(John Cleveland)
‘Venient annis saecula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet & ingens pateat tellus,
Tethysque novos detegat orbes,
Nec sit terris ultima Thule.’
(Seneca, Medea, 375–9)
For defending in our Civil Wars
the King’s against the better cause,
Newcastle got its motto: FORTIT-
ER TRIUMPHANS DEFENDIT.
After Nigeria and Prague I come
back near to where I started from,
all my defences broken down
on nine or ten Newcastle Brown.
A sudden, stiff September breeze
blows off the sea along the quays
and chills us; autumn and I need
your shoulder with a desperate need.
A clumsy effort at control,
I faff with paper chips and coal,
and rake out with elaborate fuss
one whole summer’s detritus.
A good draught and the fire roars
like muted Disney dinosaurs,
and last week’s Sunday paper glows
yellowish, its urgent prose,
like flies across a carcass, spreads
and fattens on the voiceless dead.
A picture shows lobbed mortar bombs
smashing down Onitsha homes.
The fire sucks in the first cold air
under the coverage of massacre.
The fire chatters, almost flies,
a full-fledged bird of paradise.
I lay down, dizzy, drunk, alone,
life circling life like the Eddystone
dark sea, but lighting nothing; sense
nor centre, nor circumference.
A life-long, sick sixpennyworth
of appalling motion round the Earth;
scared, moonrocketing till Pop-
eye and blurred planets stop;
Switchback; Helter Skelter; Reel;
the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Big Wheel,
its million coloured lightbulbs one
red halo like an empty sun.
The Caterpillar; Hunslet Feast;
one hand on my first woman’s breast;
darkness; acceleration so
we’re desperate with vertigo;
then chained in solitary Chair-
o-planes through whistling air
as all the known Leeds landmarks blur
to something dark and circular.
Venus, Vulcan, Cupid stare
out vacantly on City Square,
and Deus iuvat impigros
above the bank where God helps those
who help themselves, declares
Leeds purposeful in its affairs.
Mercator; miles, school chapel glass
transparencies to blood and brass.
And Self Help Samuel Smiles was said
to have waltzed round our first bed
in our partitioned ballroom flat
with hardly room to swing a cat.
Worthies! Loiners! O King Dick
Oastler and his rhetoric,
and William Hey, the first to show
syphilis in utero.
O highlife crocodiles that went
round one palm tree in the bare cement!
The dizziness! That spiral stair
up St Vitus’s Cathedral; there
the golden cockerel and great Prague
before us like a catalogue;
slides. Bloodless mementos, all
Time-Life International.
And now with vistas like Earl Grey’s
I look out over life and praise
from my unsteady, sea-view plinth
each dark turn of the labyrinth
that might like a river suddenly
wind its widening banks into the sea
and Newcastle is Newcastle is New-
castle is Peru!
Swirled detritus and driftwood pass
in state the 1880 Sas-
inena Cold Storage Co.,
and Neptune gazes at the Tyne’s flow
seawards, where the sea-winds ‘boast
and bluster’ at the North East coast,
the sluggish Tyne meandering through
the staithes and shipyards of Peru.
Shadow girders faced with sun
shimmer like heaped bullion.
Commerce and contraceptives glide
and circle on the turning tide;
Plain, Gossamer and Fetherlite
and US Trojan, knotted tight,
ferry their unborn semen, free
for ever from discovery.
like spirochetes through dark brains,
tunnel the Andes, spiralling for zinc
and silver, gold and lead; drink
still makes me giddy; my mind whirls
through all my wanderings and girls
to one last city, whose black crest
shows all the universe at rest.
At rest! That last red flash
as life’s last ember turns to ash
and riddled dusts drop through the grate
around the heart. O celebrate,
as panic screws up each charged nerve
to cornering the next sharp swerve,
Earth, people, planets as they move
with all the gravity of love.
First this Victorian terrace, where
small scars of the last World War –
those wrought iron railings made
into shrapnel and grenade,
acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys,
victorious artillery –
are enough reminder that we brave
harsh opposition when we love.
This cluttered room, its chandelier
still spinning from the evening’s beer,
this poor, embattled fortress, this strong-
hold of love, that can’t last long
against the world’s bold cannonade
of loveless warfare and cold trade,
this bed, this fire, and lastly us,
naked, bold, adventurous.
Discovery! wart, mole, spot,
like outcrops on a snowfield, dot
these slopes of flesh my fingers ski
with circular dexterity.
This moment when my hand strays
your body like an endless maze,
returning and returning, you,
O you; you also are Peru.
And just as distant. Flashing stars
drop to the ashpit through the bars.
I’m back in Africa, at ease
under the splashed shade of four trees,
watching a muscled woman heave
huge headloads of dead wood; one bare leaf
for covering wilts in the heat,
curls, then flutters to her flat, cracked feet.
And round each complex of thatched huts
is a man-high cactus hedge that shuts
out intruders and the mortars thud
like a migraine in the compound mud.
Night comes, and as drunk as hell
I watch the heavens and fireflies, and can’t tell,
here at my Shangri-la, Pankshin,
where insects end and stars begin.
My fingerprints still lined with coal
send cold shudders through my soul.
Each whorl, my love-, my long life-line,
mine, inalienably mine,
lead off my body as they press
onwards into nothingness.
I see my grimy fingers smudge
everything they feel or touch.
The fire I laid and lit to draw
you downstairs to the second floor,
flickers and struts upon my bed.
And I’m left gazing at a full-page spread
of aggressively fine bosoms, nude
and tanned almost to négritude,
in the Colour Supplement’s Test
Yourself for Cancer of the Breast.
Durham
‘St Cuthbert’s shrine,
founded 999’
(mnemonic)
ANARCHY and GROW YOUR OWN
whitewashed on to crumbling stone
fade in the drizzle. There’s a man
handcuffed to warders in a black sedan.
A butcher dumps a sodden sack
of sheep pelts off his bloodied back,
then hangs the morning’s killings out,
cup-cum-muzzle on each snout.
I’ve watched where this ‘distinguished see’
takes off into infinity,
among transistor antennae,
and student smokers getting high,
and visiting Norwegian choirs
in raptures over Durham’s spires,
lifers, rapists, thieves, ant-size
circle and circle at their exercise.
And Quasimodo’s bird’s-eye view
of big wigs and their retinue,
a five car Rolls Royce motorcade
of judgement draped in Town Hall braid,
I’ve watched the golden maces sweep
from courtrooms to the Castle keep
through winding Durham, the elect
before whom ids must genuflect.
But some stay standing and at one
God’s irritating carrillon
brings you to me; I feel like the hunch-
back taking you for lunch;
then bed. All afternoon two church-
high prison helicopters search
for escapees down by the Wear
and seem as though they’re coming here.
Listen! Their choppers guillotine
all the enemies there’ve ever been
of Church and State, including me
for taking this small liberty.
Liberal, lover, communist,
Czechoslovakia, Cuba, grist,
grist for the power-driven mill
weltering in overkill.
And England? Quiet Durham? Threat
smokes off our lives like steam off wet
subsidences when summer rain
drenches the workings. You complain
that the machinery of sudden death,
Fascism, the hot bad breath
of Powers down small countries’ necks
shouldn’t interfere with sex.
They are sex, love, we must include
all these in love’s beatitude.
Bad weather and the public mess
drive us to private tenderness,
though I wonder if together we,
alone two hours, can ever be
love’s anti-bodies in the sick,
sick body politic.
At best we’re medieval masons, skilled
but anonymous within our guild,
at worst defendants hooded in a car
charged with something sinister.
On the status quo’s huge edifice
we’re just excrescences that kiss,
cathedral gargoyles that obtrude
their acts of ‘moral turpitude’.
But turpitude still keeps me warm
in foul weather as I head for home
down New Elvet, through the town,
past the butcher closing down,
hearing the belfry jumble time
out over Durham. As I climb
rain blankets the pithills, mist
the chalkings of the anarchist.
I wait for the six-five Plymouth train
glowering at Durham. First rain,
then hail, like teeth spit from a skull,
then fog obliterate it. As we pull
out of the station through the dusk and fog,
there, lighting up, is Durham, dog
chasing its own cropped tail,
University, Cathedral, Gaol.
Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast
for Jane
‘These rooms have been furnished by the League of Friends
For your comfort and rest while illness portends.
Take care of the things which from us you borrow
For others are certain to need them tomorrow.’
(Inscribed in the League of Friends rest room, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
‘C’est mon unique soutien au monde, à présent!’
(Arthur Rimbaud, 2 July 1891, Oeuvres, p. 528)
A Scottish & Newcastle clops
past the RVI and traffic stops
to let the anachronistic dray
turn right into the brewery.
Victoria, now that daylight’s gone,
whitens, and a Park lake swan
loops its pliant neck to scoff
the bits of sandwich floating off
the boathouse jetty. Empress, Queen,
here slender, beddable, your clean-
living family image drove
my mother venomously anti love,
and made her think the stillbirth just
retribution for our filthy lust;
our first (the one we married for)
red splashes on a LADIES floor …
inter urinam et faeces nasc-
imur … issues of blood. You ask,
as brought to bed you blench and bleed,
then scream, insisting that I read,
as blood comes out in spurts like piss,
a bit of Pride & Prejudice.
I will her breaths. Again! Again!
my daughter heaves in oxygen
and lives, each heaved breath
another lurch away from death,
each exhalation like death throes,
a posser squelched down on wet clothes,
and the only sign of life I see
is a spitting tracheotomy.
When you’re conscious, Jane, we’ll read
how that caparisoned, white steed
helped the younger son get past
leafage clinging like Elastoplast
and win through to bestow the kiss
that works the metamorphosis.
But frogs stay frogs, the briar grows
thicker and thicker round the rose.
I stoop to kiss away your pain
through stuff like florist’s cellophane,
but my kiss can’t make you less
the helpless prey of Nothingness –
ring-a-ring-a-roses … love
goes gravewards but does move.
Love’s not something you can hoard
against the geriatric ward.
Mother, all, all, of us in this
brave trophallaxis of a kiss
that short-circuits generations scent
mortality’s rich nutriment.
The waiting room’s an airless place
littered with comics: Spectre; Space;
Adventure; love and hate
in AD 3068:
interplanetary affairs
policed by Superlegionaires:
STONE BOY of the planet Zwen
who turns to stone and back again,
and BRAINIAC, space-genius,
who finds Earth’s labs ridiculous,
and MATTER-EATER-LAD resist
the mad, moon-exiled scientist –
Dr MANTIS MORLO! Will he smash
our heroes into lunar ash?
Air! Air! There’s not enough
air in this small world. I’ll suf-
focate. Air! Air! – In each black
PVC disposal sack,
I see two of my dimensions gone
into a flat oblivion.
Weightless, like a stranger caught
loosely flapping on my mother’s grate,
down corridors, a shadow man,
I almost sleepwalk, float past An-
aesthesia, X-Ray, Speech
Therapy an
d, come full circle, reach
again the apparatus where you lie
between the armless and the eyeless boy.
I sicken. Jane! I could cut off
your breathing with a last wet cough,
break the connections, save you from
almost a lifetime’s crippledom,
legs splayed outwards, the crushed bones
like the godfish Olokun’s.
The black spot crossing; on both sides
a blank male silhouette still strides
off the caution and just keeps
on striding, while Newcastle sleeps,
between the Deaf School and the Park,
into his element, the dark.
The Scottish drivers have begun
the last stretch of the homeward run;
another hundred and they’ll pull
into the brightening capital,
each lashed, tarpaulined hulk
groaning borderwards: Blue Circle Bulk
Cement; Bulk Earthmoving; Bulk Grain;
Edinburgh and back again.
And up the Great North Road in twos
great tankers of Newcastle booze,
returning empty, leaving full,
swashing with comfort for John Bull
and John Bull’s bouncing babes who slug
their English anguish at the bottle’s dug.
O caravanserais! I too could drown
this newest sorrow in Newcastle Brown.
I thrash round desperately. I flail
my arms at sharks in seas of ale.
Organs. Head/-lights/-lines. Black. White.
The on/off sirening blue light;
heart/lungs like a grappled squid;
BLIND PARAPLEGIC’S CHANNEL BID.
Blood; piss; oceans; taste of salt.
Halt! Halt! Halt! Halt!
I surface and the Tynemouth Queen,
that death’s door study streaked with green,
is sitting dwarfish, slumped, alone
on her seawind-eroded throne,
scowling at a glimpse of sea
and wrecked, Dane-harried priory.
Above the grounded RVI
a few wind-driven seagulls cry
like grizzling kids. Out there; out there
where everything is sea and air,
at Tynemouth and at Seaton Sluice,
the sea works bits of England loose,
and redeposits on the land
the concrete tanktraps as blown sand.
Blood transfusion, saline drip,
‘this fiddle’ and ‘stiff upper lip’
have seen us so far.
You’ll live,
like your father, a contemplative.
Daylight, but a pale Blue Star
still just glimmers on the nearest bar.
An orderly brings tea and toast.
Mother, wife and daughter, ghost –
I’ve laid, laid, laid, laid
you, but I’m still afraid,
though now Newcastle’s washed with light,
about the next descent of night.