Selected Poems

by Harrison, Tony

plantlife, a yellow house, a pair of lovers,

  uniting in their love deep opposites.

  This Earth, and this Earth’s sterile satellite

  won’t always be, like life and death, apart,

  if Man’s destructive mind with Nature’s might

  leaves the planet pitted lunar chart

  with no one here to name its barren craters

  after rainbows, or discoverers, or peace,

  though there’ll be peace when Earth’s worst agitators

  find in final dissolution their release.

  Despite barricaded bolt-holes deep below

  it’s often said that what will come off best

  once, step by step, we’ve reached All-Systems-Go,

  of all life on this Earth, ’s the lowliest:

  these bugs tonight like high-roast coffee beans

  that fling themselves at flames and self-destruct,

  that blue wasp juicing bugs like tangerines,

  fat bucking locusts jockeyed on and sucked,

  these trawling spiders that have rigged their nets

  halfway between our porchlamps and the night,

  their dawn webs threaded with dew jewelettes

  and hauls of flies caught lurching for our light.

  A blundering beetle with black lacquered back

  that dialled its liquidation to the spider’s limb,

  embalmed in abseil/bell-pull, a stored snack

  swathed in white cerements of sticky scrim.

  Phoning that zero gets the spider quick.

  Each leg’s in touch with 45 degrees

  of laddered circle where the insects stick

  on tacky wires their weaver walks with ease.

  Even the love-bugs, randy and ridiculous,

  coupling regardless of death close behind

  could still be fucking after all of us

  are merged in the molten mess made of Mankind.

  Falling asleep to loud cicada chirrs,

  to scuttling cockroach, crashing carapace,

  the noises that I hear are our inheritors

  who’ll know the Earth both B. and A. our race.

  And underneath those floorboards of good heart

  I think I hear the slither of a snake

  and then the rodent prey the snake makes start.

  Let’s forget about the world until we wake!

  III

  Each board of ‘tongue in groove’ ’s scored by a line

  I measure insect movements by from bed.

  A spider crossing long since scentless pine

  racks its nightcatch on a slender thread.

  The blowfly’s hawsered body still looks wet

  though all night it’s been suspended in the dry.

  It spins round, flashing, in the spider’s net

  with shredded cockroach wings and antennae.

  I knew I’d wake today and find you gone

  and look out of the window, knowing where

  you’d be so early, still with nothing on,

  watering our new plants with drowsy care.

  The night, already stripped of half its dark,

  now with the rest sloughed off, ’s revealed as day,

  and the sun already makes small rainbows arc

  out of the hose’s nozzle drizzling spray.

  Crunching the rusted needles that I strew

  to stunt the weed growth on the paths we hacked

  I come towards you and am naked too,

  and, being naked, feel my nerves react

  to the pliant give and snap of spider thread,

  snagged on a nipple, sliding on my sweat,

  pinged on a whisker, snapped against my head –

  the night survivor loosened from the net.

  Though impossible to hear I sense each ping

  as of an instrument too tautly strung

  with notes too high for human voice to sing

  and, in any case, not heard if ever sung,

  and maybe like that air of Socrates,

  I hope he played at least once with some skill,

  transposed beyond our ken into high keys

  I can’t hear now, and know I never will.

  For all that unseen threads break on my face,

  for all these cordons of cobweb caress

  I walk towards you and don’t change my pace

  feeling each broken thread one stricture less

  against my passage to the world of day.

  I can only know the last one when it breaks.

  You can’t see them ahead, and anyway,

  I have to scan the ground for rattlesnakes.

  I wonder as I walk still half awake

  if the trees that baked a bit long in the boot

  and we’d planted in the dark would ever take

  and if we’d ever taste their hoped-for fruit.

  I pass what’s become in 12 months gut-high pine

  planted last summer in a long close row

  as our few acres’ demarcation line

  and I will what’s still a hedge to grow less slow,

  and be tall enough to mask the present view

  of you watering the saplings as you spray

  rainbows at fig-trees planted 2-1-2

  and both of us still nude at break of day.

  A morning incense smokes off well-doused ground.

  Everywhere you water rainbows shine.

  This private haven that we two have found

  might be the more so when enclosed with pine.

  Cypress & Cedar

  A smell comes off my pencil as I write

  in the margins of a sacred Sanskrit text.

  By just sufficient candlelight I skim

  these scriptures sceptically from hymn to hymn.

  The bits I read aloud to you I’ve Xed

  for the little clues they offer to life’s light.

  I sit in mine, and you sit in your chair.

  A sweetness hangs round yours; a foul smell mine.

  Though the house still has no windows and no doors

  and the tin roof’s roughly propped with 4 × 4s

  that any gale could jolt, our chairs are fine

  and both scents battle for the same night air.

  Near Chiefland just off US 129,

  from the clapboard abattoir about a mile,

  the local sawyer Bob displays his wares:

  porch swings, picnic tables, lounging chairs,

  rough sawn and nailed together ‘cracker’ style.

  The hand I shake leaves powerful smells on mine.

  Beside two piles of shavings, white and red,

  one fragrant as a perfume, and one rank

  and malodorous from its swampland ooze,

  Bob displayed that week’s work’s chairs for me to choose.

  I chose one that was sweet, and one that stank,

  and thought about the sweet wood for a bed.

  To quote the carpenter he ‘stinks o’ shite’

  and his wife won’t sleep with him on cypress days,

  but after a day of cedar, so he said,

  she comes back eagerly into his bed,

  and, as long as he works cedar, there she stays.

  Sometimes he scorns the red wood and works white!

  Today I’ve laboured with my hands for hours

  sawing fenceposts up for winter; one tough knot

  jolted the chainsaw at my face and sprayed

  a beetroot cedar dust off the bucked blade,

  along with damp earth with its smell of rot,

  hurtling beetles, termites in shocked showers.

  To get one gatepost free I had to tug

  for half an hour, but dragged up from its hole

  it smelled, down even to the last four feet

  rammed in the ground, still beautifully sweet

  as if the grave had given life parole

  and left the sour earth perfumed where I’d dug.

  Bob gave me a cedar buckle for my
belt,

  and after the whole day cutting, stacking wood,

  damp denim, genitals, ‘genuine hide leather’

  all these fragrances were bound together

  by cedar, and together they smelled good.

  It was wonderful the way my trousers smelled.

  I can’t help but suppose flesh-famished Phèdre

  would have swept that prissy, epicene,

  big-game hunting stepson Hippolyte,

  led by his nose to cedar, off his feet,

  and left no play at all for poor Racine,

  if she’d soaped her breasts with Bois de Cèdre.

  If in doubt ask Bob the sawyer’s wife!

  Pet lovers who can’t stand the stink of cat

  buy sacks of litter that’s been ‘cedarized’

  and from ancient times the odour’s been much prized.

  Though not a Pharaoh I too favour that

  for freighting my rank remains out of this life.

  Why not two cedar chairs? Why go and buy

  a reeking cypress chair as a reminder,

  as if one’s needed, of primeval ooze,

  like swamps near Suwannee backroads, or bayous,

  stagnation Mother Nature left behind her

  hauling Mankind up from mononuclei?

  Cypress still has roots in that old stew

  paddling its origins in protozoa,

  the stew where consciousness that writes and reads

  grew its first squat tail from slimy seeds.

  I’d’ve used it for the Ark if I’d been Noah,

  though cedar, I know you’ll say, would also do.

  This place not in the Blue Guide or in Fodor

  between the Suwannee River and the Styx

  named by some homesick English classicist

  who loved such puns, loathed swamps, and, lonely, pissed

  his livelihood away with redneck hicks

  and never once enjoyed the cedar’s odour,

  or put its smoke to snake-deterrent use

  prescribed by Virgil in his Georgics III

  with chelydrus here in the US South

  construed as the diamondback or cottonmouth

  which freed him, some said, from his misery.

  Others said liquor, and others still a noose.

  And, evenings, he, who’d been an avid reader

  of the Odyssey and Iliad in Greek,

  became an even avider verandah drinker

  believing sourmash made a Stoic thinker

  though stuck with no paddle up Phlegethon’s creek,

  and had no wife with clothes chest of sweet cedar.

  But you bought one at Bob’s place and you keep

  your cotton frocks in it, your underwear,

  and such a fragrance comes from your doffed bras

  as come from uncorked phials in hot bazaars,

  and when you take your clothes off and lie bare

  your body breathes out cedar while you sleep.

  That lonely English exile named the river,

  though it could have been someone like me, for whom,

  though most evenings on the porch I read and write,

  there’s often such uneasiness in night

  it creates despair in me, or drinker’s gloom

  that could send later twinges through the liver.

  Tonight so far ’s been peaceful with no lightning.

  The pecan trees and hophornbeams are still.

  The storm’s held off, the candleflame’s quite straight,

  the fire and wick united in one fate.

  Though this quietness that can, one moment, fill

  the heart with peace, can, the next, be frightening –

  A hog gets gelded with a gruesome squeal

  that skids across the quietness of night

  to where we’re sitting on our dodgy porch.

  I reach for Seth Tooke’s shotgun and the torch

  then realize its ‘farmwork’ so alright

  but my flesh also flinches from the steel.

  Peace like a lily pad on swamps of pain –

  floating’s its only way of being linked.

  This consciousness of ours that reads and writes

  drifts on a darkness deeper than the night’s.

  Above that blackness, buoyed on the extinct,

  peace, pure-white, floats flowering in the brain,

  and fades, as finally the nenuphar

  we found on a pewter swamp where two roads ended

  was also bound to fade. The head and heart

  are neither of them too much good apart

  and peace comes in the moments that they’re blended

  as cypress and cedar at this moment are.

  My love, as prone as I am to despair,

  I think the world of night’s best born in pairs,

  one half we’ll call the female, one the male,

  though neither essence need, in love, prevail.

  We sit here in distinctly scented chairs

  you, love, in the cedar, me the cypress chair.

  Though tomorrow night I might well sit in yours

  and you in mine, the blended scent’s the same

  since I pushed my chair close to your chair

  and we read by the one calm candle that we share

  in this wilderness that might take years to tame,

  this house still with no windows and no doors.

  Let the candle cliché come out of the chill –

  ‘the flickering candle on a vast dark plain’

  of one lone voice against the state machine,

  or Mimi’s on cold stairs aren’t what I mean

  but moments like this now when heart and brain

  seem one sole flame that’s bright and straight and still.

  If it’s in Levy County that I die

  (though fearing I’d feel homesick as I died

  I’d sooner croak in Yorkshire if I could)

  I’ll have my coffin made of cedar wood

  to balance the smell like cypress from inside

  and hope the smoke of both blends in the sky,

  as both scents from our porch chairs do tonight.

  ‘Tvashti’, says this Indian Rig Veda,

  ‘hewed the world out of one tree,’ but doesn’t tell,

  since for durability both do as well,

  if the world he made was cypress wood; or cedar

  the smell coming off my pencil as I write.

  V.

  ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.’

  Arthur Scargill, Sunday Times, 10 Jan. 1982

  Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard

  to find my slab behind the family dead,

  butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard

  adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.

  With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short

  of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite.

  That’s two peers already, of a sort,

  and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit,

  whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,

  causes the distinguished dead to drop

  into the rabblement of bone and rot,

  shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.

  Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned

  luggage cowhide in the age of steam,

  and knew their place of rest before the land

  caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.

  This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s

  the place I may well rest if there’s a spot

  under the rose roots and the daffodils

  by which dad dignified the family plot.

  If buried ashes saw then I’d survey

  the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,

  and left, the ground where Leeds United play

  but disappoint their fans week after week,

  whic
h makes them lose their sense of self-esteem

  and taking a short cut home through these graves here

  they reassert the glory of their team

  by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.

  This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.

  Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.

  One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT

  sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.

  Far-sighted for his family’s future dead,

  but for his wife, this banker’s still alone

  on his long obelisk, and doomed to head

  a blackened dynasty of unclaimed stone,

  now graffitied with a crude four-letter word.

  His children and grand-children went away

  and never came back home to be interred,

  so left a lot of space for skins to spray.

  The language of this graveyard ranges from

  a bit of Latin for a former Mayor

  or those who laid their lives down at the Somme,

  the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer,

  how people ‘fell asleep in the Good Lord’,

  brief chisellable bits from the good book

  and rhymes whatever length they could afford,

  to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!

  Or, more expansively, there’s LEEDS v.

  the opponent of last week, this week, or next,

  and a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses

  on the team or race that makes the sprayer vexed.

  Then, pushed for time, or fleeing some observer,

  dodging between tall family vaults and trees

  like his team’s best ever winger, dribbler, swerver,

  fills every space he finds with versus Vs.

  Vs sprayed on the run at such a lick,

  the sprayer master of his flourished tool,

  get short-armed on the left like that red tick

  they never marked his work much with at school.

  Half this skinhead’s age but with approval

  I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.

  No one clamoured in the press for its removal

  or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.

  These Vs are all the versuses of life

  from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White

  and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,

  Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

  class v. class as bitter as before,

  the unending violence of US and THEM,

  personified in 1984

  by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

  Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,

  East/West, male/female, and the ground

  these fixtures are fought out on ’s Man, resigned

  to hope from his future what his past never found.