Sentences
1. Brazil
Even the lone man
in his wattle lean-to,
the half-mad women
in their hive of leaves,
pitched at the roadside
by a low shared fire
so near the shoulder
that their tethered goat
crops only half-circles
of tough, scorched turf,
and occasional tremors
shake ash from the charcoal,
live for something more
than the manioc and curds
they’re preparing,
barely attentive to speech
as they strain
through the oppressive mid-day drowse,
or, at night, through the noise
of the insects drilling into them
the lessons of loneliness
or failed pioneering
over miles of savannah,
for the punctual Bahia-Rio
coaches as they come
to the village of Milagres
they are outcasts from
for a quick cafezinho,
a quick piss,
edible necklaces
and caged red birds.
2. Fonte Luminosa
Walking on the Great North Road
with my back towards London
through showers of watery sleet,
my cracked rubber boot soles
croak like African bullfrogs
and the buses and lorries that swish
like a whiplash laid on and on
without intermission or backswing
send a spray splashing over
from squelching tyres skywards
STOP red, GO green, CAUTION
amber, and at the crossing
where you had your legs crushed
I remember the fonte luminosa,
Brasilia’s musical geyser
spurting a polychrome plumage,
the fans of rich pashas,
a dancer’s dyed ostriches,
making parked Chevrolets
glisten, people seem sweaty,
and when yellowing, loppy Terezinha,
the eldest, though your age,
of the children all huddled
under the fancy ramp entrance
of the National Theatre,
comes and scoops from the churned
illuminated waters a tinful
for drinking and cooking and goes
gingerly to ingenious roads
where cars need never once
stop at Belishas or crossings,
intersect, crash, or slow down,
the drops that she scatters
are not still orange or purple,
still greenish or gorgeous
in any way, or still gushing,
but slightly clouded like quartz,
and at once they’re sucked back
into Brazil like a whelk
retracting, like the tear
that drains back into your eye
as once more you start coming through
the rainbowing spindrift and fountains
of your seventh anaesthesia.
3. Isla de la Juventud
The fireflies that women
once fattened on sugar
and wore in their hair
or under the see-through
parts of their blouses
in Cuba’s Oriente,
here seem to carry
through the beam where they cluster
a brief phosphorescence
from each stiff corpse
on the battlefields that look
like the blown-up towel
of a careless barber,
its nap and its bloodflecks,
and if you were to follow,
at Santa Fe’s open-air
cinema’s Russian
version War & Peace,
the line of the dead
to the end, corpses,
cannons and fetlocks,
with your snowboots,
or butt-end of your rifle,
you would enter an air
as warm as the blankets
just left by a lover,
yours, if you have one,
an air full of fireflies,
bright after-images,
and scuffed Krasnoe snow
like unmeltable stars.
4. On the Spot
for Miroslav Holub,
Havana, August 1969
Watching the Soviet subs surface
at the side of flagged battleships
between Havana harbour and the USA
I can’t help thinking how the sword
has developed immensely,
how only nomads in deserts
still lop heads off with it,
while the pen is still only
a point, a free ink-flow
and the witness it has to keep bearing.
Miroslav, you must remember
there’d be no rumba now,
if the blacks who made Cuba
had not somehow evolved
either when shackled or pegged
or grouped for a whiplash harangue
or under the driver’s bluebottle eye
following their own eyes flicking,
flies dying in jam-jars
jerking all over –
Think
of those trapped pupils let loose,
the offal they’d flock to,
O have to, being so hungry,
History inescapable, high,
necessary, putrescent,
unburied, still not picked over,
only the balls of it gnawed at –
had not evolved as I said,
together, somehow, with slight spasms
of only the nipples or haunches,
a calf-muscle tugging the chain taut,
the art of dancing on the spot
without ever being seen to be moving,
not a foot or a hand out of place.
Voortrekker
A spoor from a kraal. Then grass
greens the turd of the carnivore
gone all gums. So the sick Boer
lays on with the whip less.
Panic in him and round him
like a wind-flapped tilt –
only the sable sons of Ham
cram Death’s dark veld.
Coupled together in God’s span,
outnumbered many times over,
ox, dog, Hottentot, Caffre,
and just one Christian man.
The Bonebard Ballads
1. The Ballad of Babelabour
‘This Babylonian confusion of words results from their being the language of men who are going down.
(Bertolt Brecht)
What ur-Sprache did the labour speak?
ur ur ur to t’master’s Sprache
the hang-cur ur-grunt of the weak
the unrecorded urs of gobless workers
Their snaptins kept among their turds
they labour eat and shit
with only grunts not proper words
raw material for t’poet
They’re their own meat and their own dough
another block another
a palace for the great Pharaoh
a prison for their brothers
Whatever name’s carved on those stones
it’s not the one who labours
an edifice of workers’ bones
for one who wants no neighbours
Nimrod’s nabobs like their bards
to laud the state’s achievements
to eulogize his house of cards
and mourn the king’s bereavements
The treasurer of Sprache’s court
drops the bard his coppers
He knows that poets aren’t his sort
but belong to the ur-crappers
Ur-crappers tongueless bar
dless nerks
your condition’s shitty
no time for yer Collected Works
or modulated pity
but ur ur ur ur ur ur urs
sharpened into Sprache
revurlooshunairy vurse
uprising nacker starkers
by the time the bards have urd
and urd and urd and Sprachered
the world’s all been turned into merde
& Nimrod’s Noah’sarkered
sailing t’shit in t’ship they urd at
no labour can embark her
try and you’ll get guard-dog grrred at
the shitship’s one class: Sprache
Bards & labour left for dead
the siltworld’s neue neue
bard the HMV doghead
in that negra negra Goya.
(See the picture ‘A Dog Buried in the Sand’ among the Black Paintings of Goya in the Prado.)
2. The Ballad of the Geldshark
(from Aeschylus)
Geldshark Ares god of War
broker of men’s bodies
usurer of living flesh
corpse-trafficker that god is –
give to War your men’s fleshgold
and what are your returns?
kilos of cold clinker packed
in army-issue urns
wives mothers sisters each one scans
the dogtags on the amphorae
which grey ashes are my man’s
they sift the jumbled names and cry:
My husband sacrificed his life
My brother battle-martyr
Aye for someone else’s wife
Helen whore of Sparta
whisper mutter belly-aching
the people’s beef and bile: This war’s
been the clanchiefs’ making
the ruling clanchiefs’ so-called ‘cause’.
Where’s my father husband boy?
where do all our loved ones lie?
six feet under near the Troy
they died to occupy.
3. ‘Flying down to Rio’:
A Ballad of Beverly Hills
Big mouth of the horn of plenty
horny horny Hollywood
Food flesh fashion cognoscenti
grudge the midge her mite of blood
Fat bugs fry and small gnats ping
against Insectecutor bars
so no slight unsightly sting
blemishes the flesh of stars
Don’t adjust the skew-whiff Manet
you’ll touch off the thief device
monitored each nook and cranny
of this closed circuit paradise
but tonight she’s feeling spooky
plucking plasmic plectra strike her
nervestrings like a bop bazouki
boogie-woogie balalaika
Divinely draped in 3rd World ‘folk art’
(Locations where the labour’s cheap!)
unaware she’ll soon join Bogart
big C first and then big sleep
Brown tits on show ’ll
scotch the lies they’re not her own
Death’s the only gigolo ’ll
rumble that they’re silicone
Death the riveting romancer
in sheerest X-ray underwear
nimble-footed fancy dancer
bonier than Fred Astaire
Girning atcha gotcha gotcha
(on his dance card once you’re born)
cold carioca or chill cha-cha
charnelwise to Forest Lawn
Or choker sheikh whose robes hang loose
O worse than loss of honour fate!
His kisser sags from black burnous
your veils are blue barbiturate
Freeway skiddy with crashed star’s gore
(fastlivingwecanshow’em!)
the jelling jugular ’ll pour
at least a jereboam …
Places that you once changed planes at
or hardened second units shot
this afterlife eternal flat
horizonless back lot
places faces from your worst dream
say starvelings of Recife
who made your slimmer’s body seem
embarrassingly beefy
On such locations old at twenty
boys grub green crabs from grey mud –
big mouth of the horn of plenty
horny horny Hollywood.
Social Mobility
Ah, the proved advantages of scholarship!
Whereas his dad took cold tea for his snap,
he slaves at nuances, knows at just one sip
Château Lafite from Château Neuf du Pape.
From The School of Eloquence
‘In 1799 special legislation was introduced “utterly suppressing and prohibiting” by name the London Corresponding Society and the United Englishmen. Even the indefatigable conspirator, John Binns, felt that further national organization was hopeless … When arrested he was found in possession of a ticket which was perhaps one of the last “covers” for the old LCS: Admit for the Season to the School of Eloquence.’
(E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class)
Nunc mea Pierios cupiam per pectora fontes
Irriguas torquere vias, totumque per ora
Volvere laxatum gemino de vertice rivum;
Ut, tenues oblita sonos, audacibus alis
Surgat in officium venerandi Musa parentis.
Hoc utcunque tibi gratum, pater optime, carmen
Exiguum meditatur opus, nec novimus ipsi
Aptius a nobis quae possint munera donis
Respondere tuis, quamvis nec maxima possint
Respondere tuis, nedum ut par gratia donis
Esse queat, vacuis quae redditur arida verbis …
Si modo perpetuos sperare audebitis annos,
Et domini superesse rogo, lucemque tueri,
Nec spisso rapient oblivia nigra sub Orco,
Forsitan has laudes, decantatumque parentis
Nomen, ad exemplum, servo servabitis aevo.
(John Milton, 1637)
Heredity
How you became a poet’s a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, foe and Harry –
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.
One
On Not Being Milton
for Sergio Vieira & Armando Guebuza (Frelimo)
Read and committed to the flames, I call
these sixteen lines that go back to my roots
my Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,
my growing black enough to fit my boots.
The stutter of the scold out of the branks
of condescension, class and counter-class
thickens with glottals to a lumpen mass
of Ludding morphemes closing up their ranks.
Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress
clangs a forged music on the frames of Art,
the looms of owned language smashed apart!
Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!
Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting.
In the silence round all poetry we quote
Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote:
Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting.
Note. An ‘Enoch’ is an iron sledge-hammer used by the Luddites to smash the frames which were also made by the same Enoch Taylor of Marsden. The cry was: ‘Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them!’
The Rhubarbarians
I
Those glottals glugged like poured pop, each
rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise
‘mob’ rhubarb-rhubarb to a tribune’s speech
crossing the crackle as the hayricks blaze.
The gaffers’ blackleg Boswells at their side.
Horsfall of Ottiwells, if the bugger could,
’d’ve liked to (exact wor
ds recorded) ride
up to my saddle-girths in Luddite blood.
What t’mob said to the cannons on the mills,
shouted to soldier, scab and sentinel
’s silence, parries and hush on whistling hills,
shadows in moonlight playing knurr and spell.
It wasn’t poetry though. Nay, wiseowl Leeds
pro rege et lege schools, nobody needs
your drills and chanting to parrot right
the tusky-tusky of the pikes that night.
II
(On translating Smetana’s Prodaná Nevésta for the Metropolitan Opera, New York.)
One afternoon the Band Conductor up on his stand
Somehow lost his baton it flew out of his hand
So I jumped in his place and conducted the band
With mi little stick of Blackpool Rock!
George Formby
Finale of ACT II. Though I resist
blurring the clarity of hanba (shame)
not wanting the least nuance to be missed
syllables run to rhubarb just the same …
Sorry, dad, you won’t get that quatrain
(I’d like to be the poet my father reads!)
It’s all from you once saying on the train
how most of England’s rhubarb came from Leeds.
Crotchets and quavers, rhubarb silhouettes,
dark-shy sea-horse heads through waves of dung!
Rhubarb arias, duets, quartets
soar to precision from our common tongue.
The uke in the attic manhole once was yours!
Watch me on the rostrum wave my arms –
mi little stick of Leeds grown tusky draws
galas of rhubarb from the MET-set palms.
Note. Tusky: the Leeds word for rhubarb.
Study
Best clock. Best carpet. Best three chairs.
For deaths, for Christmases, a houseless aunt,
for those too old or sick to manage stairs.
I try to whistle in it but I can’t.
Uncle Joe came here to die. His gaping jaws
once plugged in to the power of his stammer
patterned the stuck plosive without pause
like a d-d-damascener’s hammer.
Mi aunty’s baby still. The dumbstruck mother.
The mirror, tortoise-shell-like celluloid
held to it, passed from one hand to another.
No babble, blubber, breath. The glass won’t cloud.
The best clock’s only wound for layings out