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Selected Poems

Page 16

by Harrison, Tony


  The ones we choose to love become our anchor

  when the hawser of the blood-tie’s hacked, or frays.

  But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling: Wanker!

  It’s the aerosolling skin I met today’s.

  My alter ego wouldn’t want to know it,

  his aerosol vocab would baulk at LOVE,

  the skin’s UNITED underwrites the poet,

  the measures carved below the ones above.

  I doubt if 30 years of bleak Leeds weather

  and 30 falls of apple and of may

  will erode the UNITED binding us together.

  And now it’s your decision: does it stay?

  Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard

  to find out where I’m buried but I’m near

  the grave of haberdasher Appleyard,

  the pile of HARPs, or some new neonned beer.

  Find Byron, Wordsworth, or turn left between

  one grave marked Broadbent, one marked Richardson.

  Bring some solution with you that can clean

  whatever new crude words have been sprayed on.

  If love of art, or love, gives you affront

  that the grave I’m in’s graffitied then, maybe,

  erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNT

  but leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v.

  victory? For vast, slow, coal-creating forces

  that hew the body’s seams to get the soul.

  Will Earth run out of her ‘diurnal courses’

  before repeating her creation of black coal?

  But choose a day like I chose in mid-May

  or earlier when apple and hawthorn tree,

  no matter if boys boot their ball all day,

  cling to their blossoms and won’t shake them free.

  If, having come this far, somebody reads

  these verses, and he/she wants to understand,

  face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds,

  and read the chiselled epitaph I’ve planned:

  Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.

  Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find

  how poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT

  find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.

  The Mother of the Muses

  in memoriam Emmanuel Stratas,

  born Crete 1903, died Toronto 1987

  After I’ve lit the fire and looked outside

  and found us snowbound and the roads all blocked,

  anxious to prove my memory’s not ossified

  and the way into that storehouse still unlocked,

  as it’s easier to remember poetry,

  I try to remember, but soon find it hard,

  a speech from Prometheus a boy from Greece bc

  scratched, to help him learn it, on a shard.

  I remember the museum, and I could eke

  his scratch marks out, and could complete

  the … however many lines there were of Greek

  and didn’t think it then much of a feat.

  But now, not that much later, when I find

  the verses I once knew beyond recall

  I resolve to bring all yesterday to mind,

  our visit to your father, each fact, all.

  Seeing the Home he’s in ’s made me obsessed

  with remembering those verses I once knew

  and setting myself this little memory test

  I don’t think, at the moment, I’ll come through.

  It’s the Memory, Mother of the Muses, bit.

  Prometheus, in words I do recall reciting

  but can’t quote now, and they’re so apposite,

  claiming he gave Mankind the gift of writing,

  along with fire the Gods withheld from men

  who’d lived like ants in caves deprived of light

  they could well end up living in again

  if we let what flesh first roasted on ignite

  a Burning of the Books far more extreme

  than any screeching Führer could inspire,

  the dark side of the proud Promethean dream

  our globe enveloped in his gift of fire.

  He bequeathed to baker and to bombardier,

  to help benighted men develop faster,

  two forms of fire, the gentle one in here,

  and what the Luftwaffe unleashed, and the Lancaster.

  One beneficial and one baleful form,

  the fire I lit a while since in the grate

  that’s keeping me, as I sit writing, warm

  and what gutted Goethestrasse on this date,

  beginning yesterday to be precise

  and shown on film from forty years ago

  in a Home for the Aged almost glazed with ice

  and surrounded by obliterating snow.

  We had the choice of watching on TV

  Dresden destroyed, then watching its rebirth,

  or, with the world outside too blizzardful to see,

  live, the senile not long for this earth.

  Piles of cracked ice tiles where ploughs try to push

  the muddied new falls onto shattered slates,

  the glittering shrapnel of grey frozen slush,

  a blitz debris fresh snow obliterates

  along with what was cleared the day before

  bringing even the snowploughs to a halt.

  And their lives are frozen solid and won’t thaw

  with no memory to fling its sparks of salt.

  The outer world of blur reflects their inner,

  these Rest Home denizens who don’t quite know

  whether they’ve just had breakfast, lunch, or dinner,

  or stare, between three lunches, at the snow.

  Long icicles from the low roof meet

  the frozen drifts below and block their view

  of flurry and blizzard in the snowed-up street

  and of a sky that for a month has shown no blue.

  Elsie’s been her own optometrist,

  measuring the daily way her sight declines

  into a growing ball of flashing mist.

  She trains her failing sight on outside signs:

  the church’s COME ALIVE IN ’85!

  the small hand on the Export A ad clock,

  the flashing neon on the truck-stop dive

  pulsing with strobe lights and jukebox rock,

  the little red Scottie on the stoop & scoop

  but not the cute eye cast towards its rear,

  the little rounded pile of heaped red poop

  the owners are required to bend and clear.

  To imagine herself so stooping is a feat

  as hard as that of gymnasts she has seen

  lissom in white leotards compete

  in trampolining on the tv screen.

  There’s one with mashed dinner who can’t summon

  yet again the appetite to smear

  the food about the shrunk face of a woman

  weeping for death in her 92nd year.

  And of the life she lived remembers little

  and stares, like someone playing Kim’s Game,

  at the tray beneath her nose that fills with spittle

  whose bubbles fill with faces with no name.

  Lilian, whose love made her decide

  to check in with her mate who’d had a stroke,

  lost all her spryness once her husband died …

  He had a beautiful … all made of oak …

  silk inside … brass handles … tries to find

  alternatives … that long thing where you lie

  for words like coffin that have slipped her mind

  and forgetting, not the funeral, makes her cry.

  And Anne, who treats her roommates to her ‘news’

  though every day her news is just the same

  how she’d just come back from such a lovely cruise

  to that famous island … I forget its name …


  Born before the Boer War, me, and so

  I’m too old to remember I suppose …

  then tries again … the island’s called … you know …

  that place, you know … where everybody goes …

  First Gene had one and then a second cane

  and then, in weeks, a walker of cold chrome,

  now in a wheelchair wails for the Ukraine,

  sobbing in soiled pants for what was home.

  Is that horror at what’s on the TV screen

  or just the way the stroke makes Jock’s jaw hang?

  Though nobody quite knows what his words mean

  they hear Scots diphthongs in the New World twang.

  And like the Irish Sea on Blackpool Beach,

  where Joan was once the pick of bathing belles,

  the Lancashire she once had in her speech

  seeps into Canadian as she retells,

  whose legs now ooze out water, who can’t walk,

  how she was ‘champion at tap’, ‘the flower’

  (she poises the petals on the now frail stalk)

  ‘of the ballet troupe at Blackpool Tower’.

  You won’t hear Gene, Eugene, Yevgeny speak

  to nurses now, or God, in any other tongue

  but his Ukrainian, nor your dad Greek,

  all that’s left to them of being young.

  Life comes full circle when we die.

  The circumference is finally complete,

  so we shouldn’t wonder too much why

  his speech went back, a stowaway, to Crete.

  Dispersal and displacement, willed or not,

  from homeland to the room the three share here,

  one Ukrainian, one Cretan, and one Scot

  grow less Canadian as death draws near.

  Jock sees a boozer in a Glasgow street,

  and Eugene glittering icons, candles, prayer,

  and for your dad a thorn-thick crag in Crete

  with oregano and goat smells in the air.

  And home? Where is it now? The olive grove

  may well be levelled under folds of tar.

  The wooden house made joyful with a stove

  has gone the way of Tsar and samovar.

  The small house with 8 people to a room

  with no privacy for quiet thought or sex

  bulldozed in the island’s tourist boom

  to make way for Big Macs and discothèques.

  Beribboned hats and bold embroidered sashes

  once helped another émigré forget

  that Canada was going to get his ashes

  and that Estonia’s still Soviet.

  But now the last of those old-timers

  couldn’t tell one folk dance from another

  and mistakes in the mists of his Alzheimer’s

  the nurse who wipes his bottom for his mother.

  Some hoard memories as some hoard gold

  against that rapidly approaching day

  that’s all they have to live on, being old,

  but find their savings spirited away.

  What’s the point of having lived at all

  in the much-snapped duplex in Etobicoke

  if it gets swept away beyond recall,

  in spite of all the snapshots, at one stroke?

  If we are what we remember, what are they

  who don’t have memories as we have ours,

  who, when evening falls, have no recall of day,

  or who those people were who’d brought them flowers.

  The troubled conscience, though, ’s glad to forget.

  Oblivion for some ’s an inner balm.

  They’ve found some peace of mind, not total yet,

  as only death itself brings that much calm.

  And those white flashes on the TV screen,

  as a child, whose dad plunged into genocide,

  remembers Dresden and describes the scene,

  are they from the firestorm then, or storm outside?

  Crouching in clown’s costume (it was Fasching)

  aged, 40 years ago, as I was, 9

  Eva remembers cellar ceiling crashing

  and her mother screaming shrilly: Swine! Swine! Swine!

  The Tiergarten chief with level voice remembered

  a hippo disembowelled on its back,

  a mother chimp, her charges all dismembered,

  and trees bedaubed with zebra flesh and yak.

  Flamingos, flocking from burst cages, fly

  in a frenzy with their feathers all alight

  from fire on the ground to bomb-crammed sky,

  their flames fanned that much fiercer by their flight;

  the gibbon with no hands he’d had to shoot

  as it came towards him with appealing stumps,

  the gutless gorilla still clutching fruit

  mashed with its bowels into bloody lumps …

  I was glad as on and on the keeper went

  to the last flayed elephant’s fire-frantic screech

  that the old folk hadn’t followed what was meant

  by official footage or survivors’ speech.

  But then they missed the Semper’s restoration,

  Dresden’s lauded effort to restore

  one of the treasures of the now halved nation

  exactly as it was before the War.

  Billions of marks and years of labour

  to reproduce the Semper and they play

  what they’d played before the bombs fell, Weber,

  Der Freischütz, for their reopening today.

  Each bleb of blistered paintwork, every flake

  of blast-flayed pigment in that dereliction

  they analysed in lab flasks to remake

  the colours needed for the redepiction

  of Poetic Justice on her cloud surmounting

  mortal suffering from opera and play,

  repainted tales that seem to bear recounting

  more often than the facts that mark today:

  the dead Cordelia in the lap of Lear,

  Lohengrin who pilots his white swan

  at cascading lustres of bright chandelier

  above the plush this pantheon shattered on,

  with Titania’s leashed pards in pastiche Titian,

  Faust with Mephisto, Joan, Nathan the Wise,

  all were blown, on that Allied bombing mission,

  out of their painted clouds into the skies.

  Repainted, reupholstered, all in place

  just as it had been before that fatal night,

  but however devilish the leading bass

  his demons are outshadowed on this site.

  But that’s what Dresden wants and so they play

  the same score sung by new uplifting voices

  and, as opera synopses often say,

  ‘The curtain falls as everyone rejoices.’

  Next more TV, devoted to the trial

  of Ernst Zundel, who denies the Jews were gassed,

  and academics are supporting his denial,

  restoring pride by doctoring the past,

  and not just Germans but those people who

  can’t bear to think such things could ever be,

  and by disbelieving horrors to be true

  hope to put back hope in history.

  A nurse comes in to offer us a cot

  considering how bad the blizzard’s grown

  but you kissed your dad, who, as we left, forgot

  he’d been anything all day but on his own.

  We needed to escape, weep, laugh, and lie

  in each other’s arms more privately than there,

  weigh in the balance all we’re heartened by,

  so braved the blizzard back, deep in despair.

  Feet of snow went sliding off the bonnet

  as we pulled onto the road from where we’d parked.

  A snowplough tried to help us to stay on it

  but localities nearby, once clearly marked,

  those n
amed for northern hometowns close to mine,

  the Yorks, the Whitbys, and the Scarboroughs,

  all seemed one whited-out recurring sign

  that could well be ‘Where everybody goes …’

  His goggles bug-eyed from the driven snow,

  the balaclavaed salter goes ahead

  with half the sower’s, half the sandman’s throw,

  and follows the groaning plough with wary tread.

  We keep on losing the blue revolving light

  and the sliding salter, and try to keep on track

  by making sure we always have in sight

  the yellow Day-glo X marked on his back.

  The blizzard made our neighbourhood unknown.

  We could neither see behind us nor before.

  We felt in that white-out world we were alone

  looking for landmarks, lost, until we saw

  the unmistakable McDonald’s M

  with its ‘60 billion served’ hamburger count.

  Living, we were numbered among them,

  and dead, among an incomputable amount …

  I woke long after noon with you still sleeping

  and the windows blocked where all the snow had blown.

  Your pillow was still damp from last night’s weeping.

  In that silent dark I swore I’d make it known,

  while the oil of memory feeds the wick of life

  and the flame from it’s still constant and still bright,

  that, come oblivion or not, I loved my wife

  in that long thing where we lay with day like night.

  Toronto’s at a standstill under snow.

  Outside there’s not much light and not a sound.

  Those lines from Aeschylus! How do they go?

  It’s almost halfway through Prometheus Bound.

  I think they’re coming back. I’m concentrating …

  μουσομητορ ’εργανην … Damn! I forget,

  but remembering your dad, I’m celebrating

  being in love, not too forgetful, yet.

  Country people used to say today’s

  the day the birds sense spring and choose their mates,

  and trapped exotics in the Dresden blaze

  were flung together in their flame-fledged fates.

  The snow in the street outside ’s at least 6ft.

  I look for life, and find the only sign ’s,

  like words left for, or by, someone from Crete,

  a bird’s tracks, like blurred Greek, for Valentine’s.

  (Toronto, St Valentine’s Day)

  Initial Illumination

  Farne cormorants with catches in their beaks

  shower fishscale confetti on the shining sea.

  The first bright weather here for many weeks

  for my Sunday G-Day train bound for Dundee,

  off to St Andrew’s to record a reading,

 

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