McGrandle, Visocchi and Spankie detaching
like bubbles to speed the descent into pitch-sharing,
pay-cuts, pawned silver, the Highland Division,
the absolute sitters ballooned over open goals,
the dismal nutmegs, the scores so obscene
no respectable journal will print them; though one day
Farquhar’s spectacular bicycle-kick
will earn him a name-check in Monday’s obituaries.
Besides the one setback – the spell of giant-killing
in the Cup (Lochee Violet, then Aberdeen Bon Accord,
the deadlock with Lochee Harp finally broken
by Farquhar’s own-goal in the replay)
nothing inhibits the fifty-year slide
into Sunday League, big tartan flasks,
open hatchbacks parked squint behind goal-nets,
the half-time satsuma, the dog on the pitch,
then the Boys’ Club, sponsored by Skelly Assurance,
then Skelly Dry Cleaners, then nobody;
stud-harrowed pitches with one-in-five inclines,
grim fathers and perverts with Old English Sheepdogs
lining the touch, moaning softly.
Now the unrefereed thirty-a-sides,
terrified fat boys with callipers minding
four jackets on infinite, notional fields;
ten years of dwindling, half-hearted kickabouts
leaves two little boys – Alastair Watt,
who answers to ‘Forty’, and wee Horace Madden,
so smelly the air seems to quiver above him –
playing desperate two-touch with a bald tennis ball
in the hour before lighting-up time.
Alastair cheats, and goes off with the ball
leaving wee Horace to hack up a stone
and dribble it home in the rain;
past the stopped swings, the dead shanty-town
of allotments, the black shell of Skelly Dry Cleaners
and into his cul-de-sac, where, accidentally,
he neatly back-heels it straight into the gutter
then tries to swank off like he meant it.
Unknown to him, it is all that remains
of a lone fighter-pilot, who, returning at dawn
to find Leuchars was not where he’d left it,
took time out to watch the Sidlaws unsheathed
from their great black tarpaulin, the haar burn off Tayport
and Venus melt into Carnoustie, igniting
the shoreline; no wind, not a cloud in the sky
and no one around to admire the discretion
of his unscheduled exit: the engine plopped out
and would not re-engage, sending him silently
twirling away like an ash-key,
his attempt to bail out only partly successful,
yesterday having been April the 1st –
the ripcord unleashing a flurry of socks
like a sackful of doves rendered up to the heavens
in private irenicon. He caught up with the plane
on the ground, just at the instant the tank blew
and made nothing of him, save for his fillings,
his tackets, his lucky half-crown and his gallstone,
now anchored between the steel bars of a stank
that looks to be biting the bullet on this one.
In short, this is where you get off, reader;
I’ll continue alone, on foot, in the failing light,
following the trail as it steadily fades
into road-repairs, birdsong, the weather, nirvana,
the plot thinning down to a point so refined
not even the angels could dance on it. Goodbye.
from
GOD’S GIFT TO WOMEN
Addenda
Scott Paterson, b. – d. Oct. ’65
(i)
The Gellyburn is six feet under;
they sunk a pipe between its banks,
tricked it in and turfed it over.
We heard it rush from stank to stank,
Ardler Wood to the Caird Estate.
Scott said when you crossed the river
you saw sparks; if you ran at it
something snagged on the line of water.
(ii)
It was Scott who found the one loose knot
from the thousand dead eyes in the fence,
and inside, the tiny silver lochan
with lilies, green rushes, and four swans.
A true artist, he set his pitch:
uncorking the little show for tuppence
he’d count a minute on his watch
while a boy set his eye to the light.
(iii)
One week he was early, and turned up
at the Foot Clinic in Kemback Street
to see a little girl parade
before the Indian doctor, stripped
down to just her underthings.
Now he dreams about her every night
working through his stretches: The Mermaid;
The Swan; The Tightrope-Walker; Wings.
(iv)
They leave the party, arm in arm
to a smore so thick, her voice comes
to him as if from a small room;
their footprints in the creaking snow
the love-pact they affirm and reaffirm.
Open for fags, the blazing kiosk
crowns old Jock in asterisks.
He is a saint, and Scott tells him so.
00:00: Law Tunnel
leased to the Scottish Mushroom Company after its closure in 1927
(i)
In the airy lull
between the wars
they cut the rails
and closed the doors
on the stalled freight:
crate on crate
of blood and earth –
the shallow berth
of the innocents,
their long room
stale and tense
with the same dream
(ii)
Strewn among
the ragged queue –
the snoring king
and his retinue,
Fenrir, Pol Pot,
Captain Oates
and the leprechauns –
are the teeth, the bones
and begging-cup
of the drunken piper.
The rats boiled up
below the sleepers
(iii)
The crippled boy
of Hamelin
pounds away
at the locked mountain
waist-deep in thorn
and all forlorn,
he tries to force
the buried doors
I will go to my mother
and sing of my shame
I will grow up to father
the race of the lame
from 1001 Nights: The Early Years
The male muse is paid in silences. Shahrāzād could not have been bought for less than a minor Auschwitz.
Erszébet Szanto
Dawn, and I woke up grieving for my arm
long dead below the little drunken carcass
still shut in her drunk dream. In mine, I recall,
I was fixing a stamp in a savings-book, half-full
of the same heavenly profile, a vast harem
of sisters, each one day younger than the last …
Heaven, to bed the same new wife each night!
And I try; but morning always brings her back
changed, although I recognise the room:
my puddled suit, her dog-eared Kerouac,
draped on the wineglass. I killed the alarm,
then took her head off with the kitchen knife
and no more malice than I might a rose
for my daily buttonhole. One hand, like a leaf,
still flutters in half-hearted valedicti
on.
I am presently facing the wall, nose-to-nose
with Keanu Reeves. It is a sad reflection.
The Scale of Intensity
1) Not felt. Smoke still rises vertically. In sensitive individuals, déjà vu, mild amnesia. Sea like a mirror.
2) Detected by persons at rest or favourably placed, i.e. in upper floors, hammocks, cathedrals, etc. Leaves rustle.
3) Light sleepers wake. Glasses chink. Hairpins, paperclips display slight magnetic properties. Irritability. Vibration like passing of light trucks.
4) Small bells ring. Small increase in surface tension and viscosity of certain liquids. Domestic violence. Furniture overturned.
5) Heavy sleepers wake. Pendulum clocks stop. Public demonstrations. Large flags fly. Vibration like passing of heavy trucks.
6) Large bells ring. Bookburning. Aurora visible in daylight hours. Unprovoked assaults on strangers. Glassware broken. Loose tiles fly from roof.
7) Weak chimneys broken off at roofline. Waves on small ponds, water turbid with mud. Unprovoked assaults on neighbours. Large static charges built up on windows, mirrors, television screens.
8) Perceptible increase in weight of stationary objects: books, cups, pens heavy to lift. Fall of stucco and some masonry. Systematic rape of women and young girls. Sand craters. Cracks in wet ground.
9) Small trees uprooted. Bathwater drains in reverse vortex. Wholesale slaughter of religious and ethnic minorities. Conspicuous cracks in ground. Damage to reservoirs and underground pipelines.
10) Large trees uprooted. Measurable tide in puddles, teacups, etc. Torture and rape of small children. Irreparable damage to foundations. Rails bend. Sand shifts horizontally on beaches.
11) Standing impossible. Widespread self-mutilation. Corposant visible on pylons, lampposts, metal railings. Waves seen on ground surface. Most bridges destroyed.
12) Damage total. Movement of hour hand perceptible. Large rock masses displaced. Sea white.
11:00: Baldovan
Base Camp. Horizontal sleet. Two small boys
have raised the steel flag of the 20 terminus:
me and Ross Mudie are going up the Hilltown
for the first time ever on our own.
I’m weighing up my spending power: the shillings,
tanners, black pennies, florins with bald kings,
the cold blazonry of a half-crown, threepenny bits
like thick cogs, making them chank together in my pockets.
I plan to buy comics,
sweeties, and magic tricks.
However, I am obscurely worried, as usual,
over matters of procedure, the protocol of travel,
and keep asking Ross the same questions:
where we should sit, when to pull the bell, even
if we have enough money for the fare,
whispering, Are ye sure? Are ye sure?
I cannot know the little good it will do me;
the bus will let us down in another country
with the wrong streets and streets that suddenly forget
their names at crossroads or in building-sites
and where no one will have heard of the sweets we ask for
and the man will shake the coins from our fists onto the counter
and call for his wife to come through, come through and see this
and if we ever make it home again, the bus
will draw into the charred wreck of itself
and we will enter the land at the point we left off
only our voices sound funny and all the houses are gone
and the rain tastes like kelly and black waves fold in
very slowly at the foot of Macalpine Road
and our sisters and mothers are fifty years dead.
Les Six
(i)
with Cocteau (far left); Georges Auric was briefly sent
to Coventry following the ‘umbrella’ incident.
(ii)
with Cocteau (second from the left), in the ‘Chinese’
parlour, chez Laloy. One assumes that Poulenc sneezed.
(iii)
with Cocteau (centre left): the six friends share a joke
at de Beaumont’s. Honegger obscured by his own pipe-smoke.
(iv)
with Cocteau (centre right), May ’31. Absent
is Tailleferre, by this time heavily enceinte.
(v)
with Cocteau (under piano), rehearsing for Lilith,
Milhaud having failed to return from Hammersmith.
(vi)
with Cocteau (far right): late-night horseplay at Le Boeuf.
Durey is represented by his photograph.
A Private Bottling
So I will go, then. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.
Antonio Porchia
Back in the same room that an hour ago
we had led, lamp by lamp, into the darkness
I sit down and turn the radio on low
as the last girl on the planet still awake
reads a dedication to the ships
I carefully arrange a chain of nips
in a big fairy-ring; in each square glass
the tincture of a failed geography,
its dwindled burns and woodlands, whin-fires, heather,
the sklent of its wind and its salty rain,
the love-worn habits of its working-folk,
the waveform of their speech, and by extension
how they sing, make love, or take a joke.
So I have a good nose for this sort of thing.
Then I will suffer kiss after fierce kiss
letting their gold tongues slide along my tongue
as each gives up, in turn, its little song
of the patient years in glass and sherry-oak,
the shy negotiations with the sea,
air and earth, the trick of how the peat-smoke
was shut inside it, like a black thought.
Tonight I toast her with the extinct malts
of Ardlussa, Ladyburn and Dalintober
and an ancient pledge of passionate indifference:
Ochon o do dhóigh mé mo chlairsach ar a shon,
wishing her health, as I might wish her weather.
When the circle is closed and I have drunk myself sober
I will tilt the blinds a few degrees, and watch
the dawn grow in a glass of liver-salts,
wait for the birds, the milk-float’s sweet nothings,
then slip back to the bed where she lies curled,
replace the live egg of her burning ass
gently, in the cold nest of my lap,
as dead to her as she is to the world.
*
Here we are again; it is precisely
twelve, fifteen, thirty years down the road
and one turn higher up the spiral chamber
that separates the burnt ale and dark grains
of what I know, from what I can remember.
Now each glass holds its micro-episode
in permanent suspension, like a movie-frame
on acetate, until it plays again,
revivified by a suave connoisseurship
that deepens in the silence and the dark
to something like an infinite sensitivity.
This is no romantic fantasy: my father
used to know a man who’d taste the sea,
then leave his nets strung out along the bay
because there were no fish in it that day.
Everything is in everything else. It is a matter
of attunement, as once, through the hiss and backwash,
I steered the dial into the voice of God
slightly to the left of Hilversum,
half-drowned by some big, blurry waltz
the way some stars obscure their dwarf companions
for centuries, till someone thinks to look.
In the same way, I can isolate the feints
of feminine effluvia, carrion, shite,
those rogues and toxins only introduced
to give the composition a little weight
as rough harmonics do the violin-note
or Pluto, Cheiron and the lesser saints
might do to our lives, for all you know.
(By Christ, you would recognise their absence
as anyone would testify, having sunk
a glass of North British, run off a patent still
in some sleet-hammered satellite of Edinburgh:
a bleak spirit no amount of caramel
could sweeten or disguise, its after-effect
somewhere between a blanket-bath and a sad wank.
There is, no doubt, a bar in Lothian
where it is sworn upon and swallowed neat
by furloughed riggers and the Special Police,
men who hate the company of women.)
O whiskies of Long Island and Provence!
This little number catches at the throat
but is all sweetness in the finish: my tongue trips
first through burning brake-fluid, then nicotine,
pastis, Diorissimo and wet grass;
another is silk sleeves and lip-service