A Book of Lives Read online

  That took the gale and is now

  As she is, beyond the sun.

  Avril Paton: Windows on the West

  Turn the kaleidoscope and the seventy-eyed creature

  Stretches, yawns, shakes the roof snow

  Off its back in clumsy dollops, gets a glow

  Going, cries of ‘It’s freezing!’ (not really, just a feature

  Of tenement winter), puts some coffee on, come on –

  How can a single one be a multiple seventy –

  I don’t know, but I know I like the mystery –

  Breathe out, breathe in, never in unison –

  ‘When did you get in last night?’ – ‘Where the hell

  Did you put my razor?’ – ‘Dog has started

  To chew things up again’ – ‘Well well,

  You were going to give it a bone, that’s your department’ –

  ‘That was never what art meant,

  Pictures falling off the wall, everyone has a –’

  ‘Don’t throw it away. I might need it’ –

  ‘You’ll never write a line if you don’t heed it

  When I tell you there’s enough life,

  Enough strife

  In this old sandstone block

  To turn Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby

  Into one noble undefeated cry

  Which is the single tenement sigh

  Any time, anywhere.

  Turn up the heat,

  A new day’s always sweet.’

  ‘Coffee up.’

  ‘My god another cracked cup.’

  Love and a Life

  Those and These

  Frank, Jean, Cosgrove, John, Malcolm, Mark – loves of sixty years

  Were a life that disported itself in many wonders not dispirited, though fears

  Visited often, and were there not (said Mark) other dears

  Like Leila who clutched your crotch in Cairo in ’41, she just disappears

  Is that it? And the night you broke the bed out there (said Malcolm), too many beers –

  Are you airbrushing a face,

  A grace, a disgrace –

  No no I’m not, they are all there, crowding round me, others, milling, mingling, tingling, tangling, pinning me, pulling my ears.

  Freeze-Frame

  None of those once known is disknown, hidden, lost, I see them in clouds in streets in trees

  Often and often, or in dreams, or if I feel I ought to be at my ease

  They prod and probe: ‘When my head was on your knees

  And your hand was on my head, did you think time would seize

  Head, hand, all, lock all away where there is no ring of keys –?’

  I did not, oh I did not,

  But look what I have got,

  Frame of a moment made for friendless friendly time to freeze

  The Top

  What use is a picture when the universe is up and drumming

  With its passions motions missions misprisions relentlessly going and coming

  Ghostly file of memories mopping and mowing and mumming –

  In their hands a brilliant top that they lash and lash to release its humming –

  It spins whistling softly until it wobbles, and you speed it with one last angry thumbing

  But soon it must fall back

  Into silence, attack

  As you will, take the lash as you will, to stave off the mundane numbing and dumbing.

  Tracks and Crops

  Memory is not a top that never stops, but there is such a top, top of the tops,

  Call it a world, it’s drenched with what you did, it grins and groans with the drips and drops

  Of your life, the sweat the blood the wine the weeping the honey and the hops,

  Whatever you squeezed or poured or distilled or scrambled from pores or veins, elixirs, poisons, potions not filched from shops –

  A bloom or glow like the first faint stirring of earthly unearthly crops –

  The cosmic harvesters

  Are scouring the universe

  For sheafs and tracks of love left well by all from lucky you to luckless but once-loved horny veggie triceratops.

  Jurassic

  I have a dinosaur egg in my cupboard, hard, heavy, fused to the rock it haunts.

  Someday Mark will have it and tempt its Jurassic chirp with his shazams and taunts.

  Love laid the egg even in those armoured times when the bellows and vaunts

  Of the laithly saurians belted out their ancient unlaithly wants –

  (And tenderly our own dear crocodile conveys her squeaking brood in jaws no buffalo daunts) –

  Some malice surely must

  Have sent the deadly dust

  That smothers what the pregnant earth gigantically flags up and flaunts.

  Crocodiles

  Patient patient men who can make pets of crocodiles

  Disclaim they have degrees in sedation or access to preternatural wiles.

  ‘It’s touch,’ they say. ‘If you know where to press, that’s good; if not, not! There are no smiles

  (Don’t be misled!), no purrs, no contented sighs to help you. Forget the styles

  Of furry bundles. Communicate far back and down, then further back and further down, eras, miles.

  Expressionlessness

  Has ports of ingress –

  Enter, clasp, hug, and then how quickly the esteemed veneer resiles!’

  Touch

  Touch is everything or nearly everything or it is nothing. Crocodiles mate, after all.

  The Devil’s swedger at minus a hundred is as cold and as ruthless as the Pole

  And only the most despairing and abandoned, female or male, could take it in their hole

  Or so we were told, or so they were told, when wretched creatures were taught of the Fall

  Of Man instead of the Rise of Man and hair-shirts and chastity-belts were thought to assist our feeble but our dearest soul

  Which struggled, crying, to be free

  And use its body to be

  The means of greatest grace, frolicking and fucking in the tropical throbbing unstoppable waterfall.

  Night Hunt

  The waters fall, and under the steelbright moon the hunters and the hunted shake the shadows in their trackless well-tracked wood.

  The barred and silvered dark is like a gateless cage crammed full of living food.

  Food for living! It cowers but you have to snatch it, crunch it, get it down your throat for good.

  Who can say blameworthy bloodweltering nature is anxious to be understood?

  Well, nothing is worthy of blame that feeds the root of bud baby and brood.

  It’s a darkness all the same,

  Coming to light in the shame

  Of knowing we would probably not banish our misgivings, even if we could.

  Under the Falls

  Break through and down with you, lovers all, down but not dry behind the falls.

  You’re staring into a rainbow spray, an unstrung bead-curtain as ready to brush breasts as any in cool levantine halls.

  The loud fresh swish and rush, the flash, the drizzle disorientates as well as enthrals.

  You sit back in a limbo cave of wonder, imagining the bird-calls

  Whistling through a paradise garden where all that falls

  Is a loved footfall

  Hardly disturbing at all

  The green and drowsy floor, and a world stretches somewhere, unseen, without woes or walls.

  An Early Garden

  My grandmother had a garden where I played as if arrayed in the heady scents of other days –

  Sweet pea mignonette wallflower phlox – recollection sees them shining in rainless summer rays

  Blooming and wafting for ever, and in the absence of roses demanding special praise.

  I remember roses much later, but in that early garden their erotic blaze

  Would have broken the innocence of such a mixed sweet haze

  When I
dreamed of lands

  Untouched by hands

  And drifted along even greater multi-scented ways where nothing, except a lucky memory, stays.

  A Garden Lost

  Maud never came into the garden: the fool was ower blate!

  She thought the poet’s deep voice and floppy hat were great

  But oh, the garden was squishy with worms and slugs and pigeons would mate

  Before her eyes and a cobwebby shed would relate

  Either silence or old horrors. Well, one day they padlocked the gate

  And she looked in and cried

  ‘Oh I could have tried!’

  But love is not invited twice and longing comes too late.

  Beyond the Garden

  When they lock the garden you go out into tumbleweed and sidewinder land.

  You stumble a bit, curse a bit, thirst a bit until you see you have to settle into the ways of sand.

  Date palms and desert springs, find them; eat lizards; understand

  Every dust-devil may disgorge an afreet, no demon is banned

  In the wilderness; keep watch; keep sane. Dunes, yes, on this strand

  But they don’t show you a sea

  And you must learn to be

  As dry as a scorpion, or a burr in the sand-golden tresses of Fand.

  Cape Found

  After how many days, how many months, we heard the waves, and sand became rock, and rock fell into the sound

  So far below we hesitated but did call it Cape Found.

  It was a great bay full of whales blowing. From our cliff the whole earth seemed round.

  We clambered down to the machair and jumped on the springy half-soaked blessed ground.

  ‘Do you remember the Heiliger Dankgesang?’ ‘Bits.’ ‘Sing some.’ The frail notes rose and crowned

  Our passage back to men,

  To women, to children,

  To ships and sails of health, to the whale’s road, the gull’s acres, brilliant, bonded and sound.

  Jean

  If you think it is easy to be in love, you have misheard.

  Jean said yes to the war; she had a very Latin word

  About coming back with your shield or on it, assumed with justice that I would be undeterred,

  Left me with an old red ring, a last kiss, and many letters I could reread even when ever so slightly beer-slurred

  In my sweltering troopship bound for shores where other loves were not to be ignored.

  I hear her ringing laugh

  Cut through the draff and chaff

  Like a knife-edge and after six decades I smile as I bend to burnish my word-hoard.

  War Voyage

  A poet in a troopship – is it to the ends of the earth? – wake the anchor –

  Hundreds of hammocks swaying and snoring – time for ribaldries, no space for rancour –

  Lashings of rain at first as we passed a ghostly rain-shrouded tanker –

  South then, south round Africa, months of sweat, daily deck drills to make us leaner and lanker –

  Near Suez, admonitory slides in close-up of every kind and colour of chancre –

  Water-watchers all

  Through sun and through squall

  In case some sleekit dark sub from Kiel should pull an eerie flanker.

  In Sidon

  Cosgrove my closest companion that burning year on the Lebanese coast,

  I have written about you already but raise you this last toast.

  Nothing happened between us and that might seem a boast

  Since there is pain in silence, but I never deserted the post

  Of our vibrant daily intimacies even if the best and the worst

  Tore me for all to see

  Eyes down in decency.

  So it was good, and I tell you this, I see you, your image is clear, you are in my mind, you have not grown old, my Cosgrove, you are no ghost!

  An Encounter 1

  Those possible worlds that we see and cannot alter – oh they are a devastation!

  The man beside me on the plane with his short-sleeved safari jacket needed no persuasion

  To talk: we were friends, brothers, long before we reached the destination.

  His wife on his other side was a mouse, never spoke: she was not part of an equation

  That in word and look, hand on sleeve, pressed knee proved an instant mutual one-hour-long revelation

  Of impossible desire

  Which could only expire

  As we took our separate ways on the tarmac, nursing elation, fighting desolation.

  An Encounter 2

  (In another universe, I poisoned her coffee and fled with Chuck to Amsterdam

  Where we made some disguise and jumped onto a jangling tram

  And snuggled into a brown café to smoke a little something and down the odd dram

  And climbed to a steep high narrow room and lay there trying to cram

  A lifetime into a night, pausing only to look down across the Dam

  And the dark canal

  Where even the banal

  Quiver of a floating moon we took as a glory and in that universe, briefly, we were happy, without a qualm.)

  Desire

  It is a power, it is a mystery, it is a fate, but above all it is a power.

  The jaws of Venus will not let go their prey. Hour after hour

  They sink deeper, and the victim even smiles to see the spreading flower

  Of blood, as it springs from those scary threshings of life. Don’t cower,

  Don’t wince! It’s only a nightmare, it’s only a movie, it’s only imaginary Phaedra shrieking from her tower.

  ‘Only, only’ you cry?

  What do you want to deny?

  Are you trying to tell us all these flecks of blood are not from something struggling to be born? You think it’s like the passing sting of some damned April shower?

  Love

  Love rules. Love laughs. Love marches. Love is the wolf that guards the gate.

  Love is the food of music, art, poetry. It fills us and fuels us and fires us to create.

  Love is terror. Love is sweat. Love is bashed pillow, crumpled sheet, unenviable fate.

  Love is the honour that kills and saves and nothing will ever let that high ambiguity abate.

  Love is the crushed ice that tingles and shivers and clinks fidgin-fain for the sugar-drenched absinth to fall on it and alter its state.

  With love you send a probe

  So far from the globe

  No one can name the shoals the voids the belts the zones the drags the flares it signals all to leave all and to navigate.

  After a Lecture

  Last and most unexpected friend, do you know you overthrew me

  In those first moments when you walked towards me in that lecture-room, not to undo me

  But you did undo me, I was shaking, I felt that well-known spear go through me,

  And when we talked my mind was racing like a computer to keep that contact sparking. What drew me

  Was irreducible but recognisable– drythroat fragments, physical certainties, emanations and invasions so quick to imbue me

  And wound me with hope

  I swore I would cope

  With whatever late late lifeline this man, whom I knew I loved, picked up and threw me.

  Plans

  Mark, here we are, here we go, let us celebrate four years of letters and talk,

  Purdey and Dostoevsky and Glenmorangie and a splash of Pasolini will never be out of stock

  I assure you, and although when you are in Italy it is true I may watch the clock

  For your safe return, there is nothing north or south that is able to block

  Our invisible communication. With it we shall live to unlock

  Something quite sizable

  Perhaps inadvisable! –

  Oh I don’t know what, leave it for the shock, we don’t want anything to scatter off at half-cock.

  Brickies

  Scaffolding r
ises like a forest round the six storeys of Whittingehame Court.

  The metal poles are hammered into place, the planks are laid, the brickies are at their sport

  Of scampering up the near-vertical ladders, our fort

  Bristles with a bantering excrescence of life which is, well, art of a sort.

  ‘For a full picture,’ you said, ‘for the full Brueghel we need female brickies in skirts – short!’

  ‘They’d have jeans,’ I said,

  So keep a cool head.’

  ‘Use your imagination, man. That hoot from the Clyde! It’s a boatload of feisty busty brickies getting their black-leather-skirted arse into port!’

  Italy

  You’ll be in Florence now, my man, and is there scaffolding on the duomo, or only history and the sun?

  Ghostly Etruscan backchat even before the city was begun?

  A whiff of Savonarola? Or are pigeons with cameras the new smoking gun

  To show that tourism rules, obliterates, takes a story that will run and run

  And runs with it, high art, dropping a dim litter of Goth and Hun?

  Tell me when you come back.

  I’m peering through a crack

  In the dusty polythene at distant Italy, and you, where you may be, what you will do, what you have done.

  Whistling

  What a blessing it is when you have memories that sustain you

  Through absence and distance that otherwise would drain you

  Of hope and therefore of will! Love will never not pain you

  But at the end of pain there is someone who will not disdain you

  And a slipstream of joy from Glasgow to Firenze can hardly contain you

  As you break the clouds