Authors: Tony Harrison
and my longing for you now is just as bad
at England’s northern edge for nightingales
as those White Nights last year in Leningrad,
where, packed for my flight back, thick curtains drawn
but night too like full day to get much kip,
I wanted you to watch with me from bed
that seamless merger of half dusk and dawn,
AURORA, rosy-fingered kind, and battleship
whose sudden salvo turned the East half red.
Winter false dawns woke me:
thud! thud! thud!
Lorries loaded with chipped ice and not quite four!
Felt-swathed babushkas stooping to chip more –
Leningrad’s vast pool of widowhood,
who also guard the Rembrandts and rank Gents,
who stand all day with stern unbending gaze
haloed with Tsars’ crowns and Fabergés,
their menfolk melted down to monuments.
It’s their eyes make me shy I’ve fallen for
a woman who they’d chorus at
nyet! nyet!
and make me edgy walking here with you
between the statues
VERITAS
,
HONOR
,
and
PSYCHE
whom strong passion made forget
conditions of darkness and the gods’ taboo.
Shuffling in felt goloshes saves the floor
from the unexpected guests of history
who queue all day to see what once was for
the fruits of just one bonsai family tree.
IUSTITIA
and
POMONA
in their crates.
Come winter and the art, all cordoned off,
’s wired to a
US
import anti-theft device
and opened only for researching prof.
and
patineur
from Academe who skates
those ballrooms patterned like cracked Baikal ice
buffing the princely parquets for the few
who’ll see them reproduced in some review.
Watch that elegant glissade as he yahoos
into the soundproof pile of overshoes.
on my birthday, 30 April
A silent scream? The madrigal’s top note?
Puking his wassail on the listening throng?
Mouthfuls of cumulus, then cobalt throat.
Medusa must have hexed him in mid-song.
The finest vantage point in all of Prague’s
this gagging gargoyle’s with the stone-locked lute,
leaning over cherries, blow-ups of Karl Marx
the pioneers ’ll march past and salute.
Tomorrow’s May but still a North wind scuffs
the plated surface like a maced cuirass,
lays on, lays off, gets purchase on and roughs
up the Vltava, then makes it glass.
The last snow of this year’s late slow thaw
dribbles as spring saliva down his jaw.
‘These human victims, chained and burning at the stake, were the blazing torches which lighted the monarch to his nuptial couch.’
(J. L. Motley,
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
)
Fish gnaw the Flushing capons, hauled from fleeced
Lutheran Holland, for tomorrow’s feast.
The Netherlandish lengths, the Dutch heirlooms,
That might have graced my movements and my groom’s
Fade on the fat sea’s bellies where they hung
Like cover-sluts. Flesh, wet linen wrung
Bone dry in a washerwoman’s raw, red,
Twisting hands, bed-clothes off a lovers’ bed,
Falls off the chains. At Valladolid
It fell, flesh crumpled like a coverlid.
Young Carlos de Sessa stripped was good
For a girl to look at and he spat like wood
Green from the orchards for the cooking pots.
Flames ravelled up his flesh into dry knots
And he cried at the King:
How can you stare
On such agonies and not turn a hair?
The king was cool:
My friend, I’d drag the logs
Out to the stake for my own son, let dogs
Get at his testes for his sins; auto-da-fés
Owe no paternity to evil ways
.
Cabrera leans against the throne, guffaws
And jots down to the Court’s applause
Yet another of the King’s
bon mots
.
O yellow piddle in fresh fallen snow –
Dogs on the Guadarramas … dogs. Their souls
Splut through their pores like porridge holes.
They wear their skins like cast-offs. Their skin grows
Puckered round the knees like rumpled hose.
Doctor Ponce de la Fuente, you,
Whose gaudy, straw-stuffed effigy in lieu
Of members hacked up in the prison, burns
Here now, one sacking arm drops off, one turns
A stubble finger and your skull still croons
Lascivious catches and indecent tunes;
And croaks:
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
.
Pray God be with you in your lust
.
And God immediately is, but such a one
Whose skin stinks like a herring in the sun,
Huge from confinement in a filthy gaol,
Crushing the hooping on my farthingale.
O Holy Mother, Holy Mother, Ho-
ly Mother Church, whose melodious, low
Labour-moans go through me as you bear
These pitch-stained children to the upper air,
Let them lie still tonight, no crowding smoke
Condensing back to men float in and poke
Their charcoaled fingers at our bed, and let
Me be his pleasure, though Philip sweat
At his rhythms and use those hateful tricks
They say he feels like after heretics.
O let the King be gentle and not loom
Like Torquemada in the torture room,
Those wiry Spanish hairs, these nuptial nights,
Crackling like lit tapers in his tights,
His seed like water spluttered off hot stone.
Maria, whose dark eyes very like my own
Shine on such consummations, Maria bless
My Philip just this once with gentleness.
The King’s cool knuckles on my smoky hair!
Mare Mediterraneum, la mer, la mer
That almost got him in your gorge with sides
Of feastmeats, you must flush this scared bride’s
Uterus with scouring salt. O cure and cool
The scorching birthmarks of his branding-tool.
Sweat chills my small breasts and limp hands.
They curled like foetuses,
maman
, and cried.
His crusted tunics crumple as he stands:
Come, Isabella
. God
is satisfied
.
‘Correct your maps: Newcastle is Peru!’
(John Cleveland)
‘Venient annis saecula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet & ingens pateat tellus,
Tethysque novos detegat orbes,
Nec sit terris ultima Thule.’
(Seneca,
Medea
, 375–9)
For defending in our Civil Wars
the King’s against the better cause,
Newcastle got its motto:
FORTIT-
ER TRIUMPHANS DEFENDIT
.
After Nigeria and Prague I come
back near to where I started from,
all my defences broken down
on nine or ten
Newcastle Brown
.
A sudden, stiff September breeze
blows off the sea along the quays
and chills us; autumn and I need
your shoulder with a desperate need.
A clumsy effort at control,
I faff with paper chips and coal,
and rake out with elaborate fuss
one whole summer’s detritus.
A good draught and the fire roars
like muted Disney dinosaurs,
and last week’s Sunday paper glows
yellowish, its urgent prose,
like flies across a carcass, spreads
and fattens on the voiceless dead.
A picture shows lobbed mortar bombs
smashing down Onitsha homes.
The fire sucks in the first cold air
under the coverage of massacre.
The fire chatters, almost flies,
a full-fledged bird of paradise.
I lay down, dizzy, drunk, alone,
life circling life like the Eddystone
dark sea, but lighting nothing; sense
nor centre, nor circumference.
A life-long, sick sixpennyworth
of appalling motion round the Earth;
scared, moonrocketing till Pop-
eye and blurred planets stop;
Switchback; Helter Skelter; Reel;
the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Big Wheel,
its million coloured lightbulbs one
red halo like an empty sun.
The
Caterpillar
; Hunslet Feast;
one hand on my first woman’s breast;
darkness; acceleration so
we’re desperate with vertigo;
then chained in solitary
Chair-
o-planes
through whistling air
as all the known Leeds landmarks blur
to something dark and circular.
Venus, Vulcan, Cupid stare
out vacantly on City Square,
and
Deus iuvat impigros
above the bank where God helps those
who help themselves, declares
Leeds purposeful in its affairs.
Mercator; miles
, school chapel glass
transparencies to blood and brass.
And
Self Help
Samuel Smiles was said
to have waltzed round our first bed
in our partitioned ballroom flat
with hardly room to swing a cat.
Worthies! Loiners! O King Dick
Oastler and his rhetoric,
and William Hey, the first to show
syphilis
in utero
.
O highlife crocodiles that went
round one palm tree in the bare cement!
The dizziness! That spiral stair
up St Vitus’s Cathedral; there
the golden cockerel and great Prague
before us like a catalogue;
slides. Bloodless mementos, all
Time-Life
International.
And now with vistas like Earl Grey’s
I look out over life and praise
from my unsteady, sea-view plinth
each dark turn of the labyrinth
that might like a river suddenly
wind its widening banks into the sea
and Newcastle is Newcastle is New-
castle
is
Peru!
Swirled detritus and driftwood pass
in state the 1880
Sas-
inena Cold Storage Co
.,
and Neptune gazes at the Tyne’s flow
seawards, where the sea-winds ‘boast
and bluster’ at the North East coast,
the sluggish Tyne meandering through
the staithes and shipyards of Peru.
Shadow girders faced with sun
shimmer like heaped bullion.
Commerce and contraceptives glide
and circle on the turning tide;
Plain, Gossamer
and
Fetherlite
and US
Trojan
, knotted tight,
ferry their unborn semen, free
for ever from discovery.
Discovery! Slaves, now trains,
like
spirochetes
through dark brains,
tunnel the Andes, spiralling for zinc
and silver, gold and lead; drink
still makes me giddy; my mind whirls
through all my wanderings and girls
to one last city, whose black crest
shows all the universe at rest.
At rest! That last red flash
as life’s last ember turns to ash
and riddled dusts drop through the grate
around the heart. O celebrate,
as panic screws up each charged nerve
to cornering the next sharp swerve,
Earth, people, planets as they move
with all the gravity of love.
First this Victorian terrace, where
small scars of the last World War –
those wrought iron railings made
into shrapnel and grenade,
acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys,
victorious artillery –
are enough reminder that we brave
harsh opposition when we love.
This cluttered room, its chandelier
still spinning from the evening’s beer,
this poor, embattled fortress, this strong-
hold of love, that can’t last long
against the world’s bold cannonade
of loveless warfare and cold trade,
this bed, this fire, and lastly us,
naked, bold, adventurous.
Discovery! wart, mole, spot,
like outcrops on a snowfield, dot
these slopes of flesh my fingers ski
with circular dexterity.
This moment when my hand strays
your body like an endless maze,
returning and returning, you,
O you; you also are Peru.
And just as distant. Flashing stars
drop to the ashpit through the bars.
I’m back in Africa, at ease
under the splashed shade of four trees,
watching a muscled woman heave
huge headloads of dead wood; one bare leaf
for covering wilts in the heat,
curls, then flutters to her flat, cracked feet.
And round each complex of thatched huts
is a man-high cactus hedge that shuts
out intruders and the mortars thud
like a migraine in the compound mud.
Night comes, and as drunk as hell
I watch the heavens and fireflies, and can’t tell,
here at my Shangri-la, Pankshin,
where insects end and stars begin.
My fingerprints still lined with coal
send cold shudders through my soul.
Each whorl, my love-, my long life-line,
mine, inalienably mine,
lead off my body as they press
onwards into nothingness.
I see my grimy fingers smudge
everything they feel or touch.
The fire I laid and lit to draw
you downstairs to the second floor,
flickers and struts upon my bed.
And I’m left gazing at a full-page spread