Mountain

Summer: The Great War

Summer comes down like an iron on the town

scorching out lawns and slaughtering

the mornings underground;

tar flows on main roads

like sleeves on a nylon robe,

the season is on overload;

it’s hot like a daydream

milk in a solid cream:

the dogs pant, the roofs rant,

the sun is an elephant

that sits out on the pavement,

and stands up for the government;

then ranks of drivers, speed survivors,

arrive as substitutes for breezes,

trickle into traffic seizures,

while shop assistants run resistant

lick their lips and lack their tights,

and glossy office girls upstairs

scoff at bosses’ cream and coffee world

so true to type and slow to stir;

and mothers under trees release

their children on the heaving park,

ease their eyes closed, breathing grass:

heat presses down and no one speaks,

all effort lesssens, sense recedes

as each of us surrender to the shrieking dark.

air falls on the town with a sullen blow,

fields, forests, mountain turn to hay

the day they take the cool away,

and diesels barely shift their fumes as they come and go.

1. DECLARATION

I’ll leave, I swear I’ll go,” she said.

“It would be the end if I was not the only one.”

“You might, and so might I,” is all I sighed.

Ownership was nine tenths possession then.

The declaration comes in heat:

we recoil in alarm from the years of preparation

when the curtain of finality is drawn on the world –

nothing is so sudden as choosing the point of no return.

the declaration comes in speech

dispensing with its impulse, depth and feeling,

just the reason in definitive, the statement of intent,

nothing but the invocation of a double-booked god.

the declaration comes in affirmation:

nowhere before was there such positivity,

never again will there be such serious words

now nothing is denied but contrariety.

the sterile syntax makes commitment real,

maintains it when the bodies have grown cold.

She’d come running loose on waves of abuse,

the woman I tried and failed to seduce

with reason, logic and news. “A little

philosophy goes a long way,” she said,

“and they hardly come much smaller than yours.”

No one had told me that before; no one,

she’d said as we married, would do so again.

“I’ll leave, I swear I’ll go,” she said

“I know that you don’t care.”

but if the woman designated mine should leave

I hope it’s since she’s free to go

and not because the price is low.

“I’m sorry, but,” I said,

and it sounded right the first few times around:

I fix it with my tired repetitions,

and never through my verses and reverses

mentioned love.

old friends new friends

I follow where our love tends

past the point where the peace ends.

heathaze

The summer is an anvil forging iron;

that beats a permanent crease in my mind.

I left it airing in humid midday peace

watching all the million things I seized

in spring and could not recognise as change;

have I really reached the end of my range

The day they take away the motion

I reject the smallest irritations now,

like sticking to my clothes, my diet and the truth;

day by day is another overstatement

as radiators boil and rail lines warp,

as aviation instruments aberate

and junk their jets in the field outside,

as government computers unload the bombs

that melt the polar ice caps and the moon.

Good god, isn’t this the time for escape,

when madmen sprint for a long distance bus

not because they have anywhere to go

but because it is leaving without them?

The vast mountain mass deflects direction

and girders of heat arching low on the town

strike out the brains of my racing intentions –

I do not hear a word that others say,

nor have I been moved in any way.

Is change then just a diminution, the scrap

of a pause with no finality, no spool,

no last tape of circumstance, but the stool

of a long luxurious ecstatic Krapp?

the moments left to savour seem so small –

the light of candles swimming into wax,

the rustled wrapping of digestive packs –

the rest flash by like epics, if at all.

I sit inside a heathaze, edges growing blurred,

and take the time, since no one wants to give,

to shake out contradictions from the sieve

while the grains heap up, identical, absurd.

2. CONFRONTATION

“I know, I know you don’t love me,”

she hissed, insisting I did.

“There’s nothing to say then,” I said,

saying everything.

a landscape black with force stands still,

far off stalling armies

align to wage the status quo,

and we rot at home, the prisoners of the peace,

paralysed by freedom

that trails us as we come and go.

then who’s kidding who in the phoney war?

who’s killing who?

when front faces front in silent preparation.

we wait at home, victims of inhostility

stripped into uniform

and stiffening from repetition

on the barrack squares.

we count the steps, count time

count the cost of war

before a shot has been fired –

the deadly blackout blindness,

the constant curfew,

the frantic treat we tried to complete

till contentment by order,

parades in the street,

till affection becomes

this military disease

that lasts a lifetime,

sends you blind.

we train at home, allies still,

subject to the discipline of principle:

she must whisper what she feels

while I disguise myself in what I think –

our side will punish us

for everything we do

lest the enemy destroys us first

for being what we are.

and there’s no assurance in a warcrime trial

till we know who’s lost and won.

war games are for warriors bent by time

past potency like our leaden soldier pose,

but we are cast too real and close to play,

and though I fired a hundred shots when I

was young, that was nothing to this outbreak

of moral obligation, this puritan

annihilating, loneliness we’ve found.

So does our jealous ageing god still play

the Bride of Christ, or, when he’s on our side,

does he have something on the side himself,

regretting declarations made in heat?

situations vacant

The summer is an overlord, it holds the earth in irons;

the sun is god’s great subcontractor in the sky,

it does the job it knows (you don’t ask why)

and builds the town an hour after dawn,

wakens thunderstorms, the acorn, stinkhorn,

or makes your day if it bothers to perform:

then, when it seems the Earth might have a soul,

clouds roll and situations take control.

stuff your self-sufficiency, settee,

sod you, shelves, and you bastard basking

bath, don’t you know it’s hot as hell?

a fart to the fridge and tits to the temperate

teak-topped table – it’s hot, by god, it’s hot.

I pace among les objets of home preserved

de jure in superior equilibria –

the dry emphatic books, serenity

in soaring stairs, the cool of spoons and forks.

an unflagging hifi hacks away the back-

breaking air; unyieldingly outside gross

garden gnomes ignorant or insolent defy

nomenclature, and only the tortoise knows

the score, tetchy in its grass non-perspirant

corner, with thermometric blood that drums

in agitated unison with mine.

but just when it seems life might be the goal

clouds roll and situations take control.

you thought you had a contract that assured

your development as right and not reward,

but you find in the small print that you’ve lost

your probability, your wife, your costs,

your property and half a million years.

now everything else just bores you to tears

and you find the sun to be both instrument

and measurement of time, an incident

contained in place, direction, change and pace,

agent of fate, not universal grace.

but just when you think the Universe is whole

clouds roll and situations take control.

merde to the mountain, crap to you crass

unpractised scrap of stone: what in hell

do you know of the knot at our necks,

the menacing madness that prevails

on the frying pan pavements of town

where people cook like eggs for fun

and sirens pause at every wild

voluptuous corner, their crazing

surface parts in filmy summer

clothes taut and clutched like onions

in tight string bags; now for sure

there’s only one thing left worth breaking

through the heat to do when even

tyre-faced traffic wardens massed

in pairs amaze me with their breasts:

fresh insight brings me almost to my knees –

that half of all the human feet

on earth end up in female parts.

just when it seems that I might find a role

clouds clear and situations take control:

the numbing heatwave ramraids into town

I can’t stand up, I’m done, I’m coming down.

it’s finally your head the sun contracts,

cracking you, sacking you with its cruel facts.

sirens

I

“I know, I know you don’t love me,”

I screamed at the bare rolling hills of another home;

I buried my face in the coarse downland grass

and the loneliness burned in my innocent eyes.

Each girl back then was geographical,

a study in place out of time, a star

in an album who never made the screen;

falling in love was a camera trick,

I gave and took no more than light,

though sometimes she, whichever she she was,

would take the taking further still till one

or both of us gave in or love gave out;

yet in all the times when she and my view

appeared to co-incide, I never once

with that tense relentless lens succeeded

in making her real, in making her reel.

II

yesterday a fire burned on the hillside,

sirens scowled past, trailing gazes, and men

in uniforms took brushes to the brush

(by dusk they’d beaten out the light and gone:

the cost was small and borne by the county).

tonight the street lights die all over town.

it’s not war, but darkness on domestic rates,

which alone have seen no cuts this year.

old people trip and plunge down ill-lit steps

(the papers howl) and vandals go plundering

by shadow and example; faintly they

perceive a change beyond their reach, but like

the blackened hill that bears the scars, they know

they are not the ones to throw the switch.

the dry smile of the office girl arrives

like a sensation: I do not recall

her face before this loss of life on the hill,

before this loss of face in the town, yet

she taxes me with her eyes and sets the rate

on my borrowed plot of infinite space.

her song is like a fire, it glows and fades,

and though the siren calls, some things

must be allowed to go out on their own.

III

a new girl I guess would split my thread in two –

it’s all in the mind, but I’m still on the reel,

a guilty schizoid paranoiac heel

who might straighten out unwinding with a few.

IV

so I’m Dr Jeckel in the shopping arcade

looking for a miss t’hide:

I wear a collar and tie

over the dirty raincoat of my design;

but is it all mine,

this polite lecherous stare

that sees women with shopping baskets

and streamers of children

easing off tight sweaters and skirts

in upstairs rooms,

in public parks,

in the doorway of Woolworths?

oh yes, it’s mine, for suddenly

a mental policeman erases

my masculinity with his truncheon

and I’m dragged off limp to an inanimate cell

screaming out loud:

I wish only to say

as they drag me away

that I wasn’t to blame

for this terrible flame;

I was hurt by the bliss

I thought I might miss,

I meant no assault

they were loved by default.

V

confusion pounces, longing holds me down

and questions what this loneliness is worth,

when dreams, like warfare, like the glowing earth

and sun, will only burn out on their own.

3. ESCALATION

“What is it, what is it you feel?” I said.

“What is it, what is it that’s wrong?” she said.

Hour by hour, and month by month

breath for breath and mouth for mouth,

our voices are strangled of meaning.

- talk cost lives, trust nothing, warns the propaganda

we tell no one what we know, know no one as friend,

not even the one who calls me in despair

in separation from the love of his child,

not the great old man who filled me

with what I might have been and died

because the world grew tired of honesty;

the news reached me today but not his death.

sheltered underground by an arch of reasonable fear

I have become familiar with endings –

truth and beauty stand naked in destruction

like the luxury of thought; now in austerity

sex has become another such inviolate thing,

silence and privacy blot out the pain.

we stay in hiding indefinitely,

the best of friends cannot say what is wrong

but speak of love from a trench of words;

a girl out of uniform caught breaking free

flinches and slumps for a firing squad,

and all around the battlefields and cattlefields and towns

the people flex their lips in desperate exchange

needing like their leaders the formal declaration

of war, and cursing, like their leaders,

the anarchy of information

that screams their secrets in the street

and leaves their battered mastery to bleed.

mouth by mouth and pact by pact

the torpor spreads like a plague;

- I’ll keep out of your war

if you’ll keep out of mine

the Kissingering emissaries say.

nation after nation lifts its paper fist,

empires falter and divide, continents

bury their heads in the sand of the sea:

they’re all complicit in netrality.

now we have no allies here

no one knows or cares whose side we are on

so long as we expose the espionage

of friends before they can uncover ours.

- though war’s first casualty is truth,

the honest commentators say,

- its last is love, hang on to that.

Yet when I spoke to one beyond propriety that day

I knew her only as a clench of terror

at my neck and silent blind retreat;

I fell back with the rest, I said no more,

but waved the eager Treaty in self deceit,

and defined my acquiescent love discreet.

interstitial sonnet

summer runs red like iron into steel

hardening, maddening the land. I need to sort

things out of course, get my thoughts thought out, my oughts

sought out on course; I reel confused, I reel

the line back in, and I’m real at least in my

confusion, not quite searching for my self

(that’s with me here) but using all my stealth

to find another place a self won’t die.

nothing takes so long as nothing counting

time, so here is decision, presence of mind

that would cripple presidents, send them blind –

suddenly I leave to climb the mountain.

journey to the centre of the Earth

I take the long way up, the path across fields

burned brown by the sun,

and the dust track pours recklessly down

thrusting underfoot a stonegrey desert

that’s wrapped and ended in a barbed wire field.

I ache to overcome the fall of a dried stream bed;

I rise above the pall to a grim stonemasonry of oaks

that die ahead of the rest of the shadeless world;

higher a tractor storming white

lurches slowly out from a whitewalled house

and tracks a contour of the hill:

at a distance our co-ordinates cross.

I think that thinking is a way to kill the pain of climbing,

only finding pain has killed the thought,

and fix on that as empty as a newscast –

an item on the ageing nation’s health,

a gull that hovers, strikes the air and flies.

the sun, the bastard, sun, leans on my arm and neck,

earth grabs my feet and holds me down

and a gang of unreasonable terrors punch my head –

how far how long how crazy now?

at last at first the farmland ends

in a rising rhizome allmansland of bracken scars,

black with toothmarks where the fire rat

chewed the face of the land.

speed soaks away in blood,

limbs are all dispute,

mind is a fuse that does not blow,

and has no excuse

for the last two hundred convex rolling scrambling dying

                                              flatland feet to go.

but even the top is not the top,

even flatness flattens more,

even the end goes on,

even grass is not the grass

sedge not the sedge

sand not sand

dust not dust

even not even until

I am there –

there am I

on the plateau cleft by forestry and sky

on the darker sharpened other side

where the timewater tiger has torn the belly of the hill

and spread the mountain’s splayed and trailing guts below.

it falls freefall away earthfirst,

the crossleaved heath, the coarse-leaved grief,

and suddenly the trees,

and a stream course chopped

and hung from a noose of rock

above the winding widening vast unplummeted

vertiginous obscurity of green.

down slithering down I follow them all

to the lost silent island

crouching at the centre of the earth.

remote and part-shorn sheep

flap like wet washing in sustained escape,

a solitary bluebell fades belatedly to straw,

and a fox slopes down to privacy in a tree root hole.

the sun strikes a firebreak match among the pines,

suspends the falling dancing slanting

storm of needles like dust in its beam –

they vanish from the air, weaving unseen

the tapestry of the bare forest floor.

there is no rustle underfoot from these

last year leaves, just the flicker of magic

unrelieved by the muted mountain light.

a farmer’s groundplan long-razed lodge submits,

unearthed by groping roots, earthed by the rot

of years; wood sorrel leaves lace the course

of a stream sunk out of view, and strata rise

to meet an ancient quarry’s squandered stones.

brown pine vaults fake a low-roofed church, sunlight

falls at an end somewhere utterly gold

on a springwater altar of rock and earth:

I’m lost to space in an aisle of silence, near

perfection and approximately real.

I’m your quarry now, woods,

prize me open with your claws,

I am the clause too, woods,

pass me into your lore.

this then, this is the place

the saxifrage and moss

the pulse of water

the veins of the hill,

fingers of a time before

even history could

brutalise knowledge;

I am a stranger here,

how can I tell what forces stranger still

come creaking through the noiseless deep?

sulking through this soft green fullness

that two millennia held still?

here at last came the last man of the tribe

when breakers rolled across his kingdom’s sand

sliding the hopes of his race beneath the swell;

occupation was an intrusive sea

that tamed the coast with a wrack of slavery

and tossed the limp defenders high inland.

embers of the dying battle lit the hill,

the blood of liegemen burned the heath soil white,

and at last by dark the last man came, sunk

in defeat his land’s lost heart, and opened

his wounds red on green in the spring where a moss

of death clamped his mind in the rock, and closed

on the secret of his legendary line.

the enemy maintain their own heroes now,

they fly fantastically beyond the hill;

but time and vanity have washed all trace

of that other early wisdom from the world,

all but this primeval certainty

locked deep in the cold wet evergreen spring.

a plane passes

the spell and the sky break

myths cancel out:

having sought free thought

free action and free speed

I have lost the will to turn them into deeds.

4. DISINTEGRATION

“why don’t you love me?” she said

when she wanted to hear I did;

and inside I tore down the walls of the room

and pressed the button

to release the maniacal bomb.

“that was never what I said,” I said

as I drove off my mountain edge into the gentle air

of another silent empty gesture.

- the state of insecurity needs you,

the propaganda pleads in parody

the day they took my friends away.

no one could tell whose side they were on:

orders arrived by night, plain clothes, plain car;

normality disperses, reason flakes away

like faces in ancient stone.

“why them, not me?” I said,

then, another way alone, “why me?”

the random recruits march out at dawn

pulling with them the front of the war;

everyone I greet has a weapon of their own,

stares me in the face,

demands mine is shown.

“it’s hatred by default,

love by assault, I apologise,”

says one I have known for years:
“the enemy may just be right,

so get yours in – you may not last the night.”

should I defect then,

become the enemy of state they need,

the one who’d press the case for independence,

the one to take the blame

for glib guerrilla armies raging in the brain?

“our marriage is a magic ring,”

says one I have not seen for years

who found his absolute in love;

“if she broke it once

it could never be repaired,”

he cried in despair.

for christsake, friend, if love was so perfect

we would never know the thing at all.

The day they took my friends away

no one could tell who was on his side.

orders arrived in a plain brown envelope.

They marched out rank by rank today,

the enemy guns were trained on their chests,

their friends on their backs.

the day they take my friends away

summer is down like iron in the land

veined in the rocks, hard and deep; I return

to the ore of people in the town and burn

with them, dead at heart, to slag and sand.

On the winding path was a crooked man;

half an age in climbing to the top,

half a day coming down.

“When he opened his mouth,” he says,

“his words came like a pain,

like an old man who confirms his life

with remorseless details of the past

and sometimes misses time from his tales.

age for sure is not the thing

that’s so intently killing him.”

What did it mean, that time together,

mouth to mouth and breath to breath

till love became a Turkish bath

and fresh air turned to sweat?

I find a pub on a high mountain road

where the sheep men and bike boys come and go.

“a wild one, yes, with his hair in his eyes,”

the familiar barmaid smiled;

“said he’d walked all day

and didn’t seem to know quite where;

he talked overtime on the edge of his stool,

and over my head on the ledge running cool

soaking up the beer like the mountain air.”

after all those years

with the thrill and guilt still grasping my crutch,

and despite the life and people between,

I think of how she might be in the dark,

and, unwisely, unrepentant,

I wish she were here from time to time.

so I work out in detail that spare weekend

of mad debauchery in a postcard hotel,

signed in casually, “and friend”,

whichever friend she might have been.

“He blurted like a winter spring,”

berates the farmer at his gate

“He said ‘good day’

the way you mean ‘goodbye’,

a man in decline, dissent on his mind.”

what if feeling in love is just

an excuse for failing in bed,

and falling in bed just an answer

to fouling in love? I said.

“Who was that silent man whose eyes met mine?”

asks the woman passed in the park;

“Maybe we’d have made it if I’d stayed.

it’s not simply who you know, you know,

but just as often how.”

one old friend could still touch that nerve,

I thought I’d know her features anywhere;

sometimes in the strangeface streets

of the town where we lived I’d press

her faint resemblance on the shopping crowd.

I could be so lonely now in the cities we knew

with the odds of us meeting

stretched out of belief:

it’s not our faces

that our independent movements change,

but relativity

and needs and places.

“his words came like a fit,”

says a neighbour from her door

“there was something so desperate he wanted to say,

so maybe I was wrong never hearing a thing

in my effort to agree.”

I’ve come from mountain to dismounting

from hillside to hill-sight, from moor to less

from motion in two planes to flight in a third –

this day of thought without a spoken word.

and then comes the day,

the day they take the words away.

the day they take the words away

clouds flamed on the mountain

I’m writing every waking moment

working sadness into torment

day came, night came, day again;

I work the anguish into irritation

like cats that rattle dustbins at my door

or the aching sun that burns my body raw –

no entry, one-way communication,

as the sleek bird overhead

flexes wings on the rising air,

curves its flight to the valley and the sea.

“I demand to have ideas,” the poem screams,

“ideas to hold the words together,

words to tear the world apart.

it’s only time I need

to overthrow the torture,

the meaning and unmeaning

of the gangsters of state,

to break the verbal irons

that order markets and machines,

production, power,

loyalty and law.

one day again,” the poem ends,

“we will gain control.”

the day they take the words away,

the three-second image takes control:

“State in peril,” the tabloids shrill,

“Poets are to blame for all our ills.”

wide margins always mark the weakly, free verse causes

                                                   promiscuity.

Beware the man whose

pithy haikus refuse to

scan;

and couplets which diverge from rhyme

are on the slope that leads to sin

Everyone with messages to send

hires admen to select the type,

has managers to choose the where and when,

and actors to recite the lines;

their egos, though, retain control

under contract to supply the mime.

the day they take the words away

the papers call for more control:

then flash to pictures of a nation stunned.

as radio follows with an in-depth probe:

“The situation, Minister, has been

described as out of your control.”

“But I have said before there is no truth

at all in what was said before, and though

we’ve never been unwilling yet to take

dilemmas by the horns, simple answers

always underestimate the truth; and that

is why the country needs to know that we

are taking, vis a vis the situation,

full control.”

then phone-ins supersede, and I draw crowds

in town buying up detergents so new

I hardly know how to tell if it’s true.

back home at the day they take the words away

generalities assume control:

“Man has come from the dark of caves,”

reads the bookclub bargain for escape,

illustrating everything but the small print of the terms,

“we have come from the chilling hills

where fire beacons spread their message

through the kingdom in a day;

and we come trailing clouds of glory

throwing names like light on the world.”

“cat” predicts my son shaking a hand

in triumph at the stuffed blue toy

looking vaguely like a dog.

so bloody what, I say, the day they take the words away

as art and silence battle for control:

art renders nature legible,

    makes comprehensible

that infamous condition

    Humanity is in,

which our language is, and how,

    absolutely out of now.

(my words become a socket set,

    screw me till I squawk

but slacken off or tighten it,

    they can’t make me torque)

all meaning is an onion

    constantly unpeeled,

and I am just the someone

    whose effort has congealed:

now thoughts are just an apple

    toothless like the prose

I surrender to the crates,

    cases, names of things,

vacant unrelated states,

    roundabouts and swings;

words trail out and symbols ride

    ordered, separate,

absolute in freedom, pride –

    whole, without support.

I’m searching for the seeing,

    and blind to the seen,

I’m living for the being

    dead to what I’ve been,

dead to truth, dead deceiving,

    endlessly between.

at the close of the day they take the words away

nonentities have won control:

I lose my voice

I lose communication

lose my choice

lose all relation

I lose departure lose arrival

lose joy lose sorrow

lose my plans and lose survival

till at last I lose tomorrow

I lose direction

lose the media of thought

I lose perception

lose ideas, the last resort;

I lose imagination

lose all truth science art

I lose creation

lose my progress lose my start

lose love

lose heart.

the noontime sun stuns the hill,

sparks the television mast,

shouts the news out louder still,

brings the mountain down at last.

I step in the dust that wraps the house,

leave my print in the hall

the heat too much to bear;

the bird swoops, cat drops,

light falls on the mark on the floor;

they land together in the vacuum.

afterthought

Never never never, not again

said the world

to Auchwitz, Belsen Buchenwald.

It’s not enough to count the dead

if no one’s left to claim them,

and even if we count the dead

humanity must name them.

Never never never, not again

said the propaganda

to Flanders, Vietnam, Ruanda.

It’s not enough to film the dead

while statesmen hack our brains,

not enough to crank up dread

when their principles block drains.

Never never never, not again

said the story

of history and victory and glory.

It’s not enough to name the dead

if, dead, they’re all the same –

we have to know what they have said

and who each one became.  

5. HISTORY

the day they take the time away

again, “let’s talk it over, again,” I say.

in retrospect we master war in archives

of great speeches, and live to quote ourselves

at will in passages of public pride;

our table play of soldiers, borders, arms

retraces geometric moves of old

campaigns, and mellows their disputes in

feats of memory till all else dissolves

in the fading smoke of the big cigar.

“I know there’s nothing left to say,” you say.

the lads trailed back, shell-shocked, dumb and sane,

unspoken scenes from the front locked inside

their helmets, trapped in mud that moulds their boots;

they fell in the arms of promises, plans

for homes fit for heroes, the high-rise hopes

of independent housing states – and all

the country lacked was the heroes to come home.

today united leagues of nations talk

and talk while god in his wisdom holds back.

“well, let’s find something new to say,” I say.

our voices drown in the mandarin’s drone.

and we take it sitting down, fat in triumph,

fat in defeat, news bullet in the back

before the screen where repetitious ghosts

march on – Bronovsky,  loveable but dead,

grasps at ancestors in the death camp clay,

Sir Mortimer toys with the garbage of Troy,

and Lord Clark himself is Civilisation.

“it would change nothing anyway,” you say.

nor the death of an archduke, nor even

a couple of defenestrations, not

a captain’s ear, or a spurious party

for native Americans at the docks;

it would take a Reformation or Das

Kapital, the advent of the city state,

or some new prime cause to get history

moving again down in this neck of the woods.

I said “I love you.” “I love you,” she said;

war is no endgame won and lost

but terminal sacrifice, absolute cost.

even when the war ends

forget the help the peace sends

for the old friends’ new friends.

summer is an element, the iron in the earth,

while molecules in chains contain my total worth;

the air moves with the evening, my room

shifts in a current of retreating light,

a mountain of detergent bubbles built up by day

subsides at night to a sink’s dirty scum,

empty bottles lined across the floor

reach backwards from their point of no return,

soot and smoke creep into corners,

meander in unforeseen crevices,

and embroidered messages disappear from the edges of blankets.

some small chemistry meanwhile passes

predeterminate in the blood and lets me think

that I, without the cubes that curve the mind,

could mend myself like New Orleans iron

round a template of time, could sit the night out alone,

to be the only one alive by morning.

darkness

four hours out of twenty four the town grows furtive

like a steamed-up car in a dark back lane,

withdrawn, alert and skulking, from the strain of lights;

pavements are hard in their private parts,

blood footsteps thud with anticipation

as loneliness clumsily unbuttons the night;

tight terraces push to the edge of things,

run hands round the folds of open fields,

press down at last on the secret places of the dark.

together we go, through miles of hours

outwalking out the walking out,

the town and I, to masturbate the universe to sleep

in sterile aching contemplation.

This is not about me alone.

This is the love which we try to cover

with lies and deception and stone,

from ourselves as much as any lover.

and light

moonhung darkness ties the mountain to the sky,

a train completes an incessant distance,

and roads and factories retreat into

their miniature prefabricated day;

a half-way slate roof glows like a throne revealing

grainy farmyard hulks at two removes,

impotence hovers on the lifting air,

the world in fever gone brittle and thin;

a score of random pinprick stars faint

a moment in a hint of cloud, then fight

back brighter, multiplied: another wisp,

more night, more stars, more deep, and more to meet

the vastness of the highest rung, till peering stars

grow giddy, sway and totter back

to the earth in the eon just before dawn.

this is the point where universal detail

reverts to finite fact and vanishes,

the point where life, theirs or mine, becomes a smear,

the point of continuity below

where solitary human come and go.

come and go

they come in the dusk of shrivelling morning

to be husked by the light of a sun out of focus,

the packers and stackers, operators and stokers,

assemblers and cokers, political provokers,

the artisans and partisans, all the hocus pocus

of life’s ghost third, all ready for the way

the day will choke them, in thin grey wafers

with silence and violence clenching their throats,

drifting to the main gates opening and bursting,

where the night shift haulers, light shift crawlers,

with thirsts and curses crossing over,

sift through a time shift as they come and go.

they come from the Northern hills,

from barrack drills and training skills,

from waning towns and overspills,

uniform in boilersuits, well-worn safety boots

all looking for the slick route quick loot

till a day can play it right for scooting;

the rain forest workers, shirkers, smirkers,

had to join the circus to know how deep the murk is;

and no one sees the heat-pall leaf fall work face,

the half-strange half-friend who cuts with a weekend,

replaced on the Monday like a change of overalls

as the men of constant autumn come and go.

they come on the hooter, by motor, by rota,

the same and the torture, far into the future,

by one and by one, by product of fractions,

by runs and by tons in vacuums of action,

living for the tea break work brake and back up

till dinner time’s thinner grime and thought

like a hiccup as the mind runs in flashes

like sparks out of ashes, on how short the cash is,

on rough birds and tough words that might hurt

the family, on heatwave affections

and remedies for snow, to be cheated

of lucidity in flecks that come and go.

they come through the trap doors, steel floors, corridors,

gorged by conveyor jaws, pouring out with innate force,

the products spawned like football scores;

the doomer goods, consumer goods all come to be

successively by parts and operations,

cast from the start for artless replications,

march out aloof from nomanshand

past the chargehand’s role, the union patrol,

the hard men, card men on quality control:

pressing on to be complete, inviolate

and obsolete, the stately artefacts

born with men at their feet come and go.

Autumn: Complexes »