by Paul Keegan
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:
Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,
– All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.
Their distant husbands lean across mahogany
And delicately manipulate the market,
While safe at home, the tender and the gentle
Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,
Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,
Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,
Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,
Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,
Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners
Around the snags of furniture, they straighten
And haul out sheets from under the incontinent
And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,
Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,
Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,
Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,
Contorting wool around their knitting needles,
Creating snug and comfy on their needles.
Their huge hands! their everywhere eyes! their voices
Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,
Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,
Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,
Their wombs that pocket a man upside down!
And when all’s over, off with overalls,
Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,
Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,
And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,
Their essences of lilies and of roses.
THOM GUNN The Idea of Trust
The idea of trust, or,
the thief. He
was always around,
‘pretty’ Jim.
Like a lilac bush or
a nice picture on the wall.
Blue eyes of an
intense vagueness
and the well-arranged
bearing of an animal.
Then one day he
said something!
he said
that trust is
an intimate conspiracy.
What did that
mean? Anyway next day
he was gone, with
all the money and dope
of the people he’d lived with.
I begin
to understand. I see him
picking through their things
at his leisure, with
a quiet secret smile
choosing and taking,
having first discovered
and set up his phrase to
scramble
that message of
enveloping trust.
He’s getting
free. His eyes
are almost transparent.
He has put on
gloves. He fingers
the little privacies of those
who acted as if there
should be no privacy.
They took that
risk.
Wild lilac
chokes the garden.
DONALD DAVIE from In the Stopping Train 1977
I have got into the slow train
again. I made the mistake
knowing what I was doing,
knowing who had to be punished.
I know who has to be punished:
the man going mad inside me;
whether I am fleeing
from him or towards him.
This journey will punish the bastard:
he’ll have his flowering gardens
to stare at through the hot window;
words like ‘laurel’ won’t help.
He abhors his fellows,
especially children; let there
not for pity’s sake
be a crying child in the carriage.
So much for pity’s sake.
The rest for the sake of justice:
torment him with his hatreds
and love of fictions.
The punishing slow pace
punishes also places along the line
for having, some of them, Norman
or Hanoverian stone-work:
his old familiars, his
exclusive prophylactics.
He’ll stare his fill at their
emptiness on this journey.
Jonquil is a sweet word.
Is it a flowering bush?
Let him helplessly wonder
for hours if perhaps he’s seen it.
Has it a white and yellow
flower, the jonquil? Has it
a perfume? Oh his art could
always pretend it had.
He never needed to see,
not with his art to help him.
He never needed to use his
nose, except for language.
Torment him with his hatreds,
torment him with his false
loves. Torment him with time
that has disclosed their falsehood.
Time, the exquisite torment!
His future is a slow
and stopping train through places
whose names used to have virtue.
*
A stopping train, I thought,
was a train that was going to stop.
Why board it then, in the first place?
Oh no, they explained, it is stopping
and starting, stopping and starting.
How could it, they reasoned gently,
be always stopping unless
also it was always starting?
I saw the logic of that;
grown-ups were good at explaining.
Going to stop was the same
as stopping to go. What madness!
It made a sort of sense, though.
It’s not, I explained, that I mind
getting to the end of the line.
Expresses have to do that.
No, they said. We see…
But do you? I said. It’s not
the last stop that is bad…
No, they said, it’s the last
start, the little one; yes,
the one that doesn’t last.
Well, they said, you’ll learn
all about that when you’re older.
Of course they learned it first.
Oh naturally, yes.
NORMAN MACCAIG Notations of Ten Summer Minutes
A boy skips flat stones out to sea – each does fine
till a small wave meets it head on and swallows it.
The boy will do the same.
The schoolmaster stands looking out of the window
with one Latin eye and one Greek one.
A boat rounds the point in Gaelic.
Out of the shop comes a stream
of Omo, Weetabix, BiSoDol tablets and a man
with a pocket shaped like a whisky bottle.
Lord V. walks by with the village in his pocket.
Angus walks by
spending the village into the air.
A melodeon is wheezing a clear-throated jig
on the deck on the Arcadia. On the shore hills Pan
cocks a hairy ear; and falls asleep again.
The ten minutes are up, except they aren’t.
I leave the village, except I don’t.
The jig fades to silence, except it doesn’t.
W. S. GRAHAM Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch
Which I was given because
I loved him and we had
Terrible times together.
O tarnished ticking time
Piece with your bent hand,
You must be used to being
Looked at suddenly
/>
In the middle of the night
When he switched the light on
Beside his bed. I hope
You told him the best time
When he lifted you up
To meet the Hilton gaze.
I lift you up from the mantel
Piece here in my house
Wearing your verdigris.
At least I keep you wound
And put my ear to you
To hear Botallack tick.
You realize your master
Has relinquished you
And gone to lie under
The ground at St Just.
Tell me the time. The time
Is Botallack o’clock.
This is the dead of night.
He switches the light on
To find a cigarette
And pours himself a Teachers.
He picks me up and holds me
Near his lonely face
To see my hands. He thinks
He is not being watched.
The images of his dream
Are still about his face
As he spits and tries not
To remember where he was.
I am only a watch
And pray time hastes away.
I think I am running down.
Watch, it is time I wound
You up again. I am
Very much not your dear
Last master but we had
Terrible times together.
ROBERT GARIOCH The Maple and the Pine
For maple and for pine
I socht, thae sevin year;
maple I wad presume
raither nor sycamore.
5
Thof I wes wantan skeel
I wadnae hain on care,
my harns aa my pride:
for thon I had nae fear.
Maple for back and ribs,
10
neck and heid and scroll;
for belly the Swiss pine,
seasont, dry and auld,
the southside of the tree
frae norart in a dell,
15
sawn on the quarter, cut
midwart throu the bole.
Amati my outline,
I coft nae feenisht thing
forbye, guidit my haun
20
or I cuid streitch the strings;
wi gauge and callipers
and sense of thicknessin
I mainaged aa things weill
frae template til bee’s-sting.
25
A wolf had won inbye
for aa my besiness,
gowlan aneath my bowe
whan I wad pley my piece;
wolf-notes cam girnan throu
30
the tone. In sair distress
I brak it owre my knee,
sic wes my heaviness.
1978 GEOFFREY HILL from An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
9 The Laurel Axe
Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods
with smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine
out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green;
the avenues are spread with brittle floods.
Platonic England, house of solitudes,
rests in its laurels and its injured stone,
replete with complex fortunes that are gone,
beset by dynasties of moods and clouds.
It stands, as though at ease with its own world,
the mannerly extortions, languid praise,
all that devotion long since bought and sold,
the rooms of cedar and soft-thudding baize,
tremulous boudoirs where the crystals kissed in
cabinets of amethyst and frost.
12 The Eve of St Mark
Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands,
godmother, nod and nod from the half-gloom;
broochlight intermittent between the fronds,
the owl immortal in its crystal dome.
Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill,
the clock discounts us with a telling chime.
Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal,
burnish upon the threshold of the dream:
churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls
of copyhold well-tinctured and well-tied.
Your photo-albums loved by the boy-king
preserve in sepia waterglass the souls
of distant cousins, virgin till they died,
and the lost delicate suitors who could sing.
THOMAS KINSELLA Tao and Unfitness at Inistiogue on the River Nore
Noon
The black flies kept nagging in the heat.
Swarms of them, at every step, snarled
off pats of cow dung spattered in the grass.
Move, if you move, like water.
The punts were knocking by the boathouse, at full tide.
Volumes of water turned the river curve
hushed under an insect haze.
Slips of white,
trout bellies, flicked in the corner of the eye
and dropped back onto the deep mirror.
Respond. Do not interfere. Echo.
Thick green woods along the opposite bank
climbed up from a root-dark recess
eaved with mud-whitened leaves.
*
In a matter of hours all that water is gone,
except for a channel near the far side.
Muck and shingle and pools where the children
wade, stabbing flatfish.
Afternoon
