The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea (3 page)

The party’s over. Downstairs the monsters
of cigar-smoke and society-talk
coil and uncoil among the tissue paper
and the tangerine peel.

This was your room once. The crib.
The mirror. Your painting of a flower.
Only the initials on the shaving kit
connect you to the man that you’ve become.

In the kitchen your mother’s ghost
soaps the greasy plates and hauls
the turkey carcass to the pantry
so that she can scrub the table clean.

In the black square of the window
it hovers again. Dog or deer.
The animal that terrified you once.
But you can hear what it’s saying now.

So take the curtains. Take the bowl
with blue stripes and the white cloth
on the dresser. Take the silence.
This is all you’ll ever need.

Step across the sill and walk
into a night where the trees
are on fire and the stone church
dances on the dark.

Starlight, star bright
Lie in this cradle of night
and sleep tight

Sea shell, sea swell
Ring the church bell
for all is well

Sundown, sunrise
Nothing dies
so close your eyes

I’m in a tailback near Basingstoke,
pondering the sad-dog brakelights
of the V-reg Nissan up ahead,
thinking how we never got
the jet-packs or the protein pills
and how they’d be as unremarkable
as radios or Teflon. I’m thinking
of the way time runs just fast enough
to keep us entertained, but not so fast
we spend the whole day dumbstruck
by the fact that we can clone a sheep
or eat a mango in the Wirral.

Late October 1978.
We’re smoking in The Friar’s Grill
and playing with the cool, rotating cover
of my newly purchased Led Zep III
when, apropos of nothing, Nigel says
that Mr. Rothermere’s dead.
And sure enough, we find out later
that he died as we were talking,
falling down the stairwell of the school
we’d left five years before.

When we hear the news
we feel like hunters from the lowlands
of the Congo hearing Elvis Presley
on a Walkman, petrified
to think what devilry could squeeze
him into such a small box.

Which is when the sad-dog brakelights
of the Nissan just ahead go out,
the tailback dissolves, I put the Golf
in gear and boldly go to Basingstoke.

More gorgeous daughter of a gorgeous mother,
burn my poems if they injured you,
or hurl them out into the Adriatic.
Nothing churns the human heart like anger:

not Apollo when inspiring the priestess
in the shrine at Delphi,
neither Cybele nor drunken Bacchus
nor his cymbal-banging followers.

And nothing, not the sword of Noricum,
not the ship-devouring sea, not wildfire,
not the terrifying storm of Jupiter himself
descending, holds it back.

They say Prometheus was forced
to use a part of every animal
when making Man, and put the short fuse
of the savage lion in our guts.

Anger brought Thyestes to his grisly end
and goads all conquerors to raze
great towns and arrogantly plough
their walls into the earth.

Don’t let yourself be swept away. The same fire
burned in me when I was young, and wrecked
those golden days by driving me to write
those poems in the white heat of the moment.

But I would gladly change those bitter lines
into a sweet song and strike out every harsh word
if you would give me back your heart
and be my lover.

Consider me.
I sit here like Tiberius,
inscrutable and grand.
I will let “I dare not”
wait upon “I would”
and bear the twangling
of your small guitar
because you are my owl
andfoster me with milk.
Why wet my paw?
Just keep me in a bag
and no one knows the truth.
I am familiar with witches
and stand a better chance in hell thanyou
for I can dance on hot bricks,
leap your height
and land on all fours.
I am the servant of the Living God.
I worship in my way.
Look into these slit green stones
and follow your reflected lights
into the dark.

Michel, Duc de Montaigne, knew.
You don’t play with me.
I play with you.

I’m in the manger, sleeping.
Let me lie.
You bite me, everybody wants to know.
I bite you, no one gives a damn.
Why bark yourself
and keep me in this hole?
You let me slip,
I fight, you call me off.
I’d speak in Latin
but I’d make a dinner of it.
So let me return, as ever, to my vomit.
All the guilty are in my house.
I’m sick, tired, gone,
the ugly girl, the ditched butt
of every cigarette,
every hard crust, every wasted evening.
Sit. Fetch. Heel.
I’m old. I cannot learn new tricks,
but I will have my day.
My star will rage
and I will match you step for step
in the midday sun
and haunt you in this black coat
through my watches of the night.

I’m your best friend,
but the more I get to know of you,
the more I like myself.

You did the Hippy-Hippy Shake.
I messed with Mr. In-Between.
Tonight you’ll hit the first three chords
of “Crazy” and a thousand tiny
lights will make you half-believe
the sky has fallen at your feet.
I’ll watch a documentary
about the life of Cary Grant,
then take a bath and go to bed.

You’ll blunt the come-down with some sweet
brown sugar in a five-star suite
and wake from the recurring dream
in which your third wife fucks the pool-boy,
and see, across the bed,
a tattoo stallion on the shoulder
of a girl your daughter’s age
and hope she’ll keep on faking sleep
until you’re halfway to a strong
black coffee and a cigarette
in Mother Mary’s Bar ‘n’ Grill.

I’ll read the Sunday magazines
and find you bathing in that pop
and glare of being seen you’ve lived with
all your life, which burns and bleaches
everything until the route you took
and everyone you left behind
have turned to vapour trail and backdrop.

Did it have to be like this,
the future like a fault in flint
it took a hammer-blow to find?
Did you feel a different North
and peel away? Or was your gift
to slip the leash of every story
that we told ourselves to mend
the absence that you left behind?

This, for what it’s worth, is mine:
I passed the bottle which said
Drink Me,
but you drank, and grew and grew
until the town, your family
and friends were all too small for you.
And by the summer you were gone.

I wake some nights at 5 a.m.
and, shuffling to the window, see
a figure standing on the gravel
just outside the porchlight’s range
and wonder what it is you want,
to mock me, or make amends?
To come inside, or take my hand
and lead me to a black Mercedes
purring on the hill? To get
some measure of how many miles
you’ve put between us, or how few?

I feel the tug of gravity
which everyone who knows you feels,
but turn and potter back to bed
and melt into that larger dark
where you will always orbit, far out,
lord of hearts and oceans, lit
by sunlight borrowed from the far side
of the world, bright satellite
to this fixed earth, my counterweight,
my twin, my necessary ghost.

Young men stumbling home from parties
don’t throw pebbles at your windows now.
You sleep till dawn and that busy door
of yours now hugs the step. No one

asks how you can sleep when they are dying
all night long for love of you. Times change.
You’re old and no one gives a damn.
You’ll weep at all the men who have deserted you

as gales from Thrace roar down
that empty lane on moonless nights.
The hot lust which sends mares mad
will flare around your ulcerated heart

and you’ll cry out at the young men
who love the ivy and the dark green myrtle
but who throw the dry leaves
into the East wind, that bride of winter.

They are seldom racing cyclists
and are largely innocent

of the workings of the petrol engine.
They are, however, comfortable in taxis.

They are abroad in the small hours
and will seek out the caustic blue liqueur

that you purchased in Majorca
for comedy reasons, and will rise late.

There are whole streets
where their work is not known.

Spectacles,
a father in the army

and the distance to the next farm
made them solitary.

Their pets
were given elaborate funerals.

No one understands them.
They are inordinately proud of this

for they have shunned
the brotherhood

of the post room
and the hair salon.

They write a word
and then another word.

It is usually wrong.
Their crossings out are legion.

They sit in trains
and pass through cotton towns at nightfall,

conscious of the shape of cranes
on the violet sky

and how the poured creamer
pleats and billows in their coffee,

and how both of these things
whisper, softly, “Death.”

The dead seem so authentic, posing beside
traction engines in their practical jackets
with their folk-songs and their knowledge of mushrooms.
But they were just like us, vain about the trim
of their moustaches and their Sunday shoes.
They, too, had the dream about the dark house.

Belonging is for horses. Home was always
in the past. The Labrador, baked puddings,
the long table in the orchard at Easter.

Meanwhile, we’re stuck on this side
of the glass, watching dead leaves turn
slowly in the abandoned paddling pool,
remembering that winter when the snow
was so thick we built a cave
of blue light in the center of the lawn.

In truth, the dwarf worked in a betting shop
and wore an orthopedic shoe.
The ugly sisters were neither sisters nor, indeed, women,
nor were they remotely interested in the prince.
The plain librarian looked better with her glasses on,
the bomb had not been fitted with a clock
and when the requisitioned farm-truck shot
the as-yet-uncompleted bridge it nose-dived
into the ravine and blew up
killing both the handsome sheriff
and his lovable but stupid sidekick, Bob.

Philosophic historian,
chronicle that bleak night,
the corncrakes, the explosives,
the exact condition of the owl.
Deliver judgement on the breakdown
of the soul of the general manager
and linger over that summer
in the penitentiary. Alison,
I have not forgotten the ginger
cigarettes and Maurice’s face
in repose. I was sick.
You civilised that solitude.
Fashion our private landscape
out of the world’s howl.
Write me a cure in poetry.
Go far. Go too far.
Find that glimpse.

The inn at Beechen.
Hot rye-cheese and onion bread,
a coarse red track
through beet-fields and water-cress.
No map, only moth and star
and pine, the German weather
pleasing but without glamour.
The peasants laughed. He could not.
Something was waiting for him,
a little havoc of exquisite blue eyes,
the kindness of puzzles
and the quarrels of politicians.
His heart spoke in an unknown tongue.

Daylight and velveteen morning,
fried eggs and blue granite.
His mind was a dark stone.
Was there really a corpse?
Might not the purpose of the devil
be to break the plump and soft?
He rested for ten minutes
by the car factory
where Said was burned.
He had tasted the prince’s hand
in Cairo. Bees, verbena,
agapanthus, that hot breath.
He had been filled. But after that?

Strawberries, turquoise snowdrifts,
satisfactory hot food, the same pumpkins
drying on the shingle, green water.
The afternoon enlivened by the thought
of being unpleasant in the sulphur baths
with her English friend. Letters
to Bolivia, Uruguay, Scotland.
The quiet cancelling-out of the soul.

Meaning is nothing. Nothing.
To understand you have to get down
into the meadow of twinkling lights.

The sun, the road, this earth,
the body, food, sleep, questions,
judgement, medicines,
a rifle bullet, endless walks,
the works of Walter Savage Landor,
public houses, veal, goat, tea,
good government, bad government,
old mischief, new brooms,
a woman shot against a wall,
a deal, an aeroplane, the logic
of events, that solemn river,
a tombstone over the border.

They did not expect comfort.
They turned and stood
in the acetylene dazzle,
the gentleman queer
and the plain German dyke.
Her car was in disrepair.
He suggested coffee.
“I know you.” “How?”
“The prince. That evening …”
Question. Answer. Bad news.
His blue eyes had a light in them
that scored the heart.