A Book of Lives Read online

  In half-belief ‘Is this all for me?’

  The reward of gratitude is a star in dark skies.

  You cannot always help but trying is the crux.

  I well remember that old alky Bill

  Who shared his hovel of a house with others;

  They held him prisoner among the litter

  Of needles and syringes and empty bottles

  Waiting to be smashed on social workers.

  Another place for Bill? – possible,

  But he’s a bloody mess from fights at the moment.

  We don’t give up, that nothing is easy

  Makes it even better not to give up.

  Everyone alive is subject to change.

  Hope lies where you least expect it.

  Take exclusion from school, or rather don’t take it!

  Sandra, a so-called impossible child,

  Made sure each class was disrupted to breaking-point.

  Yelling, hitting, throwing chairs about,

  Was she getting what she wanted,

  Did she know what she wanted,

  Was it ‘What is to be done with her?’

  Or rather ‘What has been done to her?’

  She was a child abused, her mother on drugs,

  She had become a ‘case’, found caring arms

  In social services alone, and there

  Not only care but cure: a worker assigned

  To be with her throughout school, helping, calming,

  A bridge of sympathy between teacher and pupil,

  A dedication not all that far from love.

  Homelessness is terrible, but a home

  Without love is almost equally so.

  We watch, we measure, we praise whatever

  Society can do, given the means and the people

  To unknot fearful twists of fate, each day

  Brings more, and if we are powerless

  We cry out in our powerlessness.

  If we are to blame, then we are to blame;

  Fair treatment is what we ask.

  My friends,

  There is always without doubt a worst case,

  And it is so bad because it is so rare,

  Call it the dark night of the carer’s soul.

  Here you have Carl, supreme in cunning,

  Known to have a personality disorder,

  But showing the social team ‘continued improvement’:

  Ah what a quiet mockery he made

  Of schizophrenia! This man, however,

  Took a claw hammer to his next victim’s head,

  Fried his brain with butter and ate it –

  ‘Very nice,’ he said. And unpredictable

  One might add, although social workers

  Would still have nightmares, thinking, shivering –

  What was needed other than what they had,

  Vigilance to the last degree, happy recall

  Of those so many they had helped, brought back

  To life with faith and hope blessedly renewed.

  Oh if you ever thought we were not required,

  Workers on the very edge of despair,

  Consider Joe, kicked out by foster-carers

  At twelve, having stolen from the little they had:

  ‘Ah don’t know why Ah done it, but it’s okay

  If they didny wahnt me back, it’s okay –

  My ma didny wahnt me either.’ To live

  In such unquestioned acceptance of defeat

  Is dreadful, yet we know Joe can be helped.

  The value of a soul can be drawn out

  By those who are trained to do so, those

  Who can blow the tiniest downtrodden spark

  Of self-esteem into flame. You drop a tear

  In instant sympathy or you are filled

  With anger against systems and perpetrators,

  And this is good and fine and natural.

  But change is all the practicalities

  Of learning, funding, understanding, change

  Is everything we believe to be possible,

  Whatever the squalor and sickness and stink.

  There will never be a paradise with people like angels

  Walking and singing through forests of music,

  But let us have the decency of a society

  That helps those who cannot help themselves.

  It can be done; it must be done; so do it.

  The Old Man and E.A.P.

  He is not sleeping, though you might think so.

  His eyes are half shut against the light.

  ‘An old man’s nap.’ They smile, walk softly on.

  He is smiling too, but mentally.

  Without a twitch, he is on dragonback

  above Edgarallanwood – what’s in a name –

  getting ready to rein in on the low moon.

  It was a certain very dark exhilaration

  played invisibly along his lips,

  or a dark pride in riding such a beast

  perched among its spikes and rolling folds

  as it swished through cypresses, topped them,

  kicked them, flicked them with a thundery tail

  out below back down into men and

  all that, last dog-walk of the day, hurrying,

  whistle and whoop through Edgarallanwood.

  He is full of questions, this man who is not sleeping.

  Ever since the Fall of the House of Answer –

  what’s in a name – he has kept a brace

  of dragons, dangling like markers in a diary,

  whiffling at him as if they had the speech

  of old times; he listens, hard, hard,

  asks them in all the languages he knows

  if there was a day, if there could have been a day,

  if there was ever a night or a day

  when they conversed with human kind, guarded

  on terms of equality with ungreedy heroes

  the well-locked unimaginable treasuries

  laid up from times still older, and what

  oh what would those times have been like, he asks.

  The dragon’s ear is dumb; it blinks; it hits

  the moon, its wings are white with dust, the ages

  dissolve in airless silence. Go on, bark,

  last dog of evening, open the man’s eyes.

  ‘Had a good nap?’ He smiles. ‘Better than that:

  I sprang a tale of mystery and imagination.’

  An Old Woman’s Birthday

  That’s me ninety-four. If we are celebrating

  I’ll take a large Drambuie, many thanks,

  and then I’ll have a small one every evening

  for the next six years. After that – something quick

  and I’ll be off. A second century doesn’t entice.

  When I was a girl, you thought you would live for ever.

  Those endless summer twilights under the trees,

  sauntering, talking, clutching a modest glass

  of grampa’s punch diluted to suit young ladies –

  diluted? It didn’t seem so! The crafty old man

  loved to see us glowing, certainly not swaying

  but just ever so slightly, what do you say, high.

  Life put all that away. I drove an ambulance

  through shells, ruins, mines, cries, blood,

  frightful, days of frightfulness who could forget?

  It is not to be dwelt on; we do what we can.

  If this is hell, and there is no other,

  we are tempered, I was tempered – fires, fires –

  I was a woman then, I was not broken.

  No angel either; the man I married knew that!

  Well, we had our times. What are quarrels for

  but to make amends, get stronger. We did, we were.

  He is gone now. I don’t have a budgie in a cage

  but I am one, and if you want me to sing

  it will take more than cuttlebone and mirror:

  more than Drambuie: mo
re than if there was ever

  good news out of Iraq where my ambulance

  would keep me day and night without sleep:

  more than what I say here, sitting

  waiting for my son to come and see me

  perhaps with flowers, chocolate, a card,

  oh I don’t know, he is late, he is ill,

  he is old, I forget his heart is worse

  than mine, but still, I know he’ll do his best.

  You really want me to sing? Come on then,

  you sing first, then a duet, I love a duet.

  For David Daiches, on his Ninetieth Birthday

  ‘He must be ninety if he’s a day’ –

  That’s what I heard Methuselah say

  As he scoured the Internet with a glint

  (Not nine hundred yet though, eh?).

  ‘The boy is coming on. Let’s print

  Congratulations in hard copy,

  Nothing stinted, nothing sloppy!’

  David in his youth combined

  Dreams of an undivided mind,

  Sprezzatura of the chanter

  Solemn sadness of the cantor.

  Travelling salesmen spliced his ears

  Like weird Scots-Yiddish balladeers:

  ‘Aye man, ich hob’ getrebbelt mit

  De midday train.’ A fuse was lit

  To language, culture, history, nation,

  Whatever needed validation

  Circled by imagination.

  He swept up Burns, Fergusson, Scott,

  And Andrew Fletcher who cursed the knot

  Of Union, cursed his land and told it

  ‘Was only fit for the slaves who sold it’.

  The spirit of that land survived

  In senses you may think contrived,

  But David takes this in his stride

  And casts his net both deep and wide.

  A spirit well distilled, unique,

  Fragrant as mist, treasure to seek –

  David has pressed this in his book.

  Beside the Taj Mahal he shook

  The moonlight with a classic swig:

  Glenlivet, rosier than the Rig-

  Veda to a wanderer’s soul!

  Keep our tempers hale and whole!

  David, but not our David, danced,

  We are told, before the Lord

  With all his might, like one entranced,

  In a white smock without a cord,

  While shouts and trumpets brought the ark

  To blare and brilliance from the dark.

  Our David wanted to throw light

  On many: got them in his sight

  As critic, not to shoot them down

  Or crack their brows into a frown

  Of Derridean doubts – or douts.

  He set small store by sparring-bouts

  But targeted coherences.

  He gave MacDiarmid, Milton, Moses

  More than flash appearances;

  There was a web, a net, a gnosis

  That could not be described, but felt,

  Whatever Queens of Spades were dealt.

  David, your friends are gathered here

  To celebrate your latest year

  Within a life led well and long.

  This is a poem, not a song,

  But you may hear it like the dear

  Strains King David danced among.

  A Birthday: for I.H.F.

  It is no use offering the gatekeeper a garland of seventy-nine rhododendron petals. He can count.

  Do not waste your time showing the guardian of the grove a pretty pretty book of eighty-one amorous pictures.

  And as for that album of seventy-eight famous executions, keep it for the next bonfire.

  If you are ever tempted to photograph a convocation of eighty-two midges thin with hunger and thirst, forget it.

  Or if the cosmetic surgeon from Giacometti & Co. promises to make you a new man on payment of only seventy-seven pounds sterling, turn your pockets out with a shrug.

  But when at last you come across the ship with eighty sails, oh what a sight that is to take to heart, with the white canvas flapping and the rigging snapping as she churns the ocean through a stiff breeze, and the sailors sing out their seemingly inexhaustible store of shanties, and the dolphins slice and gleam and are ahead of the prow like protective things from a world that is not quite ours, and the playful captain out of sheer joy blasts his horn eighty times into the misty morning, and then with his blue eyes glittering he bangs the rail – ‘Steady as she goes!’

  Wild Cuts

  by Edwin Morgan and Hamish Whyte

  Natural Philosophy

  The dim shadow

  of the thing

  was but a blur

  against the dim shadows

  of the woods behind it.

  A Bird Too Many

  Notwithstanding

  his suffering

  he found himself smiling

  as he contemplated the remnant

  of his long-suffering

  ducks.

  Sure of a Big Surprise

  She dared not again

  tempt fate

  in the gloomy wood

  by night.

  A Drip Too Many

  About it the liquids of

  decomposition had killed

  vegetation, leaving the thing

  alone in all its grisly

  repulsiveness as though shocked

  nature had withdrawn in terror.

  Soothe and Improve

  He knew little more of savage dances

  than his tribesmen did

  of the two-step and the waltz;

  but he knew that dancing

  and song and play

  marked in themselves

  a great step upward.

  A Whizz Too Many

  A haze obscured his vision –

  everything became black – his brain

  was whizzing about at frightful velocity

  within the awful darkness of his skull.

  Last Days

  man moved less rapidly

  and as he went

  he looked now for a burrow

  into which he might crawl

  A Movement Too Many

  Presently the smoke came out,

  as I have told you,

  and the cliff went away

  toward the edge of the world.

  But they are all dead now.

  (Found poems from Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Cave Girl, 1913)

  Five Paintings

  Salvador Dali: Christ of St John of the Cross

  It is not of this world, and yet it is,

  And that is how it should be.

  Strong light hits back and the arms

  Coming from where we cannot see,

  Ought not to see, another dimension

  For another time. At this time, we

  Share the life of bay and boat

  With simply painted fishermen

  Who would give no Amen

  Even if clouds both apocalyptic and real

  Made them look up and feel

  What they had to feel

  Of shattering amazement, fear,

  Protection, and a wash of glory.

  Was it an end coming near?

  Was it a beginning coming near?

  What happened to the thorns and blood and sweat?

  What happened to the hands like claws the whipcord muscles?

  Has the artist never seen Grünewald?

  ‘I have to tell you John of the Cross called,

  Said to remind you light and death once met.’

  Sir Henry Raeburn: Portrait of Rev. Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch

  The skating minister is well balanced

  And knows it. Something distinctly smug

  Keeps those arms in place. Wouldn’t it be good

  If the god of thaws pulled that icy rug

  From under him, to remind his next sermon

  What it is tha
t goeth before a fall.

  He shivers before the fire

  Hunched in his wife’s mocking shawl –

  Not the thing at all!

  Rembrandt: Man in Armour

  No warrior here.

  This is a man who has put on some armour

  In the cause of art. No enemy is near,

  The helmet is well burnished and no doubt,

  If tapped, gives off a musical note.

  It would certainly not

  Smudge hand or glove with caked or dusty blood.

  If the man is faintly smiling, that would fit.

  Rembrandt, man, everyone will love it.

  Bring back your son, yourself, the woman at her bath,

  And we’ll use words like masterpiece again,

  A cupboard is the best place for jingle-jangle.

  Oh it’s well done: the head looms out of darkness

  With all the accoutrements bar pain.

  You are great; even a loss from you’s a gain.

  But do not trivialise the death of men.

  Joan Eardley: Flood-Tide

  Lonely people are drawn to the sea.

  Not for this artist the surge and glitter of salons,

  Clutch of a sherry or making polite conversation

  See her when she is free:

  Standing into the salty bluster of a cliff-top

  In her paint-splashed corduroys,

  Humming as she recalls the wild shy boys

  She sketched in the city, allowing nature’s nations

  Of grasses and wild shy flowers to stick

  To the canvas they were blown against

  By the mighty Catterline wind –

  All becomes art, and as if it was incensed

  By the painter’s brush the sea growls up

  In a white flood.

  The artist’s cup

  Is overflowing with what she dares

  To think is joy, caught unawares

  As if on the wing. A solitary clover,

  Unable to read WET PAINT, rolls over

  Once, twice, and then it’s fixed,

  Part of a field more human than the one