Villanelle

I never thought to have such thoughts as these,
Such thoughts as shake the bed-clothes late at night;
But having them their trouble starts to please.

The Stranger caste our fates upon his knees

But vanished with the warm card brought to sight;
I never thought to have such thoughts as these.

He left small doubts and crafty fears to ease

A tremor in the brain-pan’s dark and fright;
But having them their trouble starts to please.

The door with gargoyles swung before the keys,

A window smiled, and you, your skin like light;
I never thought to have such thoughts as these.

Our days proceed. In shop queues someone sees

Me distant with my thoughts, their failing fight;
But having them their trouble starts to please.

For I can think you naked like a tease

Or old and docile still as warm at night;
I never thought to have such thoughts as these,
But having them their trouble starts to please.

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© circa 1973-76

Love Story

Drunks in the street stagger to waiting wives
At chucking out. The cold road gleams like oil,
Littered with light from a few shops gazing
Empty-eyed into the indifferent night.
Buildings squat like black irregular teeth
Gapped by the silent cave of sleeping roads.
Another day has dropped from a useless life:
I’ll wander home, make coffee, go to bed.

Lunchtimes and evenings spent in public bars

With darts and talk, watching a silent telly
Shelved above the barmaid; the puerile jokes,
The loud and lengthy laughter, spittle strung
In an open mouth, a pint glass wobbling on
The table – these define my life waiting
For the door to open: lost love crouches
Beneath its shell, its smoke-stained sour charade.

I know an upstairs room where I could get

Some comfort, past the black grease of landings
Where thin doors hide the lonely toil of life.
But such a grim fumble sickens the past
And fouls the hour when I must face myself,
Loosed on the street, the cramped throat of the city,
Lonely without you, my lover, my love.
I’ll wander home, make coffee, go to bed.

====================

© circa 1973-76

 

Parting Ways

Parting ways: when dividers inched apart
And a little daylight sprang the knowledge
That a moment had slipped unspoken – brief
As a gasp. Paths and channels became futile
And all that remained was to walk down roads
Which spread the town, putting houses and jobs
Between us: the public personas
We’d mixed agreeably sought a new milieu,
Cold at the farthest points of the compass.
Your loss may be a temporary pain,
But not our flight from the admitted risk
Of honest talking; our failure to find
Ourselves, even in the warmth of a bed.
For now I deduce from your stubborn pout
The life you’re launched on; briefly see the stains
On that rigid mask in the High Street bustle,
Defeats of time and place as your form recedes;
Your lineaments wholly apart from me.

Someone I worked with said once how it made

Her sad that the bland acquaintance of work
Would sharpen when someone left to a crack
In the texture of the day, yet reduce
So soon to a weak stain of memory:
Friendliness was lifted like a mantle
And shifted to another. Dear Peggy!
Forty-ish, with kids, vital as a pin,
Yet fidgeting to know what made her tick,
Stuck like a clock hand on the vacant face
Of housework, part-time job, and a husband
Preparing already for retirement.
Her days were troubled by glimpses sneaked through
Doors which snapped with a muffled thud. A shriek
Was always in the air. Yet I recall
Her less than well. The brain blurs the fading
Print which gradually loses precision.

So what am I to say of you? We fenced

So long; we lay together, at the best
We laughed together, eyes at an angle
And truth a fiction written day by day.
I think of the far North: a headland’s snout,
Lip-tight, butting the cold douse of the tide;
And the white South, that plateau declining
With its back the friendly tapping of currents.
And vague beneath horizons I think of you
Swinging crazily on a nub from “Yes”
To “No” like a needle tipped with a plea.

Well, whatever is what it’s happened. Alone,

I’m off on the next slow haul. May your way
Be easy, your compromise acceptable
(As mine must be). Abandoned in the cold
Defining of our days, I wish you well.

====================

© circa 1973-76

"Though the Weekday Go..."

Though the weekday go and the moment
   Tarnish, I will give you flowers
Intricate as a thousand welcomes.
   Fling down the white flame of your smile,
Set fire to light, and purge with petals
   The grey dross of the table’s dust.

Doubtless the pen-chewers will sniff from

   The desks of their lives, denouncing
This bonfire of flowers with a parched
   Look. They are a blast of winter:
Abrupt as a cold hand they would sneer
   At a woman in her passion.

You whose absence has been the silence

   Of a god must walk with me through
The darkened rooms, touched by the brute storms
   Of night. But none can abandon
The brief burn of the sun, denying
   These moments, their absolute health.

====================

© 1976

To An Acquaintance Gone Into The Country

"Piccadilly and its halls" - Piccadilly underground station was notorious at this time as a meeting place for homosexuals; "County Hall" - the headquarters of the Greater London Council, subsequently abolished by Mrs Thatcher after it developed tendencies to regard itself as an independent socialist republic.

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The moral life, who cares for it one jot?
The folk of this benighted town do not!
From fops dissolved in giggles that they be
A part of Islington society
Where politics and fashion daily mix
And make acceptable the Dance of Dicks,
And beefy women crammed inside their jeans
Discuss what “Deconstruction” really means,
To sharks and youthful spivs who hang about
And play the coward or, when safe, the lout,
Lifting a wallet, swilling cans of Coke,
Daring the knife-edge between Threat and Joke –
All, all agree that someone is to blame
For that Dissatisfaction with no name
Which, on their shoulders, urges them to act
By throttling Reason and destroying Fact.
The rich and handsome, bopping in the street,
Fling down a vicious gauntlet at your feet,
The gays in Piccadilly and its halls
Descend to darkness and the grope for balls,
The wasted winos, loose in Leicester Square,
Demand your charity with half a glare,
The politicians, mad at County Hall,
Make one decision and begin to brawl,
And lo! the clergy in a final cod
Embrace The Issues and denounce their God!

A change of scene – what finer remedy

For stark disgust with man and accidie –
Takes you to purlieus where the skies are blue,
Where life is different and decisions few.
But what is this beside a bubbling beck?
A trailer park and gaudy discothèque!
And squatting loathsomely beyond your arm
Battery units have engulfed the farm.
Out in the fields a tractor roars its way
Across a monoculture all the day,
Grubbing up hedges, charging at the wood
Where fifty of the finest oak once stood.
A countryman, by wisdom deeply scored,
Allows you access to his hidden hoard
And taps his nose across the public bar
To let you know he knows just what you are.
He leers and shows his teeth and pulls an ear
And taps his nose again and drinks his beer,
And with an air mysteriously-wise
Makes up false maxims and then tells you lies;
And later, all goodnights devoutly bidden,
Strolls off to wisely contemplate his midden.     

Dr Swift Considers an Arts Council Grant

This poem is redolent of a different age, one of arts funding largesse. The poem's argument is jejune in places but just about holds together. In 1980 the then Arts Council of Great Britain had sumptuous headquarters in Piccadilly. Havergal Brian was subsequently remembered for producing over thirty symphonies in almost complete critical neglect. The Faber poetry list was, of course, in its heyday - although not to my eyes; the Northern Ireland Troubles were in full swing and the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan.

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Suggested by a sentence in Ifor Evans’ book Portrait of English Literature.

Gentlemen,

A cloud of dust is in the Strand
Where students march and raise a hand;
They stop the traffic, block the road
And roar with all the might of God.
Their banners and their shouts declare
The apotheosis of hot air,
And uncouth dress and surly ways
Are loci where the state decays.
They treat the people in the streets
As little more than bourgeois cheats,
Though in the respite of a pause
They claim they share a common cause.
Policemen herd them to the kerb
Where someone flings a basic verb,
And ushered on in disarray
They curse the night and damn the day.
(A lonely creature in his sleep
Hobbes turns and shudders all the deep:
The pages of Leviathan
Tremble for the fate of man.)
I came my way through the East End
Where the right price will sell a friend,
Where those who use coherent words
Are suspect like exotic birds,
And the local style is populist –
Which means that people use their fists.
Quarrels spike the muggy air
And someone rages, “I don’t care”;
A reasonable request is turned
Into an order duly spurned,
And deference, the social key,
Becomes a thing of history.
Unhappiness and pointlessness
Drape Aldgate High Street like a dress,
And the old woman in her room
Fears a sudden, bloody doom
While outside like a metaphor
The ceaseless lorries roar and roar.

A Remnant

No, not a sonnet,
Flush with fervour
Like a Victorian hymn;

Not an ode, nor an elegy,

Sweating like faces
With the tears of truth;

But a bone

Sprung from the furrow,
Crazed with the runes

Of the inarticulate earth –

Such, such is my love.
Dear, will you risk a finger

On these splintered pieces,

Bathing them once more
In the balm of your hand?

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© September 1984