The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea: Poems
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MARK HADDON
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea
Mark Haddon is a writer and illustrator of numerous award-winning children’s books and television screenplays. He is the author of the bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2004. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and lives in Oxford, England.
ALSO BY MARK HADDON
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
To Alfie and Zack
With thanks
to Don Paterson
and Sos Eltis
Contents
Go, Litel Bok
A Rough Guide
After a Beheading
Cabin Doors to Automatic
Green
This Poem is Certificate 18
Trees
Nuns
Rescued
1998
The Seventh Circle
A Tally Stick
The Model Village
New Year’s Day
Average Fool
Bushings
Midas
Thunderbirds are Go
Great White
Rings
Black
The Penguin
Days
The River-Car
Galatea
Christmas Night, 1930
Lullaby
The Twilight Zone
The Short Fuse
Miaow
Woof
Gemini
Old, New, Borrowed, Blue
Dry Leaves
Poets
Silver Nitrate
The Facts
The House of the Four Winds
Once Upon a Time
Go, Litel Bok
Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the jury.
Those of my trade, we are like the badger or the mole.
We work alone in darkness, guided by tiny
candles which we do not share, sweating to give birth
to replacement planets where things happen which don’t.
And sometimes the hard jigsaw becomes a picture
and not a car accident. More rarely we place
our fingers adroitly on the frets or keyboard
and multitudes plummet through the small white trapdoor
which bears our hieroglyphs. Then we are taken up
into the blaze and shout of the conurbations
to make words in the air and strike the strange pose
from the clothing catalogue. But sometimes we see
a swallow in wintertime. And the talking horse
and the sad girl and the village under the sea
descend like stars into a land of long evenings
and radically different vegetables
and a flex is run from our hearts into the hearts
of those who do not know the meaning of the words
cardigan or sleet. And there is no finer pudding.
Now I am like that cow in the nursery rhyme.
The fire I have felt beneath your shirts. These cloisters.
Red mullet with honey. This surprisingly large
slab of Perspex. Your hands are on me. But this man
is another man. The clock chimes, my pumpkin waits
and the frog drums his gloved fingers on the dashboard.
May the god whose thoughts are like a tent of white light
above the laundry and the pigeons of this town
walk always by your side. My burrow calls. Good night.
A Rough Guide
Be polite at the reception desk.
Not all the knives are in the museum.
The waitresses know that a nice boy
is formed in the same way as a deckchair.
Pay for the beer and send flowers.
Introduce yourself as Richard.
Do not refer to what somebody did
at a particular time in the past.
Remember, every Friday we used to go
for a walk. I walked. You walked.
Everything in the past is irregular.
This steak is very good. Sit down.
There is no wine, but there is ice cream.
Eat slowly. I have many matches.
After a Beheading
When you have jumped the logging trains
across the Hendersons and eaten
stray dog roasted on a brazier,
when you think that you can feel
the rasp of a freshly laundered pillow
on your face and hear
the little song of halyards
below your window at “The Limes”
but come round to the smell of petrol
and the sherry-hollowed faces
of your dubious companions,
when you want to lie down in the soiled,
grey snow and never move again,
you will come to a five-gabled house
in the suburbs of a cutlery-making city
and be embraced by a bearded man
with the build of a former athlete
who smokes “El Corazon” cigars.
His wife will have perfect breasts
and make the noise of a leopard sleeping.
Neither of them will ask you for your name.
You will be offered the use of a bathroom
where the towel-glare hurts your eyes,
the soap is labeled in Italian
and the cream suit on the warmed rail fits with sinister precision.
You will then be led into the dining room.
There will be beef Wellington and firm pears
and a jazz trio playing Monk
on guitar and vibes.
There will be many fingerbowls.
Your host will say, “Eat … Drink …”
and as your hand hangs like a hawk
above the confusion of forks
you will realize that this
is where your journey starts.
Cabin Doors to Automatic
We take off in a lightning storm.
The big jets kick in and we climb
through blue explosions;
below the fuselage, moonlight
on the Solway Firth, the fields
of Cumbria, our litel spot of erthe
that with the see embracéd is.
This is how we leave the world,
with the heart weeping,
and the hope that distance
brings the solving wonder
of one last clear view
before that long sleep
above the weather’s changes.
Green
Horace Odes 1:4
Spring and warm winds unlock the fist of winter.
Winches haul dry hulls down the beach.
The ploughman and his animals
no longer love the stable and the fire.
The frost no longer paints the fields white.
The moon is overhead. Cytherean Venus
dances with her girls. The Graces
and the spirits of the trees and rivers
stamp the earth while flaming Vulcan
tours the massive thunder-forges of the Cyclops.
It’s time to decorate your oiled hair
with green myrtle or with flowers growing
from the soft earth. It’s time to find a shady spot
and sacrifice a young goat to the woodland god.
Or kill a lamb if that is what he wants.
Death’s sickly face appears at the doors
this short life makes a joke of long hopes.
Pluto’s shadow hall, those ghosts
you read about in stories, and that final night
will soon be snapping at your heels.
And then you won’t be throwing knuckle-bones
to win the job of drinking-master,
or ogling pretty Lycidas, who’ll drive men wild
until he’s big enough for girls.
This Poem is Certificate 18
When you open a collection of poetry or attend a reading you need to know that the poems you choose to read or hear are suitable for the audience.
To help you understand what a poem is like you can look at the certificate it has been given. This poem has been classified as 18. That means this poem is unsuitable for anyone younger than 18.
A poem with an 18 certificate may contain scenes of a violent nature. Carlos de Sessa burning at the stake, for example, his hot fat bubbling like porridge. Or Erymas, stabbed in the mouth, the blade smashing clean through to the brain so that teeth, bone and blood spray from his ruptured face. The slow death of a parent, often from cancer, is particularly common.
There may be sex, too. A man may be sucked off in a McDonald’s en route to the airport, a babysitter may masturbate on the kiln-fired tiles of her employers’ bathroom and an arsehole may be described in more detail than is necessary. The word “cunt” may be used.
In a poem with an 18 certificate the syntax may be knottier and the meaning more opaque than in light, narrative or straightforward lyric verse. A phrase may have as many as four different interpretations, all intended for more or less simultaneous comprehension. Conversely, when the hedged sun draws into itself for self-quenching and these modalities stoop to re-enter the subterrane of faith, the intention may simply be to confuse the less intelligent reader. Sometimes a line or phrase is used simply because “it sounded right.”
A poem with an 18 certificate may be written according to occult rules which are not made available to the reader. A parallel universe may be assumed wherein the expanded inkling undergoes an allusion and, at the climax of frogging, binges in the Bermuda. Some 18-certificate poems purport to be translations of work by Finnish and Romanian poets who do not, in fact, exist. In others a lightbulb may be granted sentience.
Like plumbers and dentists, poets are fallible, and the possibility of genuine nonsense cannot be ruled out. Unlike plumbing and dentistry, however, poetry is slow, frustrating and poorly rewarded work which fails more often than it succeeds and is therefore embarked upon largely by men and women labouring under a sense of almost religious vocation, grandiose self-delusion or some combination of both. As a result, many poems with an 18 certificate are written by people whose minds you may not wish to enter.
The language of a poem with an 18 certificate may be denser and more powerful than the language you are used to dealing with. And though it makes nothing happen it may, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, ride its own melting into your soul and bring you face to face with the madness of space.
It is an offense to read or supply a poem classified as 18 to anyone below that age.
Poetry certificates are there to help you make the right choice.
Trees
They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,
yet they do not draw attention to themselves.
You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
in the air that swims above the little gardens.
Or you will wake at your aunt’s cottage,
your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.
Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
these are accidental things.
We lost this game a long way back.
Look at you. You’re reading poetry.
Outside the spring air is thick
with the seeds of their children.
Nuns
They’re out again,
flocking on the esplanade
like crows.
Passing the nudist beach
they giggle into cupped hands
like smokers around a match.
Some play crazy golf.
Some buy the less exciting
flavors of ice cream.
Others lie in deckchairs
and seem unnaturally comfortable
despite the heat.
Their ankles are
like flashes
of lightning.
We come across them
paired in bumper cars
or spellbound by cartoons
and Rugby League
on televisions stacked
in storefront windows.
They smell of soap
and dentists’ hands
and rustle when they move.
Some go native,
as they always do,
stung by that long view
through the shilling telescope
or by the soft eyes
of the boy who rents the pedalos.
They move into cheap lodgings
with a single suitcase
and experiment with fashionable clothes.
Later, out of season,
we will recognize them,
frying breaded cod
or punching ferry tickets,
marked out
by the chapel-silence
which surrounds them still,
and by the way they stoop
to talk to children.
They are not mourned,
for come October,
when the ghost train shuts down
and the colored bulbs along the pier
are packed away,
their places will be filled
by the girls we teased in school
who yearned for love
and dreamed of reaching up
to take the teacher’s hand
and being lifted from the flesh
in which they’d never felt at home,
or walking, as they walk now, up the harsh rake of the lanes, past burger bars and butchers,
past the Grand Hotel,
the Smuggler’s Haven
and the Wall of China,
past the car park and the campsite,
past the Esso station
and the padlocked school
then through the granite arch
and over moonlit
geometric lawns
into the silence
of a clean white room
out of the swing of the sea.
Rescued
Horace Odes 1:5
Which under-muscled, over-perfumed boy
is groping you on roses in your love-nest,
Pyrrha? Who’s inspired you to wash and cut
your honey-colored hair like this?
God knows how many times he’ll curse
the bad luck that made him love you,
and be flabbergasted by the force tens
blackening your little sea.
The idiot. He drinks your sunshine down
and thinks the wind will never change.
Those miserable men. You dazzle them
but no one ever ties up in your harbor.
As for me, you can read my story
on the temple wall: just another rescued
sailor who has offered up his sodden boots
to the great god of the sea.
1998
Come, Muse, let us sing of Velcro,
teabags and the Tetrapak.
For these too are works of nature,
as deserving of our praise
as dawn light on the Half-Dome,
hare tracks in overnight snow
or a fine French derailleu
r,
and will join the astrolabe
and toasting fork in old films
and stand on plastic trivets in museums,
giving off that low hum
of the long dead.
The Seventh Circle
Another werewolf night, the trees spastic
with wind and the dogs uneasy on their chains.
Three trolls wrestle with a bloody scrap
that will not die, the taverns roar and glitter
on the greasy quay and the Scissorman
chases the dragon down those little tracks
that promise daybreak by the sea, pistachio
cakes and minarets but curve, always,
back to that long night in the nursery.
The clock strikes twelve, and on the dirt road
where the shanties thin to marsh grass and burnt cars,
the music stops and tonight’s crocodile
of lost children melt into the dark.
They are ours now. You cannot touch them.
They will see you in bad dreams.
The smoke of October bonfires, a single
gunshot hurling rooks into a white sky
and you, at the French windows, ogling
the gardener’s boy while your niece makes a pig’s ear
of a Chopin Polonaise and the servants
bitch about you in the scullery.
But you will see them from the evening train,
raging in burned-out lots and under bridges.
You will see them in the corridors
of hospitals. You will see them hover
on the dark that pools in hotel rooms
and lying under blankets on the tarmac of the other carriageway, the broken glass
like snow and the lights flashing
like a black Christmas. You will see them
standing at your shoulder in the mirror.