Red House Read online

  SASHA DUGDALE

  Red House

  To Max and Harriet

  Acknowledgements

  Earlier versions of some of the poems in this collection were published in Agenda, The Irish Times, Poetry London, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Review, Idenity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010) and Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt, 2011).

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Maldon

  Red House

  ‘Perhaps Akhmatova was right’

  Ten Moons

  The Poetry of Earth

  Michael Blann

  A Ballad without Rhyme

  Dawn Chorus

  Fish’s Dream

  ‘Lifting the bedcovers and there’

  Out of Town

  Amazing Grace

  Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer’s)

  ‘I can only be who I am’

  Moor

  Prince’s

  Doggy Life

  On Beauty

  Asylum

  Song of the Seagull

  Shepherds

  All Souls’

  Annunciation

  The Alphabet of Emigration

  Agora

  Sweet Companions

  Laughter

  Wolstonbury

  ‘Late winter, like the tide retreating’

  Blessing

  About the Author

  Also by Sasha Dugdale from Carcanet / OxfordPoets

  Copyright

  Maldon

  And there on the coast like a Chinese lantern hung the sun.

  Whatever you do, you should not let them pour off the half-island

  To mix with the birds and the silts, said the wise woman.

  For there they will become us – body of our body

  Blood of our blood. And theirs and our flesh will hang

  On bushes, like the undershirt of Midas. Dead throats

  Will shirk in the sedge like spiderwebs, whispering

  Of how the victors took pliers to teeth and chopped charms out.

  No one left to remember the women, but they were deer

  Fleet and hunted, springing sideways, stunned by a fist.

  And when the sun rises, it will seem to our ancestors that a new race

  Has come up out of the sea, dripping with gold, crueller than the last.

  Red House

  The red house lies without the parish of the soul.

  The frozen trees, the swings in the grey yard, the slow sweeping fans

  Of brushes in light snow, and how that bus stops every day

  Just beyond the red house and picks up.

  Stay or leave? There is no addressing the Lord

  For we are plain beyond that, but isn’t that white round a hole

  In the sky where he once sat? Many of the shadows

  Look up in their sickness, point with their aimless guns

  And spout aimless rounds, and now one may hit

  And one piece of bright shot will slip into that winter sun

  And tear it, so that tomorrow it limps and spits sunset

  All bleeding day. Red house, red house, forgive us such trespasses

  For aren’t we the twice blessed, having lived through stranger weather

  And having known you, red house?

  *

  Starlings in the loft and eaves of the red house

  And the nestlings peep and pip at intervals, heard in rooms throughout

  By the day-sick and the unfit for work. There was a golden age

  For sure: there is always a golden age, like a shower of gold

  Sweeter at a distance, perpendicular to the beloved body

  Siring leaden times and leaden rivers. Now the madman,

  Calling out of his window, denounces his long-dead neighbours,

  The starlings pass him off, stuttering, the starlings passing through –

  How birdcalls make sense of sorrow and suffering

  Which is subject to hyper-inflation and loses its own mortal currency

  In numbers. Red house, I see you in the city, on the plain

  By the roadside and the railway. You are never in the mountains

  Or by the sea. The smell of you is homely and nauseating

  Like the smell of all humankind.

  *

  There was a woman who left the red house with her baby.

  Her own mother waved from the window, a taxi took them away,

  Daughter and granddaughter and then they were gone.

  The woman dreamt at night of the red house:

  The gaping letterboxes; the stink of tobacco and piss

  Which fits so snugly, like a baby’s bonnet;

  Her own footsteps climbing the stairwell ahead of her;

  The tender annoyance of a wasp trapped on a landing.

  Her mother stood with dumbbells in the kitchen

  Swinging her hips this way and that, swinging her eyes

  This way and that, wishing they were real bells she held

  To clash and peal about her in a passion:

  For never in all her great maternal struggling

  Had she once considered such a silence.

  *

  Once a man brought home a bear to the red house.

  A zoo-bear, still a cub, and muzzled and harnessed.

  The children were kept inside as it played. The man smoked

  And twitched the reins, and ground cigarettes under his heel.

  The bear snuffled under the bench and grubbed up shit and sweetwrappers.

  The bear’s sojourn was a gift of sorts, for the man was a romantic

  And hoped his girl would relent when she saw the creature

  And bring them milk in a saucer and titbits, and humanwarmth.

  Until she let him in he would sleep on the landing with the bear

  And teach him to dance on his hind legs, up the steps and down

  In an endless manbeast cha-cha, paws clattering, feet slapping

  His humming summoning succour from the stairwell.

  The bear they took on the third day; it went well enough back into the light.

  The man threw himself from the window, and he was lamed for life.

  *

  All the world is beyond the padded door of the flat.

  A man once followed a girl into the red house and caught her on the stairs.

  He held a black knife in his fist, and motioned.

  Others are ready for this relationship, but not her:

  She reflects at length upon the imposed hostilities

  She anticipates the knife pressing down on her pink skin

  Until it gives, she suspects they might never be friends

  Her and him, and all the while she begs and screams and whispers

  Please, playing the part assigned to her with a blade’s gesture.

  The wrought iron design of the banisters catches her eye –

  It would be designed by a man, that, in its hard superfluous beauty

  And knocked into place by another man, and then forgotten

  Until now, until she stood and wondered: why vines and sickles and sheaves?

  Little girl, he says, I have done with this. Go now. Go. Please.

  *

  Imagine this: there is a room in the red house,

  Infernal clutter, brocades and periodicals, and a mirror full of gloaming

  And when the place is empty, she takes a basin of apples

  Into this room and sits on the bed. There she is, in the mirror.

  The room is not fresh. Everything here was bought in another time

  By the long-spent, oft-bereaved who own fruit knives

  And sugar tongs and no memory of the provenance of anything –

  Except the har
d little apples, which fall so close to the tree.

  So she escapes from childhood and taking refuge

  In the red house inhales the historical sweat

  The ancient hair-grease of its inhabitants

  Who have sloughed off desperate times

  And left their wearied skins

  Folded breast-up like nightshirts on the pillow.

  *

  I could be happy and gainful without the red house

  But it draws me to its mineral seam like home

  When I am without the red house, I am without

  And when I am within, I am undone.

  A fist, a bomb will not destroy it

  A hurtful letter, or a threat:

  It is made of wasp-thought and saliva

  But holds its own like footwear made of lead.

  I cannot find it, should I want to

  I have mislaid it now for several hundred years

  It drags me in, fisherhouse of peoples

  It spins me out, it shows me empty rooms.

  The Red House lies within, I have heard it beating

  The Red House lies without the parish of the soul.

  Perhaps Akhmatova was right

  When she wrote who knows what shit

  What tip, what pile of waste

  Brings forth the tender verse

  Like hogweed, like the fat hen under the fence

  Like the unbearable present tense

  Who knows what ill, what strife

  What crude shack of a life

  And how it twists sweetly about the broken sill:

  Pressingness, another word for honeysuckle

  But housewives? Has poetry

  Ever deepened in the pail

  Was it ever found in the sink, under the table

  Did it rise in the oven, quietly able

  To outhowl the Hoover?

  Does it press more than the children’s supper

  The sudden sleepless wail?

  Did it ever?

  It lives. It takes seed

  Like the most unforgiving weed

  Grows wilder as the child grows older

  And spits on dreams, did I say

  How it thrives in the ashen family nest

  Or how iambs are measured best

  Where it hurts:

  With the heel of an iron

  On the reluctant breast

  Of a shirt?

  Ten Moons

  And then came the ten moons

  Full in the sun’s glare, and the seraphim,

  And it was light all night in the orchards

  And on the plains and even in the towns

  And mankind rejoiced, because it was now the case

  That the wrecking and equivocating could carry on

  The pale night long. Mankind rejoiced

  And went forth to those places twelve hours of light

  Had not made it worth the while to despoil

  And gambolled collectively on the cliff tops

  And regarded the night-broiling of the sea

  Hitherto forbidden, but now opened in festival.

  Half the world’s time unpeeled and exposed

  So fruit might ripen faster and tree flourish higher

  And forced photosynthesis green all the land.

  Then night ramblers, night-sun-worshippers,

  Night-motorists fanned out and made the most

  Of spectral light, which bleached out stars and even

  The cosy old moon herself, who had

  Once held a sickle broadside to the sun, and now

  Was a hollow daytime shadow.

  Only a few old-believers slept

  Hand in hand, shoulder to breast,

  As if their lives depended on it, knowing yet

  That the morning would bring nothing

  Because the day knew no beginning

  And had no end.

  The Poetry of Earth

  The poetry of earth is mostly suppressed

  It has been a good while since the cricket rasped

  His tickly song from the grate, and the grasshopper

  Minded his old green business in the field.

  I could no more sing than cling to grass

  But all the words I need are notes

  There are instruments designed to catch

  The water in spate, the ramming wave

  The trickle of a jug-throat, but I am dumb

  There are tones like cups to fit the measures of elation

  But I saw the green from the road and I had none

  I know what it means: my heart for joy did burst!

  To make a path, to live in silent trepidation

  Between song and substance

  This is a curse.

  Michael Blann

  There was a hush, then Michael Blann

  Stepped out onto the stage. Michael

  Blann, with his pipe and his jukebox head

  Oh, he’s your man.

  He has a song for all weathers, a pipe

  And a voice and he sings and he roams

  He sings to the wind and a dog of how

  The trees are all bare and Jack’s come home.

  He’s a thin voice, like a spider thread

  On days when the sun is late and fine

  Live and let live, sings Michael Blann

  The wind yields not, but the hills is mine.

  He’s no call for fate passing over

  His sheep are all angels, the stars are his lords

  He’ll play any part the clouds should fancy

  To humble tunes and hand-me-down words

  The acts are written in briar strands

  And the Pharisees are leaves in the air

  I likes a drop pipes Michael Blann

  Sing follow hark forward the innocent hare.

  He wore to his end a clutch of sheep’s wool

  To show the gods that Michael Blann

  Went alone, alone for most of his years

  But crossed the hills a singing man.

  A Ballad without Rhyme

  This is a ballad without rhyme.

  This is a ballad without sound of any sort.

  In time they found the subject of this tune

  And she was much more than the sum of her parts.

  And how did it happen? That with her thick brown paws

  And face lined all over like an exercise book

  She would be carried the night athwart

  On a star, trailing a winding sheet.

  But I saw her in the kitchen. She was twiddling the tablecloth

  Not praying, but talking to her late child

  Admonishing his invisible boyhood

  For the mess of leaden soldiers in the yard

  The three days unmade bed. Banging the lid

  Of the salt-caddy. Fine loneliness

  For the house, half-broken, stood

  In a mouth of trees and upon a waste

  And where the bench in the yard

  Had worn the imprint of an arse

  Half a century in the making

  There now was a bare place

  And what she had was thyme

  Stolen from the hillside,

  Scenting every cupboard, room

  Wild thyme for embalming.

  So all the armies are passed –

  She kept keys in a casserole

  With cuttings, letters and a crust

  A needle and an awl.

  So solitary her movement I nearly cried out

  How I need this rhyme! This coming of age

  When all ages are equally mine

  And only gibbets and gristle to illuminate.

  Make history of us, good calm history

  In tapestries and ballad form

  I desire a painting of her, in the bed’s dent

  A relic, a stain in the shroud, a rent

  Instead I have the barren machinery:

  The grease, the rags and the sod.

  Skimmed of all her martyrdom she stands
>
  Wrathful, impossible to behold.

  Dawn Chorus

  29 March 2010

  Every morning since the time changed

  I have woken to the dawn chorus

  And even before it sounded, I dreamed of it

  Loud, unbelievably loud, shameless, raucous

  And once I rose and twitched the curtains apart

  Expecting the birds to be pressing in fright

  Against the pane like passengers

  But the garden was empty and it was night

  Not a slither of light at the horizon

  Still the birds were bawling through the mists

  Terrible, invisible

  A million small evangelists

  How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smouldering coal

  Their throats singed and swollen with song

  In dissonance as befits the dark world

  Where only travellers and the sleepless belong

  Fish’s Dream

  I thought I would dive into the pool like them

  But found myself skimming the surface like a pond-skater

  The water was the dead spit of the sky

  I saw my children kissing strangers

  My son was mouthing a girl, the devotion

  Of two fighting fish, he wants me far

  From the river of his life, back to swimming the ocean

  With the fleeting ghosts of kelt

  That pay visit only when it is the season.

  And so I am spawned and held

  In the sea’s own shuttle

  To be a glistening return

  Containing my own river-reason

  And muscle-mettle

  Washed into unknown elation

  Caught in the strange current

  Of homing, homing!

  The womb abhorrent

  The body teeming

  The water – from here –