MARK WALDRON
MEANWHILE, TREES
These poems may sometimes pretend they’re joking but they never really are. And what is it they’re not joking about? Death for one thing, and the fact that we don’t actually know who we are, and the fact that we don’t truly know who our loved ones are, or what art is, or anything else for that matter.
Sometimes it feels as though someone has run off with meaning. It’s no longer to be found where we could once expect to find it, perhaps in religion or in nature or in art, and these poems set off in search of it. Their aim is to see if there’s a way of looking and a way of using language that can bring some meaning back to the world, because without it, we’re lost.
Meanwhile, Trees is Mark Waldron’s third collection, following The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), both published by Salt.
‘Mark Waldron is the most striking and unusual new voice to have emerged in British poetry for some time.’ – John Stammers
‘Waldron has been busy forging a new language of deadpan, twenty-first century surreal, as receptive to John Berryman’s influence as anything written in the wake of The Dream Songs, as sceptical of the lyric self as anything in John Ashbery, and usually a lot funnier.’ – Dai George, The Boston Review
‘The post-Beckettian self-inquisition offered up by Mark Waldron (a poet, incidentally, writing consistently better than virtually any other at the moment).’ – Ahren Warner, Best British Poetry
Cover artwork: Meanwhile, trees, from Abtei im Eichwald (1809-10) by Caspar David Friedrich
Mark Waldron
Meanwhile, Trees
For my mum and dad
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these poems, or versions of them, have appeared in Blue of Noon, Kaffeeklatsch, Magma, The Morning Star, Poetry London, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, Rising, The Quietus and Transom Journal. ‘So I hid my song’ was commissioned by Rachel Whiteread for her 2013 show at Gagosian in London. ‘Denmark Brochure’ and ‘All my poems are advertisements for me’ were published in Follow the Trail of Moths published by Sidekick Books. ‘The Decline of the Long s’, was written for Likestarlings in an exchange of poems with Jena Osman; ‘The Sea’ was commissioned by Jackie Saphra and Kate Potts for Somewhere in Particular; and ‘A cat called Orangey was in a number of movies’ was published by Sidekick Books in Lives Beyond Us. ‘Collaboration’ appears in Best British Poetry 2013, ‘First off appears’ in Best British Poetry 2014, and ‘I am lordly, puce and done’ appears in Best British Poetry 2015, all published by Salt.
I’d like to thank Roddy Lumsden, John Stammers, Ahren Warner and my wife, Julie Hill, for their advice and suggestions on these poems.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
So I hid my song
You know when you drop
All My Poems Are Advertisements for Me
Meanwhile, Trees
So I was at home doing the washing up
The Sea
The Madding Wind
When You Come in, Poppet
A train, pale white in colour,
Look at Our Faces – How Dead We’re Going to Be!
The Shoes of a Clown
A cat called Orangey was in a number of movies,
The Uncertainty Principle
You know that intermingled time of night and day
The Fire
Uh-Oh Sweet Wife
As Though We Hoped to Be Forgiven
A Glib
Yes I admit that I have ate
King Richard I
Confessional Poem
The Meeting
Poem in which
Innovations in Naval Gunnery
Underground Beekeeping
Vegetable Magnetism
Outdoor Philately
No Moose
Sucked
Sometimes a Phallus Is Just a Phallus
The Dead Are Helpless
The Voice
Those worms that inhabit the bowel,
In the Boulangerie
Guns in Films
It’s hard to see Hamlet as some kind of everyman,
The Decline of the Long s
No More Mr Nice Guy
Professor Hydrofoil Is Attending a Matinee
The Tenant
We rested our hands
Grace
Manning
I Collaboration
II The Stage Is Set
III Does a Filmic Wind Tousle the Photo-Real Grass?
IV Denmark Brochure
V Manning in the Rock Garden
VI Out Here in the Future, Everything Is Doubly Suspect
VII I am lordly, puce and done,
VIII Don’t talk to me about ghosts,
IX Enter a Ghost Smelling Minty
The Common Quail
The Lawn Sprinkler
First off,
About the Author
Copyright
So I hid my song
in a disused shed. No wait, that’s not right, first I hid
my song in a tin,
and then the tin I hid in a sock, and the sock in a shoebox,
and the shoebox in a hatbox, and the hatbox
in the box that the breadbin came in.
So I concealed that box among a rummage of others
of hundreds of sizes and sounds-when-you-shook-them,
in that shed above-mentioned.
And I’d begun to walk away when I turned and I saw
that the shed was all lit with the sun,
and I resolved there and then that I must squirrel the shed
under the ground in a dilapidated field
where dirt grew and ephemera lay scattered about
like butter.
And once I’d buried the shed then I hid the whole field
in the blue-red mountains,
sliding it into a slot that I’d made beneath trees and foxes
and ants.
And then those mountains I shoved, like that, upside down
in the sopping wet bed of the sea,
and the sea I secreted beneath a particular sky, and the sky
under space,
and space I buried beneath that pernickety edge of nothing.
And now it’s still not safe.
You know when you drop
something, a bottle or a vase perhaps, and when it first
contacts the ground it does so in such a state of shock
that it pauses there stunned, just for a fraction of
a moment, before it comes to, and expeditiously collects
itself, summons, despite its near panic, a sense
of obligation, recalls just what’s expected of it, before it
tenses its body, scrunches up its eyes, fabricates
from nothing an explicit pop and a mass escape
from the suffocating incarceration of existence,
a breakout that dashes obediently to its slot, that being
the ordained scatter-pattern of pieces and bits, where it rests
then in an array of elfin smiles that seem to celebrate relief,
to relish languidly what they, for this moment, take to be their
liberty and to smoke thin cigarettes with their small feet
up in front of TVs showing film of countryside in Spring,
the next cell door having not yet swung entirely shut.
All My Poems Are Advertisements for Me
When I was young there was nothing exactly stupid
about the world. In fact, in the good old days
there was the thump and the tug of it, the way it heaved itself
like a stone, yanked so to speak in glory,
the way i
t fell up, crushed up, and then crushed up again,
getting newer and newer, louder and sweeter,
the way it watched its own face fall between its fingers
as though its face were a handful of gold coins.
I think I might have known the whole drag of everything
going upwards, a tide that pulled me with it.
Actually, I know I did. (You were part of all this by the way.)
And the sky, well, where to begin?
The sky was so adult, not imbecilic or thin or so-so or girlish.
Did I outgrow it?
Did I drink it, shoot it, find a way round it?
Did I get inside it and drive off in it?
Forgive me, but on my way to work this morning,
even though the sun was on fire and the trees were up,
I was in the apocalypse. Death is not what you think it is.
It’s actually what I think it is.
Meanwhile, Trees
He was thinking, as he rocketed across the Tuileries,
top-hat steadied with one hand, cane gripped in the other,
and with that coddled little smile still (despite the haste
the otherwise deserted high-school corridor of his face, that
perhaps he might remake himself from something already
half-mutated such as a hotel pool-soaked novel or something
whose extra weight, as he would explain to Gaston later,
would be promissory, such as the lavish body of a maggot.
La scène: Paris, mil neuf cent dix. The city streets are wet
with an old-fangled rain that feels, rubbed between
contempo fingers, entirely démodé. It’s winter and the trees
have done avec their leaves, have choked them at the wrist,
strangled every one until they each gave up their flat green
ghosts, turned a purplish black, and dropped just as the
rubber-banded barren nuts of rams drop and do germinate
not at all in no hot earth. Oh, how he hurries crispy under
branches, possessing, as he does, all the lightness of the lost!
So I was at home doing the washing up
and I thought, perhaps I’m using
too much washing up liquid. I actually
like to use a lot of washing up liquid
because I think it makes the work easier,
well that’s the impression I get anyway,
but I have had the feeling that some
people think I use too much. I definitely
had the impression that my parents thought
I was using too much washing up liquid
when I was over at their house last week
and helping out after lunch. And then
today I thought, you know what, I can use
as much damn washing up liquid as I like
in my own damn house and no one can
stop me. I could squirt the whole of this
bottle straight down the drain if I felt like it,
and if my wife said what the heck are you
doing, I could just smile at her and carry on.
In fact no one could stop me if I sold
the damn house and everything in it
and spent all the money I got from
the sale on washing up liquid. I could
have it delivered in tankers if I could get
the parking permits. I’m appalled that
I could actually do that and no one could
have me arrested because after all it’s my
damn money. How the hell is that kind
of thing allowed to happen? Someone really
needs to have the authority to intervene
and protect me from myself.
The Sea
The man and his small dog performed their shuffling dance.
The crinkly suit the man wore was designed to mimic the sea,
his made-up face too was greyish blue and his mouth, a wet
cave that uttered the crunchy sounds of the sea as well as fish
and crab and anemone. His hair was white and coiffed in
the style of foam. The man and his dog moved purposefully
towards the audience then paused and reversed back again
in the fashion of waves. He comprehended his role but his
little white poodle in its blue coat only followed, as waves
blindly follow their predecessors towards a jaded shore.
On holiday last month I was entertained by the action
of the actual sea. Each wave that broke upon the rocks
at Morte Point was its own show. Each wave struck its pose
and then withdrew, grand and throwaway, tossed off
with the nonchalance of a well-rehearsed performance,
yet always fresh and daring (or so it seemed to me) in its
improvised quality. The variation was infinite and ridiculous
and there was a distinct new-agey flavour to the whole splash,
as well as a consistent sense of something magically bogus,
a contrived simulacrum of revelatory meaning.
The Madding Wind
I stood on a path in the little park alone that afternoon
and I watched in my dismay the wind
as it threw all connotation out of the battered trees.
I saw it rake it from the grass, thresh it from the plants,
so that the covenant each had
with its ancient reputation was beaten from it easily as seed
is hit from straw. That wind it blew allusion
right off of all creation, stripped it of its candied coat,
left nothing but a brittle chaff that danced depraved
and godless jigs with it. And when I turned myself
towards the blow I knew at once my face it emptied
like an upturned sugar bowl to make a hollowed
thrown-down countenance, and I found myself conjoined
with that divested little park in its perverted dance.
When You Come in, Poppet
Your cold clothes. Your cheek against mine,
stiffened with a thrilling foreign chill
you’ve picked up outside.
Well I move back in ahead of you.
I arrange my papers like this
on the kitchen table and I sip my tea once or twice.
Of course I must take you
back into the melting warm. I must take you
all the way in again and shove
and shove out
what I can of the whole day,
that spruced-up bull that’s left its cleanly
trace in you, that smart day
with its fearless strut and its white clothes
like the white clothes of a saint.
A train, pale white in colour,
stopped beside a bleary field at dusk, leaks
its waspish steam in wisps that eke from pistons,
slits and pipes. On board the train there sits
a little man within whose leather bag there is,
well wrapped in rags, a disembodied folded leg
that’s formed of tiny epidermis-fronted drawers
every one of which is so precisely made no
evidence of it is seen upon the surface of the skin.
Each drawer he has constructed out of flesh,
and each contains a tidy portion of it that fills it
to its brim. Just as a wily counsel might press
his point and thus unbolt a box in which a voice
is locked, so might this passenger press artfully
enough upon a section of the limb that it will click
somewhere deep within its meat, somewhere near
its marrow, with a knock like a muffled penny’s
d
rop, and with a subtle jolt will spring against
his finger’s nudge before it saunters smoothly out
lubricated solely by the goodness of its fit.
It will follow his retreating digit to present
its content, hidden within the folds of which
is the modest smell of it. And then at once,
with but a fraction of a pause, the drawer will
pop coquettish back inside its slot unprompted
by a push as though suddenly ashamed it had
displayed itself and all the neatness of its butchery.
Look at Our Faces – How Dead
We’re Going to Be!
It’s the abundance of specificity that leaves me
so dying.
I go hotfoot through miserable woods that are haunted
by me, and here are the trees
each of whose leaves suggests its particular green.
I walk across a field
that’s been spattered with fragments of cow shit
every bit of which is specific.
Here are bones, buttons. Here are wild dogs, biscuits,
French horns, imps, borlotti beans.
Here is a submarine, a brick, a rose hip.
Here are the piping bodies of girls and boys once popped
like perfect peas from puberty’s cramped pupa;
basted, they gleam head to toe with poem juice.