DON PATERSON
Selected Poems
Contents
Title Page
from NIL NIL (1993)
The Ferryman’s Arms
Morning Prayer
Filter
from Exeunt: Curtains
Heliographer
Sunset, Visingsö
Sisters
An Elliptical Stylus
Amnesia
The Trans-Siberian Express
Wind-Tunnel
Poem
Bedfellows
Nil Nil
from GOD’S GIFT TO WOMEN (1997)
Addenda
00:00: Law Tunnel
from 1001 Nights: The Early Years
The Scale of Intensity
11:00: Baldovan
Les Six
A Private Bottling
The End
God’s Gift to Women
The Lover
Imperial
On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him
from Advice to Young Husbands
14:50: Rosekinghall
Candlebird
02:50: Newtyle
from THE EYES (1999)
Advice
Chords
Dream
The Eyes
Profession of Faith
Meditation
Nothing
from One Day’s Poem
Paradoxes
Poem
Poetry
Promethean
Road
Siesta
Sigh
from LANDING LIGHT (2003)
Luing
St Brides: Sea-Mail
Sliding on Loch Ogil
Waking with Russell
The Thread
The Forest of the Suicides
The Hunt
Letter to the Twins
A Fraud
The Reading
The Rat
The Box
A Gift
The Wreck
Twinflooer
’96
The Light
The Landing
Zen Sang at Dayligaun
The White Lie
from ORPHEUS (2006)
Leaving
Tone
Horseman
Taste
The Dead
Dog
Horse
The Race
Breath
Anemone
The Ball
The Passing
The Flowers
The Drinking Fountain
The Cry
Time
Being
from RAIN (2009)
Two Trees
The Error
The Swing
Why Do You Stay Up So Late?
The Circle
The Lie
Correctives
Song for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze
The Story of the Blue Flower
Parallax
The Day
Phantom
Rain
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
from
NIL NIL
The Ferryman’s Arms
About to sit down with my half-pint of Guinness
I was magnetized by a remote phosphorescence
and drawn, like a moth, to the darkened back room
where a pool-table hummed to itself in the corner.
With ten minutes to kill and the whole place deserted
I took myself on for the hell of it. Slotting
a coin in the tongue, I looked round for a cue –
while I stood with my back turned, the balls were deposited
with an abrupt intestinal rumble; a striplight
batted awake in its dusty green cowl.
When I set down the cue-ball inside the parched D
it clacked on the slate; the nap was so threadbare
I could screw back the globe, given somewhere to stand.
As physics itself becomes something negotiable
a rash of small miracles covers the shortfall.
I went on to make an immaculate clearance.
A low punch with a wee dab of side, and the black
did the vanishing trick while the white stopped
before gently rolling back as if nothing had happened,
shouldering its way through the unpotted colours.
The boat chugged up to the little stone jetty
without breaking the skin of the water, stretching,
as black as my stout, from somewhere unspeakable
to here, where the foaming lip mussitates endlessly,
trying, with a nutter’s persistence, to read
and re-read the shoreline. I got aboard early,
remembering the ferry would leave on the hour
even for only my losing opponent;
but I left him there, stuck in his tent of light, sullenly
knocking the balls in, for practice, for next time.
Morning Prayer
after Rimbaud
I spend my life sitting, like an angel at the barber’s,
with a mug in one hand, fag in the other,
my froth-slabbered face in the gantry mirror
while the smoke towels me down, warm and white.
On the midden of desire, the old dreams
still hold their heat, ferment, gently ignite –
once, my heart had thrown its weight behind them
but it saps itself now, stews in its own juice.
Having stomached my thoughts like a horrible linctus
– swilled down with, oh, fifteen, twenty pints –
I am roused only by the most bitter necessities:
then, the air high with the smell of opened cedar,
I pish gloriously into the dawn skies
while below me the spattered ferns nod their assent.
Filter
Thrown out in a glittering arc
as clear as the winterbourne,
the jug of Murphy’s I threw back
goes hissing off the stone.
Whatever I do with all the black
is my business alone.
from Exeunt
CURTAINS
You stop at the tourist office in Aubeterre,
a columbarium of files and dockets.
She explains, while you flip through the little leaflets
about the chapel and the puppet-theatre,
that everything is boarded up till spring,
including – before you can ask – the only hotel.
A moped purrs through the unbroken drizzle.
You catch yourself checking her hands for rings.
She prepares a light supper; you chat,
her fussy diction placing words in air
like ice in water. She leads you to her room
but gets the shivers while you strip her bare;
lifting her head, you watch her pupils bloom
into the whole blue iris, then the white.
Heliographer
I thought we were sitting in the sky.
My father decoded the world beneath:
our tenement, the rival football grounds,
the long bridges, slung out across the river.
Then I gave myself a fright
with the lemonade bottle. Clunk –
the glass thread butting my teeth
as I bolted my mouth to the lip.
Naw … copy me. It’s how the grown-ups drink.
Propped in my shaky,
single-handed grip,
I tilted the bottle towards the sun
until it detonated with light,
my lips pursed like a trumpeter’s.
Sunset, Visingsö
after Jørn-Erik Berglund
The lake has simplified
to one sleep-wave
bounced between shores.
All evening,
as superstition requires,
my eyes have not left it –
the fabulous animal
I will flay for the colour
its skin grows when it dreams.
Sisters
for Eva
Back then, our well of tenements
powered the black torch that could find
the moon at midday: four hours later
the stars would be squandered on us.
*
As the sun spread on her freckled back
I felt as if I’d turned the corner
to a bright street, scattered with coins;
for weeks, I counted them over and over.
*
In a dark kitchen, my ears still burning,
I’d dump the lilo, binoculars, almanac
and close the door on the flourishing mess
of Arabic and broken lines.
*
Though she swears they’re not identical
when I dropped her sister at the airport
my palms hurt as she spoke my name
and I bit my tongue back when I kissed her.
*
Nowadays, having shrunk the sky
to a skull-sized planetarium
– all fairy-lights and yawning voice-overs –
I only stay up for novae, or comets.
*
Some mornings I wake, and fantasize
I’ve slipped into her husband’s place
as he breathes at her back, sliding his tongue
through Fomalhaut and the Southern Cross.
An Elliptical Stylus
My uncle was beaming: ‘Aye, yer elliptical stylus –
fairly brings out a’ the wee details.’
Balanced at a fraction of an ounce
the fat cartridge sank down like a feather;
music billowed into three dimensions
as if we could have walked between the players.
My Dad, who could appreciate the difference,
went to Largs to buy an elliptical stylus
for our ancient, beat-up Philips turntable.
We had the guy in stitches: ‘You can’t …
Er … you’ll have to upgrade your equipment.’
Still smirking, he sent us from the shop
with a box of needles, thick as carpet-tacks,
the only sort they made to fit our model.
(Supposing I’d been his son: let’s eavesdrop
on ‘Fidelities’, the poem I’m writing now:
The day my father died, he showed me how
he’d prime the deck for optimum performance:
it’s that lesson I recall – how he’d refine
the arm’s weight, to leave the stylus balanced
somewhere between ellipsis and precision,
as I gently lower the sharp nip to the line
and wait for it to pick up the vibration
till it moves across the page, like a cardiograph …)
We drove back slowly, as if we had a puncture;
my Dad trying not to blink, and that man’s laugh
stuck in my head, which is where the story sticks,
and any attempt to cauterize this fable
with something axiomatic on the nature
of articulacy and inheritance,
since he can well afford to make his own
excuses, you your own interpretation.
But if you still insist on resonance –
I’d swing for him, and every other cunt
happy to let my father know his station,
which probably includes yourself. To be blunt.
Amnesia
I was, as they later confirmed, a very sick boy.
The star performer at the meeting-house,
my eyes rolled back to show the whites, my arms
outstretched in catatonic supplication
while I gibbered impeccably in the gorgeous tongues
of the aerial orders. On Tuesday nights, before
I hit the Mission, I’d nurse my little secret:
Blind Annie Spall, the dead evangelist
I’d found still dying in creditable squalor
above the fishmonger’s in Rankine Street.
The room was ripe with gurry and old sweat;
from her socket in the greasy mattress, Annie
while I prayed loudly, absently enlarging
the crater that I’d gouged in the soft plaster.
Her eyes had been put out before the war,
just in time to never see the daughter
with the hare-lip and the kilt of dirty dishtowels
who ran the brothel from the upstairs flat
and who’d chap to let me know my time was up,
then lead me down the dark hall, its zoo-smell,
her slippers peeling off the sticky lino.
At the door, I’d shush her quiet, pressing
my bus-fare earnestly into her hand.
Four years later. Picture me: drenched in patchouli,
strafed with hash-burns, casually arranged
on Susie’s bed. Smouldering frangipani;
Dali’s The Persistence of Memory;
pink silk loosely knotted round the lamp
to soften the light; a sheaf of Penguin Classics,
their spines all carefully broken in the middle;
a John Martyn album mumbling through the speakers.
One hand was jacked up her skirt, the other trailing
over the cool wall behind the headboard
where I found the hole in the plaster again.
The room stopped like a lift. Sue went on talking.
It was a nightmare, Don. We had to gut the place.
The Trans-Siberian Express
for Eva
One day we will make our perfect journey –
the great train smashing through Dundee, Brooklyn
and off into the endless tundra,
the earth flattening out before us.
I follow your continuous arrival,
shedding veil after veil after veil –
the automatic doors wincing away
while you stagger back from the buffet
slopping Laphroaig and decent coffee
until you face me from that long enfilade
of glass, stretched to vanishing point
like facing mirrors, a lifetime of days.
Wind-Tunnel
Sometimes, in autumn, the doors between the days
fall open; in any other season
this would be a dangerous mediumship
though now there is just the small exchange of air
as from one room to another. A street
becomes a faint biography: you walk
through a breath of sweetpea, pipesmoke, an old perfume.
But one morning, the voices carry from everywhere:
from the first door and the last, two whistling draughts
zero in with such unholy dispatch
you do not scorch the sheets, or wake your wife.
Poem
after Ladislav Skala
The ship pitched in the rough sea
and I could bear it no longer
so I closed my eyes
and imagined myself on a ship
in a rough sea-crossing.
The woman rose up below me
and I could bear it no longer
so I closed my eyes
and imagined myself making love
to the very same woman.
When I came into the world
I closed my eyes
and imagined my own birth.
Still
I have not opened my eyes to this world.
B
edfellows
An inch or so above the bed
the yellow blindspot hovers
where the last incumbent’s greasy head
has worn away the flowers.
Every night I have to rest
my head in his dead halo;
I feel his heart tick in my wrist;
then, below the pillow,
his suffocated voice resumes
its dreary innuendo:
there are other ways to leave the room
than the door and the window
Nil Nil
Just as any truly accurate representation of a particular geography can only exist on a scale of 1:1 (imagine the vast, rustling map of Burgundy, say, settling over it like a freshly starched sheet!) so it is with all our abandoned histories, those ignoble lines of succession that end in neither triumph nor disaster, but merely plunge on into deeper and deeper obscurity; only in the infinite ghost-libraries of the imagination – their only possible analogue – can their ends be pursued, the dull and terrible facts finally authenticated.
François Aussemain, Pensées
From the top, then, the zenith, the silent footage:
McGrandle, majestic in ankle-length shorts,
his golden hair shorn to an open book, sprinting
the length of the park for the long hoick forward,
his balletic toe-poke nearly bursting the roof
of the net; a shaky pan to the Erskine St End
where a plague of grey bonnets falls out of the clouds.
But ours is a game of two halves, and this game
the semi they went on to lose; from here
it’s all down, from the First to the foot of the Second,