by Mark Waldron
Marcie is all light of course and buzzing honey,
though quite as quiet as my open hand
and my old forgotten blood
who sings to himself
as he trundles about
picking up oxygen
spending it wisely
driving the pump that pumps him round
picking it up again
spending it wisely
singing the red corpuscle song.
The made-bees are quite as quiet as the blown-mice
(all my house is glass),
and Marcie is just about as clean as any window
ever was.
No so sorry dirt at all for me to make my home in.
VIII Don’t talk to me about ghosts,
Manning yelled with a laugh
as the prop juddered to a halt
and the Le Rhône engine let loose
an ostentatious culminating ‘BOUM!’
Manning then swung elegantly down
from the Sopwith Pup cockpit,
walked around the wing,
came to a mock-shocked wobbly stop
and with his mouth ajar stood
quite motionless before me
on the upper-class and foppish grass.
A little while passed,
until it became quite evident to me
that he had either forgotten his lines
or he pretended to have forgotten them,
or, as I now firmly believe,
he was pretending to have forgotten lines
that he never actually had.
2
So, as I say,
there he positioned himself
as the light began to slowly fold itself away
into the dark’s sober briefcase,
and all the while his expression remained
as blank but also as disarming
as that of, say, a turnip.
As I stared back at him,
as I returned post-haste
his stare, though now bedecked
in the splashy garb
of my own unexciting boat race,
I began to feel myself subjected
to the first in a long procession
of differing emotions
which would proceed to march
through my consciousness, saluting
in the fashion of squaddies
who process past their king.
3
The first emotion I entertained (as one might
entertain a shy and unassuming guest at tea)
was a mild embarrassment at his behaviour.
Then, as time went on, I became increasingly
more mortified, until, out of all that
itchy awkwardness
there sprang a fragile and unexpected shoot
of mirth as a silky stem
might rise proud from a stimulated bean.
And as that bean’s
associated root bored its fidget way
down into my ticklish mind I found I must
soon produce a twiggy cough whose purpose
was to camouflage a raspberry-like splutter
behind which pressed a proper, full-blown
belly-laugh.
4
I entered next,
step by hesitant step,
a state of respectful awe,
not just at the fellow’s gall,
not just at the fact he had
the wherewithal
to hold his pose,
but at what seemed to be
the dreadful weight
of that which his dumbness
seemed so eloquently
to yammer.
And soon it was that I admit
I suddenly began to weep,
to bawl, to cry
not as I have ever caterwauled
before or since but silently
as though a sliding sluice had lifted
and let the pity that I felt
for Manning and which had
backed up all this time inside me,
pour from my eyes and nose
and mouth and ears in a
monstrous waterfall of
amalgamated tears each single
one of which stood in for some
specific incidence of misery.
And as the tears flowed
so freely from me, as though
a distraught torrent burst
from a busted dam, an absurd
and yet unnerving fear began
to run along its boiling side
like a Schützenpanzer halftrack
rattling on the tarmac
of a barely moonlit,
barely flak-lit, near
pitch-black Ruhr valley road.
A fear that the pressure of those
backed-up tears had for all
these years powered
a rusty dynamo
that had furnished me with just
enough get-up-and-go to rise
each day from my bed, and that
once the reservoir was spent
I might never summon
enough spirit to do so again!
5
So finally it was that a bitter little dread began
to gather as a vapour in the near-emptied
bladder of that sorrow. An anxiety that I must
surely neither move nor speak and break
this spell he’d cast. And it was only many
minutes after darkness fell, to the extent that
his form had been entirely obscured for
a substantial chapter of time, that I felt able
to creep backwards out of the scene and away
as the world’s alternate, piddling and barbarous
truths came down upon me as a dawn.
6
If you’re anything like me you’ll be wondering
if Manning was still there the following day.
Well the fact is that he was. There was no way
that I might ascertain if he’d stolen off to spend
the night ensconced in a hostelry or with some
confederate perhaps in a nearby abode, and
returned that morning with a hot and fortifying
breakfast lolling supine in his belly only to adopt
the same posture and open-mouthed expression
once again, but I can vouch with certainty
that when I found him in the field beside
his machine at approximately 6.15 AM, he
certainly gave the appearance of having been
positioned there right through the night,
as the dew which had formed on the grass
and on the Sopwith Pup had also formed on him,
and I was able to distinguish no tell-tale trace
of footprints leading up to his position.
I hesitate to mention this, but I swear I also
could detect a damp expanse on the front
portion of his britches, a darkened territory
which continued down the entirety of his right
thigh, as far as the top of his boot and which
might indicate his having remained in place
for many hours with no opportunity
to relieve himself since before his flight
began (though I should add that I wouldn’t
put it past him to contrive even such an
outrageous diversion as a means of misleading
those of us who were his witnesses).
7
It was only when
some time had passed
that I espied a small boy,
perhaps nine years
of age or so,
stood some little
way away from me.
And when that boy,
who had also chosen
not to approach
Manning, decided
to take his leave,
I fabricated
/> from the material
of my presence there
a departure of my own
(as a Japanese might
construct a queer
though wanting toad
from a folded piece
of paper)
and when I returned
a second time,
at approximately noon
of that same day,
Manning and his aircraft
had disappeared,
as had any tracks
they might have left,
the dew having
long since dispersed
beneath the heat
of the sun.
In fact Manning
had left behind him
to my great and
continuing amazement
no trace of his presence,
no scintilla of suggestion
that he’d had any more
substance as my own
unravelling breath.
His failure to leave
at the very least a relic,
some trinket souvenir
through which I might
touch, through which
I might palpate my own
inchoate self excites me
far more than I am able
to express.
IX Enter a Ghost Smelling Minty
Holy-moly,
the ghost is only gaseous!
Though I might care for him
he is mostly ghostly,
largely see-through,
his weightless,
his ungravid, airy dong
will do nothing for the world
that’s rude for it,
being made of earth and hot,
being all bark, all bite,
its stuff dug
from the horny old ground.
And who digged it?
Well, it did. Down there
in the filthy night. Just saying.
* * *
The Common Quail
I heard this great story the other day.
At least I’m pretty sure it was a great story,
and I think I heard it the other day.
Actually, I’m almost certain it was great
because I remember thinking, wow,
now that is a great story, and also
I’m pretty sure it was the other day
because I remember it was raining
and it was certainly raining the other day.
You know what, I really want to say
the story had a quail in it, but then
I also really don’t want to say it had
a quail in it. Those feathers that a quail
has, that brown and beige plumage looks
so right in the context of the lingering
atmosphere of the story, but also viewed
another way it just seems so wrong with
it’s One Two-Three call, and that kind of
roundish shape quails have – I don’t know,
I just can’t be sure either way. You know
that thing when you say to your friends
in the pub how you read a fascinating
article about our education system in
the West, and why it’s so totally fucked,
and they go like, ‘Wow, what did the article
say?’ and you realise you can’t remember
a single thing it said, except the residue of
that feeling of revelation you experienced
when you read it is still with you, and maybe
it’s that that’s the important thing.
The Lawn Sprinkler
The sprinkler’s simple engine
that sputters through its repetitive routine
is powered by that water which
it distributes; just as the thickness of the tongue’s
compelled to clever flutter
by those words which, as they pass over it, it speaks.
First off,
take note of my bespoke rabbit-folk,
pale, no meat on ’em (a transient enthusiasm)
as they burst from squiggly silos,
nibbling, nibbling, nibbling, liebling. Nibbling.
Then see how my consort bod escorts me
in its tight suit like a goon, and look how I leaf
so slowly through your autonomous scent
in the labyrinthine library of your presence.
This world is like edible earth to me: edible, certainly,
but full in the sense of crammed.
Me, I am but a pin – sharp, slid into it, new; or I’m old,
a blunt socket that receives existence’s
three-pronged plug that sucks my polished electricity.
(I fill myself also, as a dog fills its wallop.)
Me, I’m the national anthem of somewhere shaky.
You, you’re as neat as a particle.
I don’t particularly mean you to touch me exactly.
About the Author
Mark Waldron was born in New York. He grew up in London where he now lives with his wife and son. He began writing poetry in his early 40s and published two collections with Salt, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011). His third collection, Mean-while, Trees, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016. The Brand New Dark was chosen for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets promotion in 2014.
Copyright
Copyright © Mark Waldron 2016
First published 2016 by
Bloodaxe Books Ltd,
Eastburn,
South Park,
Hexham,
Northumberland NE46 1BS.
This ebook edition published in 2016.
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Cover design: Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce.
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ISBN: 978 1 78037 297 6 ebook.
