Alan Jenkins
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Born in 1955 in Surrey and brought up in London, Alan Jenkins was educated at the University of Sussex, and since 1981 has worked for the TLS, first as poetry and fiction editor and lately as deputy editor. During all this time his reputation has been growing inexorably, until now he can be said to dominate his generation. Most of the poets that one likes can be said to be doing that, but Alan Jenkins really does have an unusual degree of authority, at least partly derived from his determination to back up even the most anarchic thematic boldness with a scrupulously formal structure. In reporting the details of his own emotional life, for example, he has a justifiable confidence that he speaks for all of us: here the boldness is not just in the way he reports his love affairs, but in the way he registers his love for his mother, striking deep notes of grief that make other poets attempting a similar theme sound as if they are holding violins while he has been issued with the only cello. In this as in other respects he has never seemed to fit in with any readily recognizable career path for British poets. His background has boats in it, and they aren’t yachts: how many poets know their way around a proper working boat? And where does he stand in relation to the vanished Empire? His opinion seems ambivalent, like Larkin’s, yet his tone is all his own, and, typically, full of confident music. “Men were employed to keep the Empire going/In distant, dark-skinned places... where the sun was not allowed to set.” Since 1988, when he made his debut with Hot-House, he has published a good half dozen slim volumes which have been honoured with too many critical hosannas and prize-committee short-listings to be recorded here, although one owes it to Greenheart (1990) to say that it received the Forward Poetry Prize for the best collection of that year. For an introduction, a useful new-and-collected volume, A Short History of Snakes, came out in 2001, and since then there has been A Shorter Life(2005). The combination of fluency and high quality would be daunting if the charm of his line were not so understated: as things are, he makes unfailing wit seem like the only way to say it.
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A Reconsideration
Dawn-mist on the river;
then fog obscured both banks,
damp chill and green water
from a thousand leaks
in my rotting plywood hull
sluiced the cockpit planks
as I made for midstream, the screw
and bows fighting some resistance
as if the Thames had thickened
to ice, and I was an icebreaker
butting a passage through
to white and empty distance,
strafed by a single gull...
Time ran out, the tide ran
out, the river quickened
and all around the boat
I saw them in their thousands,
bobbing belly up, mouths
working, pleading with me,
blowing forlorn farewell kisses;
the silver-white heaps on the mud
of both banks flopped until
their gills had stopped
and they were still,
the mud was covered
and the air sickened...
How had I made this happen?
Perhaps someone I’d left
alone, in the lurch --
but I’d always been
the one to feel bereft!
If only I had thrown
back that little perch,
along with the foul-hooked
roach and dace, the bream
and gudgeon — no,
this might be a dream
but these deaths were real,
and when I looked
all eyes were focused on
a ‘little muddy reach’
where men in twos and threes,
dark-coated, stood around
the white blur of a corpse — a girl,
from the shape she made,
the tuft that shivered
slightly in the breeze,
stretched out for her photo-call,
a silver sheet behind her
and one of them hunched over
a tripod, an arc-light’s glare
enough to blind her...
I put in at Eel Pie Island,
the old-tea-room where
one hot Sunday afternoon
forty years before (two weeks?),
I had sent cups and saucers,
the whole table flying --
my father’s red-faced,
small gestures of repair,
my mother almost crying --
this time the scent of a wall
of roses knocked me sideways,
I went to pick one for her --
but who? She was half a world
away from me, from ‘Tideways’,
and my mother who’d loved
roses was long gone to ash
beneath a rosebush
in my sister’s gardens...
To go on or back? The flood
would bring its slew
of days like this one, of regret
for things done or undone;
the ebb a swirl
of regret for all I would not do.
I would wait there,
for the tide to reconsider.
then fog obscured both banks,
damp chill and green water
from a thousand leaks
in my rotting plywood hull
sluiced the cockpit planks
as I made for midstream, the screw
and bows fighting some resistance
as if the Thames had thickened
to ice, and I was an icebreaker
butting a passage through
to white and empty distance,
strafed by a single gull...
Time ran out, the tide ran
out, the river quickened
and all around the boat
I saw them in their thousands,
bobbing belly up, mouths
working, pleading with me,
blowing forlorn farewell kisses;
the silver-white heaps on the mud
of both banks flopped until
their gills had stopped
and they were still,
the mud was covered
and the air sickened...
How had I made this happen?
Perhaps someone I’d left
alone, in the lurch --
but I’d always been
the one to feel bereft!
If only I had thrown
back that little perch,
along with the foul-hooked
roach and dace, the bream
and gudgeon — no,
this might be a dream
but these deaths were real,
and when I looked
all eyes were focused on
a ‘little muddy reach’
where men in twos and threes,
dark-coated, stood around
the white blur of a corpse — a girl,
from the shape she made,
the tuft that shivered
slightly in the breeze,
stretched out for her photo-call,
a silver sheet behind her
and one of them hunched over
a tripod, an arc-light’s glare
enough to blind her...
I put in at Eel Pie Island,
the old-tea-room where
one hot Sunday afternoon
forty years before (two weeks?),
I had sent cups and saucers,
the whole table flying --
my father’s red-faced,
small gestures of repair,
my mother almost crying --
this time the scent of a wall
of roses knocked me sideways,
I went to pick one for her --
but who? She was half a world
away from me, from ‘Tideways’,
and my mother who’d loved
roses was long gone to ash
beneath a rosebush
in my sister’s gardens...
To go on or back? The flood
would bring its slew
of days like this one, of regret
for things done or undone;
the ebb a swirl
of regret for all I would not do.
I would wait there,
for the tide to reconsider.
Chopsticks
She struggles with her chopsticks, and I watch her slyly
As she mounts a two-pronged attack on a mound
Of noodles, or pincer-prods a shrivelled prawn around
Its dish of gloop. I watch her as she shyly
Sets down the chopsticks and picks up a spoon.
Chicken and cashews, sweet-and-sour pork; no shredded beef --
It’s too difficult, what with my teeth --
And special fried rice. Dinner will be over soon,
Ten years to the night since he died, and I concentrate
On fashioning from my chopsticks a mast
Like the masts on the model clipper ships he built
And re-built and re-built and re-built
Hour after hour, night after night, working late
Threading cotton through the tiny balsa blocks — a stickler for detail --
To make the rigging shipshape on the imagined past
Into which, in his little room, he’d set sail...
Someone’s singing, ‘So merry Christmas, and a happy new year’
And I tap out the beat with my chopsticks; Is everything all right?
You’re very quiet. Everything’s fine, mother, let me sip my beer
And remember how we sat with him — ten years to the night --
How we sat with him till it was nearly dawn
And watched him try to breathe,
The white bed between us, and him on it, and grief
No easier now there’s a tablecloth, a plate with one sad prawn;
Remember how I sat at the piano with my sister
To play our duet — ‘Chopsticks’ — over and over, ad nauseam,
Killing time till he came in to pour himself a scotch
And signal Christmas day....The clipper ships
Still have pride of place in the sitting-room, the museum
Where I’ll sit for a ‘nightcap’ among his prints and pipes,
And pour myself one more from his decanter, and watch
The late film while my mother dozes and my sister,
Miles away, plays ‘Chopsticks’ for all I know;
Where I’ll sit and think of ten years gone and her two cats gone,
Gone with the Christmas dinners, my grandmother and great-aunt,
With the endless Sunday mornings, Billy Cotton on the radio
And the endless Sunday lunches of roast beef,
Gone with half her mind and all her teeth;
Now she watches as I place my chopsticks together. Go on,
Finish up that last prawn. But I can’t.
She struggles with her chopsticks, and I watch her slyly
As she mounts a two-pronged attack on a mound
Of noodles, or pincer-prods a shrivelled prawn around
Its dish of gloop. I watch her as she shyly
Sets down the chopsticks and picks up a spoon.
Chicken and cashews, sweet-and-sour pork; no shredded beef --
It’s too difficult, what with my teeth --
And special fried rice. Dinner will be over soon,
Ten years to the night since he died, and I concentrate
On fashioning from my chopsticks a mast
Like the masts on the model clipper ships he built
And re-built and re-built and re-built
Hour after hour, night after night, working late
Threading cotton through the tiny balsa blocks — a stickler for detail --
To make the rigging shipshape on the imagined past
Into which, in his little room, he’d set sail...
Someone’s singing, ‘So merry Christmas, and a happy new year’
And I tap out the beat with my chopsticks; Is everything all right?
You’re very quiet. Everything’s fine, mother, let me sip my beer
And remember how we sat with him — ten years to the night --
How we sat with him till it was nearly dawn
And watched him try to breathe,
The white bed between us, and him on it, and grief
No easier now there’s a tablecloth, a plate with one sad prawn;
Remember how I sat at the piano with my sister
To play our duet — ‘Chopsticks’ — over and over, ad nauseam,
Killing time till he came in to pour himself a scotch
And signal Christmas day....The clipper ships
Still have pride of place in the sitting-room, the museum
Where I’ll sit for a ‘nightcap’ among his prints and pipes,
And pour myself one more from his decanter, and watch
The late film while my mother dozes and my sister,
Miles away, plays ‘Chopsticks’ for all I know;
Where I’ll sit and think of ten years gone and her two cats gone,
Gone with the Christmas dinners, my grandmother and great-aunt,
With the endless Sunday mornings, Billy Cotton on the radio
And the endless Sunday lunches of roast beef,
Gone with half her mind and all her teeth;
Now she watches as I place my chopsticks together. Go on,
Finish up that last prawn. But I can’t.
As she mounts a two-pronged attack on a mound
Of noodles, or pincer-prods a shrivelled prawn around
Its dish of gloop. I watch her as she shyly
Sets down the chopsticks and picks up a spoon.
Chicken and cashews, sweet-and-sour pork; no shredded beef --
It’s too difficult, what with my teeth --
And special fried rice. Dinner will be over soon,
Ten years to the night since he died, and I concentrate
On fashioning from my chopsticks a mast
Like the masts on the model clipper ships he built
And re-built and re-built and re-built
Hour after hour, night after night, working late
Threading cotton through the tiny balsa blocks — a stickler for detail --
To make the rigging shipshape on the imagined past
Into which, in his little room, he’d set sail...
Someone’s singing, ‘So merry Christmas, and a happy new year’
And I tap out the beat with my chopsticks; Is everything all right?
You’re very quiet. Everything’s fine, mother, let me sip my beer
And remember how we sat with him — ten years to the night --
How we sat with him till it was nearly dawn
And watched him try to breathe,
The white bed between us, and him on it, and grief
No easier now there’s a tablecloth, a plate with one sad prawn;
Remember how I sat at the piano with my sister
To play our duet — ‘Chopsticks’ — over and over, ad nauseam,
Killing time till he came in to pour himself a scotch
And signal Christmas day....The clipper ships
Still have pride of place in the sitting-room, the museum
Where I’ll sit for a ‘nightcap’ among his prints and pipes,
And pour myself one more from his decanter, and watch
The late film while my mother dozes and my sister,
Miles away, plays ‘Chopsticks’ for all I know;
Where I’ll sit and think of ten years gone and her two cats gone,
Gone with the Christmas dinners, my grandmother and great-aunt,
With the endless Sunday mornings, Billy Cotton on the radio
And the endless Sunday lunches of roast beef,
Gone with half her mind and all her teeth;
Now she watches as I place my chopsticks together. Go on,
Finish up that last prawn. But I can’t.
She struggles with her chopsticks, and I watch her slyly
As she mounts a two-pronged attack on a mound
Of noodles, or pincer-prods a shrivelled prawn around
Its dish of gloop. I watch her as she shyly
Sets down the chopsticks and picks up a spoon.
Chicken and cashews, sweet-and-sour pork; no shredded beef --
It’s too difficult, what with my teeth --
And special fried rice. Dinner will be over soon,
Ten years to the night since he died, and I concentrate
On fashioning from my chopsticks a mast
Like the masts on the model clipper ships he built
And re-built and re-built and re-built
Hour after hour, night after night, working late
Threading cotton through the tiny balsa blocks — a stickler for detail --
To make the rigging shipshape on the imagined past
Into which, in his little room, he’d set sail...
Someone’s singing, ‘So merry Christmas, and a happy new year’
And I tap out the beat with my chopsticks; Is everything all right?
You’re very quiet. Everything’s fine, mother, let me sip my beer
And remember how we sat with him — ten years to the night --
How we sat with him till it was nearly dawn
And watched him try to breathe,
The white bed between us, and him on it, and grief
No easier now there’s a tablecloth, a plate with one sad prawn;
Remember how I sat at the piano with my sister
To play our duet — ‘Chopsticks’ — over and over, ad nauseam,
Killing time till he came in to pour himself a scotch
And signal Christmas day....The clipper ships
Still have pride of place in the sitting-room, the museum
Where I’ll sit for a ‘nightcap’ among his prints and pipes,
And pour myself one more from his decanter, and watch
The late film while my mother dozes and my sister,
Miles away, plays ‘Chopsticks’ for all I know;
Where I’ll sit and think of ten years gone and her two cats gone,
Gone with the Christmas dinners, my grandmother and great-aunt,
With the endless Sunday mornings, Billy Cotton on the radio
And the endless Sunday lunches of roast beef,
Gone with half her mind and all her teeth;
Now she watches as I place my chopsticks together. Go on,
Finish up that last prawn. But I can’t.
Cousins
A Sunday at home, since I still called them that --
The house, the garden and the patch of lawn in front
Long gone to weeds and waist-high grasses
That I crawled round, hacking wildly with the shears
He’d once wielded: thick with rust now, blunt
And useless. I sweated under his old battered hat
While she poked at flowerbeds or sat
Marooned in a deckchair and wiped her glasses
That had misted with her hot flush, or with tears...
Then, after I had followed her indoors
For a ‘sit-down’ and a cup of tea, a ‘chat’,
I drifted from room to room and idly opened drawers;
With thumb-stained packs of cards, a pen that leaked
And corkscrews from Africa, I found
A locket that held two faded comma-curls
Of the hair ‘they were famous for’, two girls
In blackened-silver frames, pretty, cherub-cheeked;
With them, a stack of letters, brittle, browned,
In your great loss... such loveliness, beyond compare...
All innocent smiles, these sepia-tinted twins
Were her cousins twice-removed, long-dead --
Two angels, taken from us, one letter said,
That we might love them the more; and had they since
Stood in for all the losses she could neither share
Nor bear? To what had they been born? --
White dresses whispering over the croquet lawn,
Sun-blinds in the high-street, whiskery chaps
Who offered tigerish blazer-arms, the mill,
Tall masts at the ends of lanes, and blood-red maps? --
Men were employed to keep the Empire going
In distant, dark-skinned places, names no-one had heard
Till then, where light was like a great gong ringing
In the heavens, day after day, and where
The sun was not allowed to set. It was God’s will,
Like the deaths they bloomed to, leeches clinging
Round their heads in place of clouds of hair...
I put them back and went out to the garden — there
The honeysuckle dripped, and dew-drops hung,
Convex mirrors in which I saw glowing
All that I’d been promised, if I could only wait
And work for it, the rewards of not dying young --
Suburban arcady, a deckchair and a blackbird
Perched in the branches of laburnum, singing --
And all of it would end with her, and wouldn’t care.
‘Come on, dear, come back in. It’s getting late.’
The house, the garden and the patch of lawn in front
Long gone to weeds and waist-high grasses
That I crawled round, hacking wildly with the shears
He’d once wielded: thick with rust now, blunt
And useless. I sweated under his old battered hat
While she poked at flowerbeds or sat
Marooned in a deckchair and wiped her glasses
That had misted with her hot flush, or with tears...
Then, after I had followed her indoors
For a ‘sit-down’ and a cup of tea, a ‘chat’,
I drifted from room to room and idly opened drawers;
With thumb-stained packs of cards, a pen that leaked
And corkscrews from Africa, I found
A locket that held two faded comma-curls
Of the hair ‘they were famous for’, two girls
In blackened-silver frames, pretty, cherub-cheeked;
With them, a stack of letters, brittle, browned,
In your great loss... such loveliness, beyond compare...
All innocent smiles, these sepia-tinted twins
Were her cousins twice-removed, long-dead --
Two angels, taken from us, one letter said,
That we might love them the more; and had they since
Stood in for all the losses she could neither share
Nor bear? To what had they been born? --
White dresses whispering over the croquet lawn,
Sun-blinds in the high-street, whiskery chaps
Who offered tigerish blazer-arms, the mill,
Tall masts at the ends of lanes, and blood-red maps? --
Men were employed to keep the Empire going
In distant, dark-skinned places, names no-one had heard
Till then, where light was like a great gong ringing
In the heavens, day after day, and where
The sun was not allowed to set. It was God’s will,
Like the deaths they bloomed to, leeches clinging
Round their heads in place of clouds of hair...
I put them back and went out to the garden — there
The honeysuckle dripped, and dew-drops hung,
Convex mirrors in which I saw glowing
All that I’d been promised, if I could only wait
And work for it, the rewards of not dying young --
Suburban arcady, a deckchair and a blackbird
Perched in the branches of laburnum, singing --
And all of it would end with her, and wouldn’t care.
‘Come on, dear, come back in. It’s getting late.’
Crash
You’d lost your pearls. You told me as we slowed
To single file past churning lights, an ambulance, the rain
Reflecting red off tarmac and the shiny backs
Of accident POLICE. Everything turned raw --
From our slog towards a drug-fuelled last resort
Through drowned suburbs, dripping, wind-tossed laurel,
To the box without a sea-view, the over-priced hotel
(Its panelled Lounge, school-dinners smell
And Reader’s Digests, its walks for neither health nor sport),
Then this, the stove-in metal and approaching chainsaw...
And you had lost your pearls. For once, not a quarrel:
No, they’d shone all through dinner and still shone
When you fell backwards on the bed with nothing on --
A present from your mother, part of who you were,
All you’d brought with you when you made tracks
To here, your little something for a rainy day —
And What are they to her (the chambermaid who,
We guessed, had found them), what are they to her?
SERVICES. You made the call and looked like death
Warmed up by neon and I knew. They were gone.
The tail-back cleared suddenly, everything flowed,
You put your foot to the floor and swung into the fast lane,
The car held on, held its track towards the white
Pearl-strings and necklaces of London, you held on tight,
Tight-mouthed the whole way while I held my breath...
I could see you, naked but for your pearls, a cliché
I still tasted, I remembered making you a small
Gift of pearls that glimmered on your breast, your chin,
Then melted off. I glimpsed them in the windscreen
As the bright rain hit it and was swiped away.
To single file past churning lights, an ambulance, the rain
Reflecting red off tarmac and the shiny backs
Of accident POLICE. Everything turned raw --
From our slog towards a drug-fuelled last resort
Through drowned suburbs, dripping, wind-tossed laurel,
To the box without a sea-view, the over-priced hotel
(Its panelled Lounge, school-dinners smell
And Reader’s Digests, its walks for neither health nor sport),
Then this, the stove-in metal and approaching chainsaw...
And you had lost your pearls. For once, not a quarrel:
No, they’d shone all through dinner and still shone
When you fell backwards on the bed with nothing on --
A present from your mother, part of who you were,
All you’d brought with you when you made tracks
To here, your little something for a rainy day —
And What are they to her (the chambermaid who,
We guessed, had found them), what are they to her?
SERVICES. You made the call and looked like death
Warmed up by neon and I knew. They were gone.
The tail-back cleared suddenly, everything flowed,
You put your foot to the floor and swung into the fast lane,
The car held on, held its track towards the white
Pearl-strings and necklaces of London, you held on tight,
Tight-mouthed the whole way while I held my breath...
I could see you, naked but for your pearls, a cliché
I still tasted, I remembered making you a small
Gift of pearls that glimmered on your breast, your chin,
Then melted off. I glimpsed them in the windscreen
As the bright rain hit it and was swiped away.
Galatea
When you left, and I was thinner-skinned
I stayed in bed for weeks and cried and cried...
While rigging whined and rattled in the wind
I scrunched alone through broken bottles, claws,
The bleached brittle crusts of starfish, crab --
A salt-rich tide of little deaths — and I could hear,
In that click-click of pebbles when the sea withdraws
Her high heels on the pavement. That was the end of us...
Back down “on business”, I take a bus
Past the shut-down shop-fronts and collapsing pier
To the beach, the little café where I wrote
(So long ago!) “through wood and weeds, washed up
Like bottles, torn shoes and a plastic cup
We walked without a word, and parted”, and I choke
On the smells of vinegar, and steam, and smoke --
Outside, a salt drizzle blurs those shelves
Where the clattering hiss of shingle meets the sigh
And roar of water, where on hot days we used to lie
Like sea-creatures on the sea-bed, their ultrasound
Antennae groping, or the fish we saw
Laid glistening on the fishmonger’s slab
But could not afford to eat — how we starved ourselves
For love, learning, poetry! How ill-informed
And unreasonable we were, how raw!
Is she waiting for me, on the scrubby bit of ground
Where I got her to agree the thing had died
And she ran off, crying, in the rain --
Staring as she used to when she lay awake
And listened to that squat colossus, watched it rake
Our bedroom with its cyclops eye? — A giant claw
Gouged up sea-floor gravel, dug up the drowned;
A generator throbbed like a migraine,
In the harbour, tugs and dredgers swarmed...
Or at the Metropole, twice married,
Reading Persuasion over tea, her smile remote,
Benign? No, she is spindrift, carried
On the wind, the voice of one ill wind or another
That blows me and my leaking boat no good --
Whenever you go out, in your little craft of wood,
Your little craft of words, it will be me you hear,
It will be me reminding you of how you scorned your mother
And all women who loved you (God knows why),
It will be me reminding you that you will die,
It will be me reminding you of everything you fear.
I stayed in bed for weeks and cried and cried...
While rigging whined and rattled in the wind
I scrunched alone through broken bottles, claws,
The bleached brittle crusts of starfish, crab --
A salt-rich tide of little deaths — and I could hear,
In that click-click of pebbles when the sea withdraws
Her high heels on the pavement. That was the end of us...
Back down “on business”, I take a bus
Past the shut-down shop-fronts and collapsing pier
To the beach, the little café where I wrote
(So long ago!) “through wood and weeds, washed up
Like bottles, torn shoes and a plastic cup
We walked without a word, and parted”, and I choke
On the smells of vinegar, and steam, and smoke --
Outside, a salt drizzle blurs those shelves
Where the clattering hiss of shingle meets the sigh
And roar of water, where on hot days we used to lie
Like sea-creatures on the sea-bed, their ultrasound
Antennae groping, or the fish we saw
Laid glistening on the fishmonger’s slab
But could not afford to eat — how we starved ourselves
For love, learning, poetry! How ill-informed
And unreasonable we were, how raw!
Is she waiting for me, on the scrubby bit of ground
Where I got her to agree the thing had died
And she ran off, crying, in the rain --
Staring as she used to when she lay awake
And listened to that squat colossus, watched it rake
Our bedroom with its cyclops eye? — A giant claw
Gouged up sea-floor gravel, dug up the drowned;
A generator throbbed like a migraine,
In the harbour, tugs and dredgers swarmed...
Or at the Metropole, twice married,
Reading Persuasion over tea, her smile remote,
Benign? No, she is spindrift, carried
On the wind, the voice of one ill wind or another
That blows me and my leaking boat no good --
Whenever you go out, in your little craft of wood,
Your little craft of words, it will be me you hear,
It will be me reminding you of how you scorned your mother
And all women who loved you (God knows why),
It will be me reminding you that you will die,
It will be me reminding you of everything you fear.
Heritage
England, and a drive through farms,
Through dripping lanes, bumper-deep in mud,
Diseased herds suffering the weather
And pubs where couples drained their years together,
Sitting with pursed lips and crossed arms
Over pints of bitter and tomato juice,
And me chewing my own bitter cud,
And me logging all of it for future use
In some piece of versified revenge
As we joined the tailback past Stonehenge
And Salisbury, past Keep Out signs
And mile on mile of razor-wire,
Past the prehistoric mines
And dug-outs, fox-holes, shelling-scars,
Past the skyward-pointing spire
And mile on mile of oncoming cars;
Just to drift through panelled rooms, past walls
Of flushed, same-featured faces
Or wander round some flowering oasis
While I, stiff from the drive down, bored
Half to death, hung-over, sour with guilt
Imagined my hard-earned reward:
Her cupped hand on my tightened balls,
Her legs parting slyly under the B&B’s damp quilt...
~~
The paths we trudged through Somethingshire!
We tossed and turned in creaking beds
And sheltered from the rain in leaking sheds
And once she said, if all we could share
Was time, there wasn’t any point in going on —
A sudden ‘call of nature’ (from the beer)
And, hidden in the ferns, a bigger scare:
A cow’s skull, grinning. Soon you will be gone,
It said; What can you share but this,
But time, your moment here? Which will pass,
As fleeting as the pause between two waves,
As your footsteps on this grass
Which might be growing on your graves.
Caught short like you, she yanks down her pants
(This is real life, not chivalric romance)
And what are you? Nothing, wind and piss,
A shrivelled cock, the Kleenex scrap
She wipes herself with, that is whipped into the void --
As you will be. (She hoiked them up again,
I mimed absorption in some guidebook crap...)
You won’t sit for ever in the dappled shade
Of oak and beech, such as you once enjoyed,
Or run laughing for cover from the rain;
You won’t be reborn, you’ll dwindle, fade
And disappear, become two names
Illegible on a lichen-covered headstone
In some forgotten churchyard, overgrown
With weeds and briars and brambles
Or go to ash, to smoke and air
Inbreathed by nature-lovers on their rambles,
No-one to watch you slide into the flames
And shed a shy, a shuddering tear;
No silent gratitude in Georgian rooms
(Solicitors, Commissioners for Oaths),
No deeds of trust, no much-loved homes,
No legacy of life, no precious heirlooms --
What good are they without a sodding heir? --
Just a few hundred well-thumbed ‘tomes’,
A thrift-shop rack of stale-smelling clothes,
Some letters tied with ribbon, “Dear —”;
They too will fade and crumble, like
The regimental colours and the tweeds
And the old girls and boys who wore them,
Like all the other stuff that feeds
The worm, the moth; and soon you’ll start
To creak and rust and fall apart
Just like that old abandoned bike,
Those roofs with no-one to restore them...
~~
Breakfast: while she watched her eggs congeal
I contemplated circumcised remains
Of sausage, and a bacon-rind;
An hour before, I’d fucked her from behind
And now her face wore all the strain
Of wanting not to punish me,
Of battling indecisively
Some hurt of mine she could not heal...
Back, then, through half-timbered towns,
Past the homes of billionaires
Who long ago cashed in their shares
And bought England, whose slim blonde wives
Work out and punish four-wheel-drives
On their way to an assignation
Over lunch in the hotel lounge, ‘The Downs’;
Past the theme-park (Heritage Nation)
Where the beer-bellies, shaven heads
And shiny shell-suits swarm
Over litter-strewn lawns, and storm
The Bouncy Castle and the potting sheds
‘Now selling lager, lolly’s, video’s’;
Past the lane that every flasher knows;
Past the woods where little girls take root.
And none of this would bear fruit.
Through dripping lanes, bumper-deep in mud,
Diseased herds suffering the weather
And pubs where couples drained their years together,
Sitting with pursed lips and crossed arms
Over pints of bitter and tomato juice,
And me chewing my own bitter cud,
And me logging all of it for future use
In some piece of versified revenge
As we joined the tailback past Stonehenge
And Salisbury, past Keep Out signs
And mile on mile of razor-wire,
Past the prehistoric mines
And dug-outs, fox-holes, shelling-scars,
Past the skyward-pointing spire
And mile on mile of oncoming cars;
Just to drift through panelled rooms, past walls
Of flushed, same-featured faces
Or wander round some flowering oasis
While I, stiff from the drive down, bored
Half to death, hung-over, sour with guilt
Imagined my hard-earned reward:
Her cupped hand on my tightened balls,
Her legs parting slyly under the B&B’s damp quilt...
~~
The paths we trudged through Somethingshire!
We tossed and turned in creaking beds
And sheltered from the rain in leaking sheds
And once she said, if all we could share
Was time, there wasn’t any point in going on —
A sudden ‘call of nature’ (from the beer)
And, hidden in the ferns, a bigger scare:
A cow’s skull, grinning. Soon you will be gone,
It said; What can you share but this,
But time, your moment here? Which will pass,
As fleeting as the pause between two waves,
As your footsteps on this grass
Which might be growing on your graves.
Caught short like you, she yanks down her pants
(This is real life, not chivalric romance)
And what are you? Nothing, wind and piss,
A shrivelled cock, the Kleenex scrap
She wipes herself with, that is whipped into the void --
As you will be. (She hoiked them up again,
I mimed absorption in some guidebook crap...)
You won’t sit for ever in the dappled shade
Of oak and beech, such as you once enjoyed,
Or run laughing for cover from the rain;
You won’t be reborn, you’ll dwindle, fade
And disappear, become two names
Illegible on a lichen-covered headstone
In some forgotten churchyard, overgrown
With weeds and briars and brambles
Or go to ash, to smoke and air
Inbreathed by nature-lovers on their rambles,
No-one to watch you slide into the flames
And shed a shy, a shuddering tear;
No silent gratitude in Georgian rooms
(Solicitors, Commissioners for Oaths),
No deeds of trust, no much-loved homes,
No legacy of life, no precious heirlooms --
What good are they without a sodding heir? --
Just a few hundred well-thumbed ‘tomes’,
A thrift-shop rack of stale-smelling clothes,
Some letters tied with ribbon, “Dear —”;
They too will fade and crumble, like
The regimental colours and the tweeds
And the old girls and boys who wore them,
Like all the other stuff that feeds
The worm, the moth; and soon you’ll start
To creak and rust and fall apart
Just like that old abandoned bike,
Those roofs with no-one to restore them...
~~
Breakfast: while she watched her eggs congeal
I contemplated circumcised remains
Of sausage, and a bacon-rind;
An hour before, I’d fucked her from behind
And now her face wore all the strain
Of wanting not to punish me,
Of battling indecisively
Some hurt of mine she could not heal...
Back, then, through half-timbered towns,
Past the homes of billionaires
Who long ago cashed in their shares
And bought England, whose slim blonde wives
Work out and punish four-wheel-drives
On their way to an assignation
Over lunch in the hotel lounge, ‘The Downs’;
Past the theme-park (Heritage Nation)
Where the beer-bellies, shaven heads
And shiny shell-suits swarm
Over litter-strewn lawns, and storm
The Bouncy Castle and the potting sheds
‘Now selling lager, lolly’s, video’s’;
Past the lane that every flasher knows;
Past the woods where little girls take root.
And none of this would bear fruit.
A Late Lunch
How often, when I walked that path
Between the cows becalmed in the water-meadow
And the chink and rattle of small boats on their moorings,
Or went out into your garden with scissors for rosemary
And stood a moment under the warm wide night and the stars,
I wanted it just to go on and on --
The path, the night, and all of us, together,
The drinks tray waiting and the owl or curlew calling
And that blown rose-bush at the window, so much given back
That I thought I’d lost for ever.
Now you’re gone
I see you, G&T in hand, in your favourite chair,
Squinting as you take another drag
Or setting out lunch in sunlight on the brand-new deck
You were so proud of, that last summer. Across the creek,
Those sloping fields where a combine harvester
Crawls up and down between the water’s edge
And the low horizon; glimpsed through leaves,
The little boathouse, wind-bent sedge
And shingle foreshore, where ebb-tide and flood
Wash gently at old pilings and cormorants share
The winding channels and the shining gull-marked mud --
All just going on and on for ever.
Between the cows becalmed in the water-meadow
And the chink and rattle of small boats on their moorings,
Or went out into your garden with scissors for rosemary
And stood a moment under the warm wide night and the stars,
I wanted it just to go on and on --
The path, the night, and all of us, together,
The drinks tray waiting and the owl or curlew calling
And that blown rose-bush at the window, so much given back
That I thought I’d lost for ever.
Now you’re gone
I see you, G&T in hand, in your favourite chair,
Squinting as you take another drag
Or setting out lunch in sunlight on the brand-new deck
You were so proud of, that last summer. Across the creek,
Those sloping fields where a combine harvester
Crawls up and down between the water’s edge
And the low horizon; glimpsed through leaves,
The little boathouse, wind-bent sedge
And shingle foreshore, where ebb-tide and flood
Wash gently at old pilings and cormorants share
The winding channels and the shining gull-marked mud --
All just going on and on for ever.
The Love of Unknown Women
Young women with damp hollows, downy arms,
Bare burnished legs — you see them striding
Towards their plant-filled offices, riding
Bicycles to flatshares after work; lunchtimes, you stare
As secretaries, backpackers tanned from birth
Peel off their things and stretch on sun-warmed earth.
A few of them stare back... As if they’d share
Their world of holidays and weekend farms
With you! They step more lightly every year,
A glimpse of neck-hair, a scent that lingers, girls
Who, swinging bags with shops’ names, disappear,
Trailing glances, into crowds; each one unfurls
Her special beauty like a fragile frond
Before your famished eyes. I am what lies beyond,
They seem to say, beyond the mortgage, car and wife —
I am what you deserve, I am the buried life
You will never live. Are they pushed laughing onto beds
By hands that unhook bras and yank down briefs?
Do they wake with tongues thick-furred, heads
Hot and unremembering as carpet-swirls?
Crave water running over them in purls,
As cool as their long fingers? Schubert, jazz,
It’s all the same to them. As are your little griefs.
It isn’t fair. If you’ve not changed, what has?
Is it a kind of shifting, imperceptible, like sands
On some barren, windswept stretch of shore?
In simmering parks, on summer streets
Where they wait but not for you, you furtively explore
The curves of eyebrow, cheek and lip --
Of other things too; you search left hands
For seals of love, or ownership.
Moving off, they can smell your old defeats.
Bare burnished legs — you see them striding
Towards their plant-filled offices, riding
Bicycles to flatshares after work; lunchtimes, you stare
As secretaries, backpackers tanned from birth
Peel off their things and stretch on sun-warmed earth.
A few of them stare back... As if they’d share
Their world of holidays and weekend farms
With you! They step more lightly every year,
A glimpse of neck-hair, a scent that lingers, girls
Who, swinging bags with shops’ names, disappear,
Trailing glances, into crowds; each one unfurls
Her special beauty like a fragile frond
Before your famished eyes. I am what lies beyond,
They seem to say, beyond the mortgage, car and wife —
I am what you deserve, I am the buried life
You will never live. Are they pushed laughing onto beds
By hands that unhook bras and yank down briefs?
Do they wake with tongues thick-furred, heads
Hot and unremembering as carpet-swirls?
Crave water running over them in purls,
As cool as their long fingers? Schubert, jazz,
It’s all the same to them. As are your little griefs.
It isn’t fair. If you’ve not changed, what has?
Is it a kind of shifting, imperceptible, like sands
On some barren, windswept stretch of shore?
In simmering parks, on summer streets
Where they wait but not for you, you furtively explore
The curves of eyebrow, cheek and lip --
Of other things too; you search left hands
For seals of love, or ownership.
Moving off, they can smell your old defeats.
Orpheus
What is life to me without thee?
Much the same,
except that I can’t hear the great aria
sung by Kathleen Ferrier
and not be filled with longing and with shame,
so uncannily her portrait on the CD cover
resembles you; so uncannily her 1950s perm
brings you back to me, that first day of term,
waving me on to school. I missed you like a lover
and would have clawed through concrete and earth
to be at home with you, who had to let me go,
who gave me such a sense of my own worth
that I sing with her, as if Orpheus was my name...
*
What is left if thou art dead?
My attic flat,
the cat you took such pleasure in, who wonders why
I sit so late, and drink, and do not go to bed
to sleep an hour or so then wake
and soak the clammy pillow for your sake,
who comforts me with purring in her sleep,
the gentle sleep she offers like a gift;
who does not as I do turn over in her head
the knowledge that you died between the night and morning shift,
that as you felt yourself slip
you heaved up the black bitter years that would dry
on your cold dead lips; she does not know that.
*
Thy dear lord am I so faithful?
No more or less
than when I bundled you into a wheelchair
in a stained pink hospital quilt
and the dazed smiles of women stranded in the regimen
of sleep and pills, your new friends, were rooting for us
as we struggled to that suburban high street where
you sat for your last wash and perm;
and we came back to their wondering chorus
of ‘Ooh, lovely, dear’, and you were young again,
touching your new hair, and I was without guilt
and loved you as on that first day of term,
as if I had won you back by this huge success.
Much the same,
except that I can’t hear the great aria
sung by Kathleen Ferrier
and not be filled with longing and with shame,
so uncannily her portrait on the CD cover
resembles you; so uncannily her 1950s perm
brings you back to me, that first day of term,
waving me on to school. I missed you like a lover
and would have clawed through concrete and earth
to be at home with you, who had to let me go,
who gave me such a sense of my own worth
that I sing with her, as if Orpheus was my name...
*
What is left if thou art dead?
My attic flat,
the cat you took such pleasure in, who wonders why
I sit so late, and drink, and do not go to bed
to sleep an hour or so then wake
and soak the clammy pillow for your sake,
who comforts me with purring in her sleep,
the gentle sleep she offers like a gift;
who does not as I do turn over in her head
the knowledge that you died between the night and morning shift,
that as you felt yourself slip
you heaved up the black bitter years that would dry
on your cold dead lips; she does not know that.
*
Thy dear lord am I so faithful?
No more or less
than when I bundled you into a wheelchair
in a stained pink hospital quilt
and the dazed smiles of women stranded in the regimen
of sleep and pills, your new friends, were rooting for us
as we struggled to that suburban high street where
you sat for your last wash and perm;
and we came back to their wondering chorus
of ‘Ooh, lovely, dear’, and you were young again,
touching your new hair, and I was without guilt
and loved you as on that first day of term,
as if I had won you back by this huge success.
Rotisserie (The Wait)
‘There’s a feeling of disaster in the air, which I now know I have felt for a long time.’ — I.H., May 2001.
Our usual place, and everything in it
Exactly as we had learned to expect:
Most tables empty, the ‘interfered-with air’
Heavy with the stink of re-cooked fat
That got into the clothes, into the hair
Along with cigarettes smoked at such a rate
It was like a race, and you had to win it;
The ‘maitre d’, a supercilious queer
Who knew we had too much class to be there
(These nights, I have to keep going back
To meet you, though it’s still only me there)...
Breathless from the cold, my coat unchecked
I found our usual table, where I sat;
‘Some wine, sir?’ ‘No thanks’, I said, ‘I’ll wait.’
And wait I did, my Standard open at
The horoscopes (Predictions for New Year!
Your Stars, That Break, and You! — as if),
My mind snagged on Failure of Drug Czar,
My eye swivelling from page to watch
And back again, and then to some
Embarrassing art-work above the bar...
Once or twice, I’d known you to be late
But there’d never been a time you hadn’t come,
Grim-faced, apologizing. So I sat on,
Through the looks of waitresses who guessed
I’d been stood up, who wondered what had gone
So wrong for me I’d choose this place for a date;
Through the ‘chef’s’ indifference, the whiff
Of something raw, the turning spit. It was a test,
A trial of sorts. And since what we are
Takes the piss out of what we wish we were
And nothing we can do helps shake off ‘the dread
That how we live measures our own nature’
(How many times had you quoted that?),
I ordered, first a scotch, and then another scotch.
The room forgot me. I didn’t have to stir.
Any moment, you’d come in, take off the hat
You wore to hide the fluff of white hair growing back
Now you were ‘in remission’ — from the drugs --
And sit down, drink and smoke. (You never ate;
Just pushed things round and round your plate
Till you could decently light up again.)
A couple slouched in, a few single men
And glancing round each time I heard the door
I logged a face or two, flushed from the street,
For when you turned up, as you would any minute;
Would you ‘just have to go and make a call’?
Or, patting pockets for reserves of ten
And feigning interest in the menu, greet
Our waitress with a show of blinks and shrugs? --
Such gentle flirting... Christ, that was months ago.
No jokes, now, about the new kid on the ‘scene’,
Your last advance, or what you had to do before
You could be let off, the slate wiped clean...
As if. Were you trying to get through?
Or slumped in a cab — another scare?
I dialled your number, spoke to your machine;
Then sat again. Did I ‘want anything at all?’ --
No thanks, I said, and went on with the wait, not knowing
(And how like you, somehow, that I should not know)
What strange new circumstance prevented you
From joining me, from getting up and going,
To the phone, out to the tall night, anywhere.
Our usual place, and everything in it
Exactly as we had learned to expect:
Most tables empty, the ‘interfered-with air’
Heavy with the stink of re-cooked fat
That got into the clothes, into the hair
Along with cigarettes smoked at such a rate
It was like a race, and you had to win it;
The ‘maitre d’, a supercilious queer
Who knew we had too much class to be there
(These nights, I have to keep going back
To meet you, though it’s still only me there)...
Breathless from the cold, my coat unchecked
I found our usual table, where I sat;
‘Some wine, sir?’ ‘No thanks’, I said, ‘I’ll wait.’
And wait I did, my Standard open at
The horoscopes (Predictions for New Year!
Your Stars, That Break, and You! — as if),
My mind snagged on Failure of Drug Czar,
My eye swivelling from page to watch
And back again, and then to some
Embarrassing art-work above the bar...
Once or twice, I’d known you to be late
But there’d never been a time you hadn’t come,
Grim-faced, apologizing. So I sat on,
Through the looks of waitresses who guessed
I’d been stood up, who wondered what had gone
So wrong for me I’d choose this place for a date;
Through the ‘chef’s’ indifference, the whiff
Of something raw, the turning spit. It was a test,
A trial of sorts. And since what we are
Takes the piss out of what we wish we were
And nothing we can do helps shake off ‘the dread
That how we live measures our own nature’
(How many times had you quoted that?),
I ordered, first a scotch, and then another scotch.
The room forgot me. I didn’t have to stir.
Any moment, you’d come in, take off the hat
You wore to hide the fluff of white hair growing back
Now you were ‘in remission’ — from the drugs --
And sit down, drink and smoke. (You never ate;
Just pushed things round and round your plate
Till you could decently light up again.)
A couple slouched in, a few single men
And glancing round each time I heard the door
I logged a face or two, flushed from the street,
For when you turned up, as you would any minute;
Would you ‘just have to go and make a call’?
Or, patting pockets for reserves of ten
And feigning interest in the menu, greet
Our waitress with a show of blinks and shrugs? --
Such gentle flirting... Christ, that was months ago.
No jokes, now, about the new kid on the ‘scene’,
Your last advance, or what you had to do before
You could be let off, the slate wiped clean...
As if. Were you trying to get through?
Or slumped in a cab — another scare?
I dialled your number, spoke to your machine;
Then sat again. Did I ‘want anything at all?’ --
No thanks, I said, and went on with the wait, not knowing
(And how like you, somehow, that I should not know)
What strange new circumstance prevented you
From joining me, from getting up and going,
To the phone, out to the tall night, anywhere.