her pinafore full of ripe plums,
Victorias, with amber ooze
round their stalks, and says: Choose! Choose!
Now so much older, I,
more aware I’ve got to die,
use such ruses, I derive
from my mother, to survive.
Last week I saw here at the Met
a ‘Wheel of Life’ made in Tibet
where ‘Man Picking Fruit’ ’s used to depict,
in both the picker and the picked,
ultimate futility. Such dismal crap’ll
never spoil my mother’s apple.
Fuck philosophy that sees
life itself as some disease
we sicken with until released,
supervised by Pope or priest,
into a dry defruited zone
where no James Grieves were ever grown.
I’d barter nebulous Nirvanas
for carambolas or bananas.
I need to neologize to find
the fruit in futile humankind,
and fruitility is what I call
the fate which falls upon us all.
Meaningless our lives may be
but blessed with deep fruitility.
It could take pages if I list
all the joys of the fruitilitist:
retsina and grilled squid in Greece,
that death-bed cut-out of Matisse
I chanced on on a trip to Dallas,
Sempre libera sung by Callas,
love-making in the afternoon,
the ripe papaya on this spoon
lingered over as my way
of starting on a fruitile day,
where 73rd and Broadway meet.
Even now the morning heat
brings the piss smells off the street,
Dobermann’s and man’s piss soars
as far as us, and we’re eight floors.
This breakfasting’s my Zensual ruse
to counteract such Broadway views
as those below, where homeless spread
the books and mags to earn their bread
and, after bread, if not before,
the rocks of crack some value more.
I read titles with my opera glasses:
Opera News and Chunky Asses,
Honcho, Ramrod, Newsweek, Time,
stiff from showers 2 a dime,
but, if like new, then 4 a dollar,
Bush, the Pope, the Ayatollah,
Noriega, Gorbachev,
and other ones with covers off,
a danse macabre, a Vanitas
of big cheeses, and the chunky ass.
Diva-adoring gays peruse
the laid-out rows of Opera News.
Spectacles of temporal flux,
sidewalk piles of grubby books,
30 copies of one play
billed a great hit in its day,
and some still supposed to be
a dollar each, or 4 for 3.
And there’s a neighbour off to buy
the opera discs that help him die.
He’s young but shuffles with a cane
but will only use CDs for pain.
His father, who won’t meet him, mails
his sick son clothes from car-boot sales,
but Pa and Ma don’t realize
AIDS makes their son a smaller size.
They’ve never talked of death or sex
but occasionally Pa sends him cheques
to buy AZT, as AZT’s
one drug that slows down the disease.
I saw him in the lobby:
Hi,
Pa sent me some more cash to buy
AZT, but I bought these!
and showed me scores of new CDs.
My pa would think it such a waste
me and my opera ain’t his taste.
Got all of Callas’s CDs
to comfort me through this disease.
It’s Puccini next when Pa sends more,
and he got off at the 7th floor …
There’s someone wanting to be Mayor
haranguing winos in the square,
under Verdi’s statue who presides
over crack-heads, crooks and suicides.
Verdi with his vision blurred
by birdshit stares from 73rd
down at Dante at the Met
where Verdi helps some to forget.
But when they leave or enter there
there’s no avoiding Dante’s stare,
nor what’s beneath his constant gaze
and stays there, while the opera plays,
and pizza cartons three feet square
leave mouth-watering hot blasts of air,
a phantom mozzarella trail,
for carton dwellers to inhale
in lungfuls, hungry and alone
beyond the pale of Pizzaphone.
A claret goblet and with care
that housed video or frigidaire
now packages a shoeless man
who rummages the garbage can
already rummaged countless times
for cans you can redeem for dimes.
Shops redeem the empty can
but not the can-redeeming man,
nor that woman who’s got business sense
so beds down where machines dispense
24hr cash, and men, when pissed,
might leave five dollars in her fist.
One night I saw a famous diva
stop her limo there and leave her
scores of fresh fan-flung bouquets
to wake to from her wino haze.
And when she woke they say she cried
with rage and terror, horrified
the morning sun should wake her
laid out for the undertaker.
Death was all these blooms could mean,
these tributes she was stretched between,
beneath the bank’s cashpoint machine.
Once aware she wasn’t dead
she flogged the star’s bouquets for bread,
well, pretzels; those posh bouquets
kept her in booze for several days.
I dread the moment, while I muse
on all my fruitile 8th floor views,
I hear the answerphone replay
the dark side of the fruitile day:
message one, a Scottish friend,
sick, insomniac, half round the bend,
drying out in St Luke’s, lying
all tubed-up, detoxifying.
His message goes as follows: Hi!
just checking in before I die!
The trolleyphone’s beside his bed.
I call him back. He isn’t dead.
Thought you were dying.
I am! I am!
Fucking dying for a dram!
Another friend made mad by AIDS
leaves night-time answerphone tirades.
It wakes us when the tape records
his rabid ravings from the wards.
First his operatic repertoire
that made him a TV bar star:
Sempre libera, in falsetto,
voice corseted as Violetta,
Sempre libera, always free,
he from AIDS and she TB.
In sigmoidoscopy he’d brag:
I am the world’s most buggered fag.
Your rooter’s nothing, every dick
I’ve ever had’s ten times as thick!
After the aria and the pause
while he curtsies to applause
and clasps flung posies to his heart
the mad Munchausen stories start
and I hear a new bass voice begin:
Those things like wine-stains on my skin
those fucking things like spilled Merlot
they ain’t what you guys think you know.
They came, these scars like fucking Claret
from the forest of the flame-flayed parrot.
They’re bu
rns! They’re burns! I tried to seize
the cure for AIDS from blazing trees.
I was in Brazil, Manaus, where I gave
my Violetta. And did Manaus rave!
They adore me, darlings, in Brazil.
They think I was just acting ill.
Brava! brava! on and on
beside the steaming Amazon.
If I chose I could earn millions
from brava-bravaing Brazilians!
(Were you aware the rubber trade’s
booming again because of AIDS?
You see the stripe-gashed cauchos oozing
condoms I never packed when cruising!)
I went up-river in a cute caique
from Manaus with the urge to seek
the cure for what afflicts our kind
and the sights up-river blew my mind –
I saw pink dolphins, pink!
and I hadn’t had a drop to drink!
and no Colombia up my nose –
dolphins pink as any fan-flung rose!
I’d gone in costume. It was better
trekking dressed as Violetta.
Those creepers with sharp thorns don’t snag
my depilated legs in drag.
And where the forest was ablaze,
brave Violetta, on behalf of gays,
in corsets botanizing raced
through dense forest now laid waste,
charcoal gallows, charcoal glades
of gutted antidotes for AIDS,
the canopy deserted by
the roasted birds that used to fly.
And there were cures. They’ve gone. They’ve gone
in the bonfires of the Amazon.
Some creeper, bud, some bitter seed
might be the breakthrough doctors need.
All September it’s been blazing
to give more future Big Macs grazing.
Even now the forest flames
are burning cures that have no names.
In the ash of Amazonian oak
the cure for AIDS went up in smoke …
All this gabble seems quite graphic
though culled from National Geographic
bought at the sidewalk mag bazaar
with covers of the passé star
or politician laid between
Butt Lust ‘Seat Meat’ magazine
and iron-pumping Bulkritude
both with pages wanker-glued.
Then his falsetto ends the story:
Cessarono gli spasimi del dolore …
The sun sets here while it’s rising
on countries just industrializing
and day ends in a dying fire
hued like my rasps piled on papaya,
Broadway windows with glossed sheen
of cranberry and carotene,
sunset as the turning planet
paints New York in pomegranate,
with chemicals that now pollute
the skies to look like too ripe fruit.
The spoon-scraped limp papaya skin
goes first into the garbage bin,
then a big black trash bag, later
down the chute to the incinerator,
and the flotsam of time’s fleeting flux
goes into dawn’s first garbage trucks.
I’ll hear them grinding as it’s time
again for papaya spritzed with lime.
Tomorrow’s rasps piled on papaya
chilled, ready for the life-denier,
tomorrow when my heart says Yea
to darkness ripening into day,
remembering my mother whose
gifts of fruit taught me this ruse,
whose wartime wisdom would embrace
both good and grotty with sweet grace,
she who always used to say:
Never wish your life away!
Of all my muses it was she
first taught me to love fruitility.
Fig on the Tyne
for Siani, on her birthday
My life and garden, both transforming,
thanks to you, and global warming,
started today to intertwine
tasting my first fig on the Tyne.
When I heard scientists predict
there’d be apricots and peaches picked
in Britain’s South, and pinot noir
where the rhubarb fields of Yorkshire are,
the pithill pinot from lush vines
ripening on demolished mines,
a Rossington viognier,
Sheffield shiraz, Grimethorpe gamay,
fancy made a sun-kissed fiction:
Dionysus redeeming dereliction.
Dionysus! Wishful thinking,
sitting in Doncaster drinking
in Southern sun that lasts all day
a local Donny vin du pays.
No sommelier worth his salt ’ll spurn
Gewürztraminer from Wath-on-Dearne!
No longer would we need to traipse
through airports to the lands of grapes.
No more queuing at Heathrow
when we grow all they used to grow.
There’ll come a day no Loiner needs
to go beyond the caves of Leeds
to sup champagne that’s bottled where
they throw their empties in the Aire.
The South creeps Northwards, some say sweeps,
swapping Beaujolais nouveau for neaps.
This vision of Yorkshire by the Med
no doubt won’t come till I’m long dead.
Torridity in Tyne and Wear
won’t come till I’m no longer here.
Predictions for this land of plenty
start, at the soonest, 2020,
which is cutting it a wee bit fine
if I’m to bask beside the Tyne.
Sometimes I have to fantasize
I’m living under bluer skies,
but today I had a little sign
here in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Not just that this year’s birds are late
leaving the North-East to migrate,
they linger, O they’re welcome, they
still sing for me at break of day.
Some prophets that I’ve read believe
there’ll come a day the birds don’t leave.
The sign I mean was true but small
and grown against my garden wall.
If the scientists’ prediction
isn’t all just wishful fiction,
I thought once, why, if Leeds grows wine,
can’t I grow a fig tree on the Tyne?
Why not, if the River Aire’s
going to wind through wine hectares,
assume the scientists really know
and plant something that needs sun to grow,
more sun than usually comes its way
in Newcastle or Whitley Bay,
and here, on Tyneside, I’ll install
a fig on my least sun-starved wall,
and wait for global warming to produce
figs oozing with full taste and juice.
‘Fig trees don’t grow in my native land’
wrote Lawrence, when his work was banned.
The climate ’s changing, figs do grow
(and franker paintings go on show!)
though not like San Gervasio,
where the starved Midlander Brit
found figs as ‘fissure’, ‘yoni’, ‘slit’.
All those eyesores and black spots
bulldozed flat in his native Notts,
wait the creeping South’s advance
to metamorphose into France.
The climate he was restless for
would come up to his own front door.
I tell him now, the man who grew
one Northern fig, that it’s not true:
If you want figs, stay put in Notts,
trust global warming, you’ll have lots.
In parts
of Europe blessed with sun
I’ve picked hundreds. Now, here, one.
I’ve roamed about in similar fashion
seeking Southern fruit and passion.
His restlessness fed into mine
though I’ve always come back to the Tyne.
Though my life ’s been a different story.
I’ve been ‘o ποιητης’ and ‘Il Signore’.
Places where he used to go,
Italy, New Mexico,
I’ve also been to, half-inclined
to leave everything at home behind,
then on Guatavita’s shores I found
gold everywhere just on the ground.
I come to El Dorado and I find
exactly what I’d left behind!
Too busy being Pissarro
ever to let my garden grow
anything but those tough weeds
I’ve known in Newcastle or Leeds,
this gold I came to look upon
with an ‘O my America’ of Donne,
this El Dorado in my head,
when I found it, only led,
after all the searches I got high on
to the El Dorado dandelion.
That was my discovery,
poet/Pissarro of the piss-en-lit!
All that we search for when we roam
is nowhere if not here at home.
I picked one for you, and pressed the head
of that Andean piss-a-bed,
and now this one fig I discover
I want to share with you, my lover.
I never thought that it would grow
when I planted it ten years ago.
I decided this was what I’d do
about the same time I’d met you.
I watched it grow and much away
feared it’d die, but now, today,
September 20, ’99,
your birthday, love, here on the Tyne,
not flooded yet in Grecian sun,
I picked one fig from it, just one!
I picked the first fig that I’d grown
but tasted its sweet flesh alone,
when I’d wanted, O so much, to share
the fig with one who wasn’t there,
you with whom I hope to see
years of figs from that same tree,
I’d wanted here to cut in two
one half for me, one half for you,
to celebrate the first sweet sign
of global ripening on the Tyne
and with the first of my Tyne figs
celebrate you’re 46!
I never thought the tree would root
let alone produce a fruit,
I’ve seen it, like our love, survive
from when you were only 35.
That’s almost the length of time it took
to pick this first ripe fig to suck.
My heart too has felt the South,
that puts this fig into my mouth,
warm my heart’s North at a time
life’s forecast as a colder clime,
and, in the heart’s depths, it renewed
love in life’s last latitude.
Selected Poems Page 18
