But they were shots from other films,

  rapidly replaced by trees and skies

  which looked like trees and skies but never quite rang true.

  We had our brief adventures then relaxed

  beside the pool, while in his mountain lair

  our nemesis the foreign villain licked his wounds.

  We filled the sky with vapor trails.

  We braved the flaming rig and nursed the stricken jet

  back home. We held our nerve and everyone was saved.

  Now everything is real. This bungalow. The early train.

  We mow the lawn and smoke a cigarette

  and sit here waiting for the call that never comes.

  Great White

  Shark attacks were rare in Chapel Brampton.

  I should have been afraid of pedophiles,

  leukemia or Neil Billingham

  who lost his right eye when he lit

  a can of underarm deodorant.

  But when I lay awake at 2 a.m.

  as headlights swept the Solar System

  wallchart and the cooling pipework

  shifted in the floorspace, something else

  was moving through the dark beneath the bed.

  Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand

  pounds of muscle powering a hoop

  of butcher’s knives. The only animal

  that ate its weaker siblings in the womb.

  Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.

  And just as pious Catholics once fondled

  strips of cloth soaked in the hot fat

  of mar
tyrs, I’d run my hand across

  that photo of the fisherman from Cairns,

  his belly opened like a can of plum tomatoes.

  Even now, in lakes and rivers,

  or ten yards off the beach at Swanage,

  I remember what’s inside us all

  and sense, behind my back,

  that grey torpedo entering the shallows.

  Rings

  Horace Odes 1:9

  Look at soaring Mount Soracte

  brilliant with driven snow,

  the overburdened forest

  and the streams in chains.

  Thaliarchus, drive the cold away

  by heaping kindling on the fire

  then pour a generous double-handled

  Sabine jar of vintage wine.

  The gods will do the rest. They’ll calm

  the gales wrestling with one another

  on the boiling ocean. Then the cypress

  and the old ash will be still again.

  Forget tomorrow. Cherish everything

  chance gives to you today.

  You’re young, boy. Dance and love

  while sour old age holds off.

  Move quietly and hunt the squares

  and courtyards at the hour of dusk

  for squeals of laughter which betray

  the young girls hiding

  in the darkest corners.

  Then slip the rings and bracelets

  from their arms and fingers.

  They’ll complain. But not much.

  Black

  It comes as a surprise to find that hell

  is the same house you’ve lived in these nine years.

  Two orange stains beneath the kitchen taps,

  birdsong in the yard, those floral curtains.

  But you’re not at home. Not by a long way.

  That fist of wet meat in your chest

  will not let you forget. The seconds pass,

  as slow as that frozen age before the child

  hits the red bonnet of the skidding car.

  You light a Marlboro from the dog-end

  of the last. Outside, shoppers and workmen

  swim through their day like dolphins, ignorant

  of how they do this stupid, priceless trick

  you once knew. The phone rings. Your cigarette smoke

  does its poisonous little ballet.

  The Penguin

  Cotswold Wildlife Park, Burford

  It’s all too much. The white rhinoceros,

  The common shoveler, the Cuban tree frog.

  A whole world and every part of it

  a short walk from the tea-room.

  Pushchairs. Cornettos.

  A basin of blue concrete

  and a Humboldt penguin tumbling

  in three feet of dirty water.

  If only we could slip inside those eyes

  and find our way back

  to the pack-ice in the Weddell Sea.

  Instead we move on to the gibbons.

  The daylight hammers on and off.

  Mountains explode,

  bleeding black smoke downwind.

  Tides pulse on the coast.

  Tracks radiate

  from settlements, leaping

  the firebreaks of gorge and firth

  to seed another, then another.

  Forests burn.

  Fields. Pipelines. Roads.

  The brief nights

  blaze like lava.

  Lines blur. The lava cools.

  Green takes it all back.

  Forests thicken. Tides pulse.

  The daylight hammers on and off.

  Days

  Horace Odes 1:11

  Leuconoë, stop examining your

  Babylonian horoscopes

  and wondering what kind of death

  the gods have got in mind for us.

  We’ll never know. Accept it.

  This winter pummeling the ocean

  on the pumice rocks of Tuscany

  may be our last.

  Or not. Be sensible and pour the wine.

  This life’s too short for longing

  and the clock spins as we speak.

  Days come and go. Hold on to this one.

  The River-Car

  The way it’s parked, nose-down between the wet rocks

  in the leaf-light of the gorge, water pouring

  through the windscreen and the tires blown;

  as if the naiads put their fairy horses

  out to grass and cruised the night in silver Escorts.

  Or as if three boys from Hebden Bridge

  grew bored and stole a car and drove it halfway

  to the moors, grew bored again, then rolled it

  from the muddy track and watched it hammer

  through the trees until it came to rest

  a hundred yards below. And as the echo

  died away, the car they drove in dreams

  kept floating downstream and the boys they’d never be

  rode every bend of starlit water to the ocean.

  Galatea

  That first ripple in the marble.

  Her hand on his wrist like a tame bird.

  Her eyes opening. The big skylight,

  the white-washed walls, the brace of chisels.

  A baby’s mind inside a woman’s body,

  playing Peep-Bo with a nurse, then bathed

  and toweled dry and taken to his bedroom

  as a sweetmeat when the guests have gone.

  Christmas Night, 1930

  The party’s over. Downstairs the monsters

  of cigar-smoke and society-talk

  coil and uncoil among the tissue paper

  and the tangerine peel.

  This was your room once. The crib.

  The mirror. Your painting of a flower.

  Only the initials on the shaving kit

  connect you to the man that you’ve become.

  In the kitchen your mother’s ghost

  soaps the greasy plates and hauls

  the turkey carcass to the pantry

  so that she can scrub the table clean.

  In the black square of the window

  it hovers again. Dog or deer.

  The animal that terrified you once.

  But you can hear what it’s saying now.

  So take the curtains. Take the bowl

  with blue stripes and the white cloth

  on the dresser. Take the silence.

  This is all you’ll ever need.

  Step across the sill and walk

  into a night where the trees

  are on fire and the stone church

  dances on the dark.

  Lullaby

  for Edith (1908–2003)

  and her great-grandson, Zack (2003–)

  Starlight, star bright

  Lie in this cradle of night

  and sleep tight

  Sea shell, sea swell

  Ring the church bell

  for all is well

  Sundown, sunrise

  Nothing dies

  so close your eyes

  The Twilight Zone

  I’m in a tailback near Basingstoke,

  pondering the sad-dog brakelights

  of the V-reg Nissan up ahead,

  thinking how we never got

  the jet-packs or the protein pills

  and how they’d be as unremarkable

  as radios or Teflon. I’m thinking

  of the way time runs just fast enough

  to keep us entertained, but not so fast

  we spend the whole day dumbstruck

  by the fact that we can clone a sheep

  or eat a mango in the Wirral.

  Late October 1978.

  We’re smoking in The Friar’s Grill

  and playing with the cool, rotating cover

  of my newly purchased Led Zep III

  when, apropos of nothing, Nigel says

  that Mr. Rothermere’s dead.

&n
bsp; And sure enough, we find out later

  that he died as we were talking,

  falling down the stairwell of the school

  we’d left five years before.

  When we hear the news

  we feel like hunters from the lowlands

  of the Congo hearing Elvis Presley

  on a Walkman, petrified

  to think what devilry could squeeze

  him into such a small box.

  Which is when the sad-dog brakelights

  of the Nissan just ahead go out,

  the tailback dissolves, I put the Golf

  in gear and boldly go to Basingstoke.

  The Short Fuse

  Horace Odes 1:16

  More gorgeous daughter of a gorgeous mother,

  burn my poems if they injured you,

  or hurl them out into the Adriatic.

  Nothing churns the human heart like anger:

  not Apollo when inspiring the priestess

  in the shrine at Delphi,

  neither Cybele nor drunken Bacchus

  nor his cymbal-banging followers.

  And nothing, not the sword of Noricum,

  not the ship-devouring sea, not wildfire,

  not the terrifying storm of Jupiter himself

  descending, holds it back.

  They say Prometheus was forced

  to use a part of every animal

  when making Man, and put the short fuse

  of the savage lion in our guts.

  Anger brought Thyestes to his grisly end

  and goads all conquerors to raze

  great towns and arrogantly plough

  their walls into the earth.

  Don’t let yourself be swept away. The same fire

  burned in me when I was young, and wrecked

  those golden days by driving me to write

  those poems in the white heat of the moment.