The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  You shielded your eye from the sun

  As a peacock strutted towards you.

  You called it beautiful and touched its head,

  Then turned around to me, eye-patched

  And fastened to a mourning blink

  Brought there by melanoma’s

  Sun-coaxed horrific oncos,

  Leaving me to guess at

  What mysteries you knew

  Foretold by love or creatures.

  DEREK MAHON Antarctica

  ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’

  The others nod, pretending not to know.

  At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

  He leaves them reading and begins to climb,

  Goading his ghost into the howling snow;

  He is just going outside and may be some time.

  The tent recedes beneath its crust of rime

  And frostbite is replaced by vertigo:

  At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

  Need we consider it some sort of crime,

  This numb self-sacrifice of the weakest? No,

  He is just going outside and may be some time –

  In fact, for ever. Solitary enzyme,

  Though the night yield no glimmer there will glow,

  At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

  He takes leave of the earthly pantomime

  Quietly, knowing it is time to go:

  ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’

  At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

  JOHN AGARD Listen Mr Oxford don

  Me not no Oxford don

  me a simple immigrant

  from Clapham Common

  I didn’t graduate

  I immigrate

  But listen Mr Oxford don

  I’m a man on de run

  and a man on de run

  is a dangerous one

  I ent have no gun

  I ent have no knife

  but mugging de Queen’s English

  is the story of my life

  I dont need no axe

  to split/ up yu syntax

  I dont need no hammer

  to mash/ up yu grammar

  I warning you Mr Oxford don

  I’m a wanted man

  and a wanted man

  is a dangerous one

  Dem accuse me of assault

  on de Oxford dictionary/

  imagine a concise peaceful man like me/

  dem want me serve time

  for inciting rhyme to riot

  but I tekking it quiet

  down here in Clapham Common

  I’m not a violent man Mr Oxford don

  I only armed wit mih human breath

  but human breath

  is a dangerous weapon

  So mek dem send one big word after me

  I ent serving no jail sentence

  I slashing suffix in self-defence

  I bashing future wit present tense

  and if necessary

  I making de Queen’s English accessory/to my offence

  PETER DIDSBURY The Hailstone 1987

  Standing under the greengrocer’s awning

  in the kind of rain we used to call a cloudburst,

  getting home later with a single hailstone in my hair.

  Ambition would have us die in thunderstorms

  like Jung and Mahler. Five minutes now,

  for all our sad and elemental loves.

  A woman sheltering inside the shop

  had a frightened dog,

  which she didn’t want us to touch.

  It had something to do with class,

  and the ownership of fear. Broken ceramic lightning

  was ripping open the stitching in the sky.

  The rain was ‘siling’ down,

  the kind that comes bouncing back off the pavement,

  heavy milk from the ancient skins

  being poured through the primitive strainer.

  Someone could have done us in flat colours,

  formal and observant, all on one plane,

  you and me outside and the grocer and the lady

  behind the gunmetal glass, gazing out over our shoulders.

  I can see the weave of the paper behind the smeared reflections,

  some of the colour lifting as we started a sudden dash home.

  We ran by the post office and I thought, ‘It is all still true,

  a wooden drawer is full of postal orders, it is raining,

  mothers and children are standing in their windows,

  I am running through the rain past a shop which sells wool,

  you take home fruit and veg in bags of brown paper,

  we are getting wet, it is raining.’

  It was like being back

  in the reign of George the Sixth, the kind of small town

  which still lies stacked in the back of old storerooms in schools,

  where plural roof and elf expect to get very wet

  and the beasts deserve their nouns of congregation

  as much as the postmistress, spinster, her title.

  I imagine those boroughs as intimate with rain,

  their ability to call on sentient functional downpours

  for any picnic or trip to the German Butcher’s

  one sign of a usable language getting used,

  make of this what you will. The rain has moved on,

  and half a moon in a darkening blue sky

  silvers the shrinking puddles in the road:

  moon that emptied the post office and grocer’s,

  moon old kettle of rain and idiolect,

  the moon the sump of the aproned pluvial towns,

  cut moon as half a hailstone in the hair.

  PAUL MULDOON Something Else

  When your lobster was lifted out of the tank

  to be weighed

  I thought of woad,

  of madders, of fugitive, indigo inks,

  of how Nerval

  was given to promenade

  a lobster on a gossamer thread,

  how, when a decent interval

  had passed

  (son front rouge encor du baiser de la reine)

  and his hopes of Adrienne

  proved false,

  he hanged himself from a lamp-post

  with a length of chain, which made me think

  of something else, then something else again.

  CIARAN CARSON Dresden

  Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule;

  Though why Mule was called Mule is anybody’s guess. I stayed there once,

  Or rather, I nearly stayed there once. But that’s another story.

  At any rate they lived in this decrepit caravan, not two miles out of Carrick,

  Encroached upon by baroque pyramids of empty baked bean tins, rusts

  And ochres, hints of autumn merging into twilight. Horse believed

  They were as good as a watchdog, and to tell you the truth

  You couldn’t go near the place without something falling over:

  A minor avalanche would ensue – more like a shop bell, really,

  The old-fashioned ones on string, connected to the latch, I think,

  And as you entered in, the bell would tinkle in the empty shop, a musk

  Of soap and turf and sweets would hit you from the gloom. Tobacco.

  Baling wire. Twine. And, of course, shelves and pyramids of tins.

  An old woman would appear from the back – there was a sizzling pan in there,

  Somewhere, a whiff of eggs and bacon – and ask you what you wanted;

  Or rather, she wouldn’t ask; she would talk about the weather. It had rained

  That day, but it was looking better. They had just put in the spuds.

  I had only come to pass the time of day, so I bought a token packet of Gold Leaf.

  All this time the fry was frying away. Maybe she’d a daughter in there


  Somewhere, though I hadn’t heard the neighbours talk of it; if anybody knew,

  It would be Horse. Horse kept his ears to the ground.

  And he was a great man for current affairs; he owned the only TV in the place.

  Come dusk he’d set off on his rounds, to tell the whole townland the latest

  Situation in the Middle East, a mortar bomb attack in Mullaghbawn –

  The damn things never worked, of course – and so he’d tell the story

  How in his young day it was very different. Take young Flynn, for instance,

  Who was ordered to take this bus and smuggle some sticks of gelignite

  Across the border, into Derry, when the RUC – or was it the RIC? –

  Got wind of it. The bus was stopped, the peeler stepped on. Young Flynn

  Took it like a man, of course: he owned up right away. He opened the bag

  And produced the bomb, his rank and serial number. For all the world

  Like a pound of sausages. Of course, the thing was, the peeler’s bike

  Had got a puncture, and he didn’t know young Flynn from Adam. All he wanted

  Was to get home for his tea. Flynn was in for seven years and learned to speak

  The best of Irish. He had thirteen words for a cow in heat;

  A word for the third thwart in a boat, the wake of a boat on the ebb tide.

  He knew the extinct names of insects, flowers, why this place was called

  Whatever: Carrick, for example, was a rock. He was damn right there –

  As the man said, When you buy meat you buy bones, when you buy land you buy stones.

  You’d be hard put to find a square foot in the whole bloody parish

  That wasn’t thick with flints and pebbles. To this day he could hear the grate

  And scrape as the spade struck home, for it reminded him of broken bones:

  Digging a graveyard, maybe – or better still, trying to dig a reclaimed tip

  Of broken delph and crockery ware – you know that sound that sets your teeth on edge

  When the chalk squeaks on the blackboard, or you shovel ashes from the stove?

  Master McGinty – he’d be on about McGinty then, and discipline, the capitals

  Of South America, Moore’s Melodies, the Battle of Clontarf, and

  Tell me this, an educated man like you: What goes on four legs when it’s young,

  Two legs when it’s grown up, and three legs when it’s old? I’d pretend

  I didn’t know. McGinty’s leather strap would come up then, stuffed

  With threepenny bits to give it weight and sting. Of course, it never did him

  Any harm: You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make him drink.

  He himself was nearly going on to be a priest.

  And many’s the young cub left the school, as wise as when he came.

  Carrowkeel was where McGinty came from – Narrow Quarter, Flynn explained –

  Back before the Troubles, a place that was so mean and crabbed,

  Horse would have it, men were known to eat their dinner from a drawer.

  Which they’d slide shut the minute you’d walk in.

  He’d demonstrate this at the kitchen table, hunched and furtive, squinting

  Out the window – past the teetering minarets of rust, down the hedge-dark aisle –

  To where a stranger might appear, a passer-by, or what was maybe worse,

  Someone he knew. Someone who wanted something. Someone who was hungry.

  Of course who should come tottering up the lane that instant but his brother

  Mule. I forgot to mention they were twins. They were as like two –

  No, not peas in a pod, for this is not the time nor the place to go into

  Comparisons, and this is really Horse’s story, Horse who – now I’m getting

  Round to it – flew over Dresden in the war. He’d emigrated first, to

  Manchester. Something to do with scrap – redundant mill machinery,

  Giant flywheels, broken looms that would, eventually, be ships, or aeroplanes.

  He said he wore his fingers to the bone.

  And so, on impulse, he had joined the RAF. He became a rear gunner.

  Of all the missions, Dresden broke his heart. It reminded him of china.

  As he remembered it, long afterwards, he could hear, or almost hear

  Between the rapid desultory thunderclaps, a thousand tinkling echoes –

  All across the map of Dresden, store-rooms full of china shivered, teetered

  And collapsed, an avalanche of porcelain, slushing and cascading: cherubs,

  Shepherdesses, figurines of Hope and Peace and Victory, delicate bone fragments.

  He recalled in particular a figure from his childhood, a milkmaid

  Standing on the mantelpiece. Each night as they knelt down for the rosary,

  His eyes would wander up to where she seemed to beckon to him, smiling,

  Offering him, eternally, her pitcher of milk, her mouth of rose and cream.

  One day, reaching up to hold her yet again, his fingers stumbled, and she fell.

  He lifted down a biscuit tin, and opened it.

  It breathed an antique incense: things like pencils, snuff, tobacco.

  His war medals. A broken rosary. And there, the milkmaid’s creamy hand, the outstretched

  Pitcher of milk, all that survived. Outside, there was a scraping

  And a tittering; I knew Mule’s step by now, his careful drunken weaving

  Through the tin-stacks. I might have stayed the night, but there’s no time

  To go back to that now; I could hardly, at any rate, pick up the thread.

  I wandered out through the steeples of rust, the gate that was a broken bed.

  EAVAN BOLAND Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening

  Jean-Baptiste Chardin

  is painting a woman

  in the last summer light.

  All summer long

  he has been slighting her

  in botched blues, tints,

  half-tones, rinsed neutrals.

  What you are watching

  is light unlearning itself,

  an infinite unfrocking of the prism.

  Before your eyes

  the ordinary life

  is being glazed over:

  pigments of the bibelot,

  the cabochon, the water-opal

  pearl to the intimate

  simple colours of

  her ankle-length summer skirt.

  Truth makes shift:

  The triptych shrinks

  to the cabinet picture.

  Can’t you feel it?