Meanwhile Trees

by Mark Waldron

  The Tenant

  Pour drink out of a can, spoon

  meat out of a tin:

  air moves in. Some portion

  of the air wakes up,

  leaves its position

  reclining dozily in space and drops

  quick into every virgin crevice

  of that fresh vacuity.

  There it squats,

  just as a hermit, crazy maybe

  (inhabited by loss himself perhaps),

  might squat a cave for forty years;

  or as an undressed crab might haunt

  a whelk’s clockwise shell.

  So that newly housed and hunkered

  atmosphere, now it’s made its home,

  begins to brood and then to stew

  that very spot it’s in until

  it’s made of it a rich stock that is

  the vivid ghost of that exact place.

  We rested our hands

  on the professor’s back. I remember I could feel his unbending aluminium through the fabric of his jacket that, beneath our touch, slipped a bit against the shiny metal. That immalleable quality seemed so incongruous on him I almost recoiled and pulled away my hand earlier than would have seemed fitting. It’s also true that I couldn’t exactly tell if my touching of him was some conniving political gesture or if I’d genuinely meant it. I’m afraid that looking back, it seems that both might be true. Once you are aware of your effect, you will always be half dissembling. The professor didn’t breathe or show any sign of life of course, though not because his life is some imaginary quality endowed on him by children. In fact I’d say the opposite was true. We had made him seem not to be alive, so that his sensational existence should be still more vivid every time it came to us.

  Grace

  One thing I like about collecting is that when I collect a thing

  and add it to the bunch, then the pile outside the bunch diminishes

  by precisely that amount. So effectively I disturb the world twice,

  both intimately and broadly, both in privy, in my own shuttered

  room, and also in the landscape beyond, with its indeterminate

  scraping and shuffling and whooshing sounds. Also, when I make

  my choice of object I radically alter its value allowing it to burst

  from its cocoon of mundanity, its repulsive poverty, to emerge

  soft and hot and beginning, almost vile in its shimmying vividity,

  awoken by the anointing touch of just my poor bashful notice.

  Effectively, I do well twice you see, and perhaps even a third time

  in a kind of schadenfreude, because when I lifted the thing from

  the pile outside, I denied it to my enemies who are many and

  include all those solipsists with their nasty habits so aggrandised.

  Manning

  I don’t know what Manning is, but I can say this,

  that he got everywhere, in history and in space.

  So I scraped him off with something like a spatula,

  and then I took him off that thing like a spatula

  with something like my finger, and then I undressed him

  and ground him down (gently), and I wettened him

  and mixed him up and kneaded him and folded him

  and clothed him again, and then I filled in each of these

  here holes with him to help make everything safe.

  I Collaboration

  At 4pm Manning and I sat down to discuss the poem and his role in it. An imaginary wind buffeted and rattled the remote French farmhouse window like some sort of device, like a signifier of something trenchant and solemn. Manning said he was so excited about the poem that he was actually rock-hard as he put it, and what about I set it in a hotel room and sort him out with a Latvian stripper and half an ounce of good quality gak. And with that, quite matter-of-factly, he pulled his johnson out of his zoot suit pants to show me his predicament. His member (though my gaze, I can assure you, recoiled from it with more haste than a hand would from a hot coal) looked something like a monstrous jewel in the setting of the surrounding grey fabric of his trousers; or like, perhaps, a misplaced floral buttonhole that would have seemed less offensive had it protruded from the suit’s lapel. It appeared to me that its grotesque rudeness buzzed against its, dare I say it, rather feminine beauty with a metallic ringing sound, but perhaps that was merely tinnitus brought on by the stress of the situation. I’d never known Manning to talk or behave in this way before. And even though it soon came to me that he’d been suffering from concussion after being hit full on the head by a lance in a jousting accident, and even though within a day or so he’d recover fully and return to his sensitive, and innately feminist self, I found that I always felt a little wary in his presence thereafter, for what I’d heard and seen that afternoon must surely have lain dormant in him for all the time I’d known him. And perhaps since then, I consequently feel a little less secure in the company of all my friends and acquaintances as well, of course, as in the company of myself.

  II The Stage Is Set

  Some weak, decrepit wind once sloughed off

  a dismal place

  and made of the yawns

  of the wretched old men who once lived there

  comes to a sorry halt over the land and expires disturbing

  nothing.

  *

  Manning pulls the damaged machine out of its dive

  just above the blind and dopey trees that panic only once

  the danger’s passed.

  He hears himself laugh

  like a mad Hun

  and the washed skies lie all about him

  thinned with the dreamt-up blood of angels.

  Manning, his aircraft,

  the flapping fabric of its torn wing,

  the trees and the sky are all one and the same.

  They each smell exactly of breath.

  They are made of the same

  finely patterned material,

  part hard, part nothing,

  of which every concocted thing is made.

  Manning is most likely a poet. To his lovers he says things like:

  I am rinsed through passion, my darling;

  absolved, ruined; absolved, ruined.

  He tries to gain height now,

  he means to pull up and up

  towards a cloud that looks exactly like a cauliflower

  or an old woman striking a lofty attitude and lighting a pipe.

  Once inside the cloud

  he’ll continue to climb, using it as cover

  as he hungrily re-gathers the potential

  energy of altitude.

  But though the aircraft’s wings judder as though buffeted

  by wind,

  the propeller only grasps hopelessly, pitifully over and over,

  like the hands of desperate children,

  at the completely meatless air.

  *

  Back in the officers’ mess

  where I’ve put him

  (I own him very much

  as some people own bees),

  Manning lights a thin cigar as a joke

  and smiles at me

  between puffs and bouts of coughing, daring me to allude to it.

  The cigar is only a smokescreen though,

  its smoke stands in for a hopeless ghost, all airs and graces.

  III Does a Filmic Wind Tousle the Photo-Real Grass?

  It does.

  The ho-hum flies can barely be bothered to move their wings

  to fabricate their buzz.

  They use their mouths instead.

  They make their buzzing

  with their long black lips which consequently

  blur at the tips

  so it looks as if a tiny flapping fly alit

  on each proboscis.

  *

  Enter Dr Manning with Marcie and me and you on a cliff-top path.

  (Marcie and I are walking just behind the doctor
<
br />   and are holding hands secretly,

  you are bringing up the rear, picking blackberries

  and then scampering along the path to catch up with us).

  Dr Manning:

  How convenient, then, that I should find

  the reflection of my own self so arousing,

  that I should be quite so enthralled by the sweet, up-market stink

  of my smart papery hum.

  Fact is, I can’t say if Manning has an actual moustache.

  Sometimes he does,

  sometimes he doesn’t.

  Sometimes he doesn’t,

  sometimes he does.

  The oscillation between having

  and not having

  can occur many times

  in a single humid day

  when the stuff of which we’re made

  and the material that surrounds us

  become so similar in consistency

  that we begin to lose

  our definition

  and to dissolve, or at least to fear it!

  Also, the moustache

  that Manning sometimes wears might be fake,

  or alternatively, the doctor being, in common with us all,

  spurious (or cooked-up as he puts it),

  it might be doubly fake.

  (I should mention, that I, as well as Manning as it happens,

  have a powerful antipathy towards so much

  that is nowadays labelled ‘surreal’,

  perhaps because of the promiscuous availability

  of ‘unlikely’ juxtaposition,

  or the hideous banality of another’s dreams.

  But there are elements of his story to which, I admit,

  that facile description seems inexorably drawn,

  much as a magnet is drawn to cheese

  in the kind of easy-peasy panto which we both so abhor.)

  Allow me,

  under the tall ships and all their lugubrious weight,

  and the cannons and ropes and what-not,

  the bent sea was absolutely

  wet-through, sopped right out to the gills.

  What hurts

  more than anything

  is how I watched it lie brazen under the sun,

  creaking under the lightness too

  of my impossible gaze

  at the very same time

  as Manning was unconsciously growing an

  immeasurably small volume of facial hair

  right under the nose of my mother,

  who sat in the actual Inn,

  breathing him in,

  breathing him out,

  breathing him in.

  My old mum Merle who, I might add,

  had always laughed so dismissively at moustaches,

  as people of her social class

  and in that lukewarm historical moment, always did.

  In the courtyard

  the fading evening light walks about aimlessly,

  looking at the bushes,

  looking at the expensive cars,

  and then back at the bushes

  and then back at the cars,

  in its hand,

  a glass

  with a tiny bit of completely melted ice in it.

  Wherever you drill into the world

  you’ll find its richness, dum-de-dee,

  said Manning, and he ate another one

  of my yellowy salted peanuts and lit a smile.

  IV Denmark Brochure

  The mood is polite, facetious.

  Manning himself, disordered, facticious.

  The average colour, purpley-beige

  except when it’s dark. (Forgive me, but

  all of us, we did look up at the night sky.

  We saw behind the day’s

  blue curtain – saw the terrible workings!

  It seemed so bored with us!)

  According to the intro (and why not?),

  the average temperature is coldish,

  depending. The sky, humdinging.

  Geography, nice, alien,

  peninsularic. Penguins, erroneous.

  The sea, blank, made quite crispy

  with say-so. Manning, popped,

  avoidant. Marcie, ghosted, jizzed, lit.

  I could go on. Beasts don’t even

  glance at a smashed moon.

  V Manning in the Rock Garden

  Chorus of the small stones: We, then, are the mealy stones,

  our weight untrue, our authored heat curdles our manners.

  Listen to our voices. Count us out. Count us in.

  Forgive me. The dreamt, having no bodies

  are unaffected by alcohol. The booze goes right through ’em

  without consorting avec the dry scaffold of their sticks.

  Bein’ in some way, shall we say, ill, Manning the Stone

  found himself born, found himself, ahem, dumped.

  He can look at his actual concocted body.

  He can photograph his itchy feet on the iffy ground.

  He is pregnant, bone-stuffed. He carries himself in his middle

  that’s as stiff as a bubble.

  He will be an old man never having been slitted. (I made that.)

  (I have scribbled up the all of us.)

  Myself, I daubed up inside myself in colours

  appropriate therein. Manning is concerned that in the long run

  this trick of ours don’t work.

  Forgive me, but we are absolutely cunted, absolutely coined.

  VI Out Here in the Future,

  Everything Is Doubly Suspect

  Manning, oh Manning! Oh! shouts the lovely she-alien, her delicious tentacles gesticulating madly, her voice like that of a whale. Manning looks up at her. He feels shame at his detachment just at the moment of the creature’s joyful panic. How strange, he thinks, to find convergent evolution has produced such similar and complementary genitals on so many diverse planets. And how predictable, somehow, that every high-end creature should orgasm so similarly, and that his charm (we know he has it) as well as his innate physical skill should function so effectively when deployed on hyper- evolved vegetation, thought-stones, buzzing grey pools of intelligence or mollusc-type beings. Manning’s Plexiglass helmet has begun to steam-up on the inside. The oxygen- rich atmosphere he breathes is unlike the octatron’s, so one of them was obliged to wear the helmet while the other could safely inhale their own home-gas selected from the comprehensive menu available from room service and then fed through tiny vents into the plush, retro- styled cabin suite. Manning, as ever, had been the gentleman and donned the headgear, but now he appears, to the exhausted, subsiding octatron, like nothing so much as some comical, orb-headed creature. Then, with a gentle, and, to Manning’s ear at least, maternal laugh, she takes the heavy white ball of his helmet in a still partly engorged tentacle and kisses it. Oh Manning, how ridiculous you are, though I do believe I love you!

  VII I am lordly, puce and done,

  but enough about me, Manning says

  as he adjust his tights under what we take for a moon.

  There’s a cascading swagger,

  everything is joy in a thin strip:

  Forgive me, the trees themselves

  are morose rather than lightweight, the sky is certainly lit.

  The ground bows down like a dumpty stone

  quite free under its own buff

  beneath the undressed pomp of its own boff,

  and Manning laughs a luvvy laugh beneath a stony arch.