Red House Read online

  A silvery migration.

  Lifting the bedcovers and there

  The scent of little bodies, their secretions

  Their feet, bellies, mouths and hair

  Animals overwintering for the season

  Of a single night, and how the air

  Surges into, under, like water through the horses

  Of Augeas, cold on the sweet, fetid, bare

  Skins, and that smell is fled contorted

  With a small grimace out to the spare

  Grey morning, all I embrace

  Evaporating in the cool earth’s care

  Less animal now the opening faces

  Their clothes lie folded on the chair

  Not yet awake, nor soon aware.

  Out of Town

  Out in the open fields go the good ghosts

  The ones who released from heaven leap and croon

  Who were locked to the old church beneath the bypass

  Until their heartstones were piled to make more room

  They come and go now like vapours through the grates

  They come and go, released from mortal flesh and weight

  And parade through the unsown fields of wild oats

  And meadows of agrimony and clover

  And reach a hill, the wedge end of a fell,

  And this too the revelling ghosts fly over

  All the better to reach the fingers of the town

  The town’s sightless fingers groping for their own.

  Ghosts like to find the middle point

  The place where open country runs to ground

  Amongst the out-of-town superstores

  Allotments, cemeteries, stolen vehicle pounds

  Where roads peter into ruts of ancient use

  And owners turn unwanted house pets loose.

  The blossoming of the end, the frayed flex of the beginning:

  The pilgrim enters in, passes through and out.

  The ghosts however go no further

  The place of worship for the immaterial devout

  Might be fixed here, by a vague averaging of town and field

  On a site leasehold under offer / current yield

  Or down a twitten, where the sad ghosts of weeds

  Proliferate all the summer long

  Where the walls are sprayed with piss and broken bottles

  But morning is coated in silver light and song

  And the snakehead streetlamps warm a gap

  In the hoary canopies of each year’s cold snap

  This is where the town fucks sincerely

  Exhibits its most human shape

  The ones who are destitute or nearly

  The ones without an honest place to sleep

  Come here and in the morning when the birds sing like crazy

  They walk a few yards into the wet green and weep

  But ghosts are beyond all human weakness

  They throng to service stations as to holy wells

  That wherever the world tips upon its axis

  They won’t be nearer or further then from hell

  The listless ghosts, unfreighted, aimless, flit

  And need a wasteland to level their spirit.

  I have met people who spend their nervous youth

  In cities, fearing even the weather that blew

  From empty places, beaches, heaths

  And others, who gorged on wide skies, those too

  When the time came, lifted up their souls and died

  And in the hereafter craved the lonely divide

  I know a few of us to whom the place is already sweet

  Its copses of rusting cars, its pointless verge

  The ache it puts in place of a deep heart

  As this life and the one beyond converge

  Here the poisoned Lethe trickles under weeds

  That scatter, year after year, their unloved seeds.

  No nearer to heaven here, or hell

  No talk of salvation here, or ruination

  All that can be done of both is done

  The mind has made of both a desolation

  And in this desolation at last a space

  Where no-man’s-land might be an honest place.

  A lorry driver sleeping in his cab

  Two walkers wearing hats and carrying shells

  The ghosts are in each blade of grass

  Each blade of grass a heaven and a hell

  The pilgrims come amongst them and pass through

  And one looked much like me and one like you.

  Amazing Grace

  It was sweet, but so short

  You’re not being honest, he said

  And I was filled

  But bent under the weight

  Some bodily discomfort helps

  I was lost, I’d know

  Not honest, like that, repeating

  The words, but I see now.

  Grace, which precious, like to mercy

  Falls, dissolves like snow

  I wish something were forever

  I was lost, I should know.

  The shadows fret me, if I’m honest

  Woman, you can fucking shut your

  And all that folding and unfolding linen

  Heart, be honest, hold your

  Weeds grow often and are undaunted

  By fingers scrabbling in the dirt

  Amazing – graceless now, but living –

  How the hell to fill a wretch like her.

  Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer’s)

  for A.W.

  She walked then: pale and unbent

  Frail as a cloud, filled with a cloud’s watered light

  And all the ropes were gone, and the language unlearnt

  And vital knots of past and future long untied.

  There was once no sailing without the augur on board,

  Who shaped each day and told what tumbled past,

  Who sought the truth in feathered gore

  Whilst others watched from the crow’s nest.

  She too surveyed the calm, and was concerned:

  What to make of all the signs, for the sea is rarely blank.

  And there was a circling, a moment returned

  When daughter was mother, and there the sun shrunk

  And bent and was narrow at the line of sky

  And still the clouds twisted and birds flew

  All above at that time there was no end to life

  And no end to other brightnesses at least as true

  That seem like mirages now. For signs were massing

  To display themselves in a common light:

  They did all surely point to the one passing

  Of pale day into paler night.

  I can only be who I am

  Said the storm as it drew its crow wings about the tree

  The tree knew that smell

  It flinched and held itself small and rigid

  If it had gods it would ask them for mercy

  Splintering its thousand green flags

  In the storm’s great embrace

  But the tree knows loneliness too

  Learnt from the caterpillar and the bird

  And godlessness, which is next to survival

  And a hundred other small skills

  Which are barely noticeable from the sky

  But have counted for something grand

  In the hill’s meadow-grass.

  Remember we walked its grey trunk

  Over the fluent stream

  It gave us passage, but no word of what lay beyond

  Moor

  And for days it seemed she was climbing

  Knees bloodied – as quick as she knew how

  So that one said to another: hey Phil

  Did you see how fast that girl was walking?

  But as she herself could see nothing, she could not tell

  It was just an endless effort of heather and fern

  As rancid as closed windows and pencil shavings

  And the red water tippling fr
om flush to ocean

  So slowly fast her walking was but nothing

  To its coronation dance. She had heard of men

  Who married this place with its hares

  And laid their heads on stones and begot

  With water making utterance of its sifting

  And shifting and spouting –

  And after that chasing quivering throatful

  All the women in the world were no more than

  Spoons of cough medicine.

  How well she knew her limits

  Although she had jumped the golden trickling

  Just like a boy, was as stupid as any man.

  When he comes, she said, and takes the water

  Over me, then what shall I be?

  Faster and faster she goes, plaiting the fibres of grasses

  Hoping the sky will take pity on her

  Make a rapid stream of me that he might love me deeper

  Put finger and thumb in me, and nape of neck

  And break the lip of me with startled face

  And we will be quite apart, and yet

  Down in that city, shivering and shining with rain

  He will long for the red halo, climbing his forehead

  Clinging in drops to his shoulder, lifted in his hands

  For certain downfall.

  Prince’s

  24 January 2011

  Yesterday afternoon, one of the shortest of the year

  When the hills were dark with a night not yet come

  And the high street silent and all the doors closed

  I learnt that Prince’s would soon be gone.

  A haberdasher’s is hardly a terrible loss

  It was not a place I ever went in much

  Although I admired the near-redundant, near-extinct

  Art of dressing the provincial shopfront

  The quaint pre-war touches: how the ladies’ shirts

  Were tied in pretty ribbons at their waists

  And jaunty trilbies floated over dancing jackets

  Bearing pockets of silken hanky points.

  And often I have seen gentlemen cradling paper bags

  Of slippers and shoes with new black heels

  Slipping out from under the shop’s sun blind

  And disappearing down the modern street

  Thirty years now. I walked to school that way

  Saw the seasons come and go in their displays:

  Nightshirts hanging from green hoops in spring

  Snowmen holding Christmas stockings in branched fingers

  You would call it an ordinary shop on an ordinary street

  And not somewhere the dream’s particles might lie.

  The lady serving me lost her husband last year

  She’s glad it’s over, she says, she needs more time.

  I have not the wit to offer any comfort

  The window unadorned reads ‘closing – end of line’.

  How the fact of it can suddenly strike you

  Yes, time is good, I say. I’m sure things heal with time.

  But time flows down the high street like a river

  Like the Spital, which exceeds its muddy confines

  Each winter, and the rest of the long year

  Whispers insistent at the back of the shopper’s mind.

  I should be able to escape this honest town

  There must be places where creation sings aloud

  Can you not hear it? How its blasting trumpet-wind

  Blows the streams back up to higher ground.

  This next spring we will wade up the Spital river

  And shrug the town from us, and leave it lie

  How the stream narrows now and lightens

  Its pulse grows feeble, its breath a tiny sigh –

  In the window I see the yards of draper’s tape,

  Which once knew the height of a body, its mortal breadth.

  So night falls once again with the roaring of a river

  Indifferent to its very depths.

  Doggy Life

  After Auden’s Musée des Beaux-Arts

  I have my doggy life to consider

  Others may do the falling from the sky

  I make a home in the ripe corn

  And count birds and insects yappily.

  It is the very health of me

  That matters – gleaming coat and fangs

  And mind untroubled by psychosis

  Beyond the usual things –

  Yesterday, for instance, a magpie,

  Several old and chewy balls

  And a nameless mess I worry

  Until my impatient owner yells.

  The endless doggy acquisition:

  Bones and feathers, piss and spit

  The innocent horse’s whisking tail,

  The innocent horse’s tumbling shit.

  A dog like me lives by a camp

  A dog like me licks hangman’s hands

  That taste of sweat and hempen rope

  And nicotine and scented soap.

  On Beauty

  Those children with their yellow-painted faces and tangled wreaths

  Of green and berry and stick, they have waited

  A thousand years to be born again, and here they are

  Gracious and grateful, and still with impacted movement.

  I call their legs shanks, because they are as slender as forearms

  Their flesh is at one with their bone; their hair with their flesh

  I ascribe to them no existential complaints, no nervous diseases

  Constipation, chewed nails, hard skin, tooth decay, bad breath

  Their soul is as large as their body, precisely,

  Their body fit to glove such a splendid invisible organ.

  I have cracked my glasses on a stone and I have a blister.

  Lord, give me strength to protect these children

  From the soldiers, ex-soldiers, arse-fuckers, shitmongers

  The unclean, unwashed, the simple, the hopeless, the West

  With its bulbous self-determination, all those people who kiss

  Death and say: I don’t know I don’t know all the while

  From ice-creams, cheap sweets and tin signs that say: drink cola

  And internecine wars and minefields, chemical spills, slicks

  Shit, better to die than to live like that. Better to wander Lethe

  In shadow, than paint yourself and gambol under the flawed sun.

  Asylum

  You say the old masters never got it wrong,

  But when Goya painted the death of the imagination

  It was a lost dog against a usurious yellow sky

  And the dog, a hapless creature who had drawn itself

  Ten miles on two legs, stared in amazement

  To see the man who once fed him from his plate

  Reduced to this.

  So I felt this week, the vile soil and everything upon it –

  The beggar guest kicked from the table

  Before his own dog, and even the honest unpicking

  Of art performed nightly and in seclusion.

  Like any Penelope my armour is resignation

  Although I thought I would lift the bow myself

  And draw.

  By the morning he is gone

  And what to make of this?

  The prostitutes hang from a beam like mice

  The suitors are piled unburied in the yard.

  And some say that it is now much better

  And others, that it is worse.

  So order was restored

  I stared in amazement

  Song of the Seagull

  Ukrainian folksong

  Woe, woe, woe to the seagull

  Seagull, O poor unhappy bird

  She who wove her nest, laid her eggs

  By the well-trod road.

  Where some young travelling merchants

  Stopped to rest and graze their oxen

  And chased the gull away,

  Stole her little ch
ildren.

  The seagull rose and there she circled,

  Then down to the road she hurtled

  To the damp, cold earth she falls,

  To the men she calls.

  ‘O most kind and noble merchants,

  Still so young, no more than children

  Give back my little chickens,

  My own little children.’

  ‘No, you shall not ever see them,

  Nor fold them close, no, I’ll not yield

  For you’ll gather them about you

  And fly off to the field.’

  ‘I will never fly away,

  I’ll stay here, oh I will stay

  Here to watch over your oxen,

  To mind my little children.’

  ‘Fly, unhappy seagull, fly

  To the far green hills, fly

  For your children’s necks are broken

  And in my pot they lie.’

  ‘My children’s slim necks are broken,

  Dead in your pot they lie,

  Then may your oxen sicken

  Sicken all and die.

  ‘May you know no journey’s end

  May your travels last forever

  For my children are dead,

  Lost to me forever.’

  Shepherds

  Late June the ghosts of shepherds meet on the hills

  And one has his crook with its musket barrel hook

  One carries a Bible, and all wear the smock

  And listen out for the little bells and the canister bells

  Worn by the sheep and the big cattle, carried by the wind

  Which shapes the hawthorn into mermaid’s hair and open book.

  There are those who died on the hills, and those who died in their beds,

  The haloed, who wear a flame about them, were