Parallel Lines – poems from the turn of the century

Fields

A field is an open space of closure,

the balance of distance and containment

which frames the first and second things you see.

Effortless first memories explode to fill

attention like the earliest atom:

great horses rode the downs in primeval white

observed from the back of the family Ford;

your whole world was the playtime grass when your legs

were bare and imagination still vast,

though hunched up now, shrunken and spare;

you taunted a boy till his failed future

burst like a boil, though perhaps it was you,

friendless and small, who were scalded by malice,

and blinded by the reign of kicks and shame.

School fields are your first insight into state

sponsored terrorism; they have a sound

like the shrieking blackboard chalk that mark you

for life with trophies of fake confidence,

and honoured rituals of pain. Meanwhile

on grassy scraps on crap estates the council

slaps exclusion orders on children’s games;

they hang out there now for contraband smokes

and snatches of how the big kids have sex.

A field is the menace of fence and expanse

which redesigns what it means to be free.

The wind moves the light in the leaves

in some suburban blowup park;

the young artist stalks his fading shadow,

he sees things not there

and can’t see those which are.

Or he falls sick and pale from a Greyhound

in Mainstreet, and stands in the unfenced heat

while the patient prairie waits;

it could be Manitoba, it could be Kansas.

No one cares unless they live here – they’re all

too weak to seek surprise, too strong for retreat.

There is a place of limitless extent,

a statement of the government’s intent

that’s on no maps, and steps on your dissent:

when we laughed outside in peace and protest

they captured all of us on photograph

while oblivion stayed hidden under grass.

The sister of our friend left home one day

and vanished in the biggest field of all –

so watch out if you go without consent

in any place where no-one knows you went:

Sometimes in the country for a walk

your only paper is a new cheque book,

so you spend your time composing lines

with ends for which you haven’t got the means.

You may discover tiny plots

graphed out for science,

square by square,

with gridlock questions     

on the rate of growth of plants,

or the volume of worms in the universe;

or you’ll wander lost for hours on the open moors,

once ancient forest, where advancing bracken

folds round in the gentle ebb and flow

of abuse and accommodation.

You search for answers in the curved sloped meadow

which bends to such exquisite forms

of height and depth and light that you long

to be consumed by the shapes of nature,

hold fields in differential equations.

It’s not memory or measuring that thrills,

but endless opportunity for scale

and space, and closeness to impossibles.

Then when autumn’s done its stingy tinted stint

and the year is on the tern,

a shallow flint field fills with gulls;

it stretches to the edges of the mist

in spindly dwindling mediocrity,

squeezing your life out, despite yourself.

Who trusts the evidence of their eyes

when even photographic film is designed

for images whose brightness exceeds the real?

Weaker and bleaker

day after day and frame by frame

catastrophe folds into folklore;

at Verdun, in another such country,

the corpses served as stepping stones

across the drowning mud.

And still in foreign fields,

the desert, the jungle,

the rice fields, the bush,

the supercharged demons  of power

continue to kill with mechanical efficiency.

A blind madman urges his countrymen

to cross the front line;

and a soldier survives because terror

is always more deadly than reason:

his best friend’s face is splashed

on his jacket as if the blood was his own.

No space is large enough to contain his rage,

no distance too great to escape his passivity.

From stale back yards to Antarctic wastes,

we all know a field which promises grace;

one selfish hope refuses to resign:

I won’t step in your field, keep out of mine.

1997

The straight and narrow

It’s clear the historic sight of badgers

crossing elderly people has diverted

traffic, but in fog the Temporary

lights up, and Space bends for miles. With delays

possible until Nineteen Ninety Nine,

one way is to reduce speed now and stay

in lanes closed by slow loose chippings. We know

to keep clear of the heavy plant and wild

animals which stop children 10%

at any time; we could give way to floods

and lay by like slow police in their free way,

or follow signs to alternative routes.

But we must keep to right and drive straight ahead,

looking left right left for exits and Ends.

1997

Falling trees

Old people prod their dying fires with sticks;

little by little, each winter the chill

slips its knot tighter, and gnarled hands take picks

to the boughs in Bosnia’s street, and kill

the source of every future winter’s fuel.

I never understood, as a child, why the great

garden sycamore where I played, whose leaves

I collected for bonfires, whose scintillating wings

taught me the secret of flight, had to be felled.

Perhaps the point is no one understands.

In Cannock Forest, a lifetime ahead,

I found stands of ancient oaks lying dead.

When roots unearthed the pavement in our street

the council workmen came with drastic saws

to solve a minor footpath irritation;

we vowed to fight authority – and did

when stray public weed killer cleaned the streets

and wiped out the edges of everything.

Sadness fell on us all when the Great Storm

snapped the matchwood landscape of history,

and tree-dweller martyrs stood up against

the State’s scorched earth commitment to progress.

A log floats by listlessly in the canal.

Last night it faced the wind and shared

the integrity of fellow species;

today, in a thousand ways, it meets decay.

Later comes renewal. When species die

it’s only the unlikeliest which thrive:

new laws aspire to save a list of plants,

but madness elevates the rats and ants

Rainforest timber burns into ranches:

soil slides into oceans, where it stanches

warming currents and cools far continents.

But what does it mean that a healthy tree falls

at the end of a century which scrawls

death warrants for a hundred million

guiltless, helpless, sensate women and men?

The horror of life that’s grown hard to bare

is that it must go on when we’re not there.

1999 

Changing the flow

When they murdered Thatcher in the white hotel

does a death wish state strafe the IRA

with bitter Peckinpah retaliation?

Does a bloodbath of state-sponsored terror,

endorsed by madmen at the Daily Mail,

see a final end to Men of Violence?

Does widowed Tebbit succeed to Downing Street?

Does he scratch the cricket test and ditch tales

of rats scuttling in the Channel Tunnel

till some more viscous and auspicious day,

only to unleash his white fanged vengeance,

deranged and spitting venom on Irish

treason back beyond the Easter Rising?

Does he, tearing at the throat of history,

endow the RUC with means and men,

feed the Loyalist death squads information,

grant the Prots another Reformation?

Does he end the war on known Republicans

with re-enactments of the Black and Tans?

Will we ever know forgiveness again

once shoot-to-kill has been declared too tame?

Or does revenge forge stronger barricades,

and fan a forest fire of US funds?

Does this undeclared and obscure local

war spew up on every English pavement,

jabbing its fist in frightened puffed up

faces; or does it hasten public pleas

to set tormented Irish people free?

Menace and madness have forever dumped

corpses in the river of history,

but barrages are built by tyrants

and mandarins to hold back time; maybe

it takes the opportunists’ bricks and bombs

to break their bloody dams, deluging the land

with uncertainty and changing the flow.

2000 

Turd

The island oozed from sphincters deep at sea,

its molten hills and shore congealed into a curd

of basalt, pumice, soot and scarp and scree –

rolled and curled in a steaming liquid turd.

Columbus passed this way to bloat his ship

off La Gomera’s cliffs with water, beef

and corn to face his wild Atlantic trip.

He didn’t give a crap for Tenerife

shooting fire nearby in spray-glazed skies;

he was just some eager jerk burning for fame

and instant wealth from deals in Eastern spice,

crazy for quick routes that would win the game.

The Guanchos’ goats still roamed the flows in peace;

they picked a living here two thousand years,

and could not know their world was soon to cease

as two new continents were born in tears.

The purging Spaniards did not come to tame

these listless island people, but to squeeze

life from them like giants who, to reclaim

the earth, must melt mountains and boil the skies:

it’s conquerors who choose to kill or deal.

But wealth distilled from slavery was pissed

away; then sugar, wine and cochineal

were gold, then dust for Spanish alchemists.

Commerce plundered where the magma had played,

but dealers in fire are seldom righteous

so each ash promise fell where the last was laid

as the island rose on its trade’s detritous.

Two trucks meet on a mountain bend, one slides

inland, slick-geared, dripping liquid cement,

the other, grieving green bananas, grinds

downhill to port, wincing past the present.

At each town corner, drawn here by the heat

cockcroach timeshare touts twitch with scratchcard schemes:

no one has to wait or pay for self deceit

when there’s nothing left to buy but dreams.

Today the thrills of summer fill the plain,

and no one counts as loss Los Christianos,

and yet, to shift this shit and start again

they’d have to waken all the dead volcanoes.

2001 

When pigs could fly

If I was a pig I’d know the time to die.

I’d be prepared to ride the final truck,

pressed close as rashers, squealing round bends;

I’d inhale alarmed anticipation

but wait in line, poking beneath surface

things with my swine brain – till I’m dropped

by bolt and knives, the easy preordained

utensils for abbreviating life.

When pigs could fly, their fresh-dead carcasses

were lightly flicked aside on hooks and rails.

But now the stale air thickens with gunfire,

pork flesh and saltpetre stifle the wind,

and bodies rise in piles like pigsty shite.

If I was a pig I’d know it’s wrong to die

terror-white in this sad battue, this bath

of blood, this medicated Buchenvald,

this Belsen yard which screams with dread and rends

the steaming air long after breathing ends.

2001

A cubicle on the M25

Ghenghis Khan is a hero in Ulan Bator,

a great reformer who made his people one.

In this land of steppes without roads or maps

every truck journey is an arm stretched out

to friends and space connects one home to the next.

Navigation is not some private test

or a battle of wills to prove your sex;

you stop to ask the way at each front door

and each homestead kitchen is a transport caff.

This land has one tarmac track that flicks out

towards the Russian border, across ground

so open there’s nowhere to go for a shit;

the rest is listless desert, private choice.

So when you need a route you drive it, right?

You and your rig become a road, laid out

in blind winter snow or squinting dust storms,

hauling diesel in tankers, tractor parts

and tools, industrial miscellany.

While mere railway lines run out to nothing,

sharing their purpose with unravelled string,

these nameless trunkroads touch a whole people –

taut cords pull them and their past together;

every life is on a route to somewhere new.

I stop to rest on the M25;

the service station quivers with intent

and interrupted function, like an ant

hill disturbed. There I lock myself away

in a quiet cubical free of motion,

taking shelter from my destinations

and the blinding loneliness that stalks my steps.

2001 

Lists

1:

I wrote a poem

on the back of a shopping list.

It was composed entirely

of short lines which

left wide margins,

and showed no trace

of narrative or drama

or any extraneous detail.

It was raw life

stripped to necessity,

made palatable, just,

by a glimpse of pleasure

down the toy aisle of your imagination.

It was consistent

within itself,

and nothing

was missed.

2:

I wrote a poem

on the back

of a wedding list.

It was also composed

of short lines

with wide margins;

it raised the trivial,

to the level of

life’s essentials,

and elevated desire

to a primordial force,

leading readers

to imagine

more perfect worlds.

I asked myself:

could I buy that?

and, if not,

so what?

3:

I wrote a poem about

pleasure, joy, delight,

appetite, craving; desire

longing, inclination:

all we list.

4:

If you want to hear

a very old poem

all you have to do

is list.

5:

I grow listless;

words lean;

I am inclined to write

a list of poems.

2002