Selected Poems (20 page)

darkens from a fresh blood to a dried.

Home, home to my woman, home to bed

where opposites seem sometimes unified.

A pensioner in turban taps his stick

along the pavement past the corner shop,

that sells samosas now not beer on tick,

to the Kashmir Muslim Club that was the Co-op.

House after house FOR SALE where we’d played cricket

with white roses cut from flour-sacks on our caps,

with stumps chalked on the coal-grate for our wicket,

and every one bought now by ‘coloured chaps’,

dad’s most liberal label as he felt

squeezed by the unfamiliar, and fear

of foreign food and faces, when he smelt

curry in the shop where he’d bought beer.

And growing frailer, ‘wobbly on his pins’

the shops he felt familiar with withdrew

which meant much longer tiring treks for tins

that had a label on them that he knew.

And as the shops that stocked his favourites receded

whereas he’d fancied beans and popped next door,

he found that four long treks a week were needed

till he wondered what he bothered eating for.

The supermarket made him feel embarrassed.

Where people bought whole lambs for family freezers

he bought baked beans from check-out girls too harassed

to smile or swap a joke with sad old geezers.

But when he bought his cigs he’d have a chat,

his week’s one conversation, truth to tell,

but time also came and put a stop to that

when old Wattsy got bought out by M. Patel.

And there, ‘Time like an ever rolling stream’ ’s

what I once trilled behind that boarded front.

A 1,000 ages made coal-bearing seams

and even more the hand that sprayed this CUNT

on both Methodist and C of E billboards

once divided in their fight for local souls.

Whichever house more truly was the Lord’s

both’s pews are filled with cut-price toilet rolls.

Home, home to my woman, never to return

till sexton or survivor has to cram

the bits of clinker scooped out of my urn

down through the rose-roots to my dad and mam.

Home, home to my woman, where the fire’s lit

these still chilly mid-May evenings, home to you,

and perished vegetation from the pit

escaping insubstantial up the flue.

Listening to
Lulu
, in our hearth we burn,

as we hear the high Cs rise in stereo,

what was lush swamp club-moss and tree-fern

at least 300 million years ago.

Shilbottle cobbles, Alban Berg high D

lifted from a source that bears your name,

the one we hear decay, the one we see,

the fern from the foetid forest, as brief flame.

This world, with far too many people in,

starts on the TV logo as a taw,

then ping-pong, tennis, football; then one spin

to show us all, then shots of the Gulf War.

As the coal with reddish dust cools in the grate

on the late-night national news we see

police v. pickets at a coke-plant gate,

old violence and old disunity.

The map that’s colour-coded Ulster/Eire’s

flashed on again as almost every night.

Behind a tiny coffin with two bearers

men in masks with arms show off their might.

The day’s last images recede to first a glow

and then a ball that shrinks back to blank screen.

Turning to love, and sleep’s oblivion, I know

what the UNITED that the skin sprayed
has
to mean.

Hanging my clothes up, from my parka hood

may and apple petals, browned and creased,

fall onto the carpet and bring back the flood

of feelings their first falling had released.

I hear like ghosts from all Leeds matches humming

with one concerted voice the bride, the bride

I feel united to,
my
bride is coming

into the bedroom, naked, to my side.

The ones we choose to love become our anchor

when the hawser of the blood-tie’s hacked, or frays.

But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling: Wanker!

It’s the aerosolling skin I met today’s.

My
alter ego
wouldn’t want to know it,

his aerosol vocab would baulk at LOVE,

the skin’s UNITED underwrites the poet,

the measures carved below the ones above.

I doubt if 30 years of bleak Leeds weather

and 30 falls of apple and of may

will erode the UNITED binding us together.

And now it’s your decision: does it stay?

Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard

to find out where I’m buried but I’m near

the grave of haberdasher Appleyard,

the pile of HARPs, or some new neonned beer.

Find Byron, Wordsworth, or turn left between

one grave marked Broadbent, one marked Richardson.

Bring some solution with you that can clean

whatever new crude words have been sprayed on.

If love of art, or love, gives you affront

that the grave I’m in’s graffitied then, maybe,

erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNT

but leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v.

victory? For vast, slow, coal-creating forces

that hew the body’s seams to get the soul.

Will Earth run out of her ‘diurnal courses’

before repeating her creation of black coal?

But choose a day like I chose in mid-May

or earlier when apple and hawthorn tree,

no matter if boys boot their ball all day,

cling to their blossoms and won’t shake them free.

If, having come this far, somebody reads

these verses, and he/she wants to understand,

face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds,

and read the chiselled epitaph I’ve planned:

Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit
.

Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find

how poems can grow from
(beat you to it!) SHIT

find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind
.

in memoriam
Emmanuel Stratas,

born Crete 1903, died Toronto 1987

After I’ve lit the fire and looked outside

and found us snowbound and the roads all blocked,

anxious to prove my memory’s not ossified

and the way into that storehouse still unlocked,

as it’s easier to remember poetry,

I try to remember, but soon find it hard,

a speech from
Prometheus
a boy from Greece bc

scratched, to help him learn it, on a shard.

I remember the museum, and I could eke

his scratch marks out, and could complete

the … however many lines there were of Greek

and didn’t think it then much of a feat.

But now, not that much later, when I find

the verses I once knew beyond recall

I resolve to bring all yesterday to mind,

our visit to your father, each fact,
all
.

Seeing the Home he’s in ’s made me obsessed

with remembering those verses I once knew

and setting myself this little memory test

I don’t think, at the moment, I’ll come through.

It’s the Memory, Mother of the Muses, bit.

Prometheus, in words I do recall reciting

but can’t quote now, and they’re so apposite,

claiming he gave Mankind the gift of writing,

along with fire the Gods withheld from men

who’d lived like ants in caves deprived of light

they could well end up living in again

if we let what flesh first roasted on ignite

a Burning of the Books far more extreme

than any screeching Führer could inspire,

the dark side of the proud Promethean dream

our globe enveloped in his gift of fire.

He bequeathed to baker and to bombardier,

to help benighted men develop faster,

two forms of fire, the gentle one in here,

and what the
Luftwaffe
unleashed,
and
the Lancaster.

One beneficial and one baleful form,

the fire I lit a while since in the grate

that’s keeping me, as I sit writing, warm

and what gutted Goethestrasse on this date,

beginning yesterday to be precise

and shown on film from forty years ago

in a Home for the Aged almost glazed with ice

and surrounded by obliterating snow.

We had the choice of watching on TV

Dresden destroyed, then watching its rebirth,

or, with the world outside too blizzardful to see,

live, the senile not long for this earth.

Piles of cracked ice tiles where ploughs try to push

the muddied new falls onto shattered slates,

the glittering shrapnel of grey frozen slush,

a blitz debris fresh snow obliterates

along with what was cleared the day before

bringing even the snowploughs to a halt.

And their lives are frozen solid and won’t thaw

with no memory to fling its sparks of salt.

The outer world of blur reflects their inner,

these Rest Home denizens who don’t quite know

whether they’ve just had breakfast, lunch, or dinner,

or stare, between three lunches, at the snow.

Long icicles from the low roof meet

the frozen drifts below and block their view

of flurry and blizzard in the snowed-up street

and of a sky that for a month has shown no blue.

Elsie’s been her own optometrist,

measuring the daily way her sight declines

into a growing ball of flashing mist.

She trains her failing sight on outside signs:

the church’s
COME ALIVE IN
’85!

the small hand on the
Export A
ad clock,

the flashing neon on the truck-stop dive

pulsing with strobe lights and jukebox rock,

the little red Scottie on the stoop & scoop

but not the cute eye cast towards its rear,

the little rounded pile of heaped red poop

the owners are required to bend and clear.

To imagine herself so stooping is a feat

as hard as that of gymnasts she has seen

lissom in white leotards compete

in trampolining on the tv screen.

There’s one with mashed dinner who can’t summon

yet again the appetite to smear

the food about the shrunk face of a woman

weeping for death in her 92nd year.

And of the life she lived remembers little

and stares, like someone playing Kim’s Game,

at the tray beneath her nose that fills with spittle

whose bubbles fill with faces with no name.

Lilian, whose love made her decide

to check in with her mate who’d had a stroke,

lost all her spryness once her husband died …

He had a beautiful … all made of oak …

silk inside … brass handles …
tries to find

alternatives …
that long thing where you lie

for words like coffin that have slipped her mind

and forgetting, not the funeral, makes her cry.

And Anne, who treats her roommates to her ‘news’

though every day her news is just the same

how she’d just come back from
such a lovely cruise

to that famous island … I forget its name …

Born before the Boer War, me, and so

I’m too old to remember I suppose …

then tries again …
the island’s called … you know …

that place, you know … where everybody goes …

First Gene had one and then a second cane

and then, in weeks, a walker of cold chrome,

now in a wheelchair wails for the Ukraine,

sobbing in soiled pants for what was home.

Is that horror at what’s on the TV screen

or just the way the stroke makes Jock’s jaw hang?

Though nobody quite knows what his words mean

they hear Scots diphthongs in the New World twang.

And like the Irish Sea on Blackpool Beach,

where Joan was once the pick of bathing belles,

the Lancashire she once had in her speech

seeps into Canadian as she retells,

whose legs now ooze out water, who can’t walk,

how she was ‘champion at tap’, ‘the flower’

(she poises the petals on the now frail stalk)

‘of the ballet troupe at Blackpool Tower’.

You won’t hear Gene, Eugene, Yevgeny speak

to nurses now, or God, in any other tongue

but his Ukrainian, nor your dad Greek,

all that’s left to them of being young.

Life comes full circle when we die.

The circumference is finally complete,

so we shouldn’t wonder too much why

his speech went back, a stowaway, to Crete.

Dispersal and displacement, willed or not,

from homeland to the room the three share here,

one Ukrainian, one Cretan, and one Scot

grow less Canadian as death draws near.

Jock sees a boozer in a Glasgow street,

and Eugene glittering icons, candles, prayer,

and for your dad a thorn-thick crag in Crete

with oregano and goat smells in the air.

And home? Where is it now? The olive grove

may well be levelled under folds of tar.

The wooden house made joyful with a stove

has gone the way of Tsar and samovar.

The small house with 8 people to a room

with no privacy for quiet thought or sex

bulldozed in the island’s tourist boom

to make way for Big Macs and discothèques.

Beribboned hats and bold embroidered sashes

once helped another émigré forget

that Canada was going to get his ashes

and that Estonia’s still Soviet.

But now the last of those old-timers

couldn’t tell one folk dance from another