A Book of Lives Page 9
To jostle the crowds
Where Mark might be whistling a snatch or a catch that would carelessly care for you and sain you.
Harry
– Tell us about Harry. – Harry the vanman? – The very man. Go ahead.
– Where shall I begin? He delivered newspapers and the van was red.
– That’s not too interesting. – We used to play strip draughts before we went to bed.
We lit out for the Blackpool Illuminations instead of trolling the Med.
I am sure there are many other things that might be said.
– So he’s not a fixture.
I get the picture.
– Do you? I don’t think so. Wayward paths can be affectionately led.
The Last Dragon
Is it the mists of autumn? My mind’s dislodged, far back, far off, in turmoil, a memory trail
To the grizzled warrior in Heorot hall whose heart inne weoll
Thonne he wintrum frod worn gemunde and told his ancient tale.
I too am old in winters and stories and may I never fail
To guard my word-hoard before the dragon with his flailing tail
Sweeps everything away
Leaves nothing to say
Either in turmoil or in peace, and neither poetry nor song nor all their longing can avail.
Dragon on Watch
My grandmother’s bronze dragon straddles my mantelpiece like a guard,
Heavy, fierce, Chinese, and now quite old, he shows no sign of not being hard
If activated. I have just been dusting his tongue which licks out like a flame. Fine, unmarred,
His ears and horns are flames, his tail is flames, his arched reptilian back is unscarred.
He will certainly outlive me, but to eat me – that’s barred!
He can watch over Mark
When I am in the dark.
Polish him with respect, with a dry cloth, and the house will never be ill-starred.
Scan Day
Two scans in one day, CT and bone – they are certainly looking after me.
Computerised tomography like a non-invasive Vesalius will slice me apart to see
If I am really what I ought to be and not what I don’t want to be.
In the giant redwood forest you are shown the rings of a fallen tree
With the few blips and wavy bits that tell you it’s been a good fight, even with destiny.
There are no chimeras
Under the cameras.
You are laid out as you are, imperfect, waiting, wondering, approximately free.
Skeleton Day
Bizarrely brought, demanding thought, the benedictions of the bone scan!
There you lie, well-injected, clothed but motionless man
As the machine lowers its load close over you and begins its creeping pan
Downwards, while the screen unrolls a little skeleton, a blueprint, a plan –
That plan is you! Skull, ribs, hips emerge from the dark like a caravan
Bound for who knows where
Stepping through earth or air
Still of a piece and still en route, beating out the music of tongs and bones while it can.
October Day
Get the sun out, get it shining! It’s only October, and only a tenth of the leaves are yellowing.
Prod a few white clouds out of their beds and get them billowing!
We can sit a while and not batten down the hatches for a gale following.
We can clink a glass and swirl the wine and still not rush the swallowing.
We can smoke in a moveless dear afternoon till the late light spreads its hallowing
Over everything
And then we must bring
The day to rest with good ease, recollections, far thoughts, love and dallying.
Titania
Scratch him between the ears, he is in excellent fettle, and when he listens to the tongs and bones
He nods his head, brays gently in time, and his hurdy-gurdy drones
Ravish Titania who has fled from pavanes and protocols trumpets and thrones
To be with her beast, to cuddle her cuddy, to dawdle with her donkey, to translate his tones
Into transports of love. So why is it touching? You don’t need erogenous zones
For a parable of affection
Doomed in direction
But groping for the gold that’s panned from gainless pains and groans.
Tatyana
Tatyana sat at her little window table in the moonlight.
First love forbade her even to ask whether it was wise to write.
Her nightgown slipped from her shoulder as she made her heart naked all that long night.
Her letter fell dead. Onegin thought her naive, provincial, and not very bright.
Bright enough to marry money, but glittering at a ball, poised and mature in the candlelight,
She knew that happiness
Was really something else,
Was once tak vozmozhno, tak blizko, so possible, so near, and now only remembered, receded, almost out of sight.
Teresa
Up here in Ávila, and grand the sierra, there’s so much air and space for vision.
God must be nearer by a sky or two. It burns. He burns. And there is no remission.
There’s love, and love, and then there’s love – and love – and if you are really aflame, who makes the decision?
I’m a bustler, I’m a hustler, I’m a hussy, I have a mission, I make an incision, I court collision.
Who do I love? My barefoot sisters, Juan de la Cruz who might be my son, the intuition
I have of one divine
Lover who will be mine
But not till I die. Ah, muero porque no muero! God forgive my ardent impatient admission!
John 1
Nothing will bring him back. I know that, of course I know that. The days
When I do not think of him are few, but if I turn my gaze
On a phantom, on a plot of earth, on a faded photograph of great times, I raise
Nothing, nearly nothing, no, not nothing, it is the something of a pain that stays
Ineradicable and only to be mitigated when I breathe the phrase
I loved you. You must know
It was truly so, although
As clay in clay you cannot catch my thanks, my steadiness, my lateness, my praise.
John 2
Once you dyed your greying hair with a black marker and the pillow was a mess.
What did I care? What did you care? We were in such happiness
It might have been peach pink or saltire blue. And as for dress
My flares were wider than yours – oh no they weren’t – oh yes they were – confess!
Faffing along the scorching Black Sea coast we were burnt too raw to caress.
At Constantsa we were blest
By a breeze from the west
Unforgiving Ovid stared down at us, but even in that half-decayed port we could not share a smidgen of his distress.
When in Thrace
Ovid had to start wearing furs – layers of them sometimes – in Thrace.
He said the winter winds and the salt sleet would cut off your face.
He threeped and threeped that his exile was a conspiracy and a disgrace.
Surrealistic metamorphoses of love and lust were hardly to be written about in that place.
But once he learned to stop girning and moaning he uncovered a trace
Of common humanity
Cast off urbanity
Wrote poems in the barbarian tongue which he hated but which was now, as a philosopher would one day say, the case.
Lust
Lust is a languorous pot of fumes in the hallway. Lust is steam-pistons. Lust is promises promises.
Lust is a bead-curtain chinkled by a dancer’s nipples as she shakes and shines through the teasing interstices.
Lust rides the wildebeest into oblivion. On its back are princes, blister
s, mistresses.
Lust is the corer screwing and sloshing its juicy cock-shaped tunnel into the melon of your wishes.
Lust is the holding of a sweaty glance across the gay disco’s heaving dance-floor and its bareback vistas.
It is really not very good
And we don’t think you should
But we know you will. Dinners come brimming from the kitchen and you grin as you crunch the ashes from those hot hot dishes.
Late Day
There are days when, and there are days if, and then again there are simply days.
After a long night, after a bad night, the sun did let out a few rays
That filtered gamely through the grimy scaffolding. The poor wintry stuff gets my praise.
If darkness kept the world like a closed eye, we could only get our nightmare to search and gaze
From its rolling red and bridled eyeball as we ride it down and down where muzzles never graze.
How great the winter sun
When horrors are undone
By gentlest flimsiest fingers lighting our fingers as we open the curtains on a day content to glimmer and not to blaze.
Bobby
Bobby on one elbow, stretched out in his red jeans on my carpet, thirty years ago
Bobby at the Grand Canyon, squinting up, on the verge, fathomless purple below
Bobby a bundle of nerves as the transatlantic plane comes down to land, heavy and slow
Bobby mugged, compensated, an unexpected few thousands to blow
Bobby with a stick and a cap and a fluttery heart in a basement café in our Glasgow
Where we faithfully meet
Take the lift to the street
Having swirled out our foamy chocolate-sprinkled late but oh not last cappuccino!
G.
‘Ah canny say Ah love ye but.’ ‘I know, that’s all right, it’s all right.’
‘Ah love ma wife an ma weans. Ah don’t go aroon thinkin aboot you day an night.
Ah wahnt tae come in yir mooth, an see thee teeth a yours – see they don’t bite!
Ah like ye right enough, but aw that lovey-dovey stuff is pure shite.
Ah widny kiss ye, God no.’ But kiss me he did one afternoon, with a drink in him, at Central Station, on the lips, in broad daylight.
It will not be denied
In this life. It is a flood-tide
You may dam with all your language but it breaks and bullers through and blatters all platitudes and protestations before it, clean out of sight.
Tomtits
Two twinkling tomtits were enjoying the scaffolding outside my window. Did they think it was a tree?
Surely they are not going to nest in those hard angles for all the world to see?
Against the filthy struts the sodden planks the louring sky they are new-minted fresh and free,
Flashing flirting blue and yellow, dark eyes darting missing nothing, not even me! –
A pair, an item, a unit, so magnetic to each other and so beautiful to us that we say they must be
In love, what else could wind
The springs of heart and mind
To frisk through all that muck and murk in such precarious liberty?
Arabian Night
The runners through the darkness hear the hooves, is it behind them or all round?
They are inured to the unknown and only wonder idly at the sound.
They track the stony desert to bring back the bride, all braided and bound
With silver and leather, silent, white-veiled and white-gowned.
Why did one of them not hunker down and set his ear to the ground?
Jealous riders jumped them
Sabred them and dumped them
But the bright bride had learned to hide, stripped off her braws, put on her shades, called her maids, packed a van and roared off, never to be found.
November Night
Dark and darker the year, late leaves flying, my thoughts turning
Back to ’38, war looming, lectures distracting, feelings racing, engrossing, burning,
Jean and Frank together within me smouldering shouldering laughing tugging churning,
Frank the first, king of something, emerging, emulating, energising, a whole province of yearning,
Gallus Russianist, stocky communist, quick-talking anti-somnambulist, your learning
Was my learning, but then
You were the first of men
In that impossible dimension of love which now with unspoken groans and even secret tears I was approaching and discerning.
Spanish Night
And yet, en una noche oscura, as we know from the words of swarthy much-buffeted John of the Cross,
In the darkest night, from a dungeon, a real one, rich in hideous shit and chains and slime and moss,
It is not impossible to bribe a jailer and bamboozle his guttering god like a joss,
Escaping from dark into dark but leaving great doctors to gloss
What light he saw then in the stars he sent his thankful, his hot, his loving thoughts across.
He sank onto the breast
Of one whom he loved best
Delirious among the dim night lilies where at last there was neither loved nor lover, but there was love and everything that was not love was dross.
Whatever Happened To
the young man sitting next to me in the Biograph (peace to its long-lost rubble!), in that smoky place
Where it was too dark to take stock of anybody’s face,
Who seized my wandering hand, laid it flat palm upwards, and with his index finger started to trace
I.L.O.V.E.Y.O.U., clear as if he had spoken, letter by steady letter, crossing with quick grace
My life-line and my heart-line and moving into a space
He was not blate to invade
But was he then afraid
Scurrying off as if in shame that he had laid the train for some outrageous embrace?
Absence
Love is the most mysterious of the winds that blow.
As you lie alone it batters with sleeplessness at the winter bedroom window.
The friend is absent, the streetlamp shivers desolately to and fro.
Your prostate makes you get up, you look out, police car and ambulance howl and flash as they matter-of-factly come and go.
There is pain and danger down there, greater than the pain you know
But it is pain all the same
As you breathe the absent name
Of one who is bonded to you beyond blizzards, time-zones, sickness, black stars, snow.
Letters
You sent a card from the Uffizi which took sixteen days to reach these shores.
A pigeon might be better, it could home in on the scaffold and count the floors.
The heart beats, I sit, I eat, I talk, I open doors
But in the everyday I am waiting for the imagined but stormily cargoed shores
Of joy and hope a letter in your upright hand tips out and restores.
‘Scrivimi!’ you write.
I do, I will, all right!
But this, though I do not send it, I give you to keep till the sun melts the rocks and the sea no longer roars.
Love and the Worlds
Scary is this tremulous earth, flaring, shouting, killing and being killed.
Is the universe rippling with life? What sign is there that space is filled
With anything but gas and dust and fire and rock? Are we the tillers to have it tilled?
I think so! And with these red hands, an act of love? Why not? We cry but we create, we kill but we build.
Dante was sure the stars were all – even ours – rolled out by love. They gild
A dark that would truly scare
If there was nothing there
The horror of there not being something, good or bad or neither, made or found, willed or self-willed.
The Release
The scaffolding has gone. The sky is there! hard cold
high clear and blue.
Clanking poles and thudding planks were the music of a strip-down that let light through
At last, hammered the cage door off its hinges, banged its goodbye to the bantering dusty brickie crew,
Left us this rosy cliff-face telling the tentative sun it is almost as good as new.
So now that we are so scoured and open and clean, what shall we do?
There is so much to say
And who can delay
When some are lost and some are seen, our dearest heads, and to those and to these we must still answer and be true.
September–November 2002
The War on the War on Terror
This woman, I heard her say she could not bear
To bring a child into a world so dreadful
It scoops up smoking body parts like that.
Did she mean she would rather leave them lying?
Of course not, that’s just twisting what she says.
Well, let’s be blunt, let us be damnably blunt.
Would you rather not have a baby in a body-bag,
Are you listening? – bits of a baby
In a body-bag, would you rather not have that,
Not see that, not touch that, not know that,
Is it too much for you, for your sensibilities,
Come on, I know what I am talking about,
I have been right through life like an arrow.
What child would welcome such a grudging mother?
Stay in bed then; count the hours and wars.
It really is a very simple question:
Would you rather have something, or nothing?
Sit with your back against some tomb, altar,