Selected Poems

by Harrison, Tony

  (John Cleveland)

  ‘Venient annis saecula seris,

  Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum

  Laxet & ingens pateat tellus,

  Tethysque novos detegat orbes,

  Nec sit terris ultima Thule.’

  (Seneca, Medea, 375–9)

  For defending in our Civil Wars

  the King’s against the better cause,

  Newcastle got its motto: FORTIT-

  ER TRIUMPHANS DEFENDIT.

  After Nigeria and Prague I come

  back near to where I started from,

  all my defences broken down

  on nine or ten Newcastle Brown.

  A sudden, stiff September breeze

  blows off the sea along the quays

  and chills us; autumn and I need

  your shoulder with a desperate need.

  A clumsy effort at control,

  I faff with paper chips and coal,

  and rake out with elaborate fuss

  one whole summer’s detritus.

  A good draught and the fire roars

  like muted Disney dinosaurs,

  and last week’s Sunday paper glows

  yellowish, its urgent prose,

  like flies across a carcass, spreads

  and fattens on the voiceless dead.

  A picture shows lobbed mortar bombs

  smashing down Onitsha homes.

  The fire sucks in the first cold air

  under the coverage of massacre.

  The fire chatters, almost flies,

  a full-fledged bird of paradise.

  I lay down, dizzy, drunk, alone,

  life circling life like the Eddystone

  dark sea, but lighting nothing; sense

  nor centre, nor circumference.

  A life-long, sick sixpennyworth

  of appalling motion round the Earth;

  scared, moonrocketing till Pop-

  eye and blurred planets stop;

  Switchback; Helter Skelter; Reel;

  the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Big Wheel,

  its million coloured lightbulbs one

  red halo like an empty sun.

  The Caterpillar; Hunslet Feast;

  one hand on my first woman’s breast;

  darkness; acceleration so

  we’re desperate with vertigo;

  then chained in solitary Chair-

  o-planes through whistling air

  as all the known Leeds landmarks blur

  to something dark and circular.

  Venus, Vulcan, Cupid stare

  out vacantly on City Square,

  and Deus iuvat impigros

  above the bank where God helps those

  who help themselves, declares

  Leeds purposeful in its affairs.

  Mercator; miles, school chapel glass

  transparencies to blood and brass.

  And Self Help Samuel Smiles was said

  to have waltzed round our first bed

  in our partitioned ballroom flat

  with hardly room to swing a cat.

  Worthies! Loiners! O King Dick

  Oastler and his rhetoric,

  and William Hey, the first to show

  syphilis in utero.

  O highlife crocodiles that went

  round one palm tree in the bare cement!

  The dizziness! That spiral stair

  up St Vitus’s Cathedral; there

  the golden cockerel and great Prague

  before us like a catalogue;

  slides. Bloodless mementos, all

  Time-Life International.

  And now with vistas like Earl Grey’s

  I look out over life and praise

  from my unsteady, sea-view plinth

  each dark turn of the labyrinth

  that might like a river suddenly

  wind its widening banks into the sea

  and Newcastle is Newcastle is New-

  castle is Peru!

  Swirled detritus and driftwood pass

  in state the 1880 Sas-

  inena Cold Storage Co.,

  and Neptune gazes at the Tyne’s flow

  seawards, where the sea-winds ‘boast

  and bluster’ at the North East coast,

  the sluggish Tyne meandering through

  the staithes and shipyards of Peru.

  Shadow girders faced with sun

  shimmer like heaped bullion.

  Commerce and contraceptives glide

  and circle on the turning tide;

  Plain, Gossamer and Fetherlite

  and US Trojan, knotted tight,

  ferry their unborn semen, free

  for ever from discovery.

  Discovery! Slaves, now trains,

  like spirochetes through dark brains,

  tunnel the Andes, spiralling for zinc

  and silver, gold and lead; drink

  still makes me giddy; my mind whirls

  through all my wanderings and girls

  to one last city, whose black crest

  shows all the universe at rest.

  At rest! That last red flash

  as life’s last ember turns to ash

  and riddled dusts drop through the grate

  around the heart. O celebrate,

  as panic screws up each charged nerve

  to cornering the next sharp swerve,

  Earth, people, planets as they move

  with all the gravity of love.

  First this Victorian terrace, where

  small scars of the last World War –

  those wrought iron railings made

  into shrapnel and grenade,

  acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys,

  victorious artillery –

  are enough reminder that we brave

  harsh opposition when we love.

  This cluttered room, its chandelier

  still spinning from the evening’s beer,

  this poor, embattled fortress, this strong-

  hold of love, that can’t last long

  against the world’s bold cannonade

  of loveless warfare and cold trade,

  this bed, this fire, and lastly us,

  naked, bold, adventurous.

  Discovery! wart, mole, spot,

  like outcrops on a snowfield, dot

  these slopes of flesh my fingers ski

  with circular dexterity.

  This moment when my hand strays

  your body like an endless maze,

  returning and returning, you,

  O you; you also are Peru.

  And just as distant. Flashing stars

  drop to the ashpit through the bars.

  I’m back in Africa, at ease

  under the splashed shade of four trees,

  watching a muscled woman heave

  huge headloads of dead wood; one bare leaf

  for covering wilts in the heat,

  curls, then flutters to her flat, cracked feet.

  And round each complex of thatched huts

  is a man-high cactus hedge that shuts

  out intruders and the mortars thud

  like a migraine in the compound mud.

  Night comes, and as drunk as hell

  I watch the heavens and fireflies, and can’t tell,

  here at my Shangri-la, Pankshin,

  where insects end and stars begin.

  My fingerprints still lined with coal

  send cold shudders through my soul.

  Each whorl, my love-, my long life-line,

  mine, inalienably mine,

  lead off my body as they press

  onwards into nothingness.

  I see my grimy fingers smudge

  everything they feel or touch.

  The fire I laid and lit to draw

  you downstairs to the second floor,

  flickers and struts upon my bed.

  And I’m left gazing at a full-page spread

  of aggressively fine bosoms, nude

 
and tanned almost to négritude,

  in the Colour Supplement’s Test

  Yourself for Cancer of the Breast.

  Durham

  ‘St Cuthbert’s shrine,

  founded 999’

  (mnemonic)

  ANARCHY and GROW YOUR OWN

  whitewashed on to crumbling stone

  fade in the drizzle. There’s a man

  handcuffed to warders in a black sedan.

  A butcher dumps a sodden sack

  of sheep pelts off his bloodied back,

  then hangs the morning’s killings out,

  cup-cum-muzzle on each snout.

  I’ve watched where this ‘distinguished see’

  takes off into infinity,

  among transistor antennae,

  and student smokers getting high,

  and visiting Norwegian choirs

  in raptures over Durham’s spires,

  lifers, rapists, thieves, ant-size

  circle and circle at their exercise.

  And Quasimodo’s bird’s-eye view

  of big wigs and their retinue,

  a five car Rolls Royce motorcade

  of judgement draped in Town Hall braid,

  I’ve watched the golden maces sweep

  from courtrooms to the Castle keep

  through winding Durham, the elect

  before whom ids must genuflect.

  But some stay standing and at one

  God’s irritating carrillon

  brings you to me; I feel like the hunch-

  back taking you for lunch;

  then bed. All afternoon two church-

  high prison helicopters search

  for escapees down by the Wear

  and seem as though they’re coming here.

  Listen! Their choppers guillotine

  all the enemies there’ve ever been

  of Church and State, including me

  for taking this small liberty.

  Liberal, lover, communist,

  Czechoslovakia, Cuba, grist,

  grist for the power-driven mill

  weltering in overkill.

  And England? Quiet Durham? Threat

  smokes off our lives like steam off wet

  subsidences when summer rain

  drenches the workings. You complain

  that the machinery of sudden death,

  Fascism, the hot bad breath

  of Powers down small countries’ necks

  shouldn’t interfere with sex.

  They are sex, love, we must include

  all these in love’s beatitude.

  Bad weather and the public mess

  drive us to private tenderness,

  though I wonder if together we,

  alone two hours, can ever be

  love’s anti-bodies in the sick,

  sick body politic.

  At best we’re medieval masons, skilled

  but anonymous within our guild,

  at worst defendants hooded in a car

  charged with something sinister.

  On the status quo’s huge edifice

  we’re just excrescences that kiss,

  cathedral gargoyles that obtrude

  their acts of ‘moral turpitude’.

  But turpitude still keeps me warm

  in foul weather as I head for home

  down New Elvet, through the town,

  past the butcher closing down,

  hearing the belfry jumble time

  out over Durham. As I climb

  rain blankets the pithills, mist

  the chalkings of the anarchist.

  I wait for the six-five Plymouth train

  glowering at Durham. First rain,

  then hail, like teeth spit from a skull,

  then fog obliterate it. As we pull

  out of the station through the dusk and fog,

  there, lighting up, is Durham, dog

  chasing its own cropped tail,

  University, Cathedral, Gaol.

  Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast

  for Jane

  ‘These rooms have been furnished by the League of Friends

  For your comfort and rest while illness portends.

  Take care of the things which from us you borrow

  For others are certain to need them tomorrow.’

  (Inscribed in the League of Friends rest room, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne)

  ‘C’est mon unique soutien au monde, à présent!’

  (Arthur Rimbaud, 2 July 1891, Oeuvres, p. 528)

  A Scottish & Newcastle clops

  past the RVI and traffic stops

  to let the anachronistic dray

  turn right into the brewery.

  Victoria, now that daylight’s gone,

  whitens, and a Park lake swan

  loops its pliant neck to scoff

  the bits of sandwich floating off

  the boathouse jetty. Empress, Queen,

  here slender, beddable, your clean-

  living family image drove

  my mother venomously anti love,

  and made her think the stillbirth just

  retribution for our filthy lust;

  our first (the one we married for)

  red splashes on a LADIES floor …

  inter urinam et faeces nasc-

  imur … issues of blood. You ask,

  as brought to bed you blench and bleed,

  then scream, insisting that I read,

  as blood comes out in spurts like piss,

  a bit of Pride & Prejudice.

  I will her breaths. Again! Again!

  my daughter heaves in oxygen

  and lives, each heaved breath

  another lurch away from death,

  each exhalation like death throes,

  a posser squelched down on wet clothes,

  and the only sign of life I see

  is a spitting tracheotomy.

  When you’re conscious, Jane, we’ll read

  how that caparisoned, white steed

  helped the younger son get past

  leafage clinging like Elastoplast

  and win through to bestow the kiss

  that works the metamorphosis.

  But frogs stay frogs, the briar grows

  thicker and thicker round the rose.

  I stoop to kiss away your pain

  through stuff like florist’s cellophane,

  but my kiss can’t make you less

  the helpless prey of Nothingness –

  ring-a-ring-a-roses … love

  goes gravewards but does move.

  Love’s not something you can hoard

  against the geriatric ward.

  Mother, all, all, of us in this

  brave trophallaxis of a kiss

  that short-circuits generations scent

  mortality’s rich nutriment.

  The waiting room’s an airless place

  littered with comics: Spectre; Space;

  Adventure; love and hate

  in AD 3068:

  interplanetary affairs

  policed by Superlegionaires:

  STONE BOY of the planet Zwen

  who turns to stone and back again,

  and BRAINIAC, space-genius,

  who finds Earth’s labs ridiculous,

  and MATTER-EATER-LAD resist

  the mad, moon-exiled scientist –

  Dr MANTIS MORLO! Will he smash

  our heroes into lunar ash?

  Air! Air! There’s not enough

  air in this small world. I’ll suf-

  focate. Air! Air! – In each black

  PVC disposal sack,

  I see two of my dimensions gone

  into a flat oblivion.

  Weightless, like a stranger caught

  loosely flapping on my mother’s grate,

  down corridors, a shadow man,

  I almost sleepwalk, float past An-

  aesthesia, X-Ray, Speech

  Therapy an
d, come full circle, reach

  again the apparatus where you lie

  between the armless and the eyeless boy.

  I sicken. Jane! I could cut off

  your breathing with a last wet cough,

  break the connections, save you from

  almost a lifetime’s crippledom,

  legs splayed outwards, the crushed bones

  like the godfish Olokun’s.

  The black spot crossing; on both sides

  a blank male silhouette still strides

  off the caution and just keeps

  on striding, while Newcastle sleeps,

  between the Deaf School and the Park,

  into his element, the dark.

  The Scottish drivers have begun

  the last stretch of the homeward run;

  another hundred and they’ll pull

  into the brightening capital,

  each lashed, tarpaulined hulk

  groaning borderwards: Blue Circle Bulk

  Cement; Bulk Earthmoving; Bulk Grain;

  Edinburgh and back again.

  And up the Great North Road in twos

  great tankers of Newcastle booze,

  returning empty, leaving full,

  swashing with comfort for John Bull

  and John Bull’s bouncing babes who slug

  their English anguish at the bottle’s dug.

  O caravanserais! I too could drown

  this newest sorrow in Newcastle Brown.

  I thrash round desperately. I flail

  my arms at sharks in seas of ale.

  Organs. Head/-lights/-lines. Black. White.

  The on/off sirening blue light;

  heart/lungs like a grappled squid;

  BLIND PARAPLEGIC’S CHANNEL BID.

  Blood; piss; oceans; taste of salt.

  Halt! Halt! Halt! Halt!

  I surface and the Tynemouth Queen,

  that death’s door study streaked with green,

  is sitting dwarfish, slumped, alone

  on her seawind-eroded throne,

  scowling at a glimpse of sea

  and wrecked, Dane-harried priory.

  Above the grounded RVI

  a few wind-driven seagulls cry

  like grizzling kids. Out there; out there

  where everything is sea and air,

  at Tynemouth and at Seaton Sluice,

  the sea works bits of England loose,

  and redeposits on the land

  the concrete tanktraps as blown sand.

  Blood transfusion, saline drip,

  ‘this fiddle’ and ‘stiff upper lip’

  have seen us so far.

  You’ll live,

  like your father, a contemplative.

  Daylight, but a pale Blue Star

  still just glimmers on the nearest bar.

  An orderly brings tea and toast.

  Mother, wife and daughter, ghost –

  I’ve laid, laid, laid, laid

  you, but I’m still afraid,

  though now Newcastle’s washed with light,

  about the next descent of night.