who cared notice that for a time,
if only a moment, you were going somewhere.
A Testament
I was so young. I wanted to experience the world, so I stared
at the sun until my eyes burned hollow; kissed all the women I
could ever love until each kiss dwindled to water. Now hardly a day
passes but I find myself blundering into the sea; or gathering in my
arms an unspeakable fire.
The Lost Boy
im Alexander Glenday died November 4th, 1918
November,and nothing said.
The old worldwhittling down
to winter.Ice on my tongue:
its wordless,numbing welcome.
We bloodybelieved in war
once; we cheeredwhen our children
sailed off forthe Front. But now
all languagefails me. Listen:
‘Army FormB. 104.
November1918.’
‘. . .a reporthas been received
from the Field, France. . .. . . was killed in
Action.’ There.Alexander
has been killed –my couthie boy.
Nineteen, lookedmore like fourteen.
They told mehis howitzer
was shattered –a shell ‘cooked off’
in the breech,and the blast tore
them apart.They were too keen
of course, boysblown to pieces
with that GreatWar days from won.
Boom. And gone.I’m a blacksmith.
I’ve seen whatwhite hot metal
makes of flesh.My own wee Eck.
I’m to blame.I was the fool
who signed, andhim still far too
young. Fifteen!His mother flung
her mug atme, mute with rage.
Each morningshe makes his bed;
lays fresh clothesacross a chair.
She’ll not speakhis name again.
Her stare isa hard, black sloe.
If fine rhymesrang like iron,
hammered bright,hot with meaning
they might weighmore in my heart.
Brave songs don’tbring the dead home;
they damn themto cross that dour
black stream whereyon pale boatman
waits and foulfoundries spit and
silence istheir only song.
When we goto his grave, I’ll
bring sorrel,because I know
the dead arealways drouthy –
their dry mouthsclotted with dust.
I’ll say sorryson, this plant
slakes onlythe one, small thirst;
may its briefwhite blossom
linger uponyour grave, like snow.
The Big Push
after Sir Herbert James Gunn, ‘The Eve of the Battle of the Somme’
Would you believe it, there’s a bloke out there singing
‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’.
His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding
from the ears. The Boche are all but finished, apparently –
I heard they’re packing old clock parts into trench mortars
now, for want of iron scrap. Some wag quips that next time he’s
sentry and hears the plop of a minenwerfer tumbling over,
he’ll not blow the alarm, he’ll shout: ‘Time, gentlemen, please . . . ’
We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid. Bravery
and cowardice are just two workings of the same fear
moving us in different ways. The 8th East Surreys
have been given footballs to kick and follow at Zero Hour;
it’s to persuade them from the trenches lest their nerve fail
as they advance on Montaubon. I’ve watched men
hitch up their collars and trudge forward as if shrapnel
and lead were no worse than a shower of winter rain.
This afternoon a few of us went swimming in the mill dam
behind Camp. Just for a while to have no weight, to go drifting
clear of thought and world, was utter bliss. A skylark climbed
high over the torn fields on its impossible thread of song:
‘like an unbodied joy.’ I don’t know why, but it reminded
me of the day we took over from the French along the Somme;
it was so tranquil, so picturesque, the German trenchworks crowded
with swathes of tiny, brilliant flowers none of us could name.
I believe if the dead come back at all they’ll come back green
to grow from the broken earth and drink the gathered water
and all the things they suffered will mean no more to them
than the setting-in of the ordinary dark, or a change of weather.
Rubble
General term for a people who are harvested and reused
or broken. To be heaped randomly or roughly stored.
Break them in different ways but they will always be the same.
Hold them in the dark; remind yourself why they should stay forgotten.
These days there is little interest in stones that bear names.
May they be piled up and given this title in common.
Let them take their place in the register of unspoken things.
May they never be acknowledged again.
Our Dad
After he’d passed over, she buried all his séance books.
Said she was comfortable with the notion of the Afterlife
but had no use for it on her parlour shelf. It felt worse
than burning somehow – imagine words gasping for air,
their loosened pages mouldering back to soil and dirt.
In the thirties, he was a regular at Circle meetings in some
North London suburb, but didn’t believe in an afterlife
or the Spirit Realm, that sunlit somewhere after death.
It was the showmanship he loved: all that cheerless
determination, cotton wool and wire; all that nifty
fiddling with lights. Let death be always nothing more
than sleight of hand. One flurry of white doves
and the earth-strewn dead spring back into our lives,
gaping and astonished. Cue the applause. Amen to that.
The Iraqi Elements
after Zaher Mousa
This is the birth of Water:
Mist is when water dies so that it can be born again.
Sluggish rivers swither among the dead,
their banks overflowing.
Listen: those whisperings in the pipework
are all the refugees from thirst.
The inscription on the fountain’s cup reads:
‘Drink, Hussain, and remember thirst.’
Their fathers: their fathers’ gentle thirst,
like sand slowly pouring into blood;
heedless as a stone: a millstone that worries
its own reflection back to sand.
So they went off to war and when they came back,
no water for the ritual cleansing,
not one drop, so they washed themselves in graveyard dust.
*****
This is the birth of Air:
Weary angels revel in it: the sky is laced
with the gutturals of genies; those dark eyes
that glimpse the invisible smouldering in their veins.
Here you touch against breasts that breathed in childhood’s loss.
Their women: their women are perfumed sadnesses;
their gaze carried away on the wind
bleached of all colour: their black clothes
abandoned – still in suitcases somewhere.
The women banked on hard graft and the smoking tanur,
but War won that bet, of course. War always does.
And when it was all over they breathed in the soot of a crow’s wing;
the drift of fans through narrow rooms.
*****
This is the birth of Fire:
Soldiers trudge home from the front line.
Slivers of shrapnel glimmer inside them.
Here’s a dead man with a cigarette in his pocket,
still alight – his last smoke.
Cancers flare and smoulder in the heads of children.
Their children: their children with happiness chalked into their faces –
if they were a pack of cards there wouldn’t be any joker.
Their children are little crusts of bread dunked
in muddy kerbside puddles. Life will gobble them up.
In other countries children have footballs to play with, but not here,
no, in this country they used the children’s heads as footballs.
*****
This is the birth of Earth: Feel this: feel the earth.
The Doldrums
after Zaher Mousa
I
I’ll carry this wound like a wristwatch – look
it’s bleeding the minutes away;
but leaves no mark, no scar on Time
though day wears day down into day.
II
Dear afternoon,
I only glimpsed you as you sailed past my window
and vanished forever, like that girl on the bus,
that hopelessly beautiful girl.
III
No. My blood is nothing like the honest river
glazing and slackening through the seasons.
Think of a worn-out wall-clock with its dodgy weathers:
faster and faster, then slower again, then . . .
The Golden Mean
I am to you
as you are
to us and
we are to
everything.
The Grain of Truth
Grows poorly in rich soil. Ripening
demands an exceptional season.
Blights more readily than us, even.
Sow it, you’ll reap a fine harvest of sorrow.
Each head clings grimly to husk and chaff,
mills the stoutest millstone
to a gritty pebble, kills all yeasts,
sulks in the oven like its own headstone.
So never offer me something
I cannot refuse and expect thanks.
Don’t bring me this gift then
ask me why I cannot thrive.
Northeasterly
Driven by sleet and hail,
snell, dour and winterly;
it fills the unwilling sail,
empties the late, green tree.
Something unknowable
lodged in the heart of me
empties itself and fills
Like that sail. Like that tree.
Macapabá
We rocked at anchor where the emptying
river spreads its green hand.
Ochre mud thickened the sea.
On the second morning, slender boats
from the forest; they brought birds
the colour of watered oil,
sallow fruit no one would taste
and a leaf folded around a knot of gold
broader than a clenching fist.
Only a leaf for a sail
and before us, look, the impossible ocean of it all;
squall and storm;
lash and flail;
the unnavigable, the hungry, the whole perfect
unstarred bleakness of the world,
as though a dark
we had always feared had grown real and cold and tidal,
and the lifted
green-black
ragged face of its hand to pull us,
pull us down,
and what chance would you say we had,
so small,
only the two, my love, just me,
just you,
but give us a leaf for a sail, and suddenly, somehow,
everywhere’s possible.
Fetch
Now that she is lost to us. Now that
she has come back, restless.
Now that we no longer believe in her,
let her ribcage crumble
with the bricks in the old warehouse
that almost remembers;
let her breath smell of iron scab,
of diesel, of lime;
let her skin be the bloom
on oily setts, let her voice
be loose sections of fencework
shivering in the wind.
Let her call out through last night’s dark
towards today. Let her not be heard.
Fetch II
She’s so real you can hardly see her, printed
like Christ’s face into cloth; the linen
rehearsing his wounds while they rusted in the air.
Her eyes turn from the empty warehouse
to the winking lights on the dock, the salt-dark firth
and the far hills brewing cumuli.
Don’t be sad, she says, Don’t grieve for any of this.
(her footsteps sweetening back to dust)
This sort of emptiness could save us all.
The Dockyard
Buddleia does well here, at least.
It thrives on flowers of sulphur, concrete dust,
coiled swarf and radon’s heavy bloom.
No wonder the petals gleam the utter blue
of a welder’s flame. No wonder the blossom
rusts so easily, a shiver in the grass-choked guttering.
In summer, butterflies briefly linger here,
all the colours of ash and earth and blood.
See how they diminish towards cloud and light
as their fragile clockwork unwinds through
the onshore wind, high over the dual carriageway
and corner shops, towards the hills.
Fireweed
I’m old enough to remember how dangerous
they were, those steam trains butting the weather
south of Forfar, heading for the big smoke.
They would seed sparks among the dropped coals littering
the ballast by the Seven Arches, sweetening the shale for weeds.
Even as we speak the willowherb is hitching upwind
through the decades; it feeds on old burnings,
hungry for nitrogen. At Doig’s Farm, their purple heads
crowd above watermint and nettle, or lean out over
the slackwater pools to marvel at themselves – tall, aristocratic,
raised out of last year’s waste, abandonment and fire.
Monster
‘I have no doubt of seeing the animal today . . . ’
I miss it all so much – family and everything.
Father in that lab coat fathers wear;
always too close, always too distant,
always too keen. You may have heard –
my mother was the product of unmentionable
absences and storms; my siblings
a catalogue of slack, discarded failures.
We are all born adult and unwise;
don’t judge me too harshly.
Which of us was not cobbled into life
by love’s uncertain weathers? Are we not
all stitched together and scarred?
Step forward any one of you who can say
they are not a thing of parts.
X Ray
The grinning moon lies
balanced on a haze of cloud,
snagged in the thousand
branches of a bare
white tree. But these
are nothing – nothing’s marks,
pauses for thought,
the interstices, the points
at which something slowed
and thickened as it made
its way through her. Surely
this speaks of a wilful
hesitancy – interest even?
; For want of the proper science
we should call that love.
The White Stone
when you take it
in your hand
it will weigh smooth
and hard and cold
as the heart once did
long ago
before it was first
touched by the world
British Pearls
‘Gignit et Oceanus margarita, sed subfusca ac liventia . . . ’
(Tacitus Agricola 1:12)
British pearls are exceptionally poor.
They can be gathered up by the handful wherever
surf breaks, but you’ll find no colour, no vitality, no lustre
to them – every last one stained the roughshod grey
of their drab and miserable weather.
Imagine all the rains of this island held
in one sad, small, turbulent world.
I can hear them falling as I write. British pearls
are commonplace and waterish and dull,
but their women wear them as if winter were a jewel.
The Constellations
The trick is always to appear fixed,
whatever happens. To hold the pattern
we were born to, though its significance
may be lost to us. Here is where we make
our stand and our love will be defined not by
touch or glance but by the distances
mapped out between us. We’ll light
everything that needs our light, steadfast
as the stars we fell from, trusting
in them through disaster and adversity,
though we know in our hearts
they are burning in their shackles, like us all.
Lacerta
Not the browbeaten old king,
or his poor wife handcuffed to her capsized throne,
or their sad and lonely daughter
waiting in the darkness for her perfect monster.
Not the dead swan nailed to its right ascension
or those pointless feathers harnessed to a stallion.
Grant me the bleakness of the northern sky
and a yellow gaze that burns relentlessly
and the scales and the claws and the flickering tongue
of a constellation none of you can name.
The Moon is Shrinking