New Poetries VII
Page 12
curl that emerged from her cap to rest on her cheek. One
night, he stuck his dick in her. The other man came, and
he wanted to take her to England and marry her, and
Christl had nowhere else to bring the child, and she
would not leave it by the river, so she crossed the sea.
Villach
STOP 1: ERLENDORF 54
The Erlendorf house was grey; no one came to the door.
A dark-green, electric-locked gate; thick tape on the
mouth of the newspaper tube on the mailbox. Is that a
surveillance camera? Small tubular box-eye at us, with
its slow, red-dot pulse.
We cycled asphalt Radwegs by the Autobahn and under
heavy bridges, by mineral-green streams and recy-
cling plants. Then down gravel, scuffed paths that cut
through trees and dark-green mountains, massive on
either side. A clear, turquoise lake; graffiti; warm grassy
air; spots of rain.
STOP 2: LUDWIG-WALTER STRASSE 20
Looking from the side the house was on, under the
pink faded church, a car-show called WERNER. Next to
that, a 24-hour casino and a net-cafe; on a bus-stop, a
women’s underwear advert. Further along, by the cross-
ing, SCHNITZELWELT.
At the point of the address itself, a dozen new apartment
buildings in matte grey, nos 15–25 interchangeable, the
handle at 20 a big plastic mitt-shape.
Werner, my uncle told the address where my grand-
mother lived to us over the phone; he added it was
opposite a church ‘with two onion domes’.
fasching
at Elli’s schmankerlstube it’s all
drinking and bosners.
in neukirchen it’s ten a.m. and children are dancing in a pen. They’re dalmatians, indianers, cowboys with foamstick horses and goggle eyes. Two headteachers smile and joggle in a pair, her cruella fishnet makeup and his penguin suit, peaked beak. High loud music wrenches in the outdoor light, rips fabric. Dance the children on.
A multicoloured snake or train of people tooting its bells and flute, curving down the road beneath the green banks and a big sky, the mountains.
the weather’s changing
It used to be ever so hot in Austria,
not so hot now, the weather’s changing, it’s like in England.
When I came to England first the weather was really
warm and I thought it’s warm in England nice here not so cold
because it’s frosty in Austria
you get all flowers you can see out the window
you couldn’t even see through because of all those ice flowers
get up in the morning freezing
get dressed straightaway make a fire
in the kitchen, we used to stay in the kitchen nice and warm there
Mary’s Dreams
First Immaculata
arrived with her briefcase of tweezers, plucked
and flossed me, Felicity buffed and filed, I was
gargled, lips vaselined and sealed. They prised
my navel for disinfection but left it,
blinking, smelling of nothing.
*
On the terrace,
hair washed and dried for a sunlit breakfast,
watching the blue ocean: Anne came,
whispering annunce, annunce, and Teresa rinsed
my pores and slipped in the whitegold.
We sat there, after, sewing angels’ wings.
*
Then Natalie with her wide white face and dark brown eyes
sat with me, rubbing my flanks
to be haylike and warm, while the animals moved in
closer and I rocked
in the weak light, under the stars like milk on ink.
Austrian pastorals
i the lake that’s black in January.
ii an a.m. running stream,
mineral off the Loser mountain.
iii stepped out the car in Ratten
to a high clear air, „Die Post“, tractor.
iv Wolfsburg, for instance, was a zone of deaf white.
v and the Villach canal, sprayed with weed.
vi I lived on a hill in Kärnten
with piebald goats and barns.
vii I’d go back to Tyrol’s
whistling river,
I’d go to Voralberg’s
houses made from wooden feathers.
viii I climbed forests of mountains
and came out to insects, flowers,
razed trees, cattle.
where I walked the smooth roads
daily, passing chickens and the ridge
above the cemetery.
THEOPHILUS KWEK
Having grown up with the even cadences of the King James Bible and Shakespeare’s plays, I arrived here in 2013 to find a rhythm – of speaking and living – that was more troubling and yet more alive: an urgent, all-embracing pulse that gently remade all my expectations in favour of a younger, more diverse Britain. I quickly found community among those with different accents and persuasions, and lost an initial shyness over my Singaporean voice. In those first months, this was my country of welcome.
But other currents began to build across the country, becoming visible at the elections of 2015 and 2017, divisive leadership contests, and the EU Referendum. Visible, too, in slurs and headlines, repeated in pubs and at street corners. Some of the following poems reckon with these currents – from the rhetoric of the Brexit debate (‘24.6.2016’) to my own experiences of personal violence (‘Occurrence’). ‘Westminster’ reflects on how questions of difference have become tangled with those of fear, and how to live bravely, while ‘Road Cutting at Glanmire’ speaks to longer-term changes which have taken place across the British Isles, and what it means to lose a landscape one knows as home.
The other poems in this set are arguments with myself, living abroad and finding belonging overseas as a son, student, and (post-) colonial subject. ‘What It’s Like’ returns to my brief spell of National Service before leaving Singapore, with a newfound perspective on what it means to have been trained to kill for one’s country at age eighteen. A trio of poems – ‘Camerata’, ‘Requiem’, and ‘My Grandfather Visits Pyongyang’ – revolve around my grandfather’s death in 2015, while he was travelling in China. The prospect (and reality) of losing a loved one at a distance recurs in these pieces, prompting me to consider my own distance even from those who are geographically close by.
‘Moving House’, among the last of these poems to be written, is framed against all of these things. It takes its immediate context from my parents’ decision to move out of our family home of the last decade during my time abroad, the experience of returning to a strange new room, and learning to inhabit it as my own. But such local movements might best be seen as gestures towards other, less quantifiable shifts. We inhabit new worlds, and our words must make sense of them.
Moving House
These are things that shake us in our sleep:
doors left open, drawers, the bare-backed chair
that still, without a coat, swivels gently,
books in boxes. Pictures taken down, squares
of darker paint turned over to the sun,
and above all, their wiring undone,
the lights’ glass tubes put away in plastic.
Once is enough. The eye learns to plot
all of this in each new habitation,
recognise the empty room’s joints, pivots,
dimensions – every house has a skeleton –
while the body learns it must carry less
from place to place, a kind of tidiness
that builds, hardens. Some call it fear,
of change, or losing what we cannot keep.
Others, experience. Truth is, it has no nam
e
or station, and only the weight we give.
Old friend, I feel its steep tug again
this evening, across wire and lens
as you show me the house, a bare continent.
(These are things that shake us in our sleep.)
Westminster
22 March 2017
I.
Broken light, high water. Here and elsewhere
the cold thought of something beyond belief
settling into movement – an unstoppable design –
lodges in the throat, will not be sung.
We fall on words made for other means:
Visibility: four miles. More clouds than sun.
II.
Within days, it seems, this injury
will join the rim of that other, deeper cut
over which no scar can form. Unclean, unshut.
As yet it gapes distinct: flesh wound, a loss
without name and yet no easier
to reckon, its surface so bare of facts
except the act of loss itself, no choice
or distance, no motive, no face, no legend
(a mere expanse which holds the skin apart),
no way to map the way to map a way.
III.
Lines open for interchange. The earth trembles,
holds fast this steel heart, its brave circulation.
Every safe passage a jubilee. Who are they
whose paths must cross at our deepest station?
IV.
Already, without doubt, we have begun to fear
and fear the upshot of fear, the lightning and the storm.
But darkness now, which passes for calm.
A prayer:
V.
For each morning that takes place unawares.
The still scalding shower. The flight of stairs.
What It’s Like
How do I tell you now about the way
they placed it in his hands, a baby’s weight,
just as tenderly pulled his shoulders back
to take the heave and coil, every fresh blow
leaving him sore, the sour echo of this
is how you kill a man?
It takes a man
to do that for his country, they said, and there
in the wet scrape it seemed almost true,
knowing a body’s length of new earth lay
upturned, packed tight to rest his barrel on,
not daring to move, legs and torso stained
with an afternoon’s digging, as ten a time
slipped away to practice advancing
from point to point, or picking up the dead,
the whole earth shattering beneath them.
Don’t be scared,
these aren’t even live.
He learned to play dead, always the lightest
in the group, the one his friends would plan
to evacuate, arms crossed over one
another’s to stabilise the casualty, last man
claiming his rifle where it fell so we don’t
give the rascals anything. If you’re lucky,
he’s still breathing (and always, the refrain)
if not, don’t move him.
It’s hard to tell
the truth of it – even half, he thinks – but these
are the things he knew, or maybe knows now,
or wishes he did, is what I’m saying.
Camerata
‘So great was his joy … that Theseus did not remember to hang out the sail which should have been a token of his safety. Aegeus, in despair at the sight, threw himself headlong from a rock, and perished in the sea.’
– Plutarch, Life of Theseus
We left the back room of the palace locked
where the king, hearing of the fleet’s approach,
had stood quickly from his untouched meal
to find his son against the sky’s black sail.
Something about that room, we later felt,
foretold catastrophe. Perhaps it was what
the servant said, hours before, who found
it swept by a hand not unlike her own,
the furniture – as if by a ghost – arranged
behind fastened doors. Or what it meant
to come upon the tall, paired mirrors thrown
from their frames in fright, hiding their brazen
infinities. A cup with its cracked lip
stood on the dresser, next to where he kept
close tally for each month the boy was gone.
We could still see his numbers in the stone,
like a child’s, their straight lines not touching,
Endings rubbed out where they were too long.
The last ones extended right to the floor.
And that is why we had to lock the doors.
My Grandfather Visits Pyongyang
Too late, we find among his photographs
a kingdom mostly dreamed of,
its absurd architecture where
he alighted some time in October.
Frame after frame resists comparison.
There isn’t a place we’ve seen
that stands as still, or with the same intent
raises its glass towards heaven,
all normalcy locked within a sound
these pictures don’t contain – a pitch rung
in the earth’s confines, too low
for human hearing. Friends tell us to allow
ourselves the time it takes
to grieve, or whatever brings us back
to last year’s long continuum,
but something stays the eye. How in some
perspectives he’s already gone,
gone from the boulevards where wide-crowned
trees fill up the viewfinder,
and men and women in work clothes hover
outside our field of vision. He’s
somewhere else entirely, now close,
now looking in, the disappearance
nothing more than a trick of the lens,
though we fall for it again and again.
How like him, we think,
then catch ourselves. The leaves turn
on their own impulse in our hands.
Road Cutting at Glanmire
‘Gleann Maghair’: the valley of ploughed land
They learned the hard way to a city’s heart
was to drive a road into the mountain
like a river, lost between its own dry banks
with gravelled walls holding the earth in place
and fast-growing trees, for the wet topsoil.
A bypass. When it was finished they came
to see the cut that had been named after them,
mounting the ridge above its strange traffic
while their own valley of ploughed land rose
a stone’s throw behind the black backbone
of the new highway. Far as I could tell
from the bus’s window, these days the village
has a changed air, full of primary schools
and real estate. We passed a lovely church
near the auctioneer’s, but without stopping
went on into Cork, taking the road which,
we were told, had been built at great cost
to shorten the journey into the city.
24.6.16
Red kites, native to Turkey, Morocco, and parts of Europe, were declared ‘vermin’ by the English crown and hunted nearly to extinction. They were successfully reintroduced to the UK in 1989.
No red kites over the field this morning.
However hard I looked, I could not find
a single cresting pair, their high crosses
invisible – as if unpitched from the grass.
No dry swoop, no sounding. No clatter from
morning’s fed sparrows rising in alarm,
no hare’s carcass eaten behind our wall,
nothin
g astir. No courting on the fell
in curious patterns, no stumbling display
of swift shadows bending above the Wye.
No haunt. No song. Only the heaven’s blue
graceless fire, and then as a ghost pursued
across a moor, the hunting-horn’s burly
cry
crucify, crucify, crucify.
Requiem
Gong-gong, 1936 –2015
You met us again in the outer room.
White bone in miniature, glazed earth
parting the skull’s cracked continents.
With love’s red cloth covering the bowl,
we lined up one by one to send you home.
A pair of hands took each broken part
and joined it with the others in the pile
so the pieces belonged as they were laid,
tibia, sternum, pelvis, patella
nook to nook, against the plain design.
In cupped fingers we scooped the fire-
tempered sand, a cloud of chalk