Wolf Tongue (21 page)

The horror of the hospital for us both.

Demolished eager hopes and trudges up the bad

steep hill in your dun winter clothes: to be

refused information. Not your bright red

party jacket not your guitar badge and

funny pinned on chrome figure. Just

petitions and pleas – how’s that man

of mine? That badly displaced fellow

on 50 mils a day and what, what for

god’s sake, is he eating, and I don’t even

believe in gods – or that one from

Cecil B. De Mille. For when the Wall,

and I don’t mean the tourist attraction

touted in China, when the Wall was

chipped to bits it broke my stern heart

and it broke his, my man, and I know

you are breaking his and mine now.

And you are breaking me to uphill

trudge bits and episodes – like poor

hammered toffee – and I cannot eat

myself and I am being distracted

my heart itself once an oven of love

turned into a rainy asylum alone

in the bleak upland rains. How

much better it might be in summer,

recovering our seasons released

upon sensational sun-peeled skin,

boats and oars and oarlocks and

handlocks and kisslocks locked

right in place, pure juice from

Spanish oranges, Miró suns pouring

endless light over grief of my walk

across the spated river, touching

the black painted bridge lamp after

dark, made in Brum, near where

Nazi airmen torched my childhood

cathedral; me in a shelter, afraid

of flames and fire, as you are now,

flames in your heart, O darling

don’t let them be extinguished now,

it is the smashed cathedral of your

life sweeping up in utter flames

to the frozen ground: torched and

charged with terrible destruction.

For many days, my man, you were

a man with a many-layered mask.

You did not want to know me and

again as I arrived and arrived you

bent your head and heart away and

did not want to know me. My own

heart a haunted husk without you.

But always I put my hand out and

want to and always did and do. We

have been driven to distractions

by a long revelation of deprivation

madness which triggered me to

trudging, loving you, pursed lips

grim in every worried step back

to your haloed bed in wardlight.

Your northern arms around me

not browned by Miró’s molten suns,

and you held me strong and lovingly,

northern hands, tight, tight, tight,

forearms around my ribs and spine,

making me shudder in happiness

and unbroken realms of loving safety,

so paleness of spirit left me undaunted;

a queen of hearts and a warrior of love!

Yet once more I am at the hospital door.

Once more you will be completely

off-centre and pilled up, caustic tongue

not lazy. Once more betraying my heart

your illness clinging like oak-roots.

I pray the trees will lend you strength.

The time has come to palm aside all

images of lost sheep and willows weeping.

In my bad dream you climbed to the wet

roof of the lunatic asylum, through barred

windows, determined to be demon free.

You said you were a magpie and would

fly to me. But your flight ended in a fatal

swan-dive into the Yorkstone yard. O

mendacious reel of bad fortune, let

sun’s pollen-gold wake me to a saner world

so fleet already without this torment too.

Smartism seems to be the best deal

in these broken-fire days, honed up

with barely held apologies, not the

Suprematism of monumental Kazimir.

He’d weep seven broken plates at its

purity of abjectness, lack of muscle

tone. Not for us now to stand upon

the steps in a revolution’s moment,

with Miró’s crown of sun and stars.

All the demonic graffiti is quite certain:

        I’m the abjuring man.

        I’m the abdicating man.

        I’m the strangely dislocated

        disconnecting disconnected man.

        I’m the storm-tossed tosser

        on Earthquake Street, mindblown

        dead on arrival sprawled on

        Richter Scale Prospekt, found

        crying wolf beside the troikas.

        I alone in detox itch and fury

        test the temper of sunbeams

        and angels. I flee across the shiny

           floor – believe me, it is shiny –

        headbackward pursued by flying

          animals and objects each

           with forktail cocktail blazing. Endless anger

             only is my recompense for

              first-rate pistolage now she’s

             fled these shores for sanity.

             O my wires keep dropping out.

             Let loose my stumble in the darkness.

             Fling my face into brooding earth.

             Trample forward onto footloose ground.

             Watch the devil’s tarpit veil smother me.

             Who today will fetch my idle drinkless

            hands a king whose neck wants wringing?

             Who will set me free from strapdown

             to deliver Sexton’s necessary utmosts?

              It will be the last house-call after all.

              No, no, it is all drinkless dole and drollery,

             regime of hysterical tomfoolery.

Why can’t you get helium on the National Health?

Because the Tory Government has taken it all.

It is dispensed every day to Cabinet ministers.

Now they are gone completely myxomatosis bunny funny.

May the demons track them down

as they tracked me. Relentless pursuit

and capture their family’s fantastic method

code and motto. O, SAS where are you now?

Gone to an alcohol oasis every one.

Blackhand gangs through every window

leapt craving my wit from ice-wagons – every day

was Drink More Pour More Day.

May they sting their heads and hearts

and sap their very strength and breath.

Am I alone in my symmetrical vision

of this unequivocal stupidity? Look

at the Labour Party too & roar with laughter.

All, all, all, clowns of conceit.

Shafted & driven intolerant on spewground

wearing only an orange Cuba baseball cap

say then this: Lift one much exercised

right arm more used to shifting Russian

vodka, drunkenly saluting naked and badly

bruised Albion and that failure St George,

declaring in soaking mattress rawness –

that’s the ugly nation you have made.

And that’s the nation of me too: each of us

in very separate parts brought to our knees.

Now it is time to put aside and forget

the decadent period of fast red cars &

slothful attitudes towards boldness

and moral mettle except in entering

the National Lottery, the greatest

con yet wrought by the Tory Party –

worse than cheap gin for quelling

here in the Great United Quelldom

where tomorrow never comes fast

enough for win ticket announcement.

I have been admiring the caked

menstruation blood you left

on a pillow before we parted.

It was the most tender

moments of our days.

We laved and laved the blood away

and you helped me with my broken leg.

It’s amazing what we did considering.

Nothing remains now.

World in smithereens.

4:56, sun rising after me,

swoon alone in the garden

at lilac and azalea fumes

thanking heaven inside

the utter madness for

nasturtium you planted

before fleeing from

my darkriver drinking.

Rain, alone in the rain,

rain and the train and

the river darkly summoning

towards its source my heart.

All the buttercoppes

flush like forests ankle-high.

I am so glad to live at the

northern end of the earth!

The south would suffocate

and humiliate me. Once more

the blossoms and birds. Even

aconite and horehound

bloom and bloom. I&I

myself am in a poisoned

corner, Chatterton-style,

entirely deconstructed.

Toe pressing the mad earth.

Stiff bottom lip turned out

against the rules and rest

of it, all in despotic shame.

Said: should do, but I won’t.

And she said: that’s the story

of your life. Almost man.

Rain, rain, rain again and bonerolling bloodthunder,

           lampblack clouds from the Pennines

                  towards fjords in the east

                       releasing their load

      soaking the tied-back crown of Russian tarragon, swaying

                            so high in the herb garden

                                 – reminding me

         of the cast-back hair of Anne de Bretagne in 1514

  commemorated in marble: full-length along the sealed

     casket

     eyes closed by human hand, lips half-parted for a last kiss,

                        O please, O please beloved,

            and those frontal bones and ribs pushed up

            made more emphatic in her exit exhalations

              in the Cathedrale Basilique Saint-Denis

                            as the young beauty

                       longed to find her breath.

                    Yes, Paris, you have everything,

                 the fastest nitrate in the best Laforgue rain,

                 the best gutters and downpipes and poets

            and the marble hightide hair swept back in death pose

                               like wind-whipped tarragon.

How sweet today the scents and air perfumes

down the overgrown flags, binding stems

cling to my fair descending legs

which never saw a proper dance

in the arms of another – at village gatherings

I could only nod, neither saying

yes or no. So charmless harmless me!

Yet the true blue cranesbill like heaven’s light, invading

our brilliant path at Sipton Shield, crowning

the riverbed of tumblestones, is my

queenly ankletwine today, and the Michaelmas

which will be for my hair, washed

in the white water, crown of hair

lashed back from my supple neck, O yes

I hoy it back, defiant almost, if I knew

the word defiant and I wished I did know,

for it is a gunmetal word with a hard ‘t’

all should be acquainted with, with which all

should be in talking agreement: talking, what’s that

my sky-blue eyed Bar?

You speak the petals off the trees

each day and I in wonder

watch you draw them down. You’re like a bird

with fluting beak, while the silence

of the Nenthead shafts populate

with lack of noisesomeness my full

disabled cleft and tongue.

To call me idiot, brand me nobody,

is bestowing lustrous ermine qualities

upon my nowhere frame. There are no proper words for me.

Pearl: now our secret paths above the tumblestones

are pierced by yellow arrow marks

for all of those who would walk there too.

Everybody’s tortured, everyone’s in chains

I hate them and loathe them with strengthening abundance,

forehead-strong, and when my abundance, my overflowing

emotion, my abundance of the heart, my

moorland affluence and wealth which others call poverty,

when it streams like a fire seam,

I loathe them for binding my pearly toes.

I hate them because I am among their

other refugees. They put up the wire, wire, wire,

along my way,

which no one should do, for wire

is an industry, a containment, made in

Leeds or Wakefield Bar said, brought by 12-wheeled lorries

in unrolled bales like silver hay

from some industrial graveskin graveyard

completely contrary to the wings of my spirit.

Fraught I am with poor lip service,

destroyed and betrayed

and the river flows from me, my molten white water,

1500 to 1400 to 1300

                                    past hawhips and sloes

and so to the sea.

I will wash myself in it forever.

Darling, reader and writer with azure eyes,

eyes the colour of the sea’s horizon,

I will wash myself in it forever.

In umber spate it ripped my breastbuttons, like your eager hands.

It broke apart my loving heart, like your cruel talking lips.

It stopped my sense.

O love, in a world of shuffled papers

and cheap haircuts, your honeysuckle-

scented locks, your locked and gripped

tongue will always be delight to me. In

an alien world of distant characters,

you’ll always be inside the dangerous

part of my forever welling willing heart.

Bar, Bar, barbed wire. Bar, the barbs

and staples and hooks and eyes. Did

you see the photographs? Did you see

the charred skin, the gravedigging

ceremony with gleaming boots,

spectacles and sneery smiles?

Did you take note my angel poet

of the complete famine due to

circumstances beyond control

of let’s grin and bear it?

Did you see the bushels of knees

and other thinly-appointed limbs

and the gaps of extracted – there’s

a word, my Bar, I know you’d love –

teeth, did you wonder where the world

was, where the world went, my honeysuckle love?

Blonde but a Jewess just the same.

No one had our words in those days.

When we stared and wandered

and stored and wondered

in each others’ far-reaching eyes

beneath the croaking creaking tumblestones

where our trout leapt mad for midge and mayfly

pollen puffed in gold explosions by sucking bees,

our ankles smoothed to Oriental beauty, before

either of us knew where was the Orient, before

Jeremy travelled there, before you read me

Fu-Manchu and the Yellow Peril, O dimmer

of my heavy lids, dizzy with pollen and sunlit

prose, O stunning quiet reader, seducer

of pathside petals and birdy wings, bringer

of betony, pointer out of fairies’ chimneys,

runner of rings in the rinsing rain.

I stood in any light there was, in

every light, dark and almost dark,

fiercely black, like a dark heart torment,

strangely grey all the way all day

from the storm-shaken ferry jetties of Ireland,

and I stood there, arms, heart and mouth open,

ready to be annoyed and poorly-addressed

by the sudden sun over the longing of the law,

and ready to be addressed by my loving love.

Medici? Three syllables, my honeysuckle

tumblestone rosehip love, but I did not

feel like an Italian court princess, for

my vowels were uncut marble then.

Even writing the words
rose
and
garment

broke my heart; their real variousnesses

pricked me awake when I expected it least.

O my love, my rosehip plucking love, my love,

kiss the bandage from my face and haul me from the wire.

All the mam-made hems, the man-made hymns,

none of the blood-filled truths, none, I say none,

none of them can move or call me as you can.

O my love, my harping, high fell honeysuckle

tumblestone molten white water love, haul me

from the terrible terror of the wristblood wire.