Selected Poems (7 page)

of aggressively fine bosoms, nude

and tanned almost to
négritude
,

in the Colour Supplement’s
Test

Yourself for Cancer of the Breast
.

‘St Cuthbert’s shrine,

founded 999’

(mnemonic)
                       

ANARCHY and GROW YOUR OWN

whitewashed on to crumbling stone

fade in the drizzle. There’s a man

handcuffed to warders in a black sedan.

A butcher dumps a sodden sack

of sheep pelts off his bloodied back,

then hangs the morning’s killings out,

cup-cum-muzzle on each snout.

I’ve watched where this ‘distinguished see’

takes off into infinity,

among transistor antennae,

and student smokers getting high,

and visiting Norwegian choirs

in raptures over Durham’s spires,

lifers, rapists, thieves, ant-size

circle and circle at their exercise.

And Quasimodo’s bird’s-eye view

of big wigs and their retinue,

a five car Rolls Royce motorcade

of judgement draped in Town Hall braid,

I’ve watched the golden maces sweep

from courtrooms to the Castle keep

through winding Durham, the elect

before whom ids must genuflect.

But some stay standing and at one

God’s irritating carrillon

brings you to me; I feel like the hunch-

back taking you for lunch;

then bed. All afternoon two church-

high prison helicopters search

for escapees down by the Wear

and seem as though they’re coming here.

Listen! Their choppers guillotine

all the enemies there’ve ever been

of Church and State, including me

for taking this small liberty.

Liberal, lover, communist,

Czechoslovakia, Cuba, grist,

grist for the power-driven mill

weltering in overkill.

And England? Quiet Durham? Threat

smokes off our lives like steam off wet

subsidences when summer rain

drenches the workings. You complain

that the machinery of sudden death,

Fascism, the hot bad breath

of Powers down small countries’ necks

shouldn’t interfere with sex.

They
are
sex, love, we must include

all these in love’s beatitude.

Bad weather and the public mess

drive us to private tenderness,

though I wonder if together we,

alone two hours, can ever be

love’s anti-bodies in the sick,

sick body politic.

At best we’re medieval masons, skilled

but anonymous within our guild,

at worst defendants hooded in a car

charged with something sinister.

On the
status quo’s
huge edifice

we’re just excrescences that kiss,

cathedral gargoyles that obtrude

their acts of ‘moral turpitude’.

But turpitude still keeps me warm

in foul weather as I head for home

down New Elvet, through the town,

past the butcher closing down,

hearing the belfry jumble time

out over Durham. As I climb

rain blankets the pithills, mist

the chalkings of the anarchist.

I wait for the six-five Plymouth train

glowering at Durham. First rain,

then hail, like teeth spit from a skull,

then fog obliterate it. As we pull

out of the station through the dusk and fog,

there, lighting up, is Durham, dog

chasing its own cropped tail,

University, Cathedral, Gaol.

for Jane

‘These rooms have been furnished by the League of Friends

For your comfort and rest while illness portends.

Take care of the things which from us you borrow

For others are certain to need them tomorrow.’

(Inscribed in the League of Friends rest room, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne)

‘C’est mon unique soutien au monde, à présent!’

(Arthur Rimbaud, 2 July 1891,
Oeuvres
, p. 528)

A
Scottish & Newcastle
clops

past the RVI and traffic stops

to let the anachronistic dray

turn right into the brewery.

Victoria, now that daylight’s gone,

whitens, and a Park lake swan

loops its pliant neck to scoff

the bits of sandwich floating off

the boathouse jetty. Empress, Queen,

here slender, beddable, your clean-

living family image drove

my mother venomously anti love,

and made her think the stillbirth just

retribution for our filthy lust;

our first (the one we married for)

red splashes on a
LADIES
floor …

inter urinam et faeces nasc-

imur
… issues of blood. You ask,

as brought to bed you blench and bleed,

then scream, insisting that I read,

as blood comes out in spurts like piss,

a bit of
Pride & Prejudice
.

I will her breaths. Again! Again!

my daughter heaves in oxygen

and lives, each heaved breath

another lurch away from death,

each exhalation like death throes,

a posser squelched down on wet clothes,

and the only sign of life I see

is a spitting tracheotomy.

When you’re conscious, Jane, we’ll read

how that caparisoned, white steed

helped the younger son get past

leafage clinging like
Elastoplast

and win through to bestow the kiss

that works the metamorphosis.

But frogs stay frogs, the briar grows

thicker and thicker round the rose.

I stoop to kiss away your pain

through stuff like florist’s cellophane,

but my kiss can’t make you less

the helpless prey of Nothingness –

ring-a-ring-a-roses
… love

goes gravewards but does move.

Love’s not something you can hoard

against the geriatric ward.

Mother, all,
all
, of us in this

brave trophallaxis of a kiss

that short-circuits generations scent

mortality’s rich nutriment.

The waiting room’s an airless place

littered with comics:
Spectre
;
Space
;

Adventure
; love and hate

in
AD
3068:

interplanetary affairs

policed by
Superlegionaires
:

STONE BOY
of the planet Zwen

who turns to stone and back again,

and
BRAINIAC
, space-genius,

who finds Earth’s labs ridiculous,

and
MATTER-EATER-LAD
resist

the mad, moon-exiled scientist –

Dr
MANTIS MORLO
! Will he smash

our heroes into lunar ash?

Air! Air! There’s not enough

air in this small world. I’ll suf-

focate. Air! Air! – In each black

PVC disposal sack,

I see two of my dimensions gone

into a flat oblivion.

Weightless, like a stranger caught

loosely flapping on my mother’s grate,

down corridors, a shadow man,

I almost sleepwalk, float past
An-

aesthesia
,
X-Ray, Speech

Therapy
and, come full circle, reach

again the apparatus where you lie

between the armless and the eyeless boy.

I sicken. Jane! I could cut off

your breathing with a last wet cough,

break the connections, save you from

almost a lifetime’s crippledom,

legs splayed outwards, the crushed bones

like the godfish Olokun’s.

The black spot crossing; on both sides

a blank male silhouette still strides

off the caution and just keeps

on striding, while Newcastle sleeps,

between the Deaf School and the Park,

into his element, the dark.

The Scottish drivers have begun

the last stretch of the homeward run;

another hundred and they’ll pull

into the brightening capital,

each lashed, tarpaulined hulk

groaning borderwards:
Blue Circle Bulk

Cement; Bulk Earthmoving; Bulk Grain;

Edinburgh and back again.

And up the Great North Road in twos

great tankers of Newcastle booze,

returning empty, leaving full,

swashing with comfort for John Bull

and John Bull’s bouncing babes who slug

their English anguish at the bottle’s dug.

O caravanserais! I too could drown

this newest sorrow in
Newcastle Brown
.

I thrash round desperately. I flail

my arms at sharks in seas of ale.

Organs. Head/-lights/-lines. Black. White.

The on/off sirening blue light;

heart/lungs like a grappled squid;

BLIND PARAPLEGIC’S CHANNEL BID
.

Blood; piss; oceans; taste of salt.

Halt! Halt! Halt! Halt!

I surface and the Tynemouth Queen,

that death’s door study streaked with green,

is sitting dwarfish, slumped, alone

on her seawind-eroded throne,

scowling at a glimpse of sea

and wrecked, Dane-harried priory.

Above the grounded
RVI

a few wind-driven seagulls cry

like grizzling kids. Out there; out there

where everything is sea and air,

at Tynemouth and at Seaton Sluice,

the sea works bits of England loose,

and redeposits on the land

the concrete tanktraps as blown sand.

Blood transfusion, saline drip,

‘this fiddle’ and ‘stiff upper lip’

have seen us so far.

You’ll live,

like your father, a contemplative.

Daylight, but a pale
Blue Star

still just glimmers on the nearest bar.

An orderly brings tea and toast.

Mother, wife and daughter, ghost –

I’ve laid, laid, laid, laid

you, but I’m still afraid,

though now Newcastle’s washed with light,

about the next descent of night.

Even the lone man

in his wattle lean-to,

the half-mad women

in their hive of leaves,

pitched at the roadside

by a low shared fire

so near the shoulder

that their tethered goat

crops only half-circles

of tough, scorched turf,

and occasional tremors

shake ash from the charcoal,

live for something more

than the manioc and curds

they’re preparing,

barely attentive to speech

as they strain

through the oppressive mid-day drowse,

or, at night, through the noise

of the insects drilling into them

the lessons of loneliness

or failed pioneering

over miles of savannah,

for the punctual Bahia-Rio

coaches as they come

to the village of Milagres

they are outcasts from

for a quick
cafezinho
,

a quick piss,

edible necklaces

and caged red birds.

Walking on the Great North Road

with my back towards London

through showers of watery sleet,

my cracked rubber boot soles

croak like African bullfrogs

and the buses and lorries that swish

like a whiplash laid on and on

without intermission or backswing

send a spray splashing over

from squelching tyres skywards

STOP red, GO green, CAUTION

amber, and at the crossing

where you had your legs crushed

I remember the
fonte luminosa
,

Brasilia’s musical geyser

spurting a polychrome plumage,

the fans of rich pashas,

a dancer’s dyed ostriches,

making parked Chevrolets

glisten, people seem sweaty,

and when yellowing, loppy Terezinha,

the eldest, though your age,

of the children all huddled

under the fancy ramp entrance

of the National Theatre,

comes and scoops from the churned

illuminated waters a tinful

for drinking and cooking and goes

gingerly to ingenious roads

where cars need never once

stop at Belishas or crossings,

intersect, crash, or slow down,

the drops that she scatters

are not still orange or purple,

still greenish or gorgeous

in any way, or still gushing,

but slightly clouded like quartz,

and at once they’re sucked back

into Brazil like a whelk

retracting, like the tear

that drains back into your eye

as once more you start coming through

the rainbowing spindrift and fountains

of your seventh anaesthesia.

The fireflies that women

once fattened on sugar

and wore in their hair

or under the see-through

parts of their blouses

in Cuba’s
Oriente
,

here seem to carry

through the beam where they cluster

a brief phosphorescence

from each stiff corpse

on the battlefields that look

like the blown-up towel

of a careless barber,

its nap and its bloodflecks,

and if you were to follow,

at Santa Fe’s open-air

cinema’s Russian

version
War & Peace
,

the line of the dead

to the end, corpses,

cannons and fetlocks,

scuffing the red crust

with your snowboots,