Mountain

Autumn: Complexes

1. OLD CERTAINTIES

At night I awake from a flimsy sleep;

the town outside leans through the window,

a street lamp throws an ochre line

down the no sleeping gutter of my pillow;

heavy lorries growl over nearby corners

and cars hiss out of a long serpentine distance,

arriving in a deadly rattle as they strike

the curtains with their headlamp flints.

Trains drag an endless jet of sound

in and out of obscurity,

flying into familiar syncopations

only for the seconds of their nearest approach;

but mostly the town just whirs and purrs

like a satisfied machine which only the random

scurry of rain can wash from my ears.

But the loudest sound is the reflex bark of memory

and footfalls on the hollow floors of hope;

from the mountain, silence falls like a stone

in the deepest well, and all the rest is waking;

First love

there were once golden lawns, rich warm hours

and oak beamed places; there were once rooms

and walks that streamed with not yet requited

love, the accidents of words, untried

embraces; and once there was a windy night

with damp shaken leaves that became the ghosts

I summoned year to year. I sought escape

in arching halls of absolutes (in thought

not deeds) in vast and labyrinthine walls;

I lined the fields with poetry, chiselled caverns

out of words that would amaze the maze

I could control: an untamed Minataur

stood by in monstrous fascination.

And every line was its own image then,

blind on the pilgrimage to the shrine of light.

the world was an obscurity, while I

lived wire-like from pylons shimmering, each

atom its own to fling me through the night.

All nature was philosophy. It took

me in, I was its thing; I dreamed of downs,

then mountains, to absorb my wanderings

until I found another way to be

alone – to be alone with friends – to force

each ecstasy of friendship to become

a fantasy of love; to walk among

the leaves, and make the longing longer still.

My hope was young; I took a hundred shots:

aimed and squeezed the triggered instant, sprang

my shuttered present on a timeless past.

The girl was the object not subject of love,

I kept each elementary outline clothed

with minor facts, taking her with trees

and empty hills, and grass and sand and rocks,

so that every step was an ending then

from friend to friend, to friends of friends of friends.

First lusts

next

we shared a last lost cigarette

(one bloody night, one girl, one kiss)

and I thought of only beginnings

as I stood by a door at the end.

a party was a kind of consolation

for my jokes, the glasses I broke, her

fears of dietary disaster.

(always I intended

or pretended to have said:

one day like Jack –

that’s Kennedy or Kerouak –

I know that you’ll grow tired of me

or I will hit the road;

but please just wait until you see

the reasons I should go.)

and yet

I promised to write that

Christmas Poem

miraculously by the end of April

if I got her into bed,

though I tried instead

to make light of our differences

with an offer to screw her

in an empty socket

till she would glow again for me.

(synchronicity was all that we lacked:

I wanted her breasts; she wanted my tact.)

until

my love was everyone

who gave me anger or affection

although or because I could not love them

and everyone I crucified

with the truth or with my lies,

and everyone I ever hurt

because of, or despite, my words.

my love became

a thing in name,

another way to comprehend

that in the end

the love we ache

is equal to the love we fake.

2. OLD UNCERTAINTIES

A walk in the town

glimpses of the mountain:

history

looking back

Mars was starving in a London flat, draft

dodging and too thin for bullets to catch;

we hung out with Jupiter, ambrosial

and stoned, while Mercury wrote messages

in obscure verse that no one quite condoned.

Across the unscaled lunar face

shadows gripped the contours like a disease,

the razor horizon cut off without sky,

and Earth, a partial place mottled blue and white,

surfaced like a diver from the deep of space:

a marketable scene, a poster on our wall.

They brought an audience like a world cup crowd,

drew together one in six of those left back

on Earth to see the pictures live;

they played some golf and said a prayer,

brought a car and watched TV,

as comfortable as home.

They planted bootprints in the sterile dust,

took their snaps of Jupiter and Mercury and Mars,

and dumped their noiseless junk back

on the transhistoric dustbin Moon.

The view across that quarter million miles

back through our brief four million years

grew slowly tattered on the wall.

After only half a decade there was nothing

but compulsion in our looking back,

the day we tore the Moonscape down,

threw Earthrise on the coals of the fire.

We’re busy nowadays with Jupiter’s

Consumerthon down at the shopping arcade;

Mars has enlisted everyone in a Star

Wars game in the blindness of space; and my new

business is a Mercury subscriber.

Alien presents

In the early autumn rain

the hillside rolls itself in mist,

hangs with edges blurred

like an alien visitor above the town.

It has come in close

to investigate our purpose,

explore the devices and that drive our lives.

“It was grey and shining,

hovered over roofs and spires

before dissolving into cloud”

observers go on drinking doubts

that crowd the public bars.

“Couldn’t say how large it was;

it seemed to fill the sky.”

Police report an ordinary day

though fog was causing some delay;

No evidence was found.

But any thought restored beneath the core

that Outside might hide something more

is just enough to satisfy the guess

that we survive as something less.

Passed civilisations

In the buildings of the capital

buried cities stretched to a long museum frieze;

a stalk-legged bird curved down a corridor,

down fragments and remains

gathered like beer mats for all to see.

Death was ambered, glassed and cased,

the mummy after six millennia,

decomposed before it hit eternity,

is now at last X-rayed for clues.

The coffee too comes alive in machines

in the bowels of the past,

while a child in only half awareness

danced away down galleries and out of sight.

The subway station landscape explodes,

reordered in its cinematographic hype –

but Elliot was wrong, it’s the hypodermic

space between that puts us down –

platforms skid out of darkness,

flash with cold illumination

and bits that don’t add up,

as the city passes in a long-buried frieze.

Back stalking the town

with all the more strenuous street lamp stars;

a figure comes lunging with supportive speed;

somewhere nearby footsteps fall on hard times.

Yet,

the mountain glimmers.

Perfect thoughts

I was looking for some total like

Perfection of the Work – or Life –

or Art, or Science, bingo, Zen,

The Thoughts of Mau, or Bill or Ben,

not God, but infinitely worse,

Life, Death and the Universe:

Time building up to the question What,

and getting stuck on If or Not.

There’s nothing you can do that can’t

be done, except that most things aren’t;

so wasn’t it a vain pretence

to claim that anything made sense?

A warp in the town,

and wanting to climb –

held back by the weight of the earth.

3. ABOLITION OF THE ABSOLUTE

On the hill, merely a shape in the early morning

before the black sky dissolves to grey,

the town below floats like tomato soup

in a bowl of darkness;

there are figures stirring on the rim

dimly, thin as shadow.

The impending mountain ...

touching

Nothing

arrived, not even the mail;

there was no sadness to take

the strain; there was no pain.

we chose that way of life

that way of aching, long and thin,

that agony of sensing nothing amiss,

privately feeling the same as yesterday

more or less – still not knowing when

or where it would hurt or which one

would be the first to cry,

or how deep it would bite.

How we wished for change

for the cure for the ailment that had

no name.

... follows every move we make ...

sights

In the interest of

the liberation of the world

I kill the man whose loaded gun is aimed at me

I kill the man who killed my friend

I kill the man who killed our brother.

now I kill the man who took away our freedom

so my brothers can be free.

I kill the man with the poisoned mind

I kill the man who hates our kind

I kill the man whose kind I hate

and kill the man whose uniform

is not so different from mine.

I kill the man who breaks our laws

and kill the man who makes them.

I kill the man who raised my anger; then

I kill the man I called my friend.

I hate this violence, I say in haste,

reaching easy as breakfast for the key to my car;

then I aim its barrel down the road

on all the other loaded guns

whose sights are set on me.

... the valley sides slump back

in the contours of a woman ...

soundings

I just can’t loose

I just can’t close

that infinite moment,

I just can’t lose

that sudden cosmic intuition

which slams the soul in the back of a taxi

tells the driver to pursue

the tail lights of dispersing stars

and sometimes finds me back at home

before I even know I’ve gone.

I just can’t lose

that infinite moment

that midnight at noon

that living unison

that Grecian urn,

I just can’t lose

those clouds of glory

and that wild west wind;

I just can’t lose it

if I never had it.

some total! sum total

of any computation:
there is no (Yeats,

what have you done to me?)

true totality.

... impassive, immense, stonefaced.

(s)cents

no stone no tide no silence no star

no war no womb no woman no bar

no birth no curse no creature no clay

no town no crowd no crossing no way

no seed no field no father no leaf

no calm no scream no laughter no grief

no word no coin can move me now

that facts are all we can allow:

between the stone the star and me

is everything that we could be.

The livid distance fades to monochrome,

a panoramic view in a day’s-end colour slide;

edges blur, canvas streaks of rain stretch

between a leaden cloud and a greenish hulk

as the sky is pulled down like an awning;

night climbs the hill once more, and fog

comes lunging in,

landscape fainting to a darkening whole

thin as mist. 

4. DISILLUSION AND DISSOLUTION

The summit draws you in, air to the fire

in warm air rising: the haul of the hill,

the drag of the sheep runs, the grab of the clouds.

solitude stumps the open track, and grants

assurance in glances back towards home;

but over the ridge, then secrecy sneaks

between the trees, belies its height, denies

the outsize hillside outside rolling round.

There was a time when I always knew

there’d be another me another you

another view outside the window as I turned to go,

a special providence too in the fall of tomorrow.

the search was on for the thing I would know

to be

a reasonable facsimile

or likeness of the truth . . .

flashes

In the interests of illumination

in The Nude Poem

I stripped away barriers of meaning

to reach the essential ethnic groan,

losing word by word

searching for freedom

irrespective of personal danger,

word from word,

emancipating man

(and maybe woman),

scratching for the point

of time before life:

a wordless but exalting

graffiti grunting

“fuck”.

oh Cambridge Station of the Academic Mind

on whose trains you are required to leave behind

the past, the present, your perspective and your name –

six hundred years’ lost property without a claim.

a clock across the road

stared endlessly into the room

spilling time into the night;

lonely waking for her.

a stream beside the botanical gardens.

fences flowed with it too like an interrupted dream

with access to Asia, Africa, America

(rocks important for chemistry and natural effect).

rare species bloom along the way to catch a train:

statements which are true

and in relation to

subjective states of beauty.

yet coming back here

with the dagger of doubt;

if – half way out –

the road isn’t clear;

back to my room

and only to find

I’d been out all along,

terrified one day I’d call

while I was in.

with my face clipped to the key ring

I fumbled with the doorlock test

of a dull inebriating thought.

a friend came round and said he’d changed

the constituents of his mind:

when I called on him

he said he was out

and I knew at once he was right.

they found the lost child in the derelict

canal where trouser traces had escaped

the rats, and identity was nothing

more than threads and blue cotton dye, leaving

faceless remorse to gnaw his mother’s sleep.

a year later

insomniac faces the same,

heads a little balder,

old friends with new definitives,

old friendships ambered in

their chronicles of situations.

and so the skipping rope recurrences

turned faster year to year:

I thought I saw a floodlit crowd

in awe when the news came through,

breaths baited with curled charred flesh

and everyone agape to see

the hopping, springing marathon, and me,

dancing with a bare

unearthed mains cable .

In the interests of liberating

anything that I could find,

I loved two girls at once and lost my mind.

There was a time I almost knew there’d be

another providence, another we,

the endless senseless falling of sparrows,

sliding with today beneath tomorrow.

browns subsume half the forest: white bedstraw

persists with moorland sedge and sparse gorse shrubs,

a lone foxglove prevails

in thinnest pink,

and beech tree borders, which in summered greens

could flatter firs, are knock-kneed, bare and frail;

the floor changes to a clattering pool

of flapping wind-pulled leaves, a slither of needles

and the softgrass-bracken leafless carpet  –

a curious recurrent private pattern.

here the world is wet and gliding blindly

down the pine floor slippery as streamstone,

sliding, piling, powered as by storms down

the frost-smoothed moss-soothed reclining strata;

withdrawn and drawn in one final liquid

vertiginous fall to the mountain core.

everything disappears in the fissures,

gaps, holes, orifices of time and thought.

mist, like smoke piling upward in still air,

stands erect in a lost mountain valley;

then smeared by sunlight, it melts in orange haze.

5. COMPLEXES

If life was just a face-out, us or it,

I’d count on binary arithmetic;

or should its vacillating purpose fool us

I’d plot with differential calculus.

No chance. The wider challenge is, one hears,

to formulate the Music of the Spheres:

either or

dayblunted dreams shunted in my head.

the station awaited its moment

when platforms and stairs slid back from the train

spinning me out alone in string, thin as that,

just a cord drawn on the world;

a chain thread of freight, overhauled,

fell away foreshortened in recession and time;

out there dockyard cranes squatting

in a dwarfish distance of coastal mists,

fields flee for their lives, steel rails

flying out of the ground – even lines

written down contribute to delusion.

I travel further nowadays it seems,

and I never thought I would forget the night,

whichever night it was, I first arrived.

    love, I cry, has vanished from the world:

    strange that she is the one I should tell.

down at the edge of my journey alone

the platform was an island of light,

the blind and stationary train

was an arrow drawn back on the night;

a cellulose stillness wrapped me

transparent and cold like a deepfreeze joint.

the first jerk of relative motion

was only the next arriving train,

so how could I believe that narrow

corridor of space and time

that hurled me back from a destination

to another shore of illuminated

certainty clamped in the dark?

my carriage door slammed like a sniper,

I surrendered my ticket at the barrier,

ready for anything but this pendular return.

    truth, I whispered, has vanished from the world;

    how strange we should feel so close in lies.

points of contact

dropped below in the derelict lock

locked in with deadnettle, figwort, dock

are the ring and the nail, set in wood, set in rock.

there rusting to metalflakes, uncrushed by neglect,

lasting the unbraked ruin-run plunge

is the wood that has pinned the ring to the wall,

that has clung so long like the water’s fall.

canal boats reached out once with hooks and lines,

grabbed themselves coal-low to the sinking lock;

horses paused to graze as the bargees hung,

trusting their load to their hold

and the open iron eye.

stonemasons came before

to maul the rocks into the wall;

they carved the crevice, hammered home

the wedge of oak and brought down

the new-wrought ring-headed nail to their work:

but no noise was like the creak of timber

or the builder’s hiss of breath

in the first thrust when the metal rang

fibre to spike at its entry point.

later as they poured their day away in talk

the workworn masons hewed no more thought

of the ring or its nail in the wood in the rock

than of the cockroach or

the cricket on the sawdust alehouse floor.

the cockroach on the field of Troy

finds food in every fallen husk,

scuttles across a meal of the world;

the cricket in the fires of Hell

scratches a song from the warmth

of the hearth, moves with invisible purpose.

the skittle ball

curves like a planet

on the sawdust floor,

rolling and taking

the gentle grade of the boards;

its surface skims in contact

and pushes into motion

grain upon grain:

particles topple,

fall into line with the sphere.

children pick slate fragments

from a shapeless ruin by the old canal

send them spinning, dancing

down the timeless water,

touching, but glancing off their past.

the Music of the Firs

The town comes and goes in far off thunder,

churning like sea sucked out of a distance.

An audience of forest firs is hushed

with expectancy: in their darkness nothing

stirs, though front-row silvered birch tops rattle

excited by the rising wind.

On the moor the air shrills like skylark song,

whining with the pylons, whistling in pipes

lined out for winter guides; the molten sky

heaves and breathes through the flutes of everything.

Autumn has dumbed the insects’ summer hum,

but other voices join – a rasping rook,

a barber shop of bleating sheep that stars

a barbed-wire bard and sounds a far alarm

from ram to lamb to ewe. Bleak beseeching

moor birds creak like hinges, and rabbits are

a stricken cracking drumbreak back in bracken.

Inside the plateau every forest tune

together soars and drowns, as the air’s

low horn on the edge of audible sound

intones its mourning for the wood’s decay.

Unseen nameless birds are chanting; branches

flap like frantic doves; map sheets slap and crash;

and water orchestrates the ground, ringing

down streams in endless peeling harmony.

Still high above all this the tree tips twist

and weave, moved by earth’s impenetrable

force, and persistent with the hiss of life.

stewed sonnet

when I paused to consider the cause that moved

me first and then, there was just nothing new

except a kind of philosophic stew

which only possibility improved.

“what message?” was all the vegetables said –

those diced routine fragments of experience,

the sludge of lentil, mushroom transience,

confusion in the cauliflower heads;

but the point was the point where lumps might meet,

not the tomatoes in opaque despair,

no easy peas nor the carrot’s hopeful share,

but collision of a grain of wheat

with the world enclosed in a pasta hoop:

all Life in a latterday primeval soup.

resolution and independence

In the interests of philosophy

I crawled back home, and half insane,

I let these crazy complex complications

roll right over me:

meaning was or is unmeaning

solution is insoluble,

resolution anything

or everything that cannot be resolved.

Therefore, if contradiction is alone

beyond all contradiction,

there is no other certainty

no other mark of truth:

human values are all dead at birth

if there’s no challenge to their worth.

6. THE REAL WORLD

deception

So this is love today:

rain on the window is one more

act of deception –

it cracks what we do in the storm

the first few seconds;

it tracks down the windscreen over

a flash of creation –

an amoeboid supernova’s

mad replication.

Here’s our most feared contagion,

our cells’ saddest plague

as “you” becomes “she”, that stage when

“we” fade into “they”.

Outside the car, the street sweeps up and bends

in the liquid wind; a polished coat of rain

is scoured by airborne flotsam that extends

its shadow inward on the road; the train

of painted road lines warps under the strain

of light on air, and a sudden cloud drowns

the moon yet slithers off without a stain.

nothing stays but the arching lights that crown

the edge of the sky and merge into the town.

we do not talk:

the wilful words are there for talking’s sake

but silence is an absolute

that finds subsistence in among

les objets of home

(the wardrobe and the storage jars,

the forks, the saucepans and the earthenware).

In our world there’s a place for everything

and their world is a place like ours,

like the one we think we’re looking for

till we find, without speaking,

that we’re already there.

Black shapeless roadway pools explode

with pinprick stars of rain, burn constantly

to nothing in concentric waves –

the way we always seem to do ourselves.

You and I, she and I, all and none

lost together because our joining

is the surest way to separation,

hopelessly groping to do it right;

hiding ourselves inside the night;

a new friend’s promised world

swirls round me in faceless inanity.

The deception is unresolved

and so utterly without meaning      

cinema verity

Today I played the hunger back on video,

kicked pain down the street in a coke can,

and wore the screamprint T-shirt of torture.

I know for sure what’s going on.

My walls are all a TV screen, I breath

the polluted air of an entire planet

in my living room; when I turn on the set

cruise missiles fly by my hotel too,

and body parts disfigure my doorstep.

So now I understand the world in full.

A car costing more than I need to know

rolls across an advert’s arid landscape,

wrapped around with a documentary film

about a civil war, a drought, a famine

a village tap and a fleeing woman.

But this desert means I see everything,

except who pays to keep me so informed,

except who owns the copyright on truth,

and who’s sponsoring this war, whose famine,

just who is renting me this bloodstained lens.

I slice a dusty album from its case

decisively, implacably involved.

I nail it to the player; a sand storm

of sound pummels at my comprehension.

No one can tell me that I’m unaware.

at the end of the road

At the end of this road is the wood

whose furthest edge fingers an arching field

and reaches up to a stream scudding down

from a white-walled house wasting among trees:

this is the point, this overlap of worlds

at the confluence of madness and mountain,

of mat grass and mystery, man and machine,

this is the bridgehead and the last retreat

where we gather for one living moment

to be part of the balance and the stalemate.

Later, after dawn, the dew boils off

in the searching sun; the hill steams like

a healing poultice on an aching sore. 

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