netted. Peace with France. Resumption

  of the Channel trade in cheaper (thus more profitable)

  kelp. So the bullion swayed where it was, or lay

  unburned in sallow mounds of stench, thick with flies.

  The smoke no longer rolled over the strands.

  There was a strange silence in the Sound:

  no ships lay among the white flecks

  the plunging gannets made, or in the gaze of the blind.

  And no one brought them soap, or glass for their crofts.

  No one ever brought them what the ashes made.

  ON SILBURY HILL

  c. 2660 B.C.

  1

  I’m slogging up through cow-muck once again,

  flanked by tussocks and the crumbly sores of burrows.

  It’s artificial and there’s nothing at the core –

  no tomb, no gold, no secret god lying in his pots.

  The slog; this moment; and memory. And love

  as crisp as the air is now, if you’re lucky.

  2

  The locals would placate it with fat fig cakes

  and sugared water – though I doubt that

  satisfied this mother of a belly (or suckled

  breast, or gargantuan eye) with its sallow-

  haunted spring at Swallowhead, quadrilled

  by the OS map to something pear-shaped, dead.

  3

  The pivot of it all, you feel, when up

  on top – though life through this early mist’s

  more heard than seen: chain-saws, tractors,

  the cracks of a gun. No birds from the corn.

  At night, of course, it’s the stadium glare

  of the new, executive estates; a havoc

  of headlights on the A4; the marigold

  smudge of Swindon foxing the stars.

  4

  A dag-lock of wool on a low thorn

  where the peak is sinking into itself,

  like a whirlpool, like a plug’s been pulled

  on the magic of the earth. Though perched

  on this swelling, an unlikely nipple, you can think

  of it all as down the shit chute. No –

  as cultic, odd; a rite, a god. To which

  we’re proffering, not what they’ve found

  in here (turf, antler-picks, a rusted bridle-bit)

  but lands and seas and skies, and all their life.

  BEFORE THE WAR

  Joe Thacker, Aunt Jessie’s father,

  master butcher of Matlock, would sit

  on his high stool at the pulpit desk

  in that wallowing smell of bloodsoaked sawdust

  and write out his orders with a quill

  in perfect copperplate: To

  Her Grace, the Duchess of Devonshire . . .

  And then, on Saturday mornings, my not-yet father

  would go in the Morris van with Len

  to Chatsworth, or the Vicarage, or Haddon Hall.

  Sometimes, if things got daft, he’d bicycle

  off on his own, an order crammed in the pannier.

  Up Haddon Hall’s eternal drive

  he’d pedal like the wind, to wait

  in the quiet courtyard for someone

  to appear (the Duke a recluse), nervous

  of the rooks, the ghosts, the millstone grit

  and gargoyles. Safely separate in his other hand,

  bandaged in the Matlock Times, were the giblets,

  liverlights and chitterlings, shambling already

  through the match results, Chamberlain

  toadying to Hitler, and all the homelier news.

  BOOKMARK

  More like elfin lungs

  or brain biopsies than petals,

  the press of ninety years

  has dealt with their blush:

  dull as tea stains, they spill

  from my grandmother’s Poems

  of Tennyson, losing her place.

  Forgotten in the attic in a box

  for thirty years, the book’s been mine all day,

  had kept these to itself like thoughts

  since 1911. And so I read, on the guarded page:

  But were I loved, as I desire to be . . .

  Her hair would make it to her waist

  at bedtime, released from its pinned-

  up bun in a silvery, fascinating stream, her door

  left almost deliberately ajar –

  as, by a scattering of blown red rose,

  these verses might have been too, I fear.

  ADDICTS

  Picking at the unofficial dump, I find

  a basket as spent as the fridge, the tyre,

  the mangled chair. A string for a handle;

  the hand that gathered chestnuts, cêpes,

  probably bone or ash by now, judging

  from the wear. Like Gogol’s Plyushkin

  I bring it home, place it on a sill

  where it gathers the weather and frays

  to a spiral nebula of reeds, half-unwoven.

  Gérard spots it, four years on:

  it’s the type of plunder his garden’s all

  but buried under, the sheds so crammed

  he can’t get in, stuff spewing from the double doors

  (‘I know where everything is, mon cher . . .’)

  in a slew of wares he sees himself inside,

  or so he explains: today’s catch could be a split

  nursery spade in fluo pink, tomorrow’s a car

  deboned to its bonnet, motor, springs.

  Not so much avarice, he says, as a cocooning urge –

  the acrobatics of a ‘manque maternelle’. His wife

  is threatening divorce, but he’s too far gone

  to change; to clear his sheds would be

  to raze his mind, he suggests, gazing hungrily

  at my crusts of basket, unravelling

  to stems in his hand: ‘Ça, c’est comme

  la vie,’ he smiles, in his sardonic way . . .

  an image I think I’ll keep. A real find.

  SOMEWHERE

  Somewhere near Rotherham we were lost

  (doubling back off the M1, cutting through)

  in an area of bright, corrugated hangars

  like boxes for toys; of factories wound down

  to their stiff chimneys and noiseless yards

  between armies of pylons, glassy business hotels,

  service stations racked only to glittery

  teen mags and the Model Railway Collector:

  an anonymous, undecided England

  in which the odd terraced house stood

  still as its sooted brick, a stitch in a street

  razed for dodgy dealerships and drive-thrus,

  for roundabouts the cars attacked like wasps

  while we pondered our exit, strangers here

  in a land so familiar to others

  it is the only view from the bridge

  of their lives: limitless, boasting the future

  like a suite of rooms opening one into the other forever.

  PURPOSES

  1

  Fifteenth-century Bible, Montpellier

  It merits more than this: two pages

  open under glass, the size of a hand,

  the text a wodge of black that,

  like ants under a stone, reveals

  itself close up as tiny curls of intent:

  not a blot, not a feint. I can feel

  the draughty cell, the hard wood

  of the bench, but not the days themselves

  he ravelled out to this – bent double

  like a lover at the well of ink,

  affecting his eyes. And what did he think

  when he finished a double page, arrived

  at the turn? A mere kink in the long

  snaking way of the book, as thick

  as his patience in the swelter of summer,

  the frosty absence of swifts in the cold:

  a sigh, perhaps, or a stir of limbs like purpose

  that lies here now in its own darkness, page under page.

  2

  Depuis 1921

  They’ve moved the machines: ten tons

  of Heidelberg iron, hot-metal slide and punch,

  towed out to leave this void in the place

  I loved to linger in, watching it work,

  lead and ink and the subtle, feathery press

  of the sharp-set rollers, the care and expert eye

  of the Barnier brothers (third generation), who read

  the books. All now gone, now it’s just computers.

  Whose words will slide off the page in a century’s time

  (Michel says), just riding on the paper as they are,

  not impressed, like his – which are seemingly

  incised in certain lights, as if by a quill,

  as if by something urgent, like a need

  that merits more than this empty floor or these dusty

  piles of brown-wrapped books, unclaimed for years,

  that no one has either read or will ever read.

  DEFEAT

  in memoriam Richard France

  With the backdrop of a London caff

  we’d feel more real – us preened

  and patted, public-school types

  plotting subversion in the glory days

  (a kind of green-striped red). You remember

  the worker, I presume? Powdered with his wage,

  weary, he’d smack the butt-end of the ketchup

  or cradle the mug like a lover’s face,

  pouting into steam. Knew all the ropes, we reckoned –

  life’s block and tackle, that head for heights . . .

  the struggle’s hoplite, slumped on the eve

  of some enormous strife. And if

  our last conversation was not in a caff

  but somewhere fancy with tubular chairs

  and menus so thin, so tall, they couldn’t

  take the wind from your gestures, still

  we were saving the world over breakfast

  in the plunge and soar of it: your intellect

  seared with passion. Look, Ad, we’ve

  to change our lives for once and for all.

  Something removed your retaining wall

  in the few short weeks between then and when

  you took to the air from a Deptford warehouse

  back in ’82 – high enough to matter, of course.

  Since then, the silence. And no more signals (as far

  as I’m concerned) but your brief, unassuming parts

  in dreams – like the early roles a film star

  might look shyly back on, yet grieve for.

  THE OX-BOW’S HEATH

  Quilhan

  1

  I do not say to you: illuminate me.

  I lack even that confidence, that pluck.

  Remind me of something that is coveted.

  Your roots do not go deep. Your grass springs back.

  2

  A waste, a tract, a dryness, flooded sometimes.

  Swallow me whole: put back the wry, the splendour.

  The wry splendours of ilex, and all your shrublets.

  The rough strawberries of the strawberry tree.

  3

  Thorniness plucks. The path shrugs thorniness off.

  It snakes like this, I think, to keep its breath.

  My footfalls on ling, on thyme, hush the thicket.

  This is the emptiness the hunters bring.

  4

  Rockiness and river. Stumbling heat and plunge.

  Winter, and I can watch the mountains pass.

  Their snow. Their breathless rain. My hand in their

  old songs burning to be sung, and to be over.

  5

  A grey heron’s hoarse flap up, yards off.

  Flood-pools of snagged trees primevally heaved from!

  We should not ‘lizard’ the dinosaurs, I’ve heard.

  They moved their heads like birds. They flustered lagoons.

  6

  Softly mudded, a boar’s defiant passing.

  Our clumsy pasts will always haunt us, crouched to.

  By whom? By wishers-well. By men with guns.

  May your bristly flanks be far. Go well.

  7

  We toss our sticks in, urge them. Then skip stones.

  Yelping to water, you’re the first one in.

  Your chin slides and puts the poplars in a flap.

  No throwing now! For the river bears her.

  8

  Aleppo pine against the deepening sky.

  Triremes’ prows prancing over darkened water.

  Because you have no thirst, perhaps, you soar.

  Aleppo pine against the sudden evening.

  9

  Heathland, then thickets. Poplars along water.

  A field of barley like a gasp. The vines.

  The ilex glitters all its classic coins.

  The church, rooted out, seethes with cicada.

  10

  The river binds us in its sack, or larme.

  What’s wrong with ox-bow? Because it doesn’t yoke us?

  It does: it drives us to it through the brush.

  In dreams we hear it chafe, to make all lagoon.

  ON HER BLINDNESS

  My mother could not bear being blind,

  to be honest. One shouldn’t say it.

  One should hide the fact that catastrophic

  handicaps are hell; one tends to hear,

  publicly, from those who bear it

  like a Roman, or somehow find joy

  in the fight. She turned to me, once,

  in a Paris restaurant, still not finding

  the food on the plate with her fork,

  or not so that it stayed on (try it

  in a pitch-black room) and whispered,

  ‘It’s living hell, to be honest, Adam.

  If I gave up hope of a cure, I’d bump

  myself off.’ I don’t recall what I replied,

  but it must have been the usual sop,

  inadequate: the locked-in son.

  She kept her dignity, though, even when

  bumping into walls like a dodgem; her sense

  of direction did not improve, when cast

  inward. ‘No built-in compass,’ as my father

  joked. Instead, she pretended to ignore

  the void, or laughed it off.

  Or saw things she couldn’t see

  and smiled, as when the kids would offer

  the latest drawing, or show her their new toy –

  so we’d forget, at times, that the long,

  slow slide had finished in a vision

  as blank as stone. For instance, she’d continued

  to drive the old Lanchester

  long after it was safe

  down the Berkshire lanes. She’d visit exhibitions,

  admire films, sink into television

  while looking the wrong way.

  Her last week alive (a fortnight back)

  was golden weather, of course,

  the autumn trees around the hospital

  ablaze with colour, the ground royal

  with leaf-fall. I told her this, forgetting,

  as she sat too weak to move, staring

  at nothing. ‘Oh yes, I know,’ she said,

  ‘it’s lovely out there.’ Dying has made her

  no more sightless, but now she can’t

  pretend. Her eyelids were closed

  in the coffin; it was up to us to believe

  she was watching, somewhere, in the end.

  ANSAPHONE

  She’s still on the ansaphone

  my father hasn’t changed yet, when he says

  the official bit about

  ‘talking after the bleep’

  and then turns to her to comment, letting

  the tape run by mistake for a fragment

  of precious sound I strain to hear

  but she doesn’t reply

  and yet she’s there.

  HANDS

  The young, spotty couple in Waitrose

  held hands even while the girl

  was grabbing a tin from a bottom shelf,

  forcing him to bend over like a clown;

  they were welded to each other.

  But neither of them were blind

  like my mother, for whom a hand

  was a lifeline. When someone close

  dies, you always wish you’d

  held their hand for a little

  longer than you did; it’s a kind

  of rule. Or you want

  to have held their hand forever –

  but that’s impossible. I’m talking

  about the realm of the real, where

  regret has flesh, and interrogates:

  So why didn’t you take her hand

  and hold it in your own for a little

  longer? Or why didn’t you hold it

  at all? Because you don’t do that

  in families, after a certain age,

  unless it’s for a purpose – such as

  helping someone over a gate

  or a sudden irruption of bad news.

  Especially when it’s the wrong way round,

  as here: not the mother comforting the child

  but the child comforting the mother,

  like the dying comforting the alive.

  TRANSPARENT

  I feel transparent.

  I want to be transparent

  in everything I do and say.

  I want people to see

  right through me, to see

  fields or buildings beyond my spine,

  as though I’ve not been

  diluted so much as scanned

  by some ultra-sonic ray

  that has rendered everything

  clotted and knotted inside me

  free and floating, off and away.

  This is not the same as death.

  It is to do with time,

  with realising one has

  so little time, in the end.

  It’s an effect of grief, too,

  to be honest. It’s the solitary

  floundering of someone

  in the knee-deep

  snow of grief, right

  in the blizzard of it

  and pressing on, regardless

  and light-headed.

  AMPURIAS

 

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