Railroad North from London up to Worstedopolis.
Britannia, Old Mother Riley, bending down to pray,
The railway line’s the X-Ray of her twisted vertebrae.
I’m watching England rolling by; here a startled grouse
Shoots out from a siding, and there Sabbath-idle ploughs
Clogged in soggy furrows are seizing up with rain.
Life’s either still or scurrying away from the train.
Anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, perhaps the train’ll crash.
Anxious, anxious, anxious, Doctor Adgie, there’s a rash
The shape of bloody Britain and it’s starting to spread.
My belly’s like a blow-up globe all blotched with Empire red.
Chancres, chancres, Shetlands, spots, boils, Hebrides,
Atlasitis, Atlasitis, British Isles Disease!
The rot sets in at Retford and the stations beyond;
Coffles of coupled, rusty coaltrucks chalkmarked COND.
But at each abandoned station shunned like a suicide
There’s that loveliest of flourishers, the purple London Pride.
Though why the ‘proud’ metropolis should monopolize weeds
Beats me, when we’ve got millions more all over mucky Leeds,
Springing up wherever life is teetering on the brink
Like pensioned-off yours truly’s pickled in his drink.
With a bit of help off Bitter, I can do it on my own.
They can stuff their pink Somalgins and their Phenobarbitone,
O those lovely bubs that almost touched black chin and shiny knees,
Leaping up and down to drumming like hoop-jumping Pekinese!
Ay, it’s a pity all that’s over. From now on every night
It’s Whatsoever Thy Hand Findeth To Do, Do It With Thy Might.
Anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, perhaps the train’ll crash.
Anxious, anxious, anxious, Doctor Adgie, there’s a rash
The shape of bloody Britain and it’s starting to spread.
My belly’s like a blow-up globe all blotched with Empire red.
Chancres, chancres, Shetlands, spots, boils, Hebrides,
Atlasitis, Atlasitis, British Isles Disease.
Veni, vidi, vici, Death’s cackling in my ear.
And there he is a Caesar with an earth-caked Roman spear.
Queer sorts of dozes these are, where I’m nodding off to dream
Of being chased by Caesars and I wake up with a scream.
Must be that pork-pie I’ve eaten or the British Railways Ale.
Night behind the window. My coaster’s tan gone deathly pale.
It’s me! It’s me the fauna’s fleeing. Nothing’ll keep still.
My adrenalin moves Nature now and not God’s heavenly will.
Lean closer as the darkness grows. My vision’s fogged by breath
Clouding up the window as life’s clouded up by death.
Anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, perhaps the train’ll crash
Anxious, anxious, anxious, Doctor Adgie, there’s a rash
The shape of bloody Britain and it’s starting to spread.
My belly’s like a blow-up globe all blotched with Empire red.
Chancres, chancres, Shetlands, spots, boils, Hebrides,
Atlasitis, Atlasitis, British Isles Disease.
Death’s chuntered in my ear-hole since I was thirty five,
And I’ve guffawed at his stories but I’ve kept myself alive
Long enough to get fed up of the same old, worn-out joke.
Death, piss off, you shaggy dog, you proper natterpoke!
Nay! Come on, Julius Seizure, you black, buck bastard come.
I can hear those muffled heartbeats like a Yoruba drum.
And see the curving shadow of the sinister drumstick,
A bit of whittling that depicts an old man’s drooping prick,
Poised above the tautened heart, on the point of being played,
Just once, just once, and then I join the goners’ masquerade.
Anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, perhaps the train’ll crash.
Anxious, anxious, anxious, Doctor Adgie, there’s a rash
The shape of bloody Britain and it’s starting to spread.
My belly’s like a blow-up globe all blotched with Empire red.
Chancres, chancres, Shetlands, spots, boils, Hebrides,
Atlasitis, Atlasitis, British Isles Disease.
My transparent head and shoulders ringed with reading lights
Goes sliding over hillsides, graveyards, demolition sites.
I’m a sort of setting sun, all my light drawn in to shed
Only darkness on the living, only darkness on the dead.
Life the bright compartment between dark cattle trucks
Concertinaed in the crush like a bug between two books.
Night and silence, and the Scotsman rushing, second
Coupled to anxious, anxious SEcond … COND … COND … COND …
Schwiegermutterlieder
I
Mother and daughter German refugees
were not much wanted in nineteen
forty five. She had to skivvy for rich Jews
in Manchester’s posh ‘Palestine’.
I never really could believe
her story of your being thrown out
by some, one snowy Christmas Eve,
for having real wax candles on your conifer,
their children shouting: Kraut! Kraut!
Then I saw the hotel towels, the stolen
London café spoons,
bits of half-eaten Stollen,
casserole and cooking pans
packed hot from the oven.
Kleptomaniac,
dear Schwiegermutter,
did you have to pack
a lb Kosher butter?
I’ve seen her waltz
off with rare, bright plants she’s pinched
from Kew, but the good bed-linen
was her own, brought bunched
up in bundles from Berlin,
embroidered: Mein Heim ist Mein Stolz.
After 13 years she fished
out her treasures; none any use.
She gave us a perished
red-rubber douche.
II
After the wedding she insisted on
a head-and-shoulders photograph that just
got her real violets on your breast
but not your belly in.
She sang and spun round in a raven
black, hook-buttoned waitress dress.
She was in some sort of heaven,
Viennese with happiness,
her arms round everybody’s neck,
warbling from pre-war musicals,
and Rů-, Rů-, Růženka Maria, your name in Czech,
with cracked ecstatic trills. –
But dying uncle Bertolt
made his ’14–18 amputation tender
by stamping his tin foot, when he was told
you’d married an Engländer.
III
Else Crossfield, Dietzsch,
née Schubert – British bitch!
The Curtain Catullus
‘Frontiers oppress me … I want to wander as much as I like … to talk, even in a broken language, with everybody.’
(Yevtushenko, 1958)
Your fat, failed ballet dancer’s calves
Bulge left, right, left. I’m out of breath and stop
To get a peep in at the skirted halves,
Those pale four inches past the stocking top.
That sight’s more in my line. I’m not so sold
On all this Gothic and this old Baroque.
My fur hat tickles and I’m freezing cold.
I need a drink, a sit-down and a smoke.
I speak my one word of your language: thanks!
Let’s kiss. You laugh a
nd pivot on one toe
To point out Hus still preaching, Russian tanks,
And Kafka’s ball-less eyes caked up with snow.
I glance round for my tail. We met head-on
In one blind alley, face to face. We grinned
And nodded and went on. I hope he’s gone.
He’d shop us if he saw my bourgeois hand
Slide down the zip-line of your dress and pass
The vertebrae, your parted Party lips
Against my lips. Relax! No cause or class
Can take the pleasure from between your hips.
Astraea! Stalin’s chocolate-Santa-Claus-
like statue’s made piecemeal. Descend! Descend!
We’re human, young, and lustful, sick of wars.
I want this gorgeous red bird for my friend.
Descend like a snow maiden from the air.
Fill Chrysostom’s or Basil’s empty niche,
Crumple stiff Nelson in Trafalgar Square.
Hear masses shouting: Goddess! bosses: Bitch!
We know you foreign Mata Hari whores.
I’m tired of stone bodies. I want yours.
Security’s embarrassing, bored noise
Booms in these cracked cupolas: Avoid,
Avoid glad eyes, come-hithers, girl’s or boy’s.
Beware Caucasian and Mongoloid …
Above all, please remember Gerald Brooke.
O I could see the flags, red, white and blue,
And Red struck to half-mast for a fuck
Between a caught-out couple like us two.
Your body plumped by bread and dumplings strains
Against your imitation bearskin as you peer
Upwards at huge saints, your peach neck cranes
At some Church soldier launching a gold spear
Against the Turk. One lurking Infidel
Is herded by Christ’s army into Hell.
I’m tired. Natasha! Olga! Masha! Come
To my bugged bedroom. Leave mausoleum,
Church, museum be. Leave your clothes there – Cold War
Bashing its dead torches on our door.
The Bedbug
Comrade, with your finger on the playback switch,
Listen carefully to each love-moan,
And enter in the file which cry is real, and which
A mere performance for your microphone.
Curtain Sonnets
1. Guava Libre
for Jane Fonda,
Leningrad, 1975
Pickled Gold Coast clitoridectomies?
Labia minora in formaldehyde?
A rose pink death mask of a screen cult kiss,
Marilyn’s mouth or vulva mummified?
Lips cropped off a poet. That’s more like.
That’s almost the sort of poet I think I am.
The lips of Orpheus fished up by a dyke
singing ‘Women of Cuba Libre and Vietnam!’
The taste, though, taste! Ah, that could only be
(‘Women! Women! O abajo men,
the thought of it’s enough to make you come!’)
the honeyed yoni of Eurydice
and I am Orpheus going down again –
Thanks for the guavas soaked in Cuban rum.
2. The Viewless Wings
(Monkwood, Grimley)
The hungry generations’ new decree
turns Worcester orchards into fields of sage.
Tipsy, courtesy cheap wine and EEC,
I hear, as unaware of ours as Keats’s age,
the same blithe bird but its old magic fails
and my longing for you now is just as bad
at England’s northern edge for nightingales
as those White Nights last year in Leningrad,
where, packed for my flight back, thick curtains drawn
but night too like full day to get much kip,
I wanted you to watch with me from bed
that seamless merger of half dusk and dawn,
AURORA, rosy-fingered kind, and battleship
whose sudden salvo turned the East half red.
3. Summer Garden
Winter false dawns woke me: thud! thud! thud!
Lorries loaded with chipped ice and not quite four!
Felt-swathed babushkas stooping to chip more –
Leningrad’s vast pool of widowhood,
who also guard the Rembrandts and rank Gents,
who stand all day with stern unbending gaze
haloed with Tsars’ crowns and Fabergés,
their menfolk melted down to monuments.
It’s their eyes make me shy I’ve fallen for
a woman who they’d chorus at nyet! nyet!
and make me edgy walking here with you
between the statues VERITAS, HONOR,
and PSYCHE whom strong passion made forget
conditions of darkness and the gods’ taboo.
4. The People’s Palace
Shuffling in felt goloshes saves the floor
from the unexpected guests of history
who queue all day to see what once was for
the fruits of just one bonsai family tree.
IUSTITIA and POMONA in their crates.
Come winter and the art, all cordoned off,
’s wired to a US import anti-theft device
and opened only for researching prof.
and patineur from Academe who skates
those ballrooms patterned like cracked Baikal ice
buffing the princely parquets for the few
who’ll see them reproduced in some review.
Watch that elegant glissade as he yahoos
into the soundproof pile of overshoes.
5. Prague Spring
on my birthday, 30 April
A silent scream? The madrigal’s top note?
Puking his wassail on the listening throng?
Mouthfuls of cumulus, then cobalt throat.
Medusa must have hexed him in mid-song.
The finest vantage point in all of Prague’s
this gagging gargoyle’s with the stone-locked lute,
leaning over cherries, blow-ups of Karl Marx
the pioneers ’ll march past and salute.
Tomorrow’s May but still a North wind scuffs
the plated surface like a maced cuirass,
lays on, lays off, gets purchase on and roughs
up the Vltava, then makes it glass.
The last snow of this year’s late slow thaw
dribbles as spring saliva down his jaw.
The Nuptial Torches
‘These human victims, chained and burning at the stake, were the blazing torches which lighted the monarch to his nuptial couch.’
(J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic)
Fish gnaw the Flushing capons, hauled from fleeced
Lutheran Holland, for tomorrow’s feast.
The Netherlandish lengths, the Dutch heirlooms,
That might have graced my movements and my groom’s
Fade on the fat sea’s bellies where they hung
Like cover-sluts. Flesh, wet linen wrung
Bone dry in a washerwoman’s raw, red,
Twisting hands, bed-clothes off a lovers’ bed,
Falls off the chains. At Valladolid
It fell, flesh crumpled like a coverlid.
Young Carlos de Sessa stripped was good
For a girl to look at and he spat like wood
Green from the orchards for the cooking pots.
Flames ravelled up his flesh into dry knots
And he cried at the King: How can you stare
On such agonies and not turn a hair?
The king was cool: My friend, I’d drag the logs
Out to the stake for my own son, let dogs
Get at his testes for his sins; auto-da-fés
Owe no paternity to evil ways.
Cabrera leans against the throne, guffaws
And jots down to the
Court’s applause
Yet another of the King’s bon mots.
O yellow piddle in fresh fallen snow –
Dogs on the Guadarramas … dogs. Their souls
Splut through their pores like porridge holes.
They wear their skins like cast-offs. Their skin grows
Puckered round the knees like rumpled hose.
Doctor Ponce de la Fuente, you,
Whose gaudy, straw-stuffed effigy in lieu
Of members hacked up in the prison, burns
Here now, one sacking arm drops off, one turns
A stubble finger and your skull still croons
Lascivious catches and indecent tunes;
And croaks: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Pray God be with you in your lust.
And God immediately is, but such a one
Whose skin stinks like a herring in the sun,
Huge from confinement in a filthy gaol,
Crushing the hooping on my farthingale.
O Holy Mother, Holy Mother, Ho-
ly Mother Church, whose melodious, low
Labour-moans go through me as you bear
These pitch-stained children to the upper air,
Let them lie still tonight, no crowding smoke
Condensing back to men float in and poke
Their charcoaled fingers at our bed, and let
Me be his pleasure, though Philip sweat
At his rhythms and use those hateful tricks
They say he feels like after heretics.
O let the King be gentle and not loom
Like Torquemada in the torture room,
Those wiry Spanish hairs, these nuptial nights,
Crackling like lit tapers in his tights,
His seed like water spluttered off hot stone.
Maria, whose dark eyes very like my own
Shine on such consummations, Maria bless
My Philip just this once with gentleness.
The King’s cool knuckles on my smoky hair!
Mare Mediterraneum, la mer, la mer
That almost got him in your gorge with sides
Of feastmeats, you must flush this scared bride’s
Uterus with scouring salt. O cure and cool
The scorching birthmarks of his branding-tool.
Sweat chills my small breasts and limp hands.
They curled like foetuses, maman, and cried.
His crusted tunics crumple as he stands:
Come, Isabella. God is satisfied.
Newcastle is Peru
‘Correct your maps: Newcastle is Peru!’