I am nothing.
Then I think how the train
Then I think how the train
from being a far blue point
troubling the slick of track
like thought in the dead of night
with a rack of stations between
the pulse of it and me
suddenly breathes at my back.
The platform stammers
and I see my poems
and see my youth in my poems
look up and back – then I think how the train
argues with a cloud of flowers
and always wins
cutting away with its cargo
leaving me in the carpark.
I tack the tarmac with footmarks
but now the train
switches its tail
shaking the rails,
then I think how the train
was waiting for me, a mushroom
put there for my hand
in the cow-coloured dawn.
That far blue point
how fast it’s grown
having visited each one of the rack of stations
and found no one home.
How quick you are, I think to the train,
how near you’ve come.
Skips
If I wanted totems, in place of the poles
slung up by barbers, in place of the clutter
of knife-eyed kids playing with tops and whips,
and boys in cut-down men’s trousers
swaggering into camera,
I’d have skips.
First, red and white bollards
to mark the road-space they need.
A young couple in stained workwear
– both clearly solicitors –
act tough with the driver, who’s late.
The yellow god with its clangorous emptiness
sways on the chains.
The young man keeps shouting BACK A LITTLE!
as the skip rides above his BMW.
The driver, vengeful, drops it askew.
Next, the night is alive with neighbours
bearing their gifts, propitiations
and household gods – a single-tub washing-machine,
a cat-pissed rug, two televisions.
Soundless as puppets, they lower them
baffled in newspaper, then score
a dumbshow goal-dance to the corner.
Time by Accurist
Washed silk jacket by Mesa
in cream or taupe, to order,
split skirt in lime
from a selection at Cardoon,
£84.99,
lycra and silk body, model’s own,
calf-skin belt by Bondage, £73.99,
tights from a range at Pins,
deck-shoes, white, black or strawberry,
all from Yoo Hoo,
baby’s cotton trousers and braces
both at Workaday
£96.00; see list for stockists.
Photographs by André McNair,
styled by Lee LeMoin,
make-up by Suze Fernando at Face the Future,
hair by Joaquim for Plumes.
Models: Max and Claudie.
Location: St James Street Washeteria
(courtesy of Route Real America
and the Cape Regis Hotel),
baby, model’s own,
time by Accurist.
The Silent Man in Waterstones
I shall be the first to lead the Muses to my native land
VIRGIL
The silent man in Waterstones
LOVE on one set of knuckles
HATE on the other
JESUS between his eyes
drives his bristling blue skull
into the shelves,
thuds on CRIME /FANTASY
shivers a stand of Virago Classics
head-butts Dante.
The silent man in Waterstones
looks for a bargain.
Tattered in flapping parka
white eyes wheeling
he catches
light on his bloody earlobes
and on the bull-ring
he wears through his nose.
The silent man in Waterstones
raps for attention.
He has got Virgil by the ears:
primus ego in patriam mecum…
He’ll lead the Muse to a rat-pissed underpass
teach her to beg
on a carpet of cardboard
and carrier bags.
The Wardrobe Mistress
This is the wardrobe mistress, touching
her wooden wardrobe. Here is her smokey
cross of chrysanthemums
skewed by the font.
They have put you in this quietness
left you here for the night.
Your coffin is like a locker
of mended ballet shoes.
You always looked in the toes.
There was blood in them, rusty
as leaves, blood from ballerinas.
Tonight it is All Souls
but you’ll stop here quietly,
only the living have gone to the cemetery
candles in their hands
to be blown about under the Leylandii.
In your wooden wardrobe, you’re used to waiting.
You know these sounds to the bone:
they are showing people to their seats
tying costumes at the back.
Everything they say is muffled,
the way it is backstage.
A stagehand pushes your castors
so you glide forward.
You know Manon is leaning
on points against a flat,
nervously flexing
her strong, injured feet,
you’re in position too, arms crossed,
touching your bud of wood.
You needn’t dance, it’s enough
to do what you always did.
That was the second bell. You feel it
tang through the crush. The wind
pours on like music
drying everyone’s lips,
they’re coming, your dancers.
You hate the moment of hush.
There. The quick luck-words
knocking on wood.
When You’ve Got
When you’ve got the plan of your life
matched to the time it will take
but you just want to press SHIFT /BREAK
and print over and over
this is not what I was after
this is not what I was after,
when you’ve finally stripped out the house
with its iron-cold fireplace,
its mouldings, its mortgage,
its single-skin walls
but you want to write in the plaster
‘This is not what I was after,’
when you’ve got the rainbow-clad baby
in his state-of-the-art pushchair
but he arches his back at you
and pulps his Activity Centre
and you just want to whisper
‘This is not what I was after,’
when the vacuum seethes and whines in the lounge
and the waste-disposal unit blows,
when tenners settle in your account
like snow hitting a stove,
when you get a chat from your spouse
about marriage and personal growth,
when a wino comes to sleep in your porch
on your Citizen’s Charter
and you know a hostel’s opening soon
but your headache’s closer
and you really just want to torch
the bundle of rags and newspaper
and you’ll say to the newspaper
‘This is not what we were after,
this is not what we were after.’
Afterword
Forty is a good age for thinking ab
out the body. These poems were written in three and a half years or so between thirty-seven and forty, and if there is an underpinning web to this collection, if there is a conversation going on between the poems which is more than the sum of what each poem is saying, then I think it is to do with the body.
Sexuality, ageing, death, reproduction – these are all so much more relative than we think when we confront them first as absolutes in childhood or adolescence. At forty I find myself living in a time of almost overwhelming physical change. The first swathe has been cut through contemporaries by sickness, accident and death. Now ours is the generation that organises funerals: funerals of parents, funerals of colleagues and mentors who were thirty or more years older and have suffered that strange thing called a natural death. We have to watch weakness in those who were strong, and strength developing in the dependent. People in the rich West stay late-middle-aged for so long now. The years tick on and then suddenly, astonishingly, the world narrows to a white bed and the wink of the electrocardiograph. Our children are growing fiercely, claiming their own sexuality, taking up more room in the house than we dare to do. Their skin and hair and smiles bloom breathtakingly.
And those familiar bones in the mirror are covered by flesh which is beginning to change in ways I scarcely understand. No longer the youngest person on the bus, no longer automatically raked by male eyes in public places, no longer constantly made conscious of who I am and where I am by whistles and comments. Go on darling, give us a smile. Now I can forget how to smooth my face to unresponsive blankness in public or how to walk past building-sites with apparent unconcern. There’s great freedom in this, and a powerful sense of recovering a body which for years seemed to belong as much to other people as to me.
The instability of the body is a source of comedy too. It swells and shrinks, presents itself one day as beautiful, the next as awkward and unsure. It sweats for fitness to stave off an autumn which is already wrinkling the edges of the leaves. It relishes an intimate, unshared life of snores, farts, bum-reducing exercises, masturbation and nose-picking, then walks out into public immaculately sheathed in whatever appearance suits it that day. The flesh-pinching reality of our bodies is constantly undermined by their surreality.
A late pregnancy has concentrated these thoughts in me. A woman of forty begins to look back on nearly thirty years of menstrual cycles, of the fear of pregnancy or the hope of pregnancy, of being always somewhere in a hormonal pattern which is both private and socially significant. Ahead of her is the menopause with its promise of a stability not experienced since childhood. And yet suddenly the body proves itself fertile again, capable of re-engaging in that flux of making bright, new creatures to walk out into the world clothed in flesh. Suddenly I am sitting at the word-processor with two hearts beating inside me.
There is a darker side to the past three years and to the poems. In public places bodies lie on damp concrete, wrapped in blankets and newspapers. Nothing is private – not the shivering nor the open-mouthed sleep nor the need which has to be exposed so that it can be ignored. Bare tattooed flesh on cold November days, shaven heads and pierced faces: these say what can be said with a body and without words except for the ritualised plea for spare change. This is the counterpoint to every trip to town, every humping of groceries into the car boot for the trip home. When I was little and there were no beggars on the streets I read of Victorian children shivering in doorways on Christmas Eve and wondered how anyone could bear to walk past, could refrain from opening their pockets and the doors of their warm houses. Now I know.
TV and radio hammer out a moment-by-moment account of wars we engage in or hold back from. Crackly voices tell of flesh melting in bunkers which the snout of a smart missile has penetrated. I am told of the battle about to start, the one which will transform living bodies to shreds of flesh and will use giant earthmovers to heap sand over them until they are obliterated. We are forced into a conspiracy where we inhabit the same time as sufferings which we pay our taxes to inflict, but cannot alleviate. As we spectate we combine physical immunity with a profound, grievous sense of complicity. In poems such as ‘In the Desert Knowing Nothing’ and ‘Poem on the Obliteration of 100,000 Iraqi Soldiers’, I have tried to express this without, I hope, seizing on the sufferings of others in order to demonstrate my own sensitivity.
Mandelstam wrote
I have the present of a body – what should I do with it
so unique it is and so much mine?
For me that question raises a hundred others. These poems are ways of finding forms for all these questions, rather than a set of answers.
FROM
Secrets
(1994)
Lemon sole
I lay and heard voices
spin through the house
and there were five minutes to run
for the snow-slewed school bus.
My mother said they had caught it
as she wiped stars from the window –
the frost mended its web
and she put her snow-cool hand to my forehead.
The baby peeked round her skirts
trying to make me laugh
but I said my head hurt
and shut my eyes on her and coughed.
My mother kneeled
until her shape hid the whole world.
She buffed up my pillows as she held me.
‘Could you eat a lemon sole?’ she asked me.
It was her favourite
she would buy it as a treat for us.
I only liked the sound of it
slim, holy and expensive
but I said ‘Yes, I will eat it’
and I shut my eyes and sailed out
on the noise of sunlight, white sheets
and lemon sole softly being cut up.
Christmas caves
A draught like a bony finger
felt under the door
but my father swung the coal scuttle
till the red cave of the fire roared
and the pine-spiced Christmas tree
shook out plumage of glass and tinsel.
The radio was on but ignored,
greeting ‘Children all around the world’
and our Co-op Christmas turkey
had gone astray in the postal system –
the headless, green-gibletted corpse
revolved in the sorting-room
its leftover flesh
never to be eaten.
Tomorrow’s potatoes rolled to the boil
and a chorister sang like a star
glowing by the lonely moon –
but he was not so far,
though it sounded like Bethlehem
and I was alone in the room
with the gold-netted sherry bottle
and wet black walnuts in a jar.
That violet-haired lady
That violet-haired lady, dowager-
humped, giving herself so many
smiles, taut glittering smiles,
smiles that swallow the air in front of her,
smiles that cling to shop-mirrors
and mar their silvering, smiles
like a spider’s wrinklework
flagged over wasteland bushes –
she’s had so many nips and tucks,
so much mouse-delicate
invisible mending. Her youth
squeaks out of its prison –
the dark red bar of her mouth
opening and closing.
She wants her hair to look black,
pure black, so she strands it with violet,
copperleaf, burgundy, rust –
that violet-haired lady, dowager-
humped, giving herself
so many smiles, keeping the light on.
Whooper swans
They fly
straight-necked and barely white
above the bruised stitching of clouds
above wind and the sound of storms
a
bove the creak of the tundra
the howl of weather
the scatter
and wolfish gloom
of sleet icing their wings,
they come
on their strong-sheathed wings
looking at nothing
straight down a freezing current of light,
they might
astonish a sleepy pilot
tunnelling his route above the Arctic,
his instruments darken and wink
circling the swans
and through his dull high window at sunrise
he sees them
ski their freezing current of light
at twenty-seven thousand feet
past grey-barrelled engines
spitting out heat
across the flight of the swans,
and they’re gone
the polar current sleeking them down
as soon as he sees them.
Snow Queen
Long long I have looked for you,
snowshoeing across the world
across the wild white world
with my heart in my pocket
and my black-greased boots
to keep the cold out,
past cathedrals and pike marshes
I’ve tracked you,
so long I have looked for you.
In your star-blue palace