SASHA DUGDALE
Red House
To Max and Harriet
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of some of the poems in this collection were published in Agenda, The Irish Times, Poetry London, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Review, Idenity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010) and Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt, 2011).
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Maldon
Red House
‘Perhaps Akhmatova was right’
Ten Moons
The Poetry of Earth
Michael Blann
A Ballad without Rhyme
Dawn Chorus
Fish’s Dream
‘Lifting the bedcovers and there’
Out of Town
Amazing Grace
Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer’s)
‘I can only be who I am’
Moor
Prince’s
Doggy Life
On Beauty
Asylum
Song of the Seagull
Shepherds
All Souls’
Annunciation
The Alphabet of Emigration
Agora
Sweet Companions
Laughter
Wolstonbury
‘Late winter, like the tide retreating’
Blessing
About the Author
Also by Sasha Dugdale from Carcanet / OxfordPoets
Copyright
Maldon
And there on the coast like a Chinese lantern hung the sun.
Whatever you do, you should not let them pour off the half-island
To mix with the birds and the silts, said the wise woman.
For there they will become us – body of our body
Blood of our blood. And theirs and our flesh will hang
On bushes, like the undershirt of Midas. Dead throats
Will shirk in the sedge like spiderwebs, whispering
Of how the victors took pliers to teeth and chopped charms out.
No one left to remember the women, but they were deer
Fleet and hunted, springing sideways, stunned by a fist.
And when the sun rises, it will seem to our ancestors that a new race
Has come up out of the sea, dripping with gold, crueller than the last.
Red House
The red house lies without the parish of the soul.
The frozen trees, the swings in the grey yard, the slow sweeping fans
Of brushes in light snow, and how that bus stops every day
Just beyond the red house and picks up.
Stay or leave? There is no addressing the Lord
For we are plain beyond that, but isn’t that white round a hole
In the sky where he once sat? Many of the shadows
Look up in their sickness, point with their aimless guns
And spout aimless rounds, and now one may hit
And one piece of bright shot will slip into that winter sun
And tear it, so that tomorrow it limps and spits sunset
All bleeding day. Red house, red house, forgive us such trespasses
For aren’t we the twice blessed, having lived through stranger weather
And having known you, red house?
*
Starlings in the loft and eaves of the red house
And the nestlings peep and pip at intervals, heard in rooms throughout
By the day-sick and the unfit for work. There was a golden age
For sure: there is always a golden age, like a shower of gold
Sweeter at a distance, perpendicular to the beloved body
Siring leaden times and leaden rivers. Now the madman,
Calling out of his window, denounces his long-dead neighbours,
The starlings pass him off, stuttering, the starlings passing through –
How birdcalls make sense of sorrow and suffering
Which is subject to hyper-inflation and loses its own mortal currency
In numbers. Red house, I see you in the city, on the plain
By the roadside and the railway. You are never in the mountains
Or by the sea. The smell of you is homely and nauseating
Like the smell of all humankind.
*
There was a woman who left the red house with her baby.
Her own mother waved from the window, a taxi took them away,
Daughter and granddaughter and then they were gone.
The woman dreamt at night of the red house:
The gaping letterboxes; the stink of tobacco and piss
Which fits so snugly, like a baby’s bonnet;
Her own footsteps climbing the stairwell ahead of her;
The tender annoyance of a wasp trapped on a landing.
Her mother stood with dumbbells in the kitchen
Swinging her hips this way and that, swinging her eyes
This way and that, wishing they were real bells she held
To clash and peal about her in a passion:
For never in all her great maternal struggling
Had she once considered such a silence.
*
Once a man brought home a bear to the red house.
A zoo-bear, still a cub, and muzzled and harnessed.
The children were kept inside as it played. The man smoked
And twitched the reins, and ground cigarettes under his heel.
The bear snuffled under the bench and grubbed up shit and sweetwrappers.
The bear’s sojourn was a gift of sorts, for the man was a romantic
And hoped his girl would relent when she saw the creature
And bring them milk in a saucer and titbits, and humanwarmth.
Until she let him in he would sleep on the landing with the bear
And teach him to dance on his hind legs, up the steps and down
In an endless manbeast cha-cha, paws clattering, feet slapping
His humming summoning succour from the stairwell.
The bear they took on the third day; it went well enough back into the light.
The man threw himself from the window, and he was lamed for life.
*
All the world is beyond the padded door of the flat.
A man once followed a girl into the red house and caught her on the stairs.
He held a black knife in his fist, and motioned.
Others are ready for this relationship, but not her:
She reflects at length upon the imposed hostilities
She anticipates the knife pressing down on her pink skin
Until it gives, she suspects they might never be friends
Her and him, and all the while she begs and screams and whispers
Please, playing the part assigned to her with a blade’s gesture.
The wrought iron design of the banisters catches her eye –
It would be designed by a man, that, in its hard superfluous beauty
And knocked into place by another man, and then forgotten
Until now, until she stood and wondered: why vines and sickles and sheaves?
Little girl, he says, I have done with this. Go now. Go. Please.
*
Imagine this: there is a room in the red house,
Infernal clutter, brocades and periodicals, and a mirror full of gloaming
And when the place is empty, she takes a basin of apples
Into this room and sits on the bed. There she is, in the mirror.
The room is not fresh. Everything here was bought in another time
By the long-spent, oft-bereaved who own fruit knives
And sugar tongs and no memory of the provenance of anything –
Except the har
d little apples, which fall so close to the tree.
So she escapes from childhood and taking refuge
In the red house inhales the historical sweat
The ancient hair-grease of its inhabitants
Who have sloughed off desperate times
And left their wearied skins
Folded breast-up like nightshirts on the pillow.
*
I could be happy and gainful without the red house
But it draws me to its mineral seam like home
When I am without the red house, I am without
And when I am within, I am undone.
A fist, a bomb will not destroy it
A hurtful letter, or a threat:
It is made of wasp-thought and saliva
But holds its own like footwear made of lead.
I cannot find it, should I want to
I have mislaid it now for several hundred years
It drags me in, fisherhouse of peoples
It spins me out, it shows me empty rooms.
The Red House lies within, I have heard it beating
The Red House lies without the parish of the soul.
Perhaps Akhmatova was right
When she wrote who knows what shit
What tip, what pile of waste
Brings forth the tender verse
Like hogweed, like the fat hen under the fence
Like the unbearable present tense
Who knows what ill, what strife
What crude shack of a life
And how it twists sweetly about the broken sill:
But housewives? Has poetry
Ever deepened in the pail
Was it ever found in the sink, under the table
Did it rise in the oven, quietly able
To outhowl the Hoover?
Does it press more than the children’s supper
The sudden sleepless wail?
Did it ever?
It lives. It takes seed
Like the most unforgiving weed
Grows wilder as the child grows older
And spits on dreams, did I say
How it thrives in the ashen family nest
Or how iambs are measured best
Where it hurts:
With the heel of an iron
On the reluctant breast
Of a shirt?
Ten Moons
And then came the ten moons
Full in the sun’s glare, and the seraphim,
And it was light all night in the orchards
And on the plains and even in the towns
And mankind rejoiced, because it was now the case
That the wrecking and equivocating could carry on
The pale night long. Mankind rejoiced
And went forth to those places twelve hours of light
Had not made it worth the while to despoil
And gambolled collectively on the cliff tops
And regarded the night-broiling of the sea
Hitherto forbidden, but now opened in festival.
Half the world’s time unpeeled and exposed
So fruit might ripen faster and tree flourish higher
And forced photosynthesis green all the land.
Then night ramblers, night-sun-worshippers,
Night-motorists fanned out and made the most
Of spectral light, which bleached out stars and even
The cosy old moon herself, who had
Once held a sickle broadside to the sun, and now
Was a hollow daytime shadow.
Only a few old-believers slept
Hand in hand, shoulder to breast,
As if their lives depended on it, knowing yet
That the morning would bring nothing
Because the day knew no beginning
And had no end.
The Poetry of Earth
The poetry of earth is mostly suppressed
It has been a good while since the cricket rasped
His tickly song from the grate, and the grasshopper
Minded his old green business in the field.
I could no more sing than cling to grass
But all the words I need are notes
There are instruments designed to catch
The water in spate, the ramming wave
The trickle of a jug-throat, but I am dumb
There are tones like cups to fit the measures of elation
But I saw the green from the road and I had none
I know what it means: my heart for joy did burst!
To make a path, to live in silent trepidation
Between song and substance
This is a curse.
Michael Blann
There was a hush, then Michael Blann
Stepped out onto the stage. Michael
Blann, with his pipe and his jukebox head
Oh, he’s your man.
He has a song for all weathers, a pipe
And a voice and he sings and he roams
He sings to the wind and a dog of how
The trees are all bare and Jack’s come home.
He’s a thin voice, like a spider thread
On days when the sun is late and fine
Live and let live, sings Michael Blann
The wind yields not, but the hills is mine.
He’s no call for fate passing over
His sheep are all angels, the stars are his lords
He’ll play any part the clouds should fancy
To humble tunes and hand-me-down words
The acts are written in briar strands
And the Pharisees are leaves in the air
I likes a drop pipes Michael Blann
Sing follow hark forward the innocent hare.
He wore to his end a clutch of sheep’s wool
Went alone, alone for most of his years
But crossed the hills a singing man.
A Ballad without Rhyme
This is a ballad without rhyme.
This is a ballad without sound of any sort.
In time they found the subject of this tune
And she was much more than the sum of her parts.
And how did it happen? That with her thick brown paws
And face lined all over like an exercise book
She would be carried the night athwart
On a star, trailing a winding sheet.
But I saw her in the kitchen. She was twiddling the tablecloth
Not praying, but talking to her late child
Admonishing his invisible boyhood
For the mess of leaden soldiers in the yard
The three days unmade bed. Banging the lid
Of the salt-caddy. Fine loneliness
For the house, half-broken, stood
In a mouth of trees and upon a waste
And where the bench in the yard
Had worn the imprint of an arse
Half a century in the making
There now was a bare place
And what she had was thyme
Stolen from the hillside,
Scenting every cupboard, room
Wild thyme for embalming.
So all the armies are passed –
She kept keys in a casserole
With cuttings, letters and a crust
A needle and an awl.
So solitary her movement I nearly cried out
How I need this rhyme! This coming of age
When all ages are equally mine
And only gibbets and gristle to illuminate.
Make history of us, good calm history
In tapestries and ballad form
I desire a painting of her, in the bed’s dent
A relic, a stain in the shroud, a rent
Instead I have the barren machinery:
The grease, the rags and the sod.
Skimmed of all her martyrdom she stands
Wrathful, impossible to behold.
Dawn Chorus
29 March 2010
Every morning since the time changed
I have woken to the dawn chorus
And even before it sounded, I dreamed of it
Loud, unbelievably loud, shameless, raucous
And once I rose and twitched the curtains apart
Expecting the birds to be pressing in fright
Against the pane like passengers
But the garden was empty and it was night
Not a slither of light at the horizon
Still the birds were bawling through the mists
Terrible, invisible
A million small evangelists
How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smouldering coal
Their throats singed and swollen with song
In dissonance as befits the dark world
Where only travellers and the sleepless belong
Fish’s Dream
I thought I would dive into the pool like them
But found myself skimming the surface like a pond-skater
The water was the dead spit of the sky
I saw my children kissing strangers
My son was mouthing a girl, the devotion
Of two fighting fish, he wants me far
From the river of his life, back to swimming the ocean
With the fleeting ghosts of kelt
That pay visit only when it is the season.
And so I am spawned and held
In the sea’s own shuttle
To be a glistening return
Containing my own river-reason
And muscle-mettle
Washed into unknown elation
Caught in the strange current
Of homing, homing!
The womb abhorrent
The body teeming
The water – from here –