SUMMER WITH MARGARET

When my mam had to go

Up north to look after gran,

Margaret’s mam said I could

Stop with them; while they were

Sorting it out Margaret looked

Away, pretending to go all shy

But there was a gleam in her eye,

Anyway it was the six weeks’

Holiday and six weeks with

Margaret night and day was a

Sun and blue sky heaven to my

Ten-year old heart.. the hot

Pavements we sat on telling stories,

The bin-yards we played catch-and-

Kiss in, the wagons with wheels

Higher than our heads we hid

Behind, the river bank we chased

Along, the green railings round

The locked petrol pumps you

Somersaulted over, your dress

Above your head, your navy

Blue knickers in full view.

Your mam said, "You two needn’t

Think you’re keeping me awake

All night with your stories,

I’ve put you together in the attic!"

There was an enormous double-bed

With a carved wooden head-board

And a counter-pane in green with

Tassels in between and a huge

White bolster. My mam would have

Had a fit but she was off on

The train to Durham City and even

Margaret herself was a bit surprised

At her mam being so easy going

But that was her mam all over.

There was a tiny skylight

With just enough light to see by,

A huge mahogany chest of drawers

And Margaret and me. I’d never

Undressed in front of a girl

Before and Margaret said, "Me mam

’Ad no business mekin’ us share"

And went a bit red as she pulled

Her dress over her head, firmly

Pushing teddy to the middle

Of the bed.

We could hear Margaret’s

Mam downstairs getting grandad’s

Supper, the smell of steak and

Chips rising. Margaret said,

"You can kiss me good-night

If you like" and I liked and

Kissed her then suddenly she

Asked "Do you know what they

Do in bed? You know what I mean!"

But I said I didn’t really.

She pulled her vest up

And her knickers down,

"All right you’ve seen

Everything now!" deftly

Donning a white nightdress

With a border of flowers

On the collar

"The man puts it inside

The woman," I said, going red.

She replied, "I’ve never let

Anyone see me in the nude before.

I didn't think I’d dare but with

You, I knew it’d be different,

You’d never try anything on."

In the middle of the night

The cats in the binyard woke us,

The whole house silent, we

Were very close, her face

Was next to mine.

She put her finger to her lips,

"Swear you’ll never tell!"

I swore and touched her where

She put my hand:

"One day well get married

And do it for real."

HUDDERSFIELD - THE SECOND POETRY CAPITAL OF ENGLAND

It brings to mind Swift leaving a fortune to Dublin

‘For the founding of a lunatic asylum - no place needs it more’.

The breathing beauty of the moors and cheap accommodation

Drew me but the total barbarity of the town stopped me from

Writing a single line: from the hideous facade of its railway

Station - Betjeman must have been drunk or mad to praise it -

To that lump of stone on Castle Hill - her savage spirit broods.

I remember trying to teach there, at Bradley, where the head

Was some kind of ex-P.T. teacher, who thought poetry something

You did to children and his workaholic jackass deputy, obsessed

With practical science and lesson preparation and team teaching

And everything on, above and beneath the earth except ‘The Education

Of the Poetic Spirit’ and without that and as an example of what

Pound meant about how a country treats its poets "is a measure

Of its civilisation". I once had a holiday job in a mill and the

Nightwatchman’s killer alsatian had more civilisation than

Huddersfield’s Deputy Direction of Education.

For a while I was granted temporary asylum at Royds Hall -

At least some of the staff there had socialism if not art -

But soon it was spoilt for everyone when Jenks came to head

English, sweating for his OU degree and making us all suffer,

The kids hating his sarcasm and the staff his vaulting ambition

And I was the only one not afraid of him. His Achilles’ heel was

Culture - he was a yob through and through - and the Head said to me

"I’ve had enough of him throwing his weight around, if it comes

To a showdown I’ll back you against him any day" but he got

The degree and the job and the dollars - my old T.C. took him

But that was typical, after Roy Rich went came a fat appointee

Who had written nothing and knew nothing but knew everyone on

The appointing committee.

Everyday I was in Huddersfield I thought I was in hell and

Sartre was right and so was Jonson - "Hell’s a grammar school

To this" - too (Peter Porter I salute you!) and always I dreamed

Of Leeds and my beautiful gifted ten-year olds and Sheila, my

Genius-child-poet and a head who left me alone to teach poetry

And painting day in, day out and Dave Clark and Diane and I,

In the staffroom discussing phenomenology and daseinanalysis

Applied to Dewey’s theory of education and the essence of the

Forms in Plato and Plotinus and plaiting a rose in Sheila’s

Hair and Johns, the civilised HMI, asking for a copy of my poems

And Horovitz putting me in ‘Children of Albion’ and ‘The

Statesman’ giving me good reviews.

Decades later, in Byram Arcade, I am staring at the facade of

‘The Poetry Business’ and its proprietors sitting on the steps

Outside, trying to look civilised and their letter, "Your poetry

Is good but its not our kind" and I wondered what their kind was

And besides they’re not my kind of editor and I’m back in Leeds

With a letter from Seamus Heaney - thank you, Nobel Laureate, for

Liking ‘My Perfect Rose’ and yes, you’re right about my wanting

To get those New Generation Poets into my classroom at Wyther

Park and show them a thing or two and a phone call from

Horovitz who is my kind of editor still, after thirty years,

His mellifluous voice with its blend of an Oxford accent and

American High Camp, so warm and full of knowledge and above all

PASSIONATE ABOUT POETRY and I remember someone saying,

"If Oxford is the soul of England, Huddersfield is its arsehole".

THE VANDAL

Someone has been tearing up the autumn,

Its ripped leaves ripple across the road

Flip liked hinged cards in the moist grass.

The rain-varnished houses vanish in smoke,

Drift on the air like blown-out breath in gusts:

So we forget frog-ponds and nut-gatherers,

Remember instead that weather’s for us

Who know too well its intentions, wind-keen,

Intense as the first frost hardening

Stubble grass to a tacky ice-blanket

Listen! In bed we hear the swollen trees totter,

Dropsical-limbed, murmuring outside the window

Like Catherine’s insistent ghost-voice

"Let me in, let me in!"

OBSTACLES

A thousand visits to the supermarket

A thousand acts of sexual intimacy

Spread over forty years.

Your essence was quite other

A smile of absolute connection

Repeated a thousand times.

Your daily visits to the outside lavatory

While I stood talking outside,

An intimacy I have sought

With no other.

My greatest fear is that you might

Have changed beyond recognition,

Submerged in trivia and the

Minutiae of the quotidian.

At ten my adoration of you was total.

At sixty it’s somewhat greater:

I place you among the angels and madonnas

Of the quattrocento, Raphael and Masaccio

And Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura.

THE GIFT

We were three weeks

Into term, Sheila,

When you came

Through the classroom door;

Forty-four children

Bent over books,

Copying Roethke’s

‘The Lost Son’.

You wrote your

First poem on the ‘Moses’

Of Michelangelo.

Words cut like stone.

I taught you Greek

But your painting of

‘The Essence of the Rose’

Was pure Platonic form.

You drew the masks

Of Comedy and Tragedy

In perfect harmony.

Having seen neither;

So Socrates was right.

Those who have the Spirit’s gift

Will one day find the light.

MY FATHER

I had a father once, the records say.

He has gone away down the long avenue

Of death, on the hand-held minor no mist

Of his breath, his firm signature no more.

No more holding down his hat in the wind,

Running to catch the last post, he has gone

Beyond the wind-shaped stones on the high wall.

His breath in that final coma came steady.

Stertorous, the oxygen mask, the catheter,

The telephone call summons and night train,

The taxi over the moors, the charge nurse

With little to say but kind words.

I had a father once, the records say,

Who carried me on the cross-bar of his bike

Down Knostrop: we saw the white bells

Of bindweed crawling with ants

Strangle the rusty railings.

My father, a quiet man, never knew what

To say, which is why he was taken

And I was not told and the records say

It was pneumonia that took him

And I was not told why the anti-biotics

Were not given.

GROTTY AND THE QUARRYMAN

He demolished five doors at a sitting

And topped it off with an outsize window

One Christmas afternoon, when drunk;

Sober he smiled like an angel, bowed,

Kissed ladies’ hands and courtesy

Was his middle name.

She tried to pass for thirty at fifty-six,

Called him "My Sweet piglet" and laid out

Dainty doylies for his teatime treats; always

She wore black from toe to top and especially

Underneath, her hair dyed black, stuck up in a

Bun, her lipstick caked and smeared, drawling

From the corner of her mouth like a

Thirties gangsters’ moll, her true ambition.

"Kill him, kill him, the bastard!" she’d scream

As all Wakefield watched, "It’s Grotty,

Grotty’s at it again!" as pubs and clubs

Banned them, singly or together and they

Moved lodgings yet again, landlords and

Landladies left reeling behind broken doors.

Blood-smeared walls covered with a shiny

Patina of carefully applied deceits! "It was

The cat, the kids, them druggies, lads from

Football", anyone, anywhere but him and her.

Once I heard them fight, "Barry, Barry, get

The police," she thumped my door, double

Five-lever mortice locked against them,

"Call t’ police ‘e’s murderin’ me!" I went

And calmed her down, pathetic in black

Underwear and he, suddenly sober, sorry,

Muttering, "Elaine, Elaine, it were only fun,

Give me a kiss, just one."

Was this her fourth or fifth husband, I’d

Lost count and so had she, each one she said

Was worse than the last, they’d all pulled her

Down, one put her through a Dorothy Perkins

Plate-glass window in Wakefield’s midnight,

Leaving her strewn amongst the furs and

Bridal gowns, blood everywhere, such perfection

Of evidence they nearly let her bleed to death

Getting all the photographs.

Rumour flew and grew around her, finally

They said it was all in a book one ‘husband’

Wrote in prison, how she’d had a great house,

Been a brothel madame, had servants even.

For years I chased that book, "Lynch," they

Told me, "It’s by Paul Lynch" but it wasn’t,

Then finally, "I remember, Sykes, they allus

Called him Sykesy" and so it was, Sweet Agony,

Written in prison by one Paul Sykes, her most

Famous inamorato, amateur boxing champion

Of all England, twenty years inside, fly-pitcher

Supreme, king of spielers; how she hated you

For beating her, getting it all down on paper,

Even making money for doing it, "That bastard

Cheated me, writing lying filth about me and

I never saw a penny!" she’d mutter, side-mouthed,

To her pals.

But that book, that bloody book, was no pub myth,

It even won an Arthur Koestler Literary Award

And is compulsive reading; hardly, as a poet,

My cup of tea but I couldn’t put it down.

Paul Sykes, I salute you, immortaliser of Elaine,

Your book became and is my sweetest pain.

LETTER TO MICHAEL HOROVITZ

It is time after thirty years

We had our Poetry Renaissance

Rise, Children of Albion, rise!

It is time after nightmares of sleep

When we walked the streets of inner cities

Our poems among the burnt-out houses

And cars, whispering compassion

To the addicts shaking and the homeless

Waking and those who have come apart

In the nowhere of today

Begging in stations

Sleeping in boxes.

It is time to find

Our lost, those children

I taught three decades ago

To paint on ceilings

With sticks of incense

Rainbows of silence

For John Cage

To write on walls

In luminous paint

Pink haiku

For Allen Ginsberg.

It is time to awaken and emblazon the sky

With symphonies of sorrow,

To draft the articles of war.

Poets of the Underground

The doors have opened

The ghost of Walt Whitman

Grey-bearded, in lonely anguish

Walks with us.

A KIND OF DISTRACTION

You always disrupt me;

When I ring you for comfort

You wing me, send my

Pudding of a mind

A-splatter on the wall.

You chase me to bed even,

Passionately, not-yourself-at-all,

You bawl your lewd reminders

Down aching avenues of dreams

To shudder me awake.

And then at last you’ll fake

Your promises and take

Some simpler way, battening

On the eggs you’ll hatch

Warmly some tea-cosy day.

All this, you’ll say, was

Merely adolescence, not

The real unpoked you,

Tittupping in high heels

And cellophaned to view.

THE FIRST MONTH OF THE YEAR

A page of the ‘Kelmscott’ Chaucer

Seen through out cottage window

When the Pennines were blind with snow

Flurrying round the stones.

The fire was low when I began to blow

That single flicker to a flame,

Was I too late, I wondered, the ‘poet in name’

Whose mind runs endlessly

As fingers through an old man’s hair?

(Either way I thought of you and your being there)

A portrait by Velasquez

Seen through the months of silence, vivid

As the door I painted scarlet for our love

When the wind joined us walking the moors;

The sculpture of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse

Seen against the sadness is more eloquent

Than the sun: there is something I would waken

Other than that ageless sleeper, if I dare,

(The way I dream of you and our being there)

WINTERLIGHT

Let us, this December night, leave the ring

Of heat, the lapping flames around the fire’s heart,

Move with bodies tensed against the light

Towards the moon’s pull and the cloud’s hand.

Arms of angels hold us, lend our bodies

Height of stars and the planets’ whirl,

Grant us sufficiency of light so we may enter

The twisting lanes to lost villages.

So we may stare in the mirror of silent pools

By long-deserted greens, deepen our sight

Of what lies beyond the things that seem

And make our vision clear as winterlight.

LEFTOVERS

Empty chocolate boxes, a pillowcase with an orange at the bottom,

Nuts and tinsel with its idiosyncratic rustle and brilliant sheen

And the reflection in it of paper-chains hand-made and stuck with

Flour-paste stretching from the light-bowl to every corner of the room.

Father Christmas himself was plastic and his vast stomach painted red

With a bulging sack behind his back and he was stuck in the middle

Of a very large cake. The icing was royal and you could see the

Whites of many eggs in the glister of its surface and on the

Upright piano the music of Jingle Bells lay open.

With aching hands I wrote thank you notes for socks to sainted aunts

And played on Nutwood Common with Rupert until Tiger Lily’s father,

The Great Conjuror, waved his wand and brought me home to the last

Coal fire in Leeds, suddenly dying.

I got through a whole packet of sweet cigarettes with pink tips

Dipped in cochineal and a whole quarter of sherbet lemons at a sitting

And there was a full bottle of Portello to go at, the colour

Of violet ink and tasting of night air and threepenny bits

Which lasted until the last gas-lamp in Leeds went out.

I had collected enough cardboard milk-tops to make a set of

Matchstick spinners and with my box of Rainbow Chalks drew circles

On my top, red, white and Festival of Britain blue and made it spin

All the way to the last bin-yard in Leeds while they pulled it down.

I was a very small teddy-bear crouched on a huge and broken chair

Ready to be put out into the wide world and my mother was there

To see me off. The light in her eyes was out, there was no fire

In her heart and the binyard where I played was empty space.

A CALL TO ARMS

It was like chucking-out time

In a rough Victorian pub

Cherubic Dylan was first to go

Lachrymose but with a show

Of strength, yelling "Buggerall,

Buggerall, this is my boat-house

In Laugherne, these are my books,

My prizes, I ride every wave-crest,

My loves are legion. What’s this

You’re saying about fashion?

Others follow where I lead,

Schoolchildren copy my verse,

No anthology omits me

Put me down! Put me down!

George Barker was too far gone

To take them on

And moaned about a list

In a crystal cave of making beneath

The basement of the Regent Street

Polytechnic.

Edith Sitwell was rigid in a carved

High-backed chair, regally aloof,

Her ringed fingers gripping the arms,

Her eyes flashing diamonds of contempt.

"A la lampe! A la lampe!"

A serious fight broke out in the saloon bar

When they tried to turf Redgrove out:

His image of the poet as violent man

Broke loose and in his turtle-necked

Seaman’s jersey he shouted,

"Man the barricades!"

A tirade of nature-paths and voters

For a poetry of love mixed it with

The chuckers-out; Kennedy, Morley

And Hulse suffered a sharp repulse.

Heath-Stubbs was making death stabs

With his blindman’s stick at the ankles

Of detractors from his position under

The high table of chivalry, intoning

A prayer to raise the spirit

Of Sidney Keyes.

Geoffrey Hill had Merlin and Arthur

Beside him and was whirling an axe

To great effect, headless New Gen poets

Running amok.

Andrew Crozier was leading a counter-attack

With Caddy and Hinton neck and neck

And Silkin was quietly garrotting

While he kept on smiling.

Price Turner was so happy at the slaughter

He hanged himself in a corner

And Hughes brought the Great White Boar

To wallow in all the gore

While I rode centaur

Charles Tomlinson had sent for.

TO MY WIFE

You buy my freedom with your love.

With every book you catalogue or stamp

My imagination hacks a strand from the hawser

That for three years has held it

In the grubbing estuary of mud and time.

Your early waking with tired eyes

And late return at evening, all

Contribute to the store of images

I love you for: the irony being

Your job is worse than mine

Your talent more.

I do not understand myself, the time, or you.

I cannot comprehend our love, shot through

Like flying silk with flashes of gold light

And the tattered backcloth of suffering.

Each night I remember our meeting;

My hair ‘like iron wire’, the grey dust

In the air of my house, the exact place

On the carpet where I kissed you

And how we talked on and on,

Too much in love for love,

Until the night was gone.

We acted out our love

By nearly going mad,

Gave up the jobs we had

To take a cottage on the moors

At less than garage rent.

For food we learned to pledge our dreams

And found, too late, the world redeems

What it had lent.

By night the world unpicked

The dream we wove by day,

Each dawn we woke to find

The stitching come away.

Two creatures from a bestiary

Besieged our dream:

A neighbour’s one-eyed cat

That prowled outside to bring

Its witch-like owner

With her tapping stick.

Was the Bach we played too loud for her deaf ears,

Or was it our love that howled her silence home?

We have re-built that house

With blood.

We have sculptured that dream

In stone.

ON FIRST READING JOHN GOODBY’S ‘IRISH POETRY SINCE 1950’

Barbarous insult to Yeats’ memory and Claudel’s

Allen, thank God you are dead, you who breathed the air of Apollinaire,

Ghost of Reverdy bear witness to the mendacity of his clamour,

Hart Crane, rise from the estuary of the great river you drowned in,

John Clare, rise from your country churchyard grave,

Gray, from your carvèd tomb and Wilde, cast off your winged shield

In Père Lachaise,

Rise poets, rise and drive the barbarous horde without the sacred gates

of Art

Where it has crept and quenched the flame, rendering the Nine silent

And bereft and covered in shame.

Pastmaster of Post Modernist jargon, defiler of the tombs of great poets

Whose souls hover in Elysium or crouch along the banks of black Lethe

Begging a crown to lay on Charon’s palm.

Souls of the great dead rise and deliver us from one who negates

Poetry as the realm of the numinous, toyer with words, vain hack of

Academe,

Spoiler of the silver stream of poetry’s wind-harp voice unseen

Traducer, seducer, traitor, hands red with blood, bearer of the ultimate guilt

Of trahison des clercs, murderer of the subtle spirit of Mallarmé,

Defiler of poetry’s purity as defined by Rilke and Valéry

Praiser of ultimate poetastry-Duhig’s penny ranting-condemner of Jimmy Simmons-

One Leeds Jimmy who could fix the world’s Duhigs once and for all,

Write them into the ground and still have a hundred lyrics in his quiver.

WINDSONG

I drowse and dream in this sleeping house

Fynbos the cat purring by the curtain

Suriya the sun god sharing the garden

Where joss sticks burn and my nostrils quiver

At the echo of Japanese songs, long ago.

In the breaking day I kiss your lips

And taste the tongue of your waking shadow.

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

This is one spring you will not see.

The fifty roses of your spray

Smelt soft across that February day

Where trees, heavy as only crematoria

Can bear, sloped down the fallen banks

To where we waited in the chapel, me

Clutching Father Kevin’s hand, remembering

My given grace and faith renewed

In answer to my prayers, Brenda in tears,

And Joyce the sister of my years, Kim

And the others from the Home, where five

Long years you waited for this day,

Of all, the most important. Visits, letters,

Phone calls far too few, until we knew

When your last days began and for sixteen

Hours we sat, but still your will to live

Went on until our backs were turned

And then you, too, had gone.

DEATH OF A POET

I am the sick animal you dream you are caring for

In the long avenues of night I cannot find a name

For the sickness except the despair of a poet sensing his veins

Silt up like the delta of a neglected river with none of the solace

Sidney Graham felt as he lay by Nessie’s side with Madron’s circling

Wood and its snow blanket of comfort falling as he glided

From this world into the next, finger-painting his adieux into the small

Of her back, bidding them be hidden beyond the tiny bulk of his poems

To be found by the faithful far from the yawning taverns of eager tourists.

Alone with Nessie and her shadows in sleep as the wood of Madron

Moved slowly towards that final deep.

THE PLAY HOUSE

We had a new house

And split the decorating.

You took the piled rolls of paper,

While I stacked the cans of gloss,

One to each corner-white-what else?

And when we began our slow labour

We did not even sigh except in some relief

In being there at last.

There were no spaces for our children’s visits

Nor for the children they would never bring.

All rooms sat square and small, but with

Every outside wall a window. There was light

Enough for a studio wherever you went,

And for the tiny hall you chose

A glazed blue bowl of your own making.

The house stood on a hill, just a little

Inaccessible but, in view of our age, others

Had to be near and there they were, paired like

Dominoes in black and white, or chequer board

Squares with a neat red pillar-box

Anchored on the corner.

All the day of the moving I longed to be alone

With you; for the men in their old-fashioned aprons

To finish and be off and make space for you to squat

And with your nimble fingers light the one real fire

We had been allowed, so I could sit in my winged

Windsor chair and decipher the text of the flames

And savour the smoke before the up-draft caught;

And for a few days there might seem little to say,

The clay wet in the bin, the canvases heaped in the studio,

And the faces in our children’s photographs stranger

Than strangers.

THE PHILOSOPHERS

Lavender musk rose from the volume I was reading through,

The college crest impressed in gold, tooled gold lettering on the spine.

It was not mine but my son’s, jammed in the corner of a cardboard box

With dozens more; just one box of a score, stored in a heap

Across my ex-wife’s floor, our son gone far, as far as Samarkand and Ind

To where his strange imaginings had led, to heat and dust, some lust

To know Bengali, to translate Tagore, or just, for all we know,

Stroll round those sordid alleys and bazaars and ask for toddy

If it’s still the same and say it in a tongue they know.

The Classics books lay everywhere around the flat, so many that my mind

Grew numb. Heavy, dusty dictionaries of Mandarin and Greek,

Crumbling Victorian commentaries where every men and de was weighed

And weighed again, and then, through a scholar’s gloss on Aristotle,

That single sentence glowed, ‘And thus we see nobility of soul

Comes only with the conquering of loss’; meaning shimmered in that empty space

Where we believed there was no way to resurrect two sons we’d watched grow up,

One lost to oriental heat and dust, the other to a fate of wards.

It seemed that rainy April Sunday in the musty book-lined rooms

Of Brenda’s flat, mourning the death of Beethoven, her favourite cat,

Watching Mozart’s ginger fur, his plaintive tone of loss, whether

Some miscreant albatross was laid across our deck, or bound around

The ship, or tangled about whatever destiny we moved towards

Across that frozen sea of dark extremity; fatigued as if our barque

Had hardly stirred for all those years of strife, for all the times

We’d set the compass right, sorted through those heaped up charts

And with fingers weary and bleary-eyed retraced our course.

The books, a thousand books that lined the walls:

Plato’s chariot racing across the empty sky,

Sartre’s waiters dancing like angels on the heads of pins,

And Wittgenstein, nodding in his smoke-filled Cambridge den,

Dreaming of a school room in the Austrian hills and walks

In mountain air, wondering why he wasn’t there.

We wondered, too, at what, if anything we knew, trying to sift some

Single fact that might elicit hope from loss, enough to get us through

Another year with other griefs to come, we knew. Some, by a little,

Through God’s grace or chance or simple will, we might delay.

More likely we would have no say. By words or actions who can stay

The rolling balls across the table’s baize, the click of ball on ball,

The line of bottles in the hall?

HUGHES’ VOICE IN MY HEAD

As soon as we crossed into Yorkshire

Hughes’ voice assailed me, unmistakable

Gravel and honey, a raw celebration of rain

Like a tattered lacework window;

Black glisten on roof slates,

Tarmac turned to shining ice,

Blusters of naked wind whipping

The wavelets of shifting water

To imaginary floating islets

On the turbulent river

Glumly he asked, "Where are the mills?"

Knowing their goneness in his lonely heart.

"Where are the mines with their turning spokes,

Lurking slag heaps, bolts of coal split with

Shimmering fools’ gold tumbling into waiting wagons?

Mostly what I came for was a last glimpse

Of the rock hanging over my cot, that towering

Sheerness fifty fathoms high screed with ferns

And failing tree roots, crumbling footholds

And dour smile. A monument needs to be known

For what it is, not a tourist slot or geological stratum

But the dark mentor loosing wolf’s bane

At my sleeping head."

When the coach lurches over the county boundary,

If not Hughes’ voice then Heaney’s or Hill’s

Ringing like miners’ boots flinging sparks

From the flagstones, piercing the lens of winter,

Jutting like tongues of crooked rock

Lapping a mossed slab, an altar outgrown,

Dumped when the trumpeting hosannas

Had finally riven the air of the valley.

And I, myself, what did I make of it?

The voices coming into my head

Welcoming kin, alive or dead, my eyes

Jerking to the roadside magpie,

Its white tail-bar doing a hop, skip and jump.

ENTANGLEMENTS

Why is it that in dreams I have visited -

As teacher or pupil - almost every college and school

In our once so green and pleasant land?

Hardly a subject from art to anthropology I have not

In dream seminar or floating spinning classroom

Studied or tried my prentice hand at, or learned

At the sandalled feet of some guru; as this minute

I returned from an easeled art room with the title

Of my weekly essay, ‘Discuss the links between the work

Of any symbolist poet and Monet.’

O, how slowly I drifted back to consciousness

Probing delightedly the dizzying whitenesses of Mallarmé

Strolling along an avenue of linden trees

Under a Provencal sky of azure

Wet with the scent of jasmine and lavender.

Yet in reality, things could hardly have been more different:

Watching our children grow from their first tottering steps,

Helping to tend them in sickness, learning the basics

Of the healer’s art, taking an old man to a ward,

Listening, listening to how many troubled lives

And to my own, perhaps; seeking to tease a meaning

Or find a thread in the jumbled maze of sorrows

Souls in their turbulence and grief have wandered through.

I even wrote a novel, ‘A Gone World’ I called it,

And helped another with the birth-pangs of her own.

Trying my hand at translation I puzzled the subtle

Metaphors of Reverdy, wandering his midnight landscapes

Of windmills and cross-roads where faith meets fate

And neither will succumb.

I sat in a packed lecture hall while a Lacanian

Misread early Freud through a crooked lens

And for a year turned every seminar to war

To make him see his vision’s fatal flaw.

I poured over cabinets of case histories,

Tried living here and there and met an amah,

Teaching her Auden and Empson. Her tears mingled

With my own at our last hurried meeting

In a crowded tea room, teaching her Klein.

I sat through many a summer watching the children play,

Feeling a hermit’s contentment in his cave,

Contemplating Plato and envisioning that cave

Of his where shadows move against the wall;

And turn to see or fail to see

The need to turn at all.

O my beloved city,

How many times have I deserted you

For the sights and sounds of Babylon?

How often and from how far

Have I conjured your broad boulevards

O Quartier Latin, crowded street cafés

With white and scarlet awnings, gold

Adornings on stone cupolas, Byzantine domes

And plinths of equine statuary before

The Gare du Nord, grumbling fading

Faience of the Gare de l’Est?

Often, O how often, did I mingle with your crowds

Crossing the Pont Mirabeau in their Sunday best,

Regretting my lost loves, watching the barges

Snail along the Seine, hearing the bells

Of the Angelus dawn?

II

Exiled in the south and in a new century,

I recall leisurely Sundays on the Grande Jatte;

The children in sun hats knelt by their boats

Unfurling handkerchiefs for sails and for supreme farewells

(Shall I return? Steamer with your poised masts

Raising anchor for exotic climes?)

III

The bells of Sacré Coeur shake rickety tables

Where old men in blazers sport the Légion d’Honneur.

Priests in birettas sip Green Chartreuse over their

Breviaries while Wilde and Gide stroll round Père

Lachaise vying to outdo each other’s tinted

Memories of soft-skinned Moroccan boys.

Weary of their weariness and of my own, and of

Rimbaud and Verlaine’s battle of strophe and

Anti-strophe and rhetoric’s demise, I take a

Lacquered tram to the Bois de Boulogne, hoping

To catch Mistinguette’s last song.

TO BRENDA WILLIAMS ON HER FIFTIETH  BIRTHDAY

The years become you as Oxford becomes you,

As you became Oxford through the protest years;

From Magdalen’s grey gargoyles to its bridge in May,

From the cement buttresses of Wellington Square

To Balliol, Balliol in the rain.

The years become you as the Abbey Road becomes you,

As you became that road through silent years,

From the famous crossing to the stunted bridge

Caparisoned with carnivals of children,

Cohorts of coloured clowns and Father Christmases.

The years become you as the Clothworkers’ Hall in gold

Became you, and you became it through the protest years,

When the Brotherton’s Portland stone, its white stone

Of innocence was snow in the School of English garden,

‘A living sculpture’, a Grene Knicht awaiting spring.

The years become you, Oxford, Leeds and London,

As you became them through the years of poems,

Through passing, silent crowds, through the cherry blossom

You sat under, plucked and ploughed, ‘a dissenting voice’,

And Balliol, Balliol in the rain.

HYMN

How I love the working-class girls of Leeds,

Their mile-wide smiles, eyes bright as beads,

Their young breasts bobbing as they run,

Hands quick as darting fish, lithe legs

Bare as they scramble over the Hollows

With brown-soled feet and dimpled bums

Half-covered with knickers, and short frocks

Full of flowers and their delicate ears,

Perfect teeth and flickering tongues, the

Fragile bones of their cheeks, the soft

Sweetness of their soprano voices dying

Away into the unforgotten magenta and

Yellow-ochre of innumerable twilights.

LAMENT

How I loathe this land of my exile,

Concrete upon concrete,

Steel upon steel,

Glass upon glass

In massed battalions

And no way back.

My mind moves to a far-off place

To a hill-top where the wind is my succour,

Its blow and howl and rage

Over the springing turf and heather

Calms as the song of a mother

And the last light’s glimmer.

THE ROAD TO HAWORTH MOOR

for Brenda Williams

The dawn cracked with ice, with fire grumbling in the grate,

With ire in the homes we had left, but still somehow

We made a nook in the crooked corner of Hall Ings,

A Wordsworthian dream with sheep nibbling by every crumbling

Dry-stone wall, smoke inching from the chimney pot beside the

Turning lane, the packhorse road with every stone intact that bound

The corner tight then up and off to Thurstonland, past the weathered

Walls of the abandoned quarry, beyond Ings Farm where Rover ran

His furious challenge to our call.

We had little, so little it might have been nothing at all

The few hundred books we’d brought and furniture bought

At auction in the town, left-overs knocked down to the few pounds

We had between us, dumped outside the red front door by the

Carrier’s cart; stared at by neighbours constantly grimacing

Though the grimy nets of the  weavers’ cottage windows, baffled

As to who we were and how and why we’d come there.

I never gave it a thought (perhaps I should have) but with

The sense of ‘poet’ in my soul, a book to read and one

To write, night walks in the valley’s hyaline air through

Brambled woods and on down tracks we trekked along

Until the sharp sneck of dawn  drew us back to the

One-up one-down cottage on the lumbering hill.

Was it folly, chance or madness, another’s or our own,

Drove us from Leeds, our native home, past shadows

Darker than death itself upon the bedroom wall

At Rawdon in the bungalow by the cross-roads where we met?

Three decades on and yet I cannot say for sure the destiny

That made us meet was dark or light, some sound or sight

‘Beyond our mortal vision’, some immaterial infinity,

A double helix on the heels of both that made my south

Your north and jerked the compass till we knew

Not day from night nor wrong from right.

Only a week ago you took me to the house you came from

Thirty years before. Together we stood as strangers in a room

Filled with plastic saccharine furniture, vinyl gloss, cabinets

Of china dogs and photographs of a departed wife and child.

All that remained of your family was a hidden coat of red paint

Beneath the kitchen windowsill and on a faded page the number for

Your long-gone  neighbour, Lilly Clarke, ninety if she lives at all,

The memory of a lilac tree, the Anderson shelter hidden by the fence,

And the incomer’s invitation to call again and then and then...

We were wrong from the beginning, you always said, wrong

To be together, wrong to go away or perhaps, as Hobsbaum said,

‘It was the place’s fault. If we’d made it to Haworth as we

Dreamed, standing on the moor top, the heather muffling your tears,

The wind sighing its threnody, crying its cradle-song, whispering

Promises of its care to come, its breath caressing the very stones

We sat on, lost beyond the ken of any guide, beyond the signatures

Of time  and place, beyond, beyond...

II

There is no clock can measure what we both passed through,

The darker griefs that soon began to haunt your fragile sleep,

The echoes of nightmare flights through empty streets that soon

Began to creep behind the wainscot of those tiny rooms, the rat

That took them up and ran to hide and haunt us, encountered

At the cellar-head or heard beneath the boards. The sad rat-catcher’s

Nod and shaking head, as if he knew more than the pair of us

What lay ahead. Like  Charlotte’s your hair lay in dark ringlets

On the pillow while I lay stunned and terrified and lost.

From then till now, two children grew, two fathers died;

One mad, one sad, but both alone. Together or apart our lives

Have changed beyond repair, the text altered and the cover bare

But still the same story more or less, echoing down hospital corridors,

Left in faded waiting rooms and lost like our children.

Cyril Williams, gravedigger at Killingbeck, buried among

The graves his own hands dug, lay beside your mother,

‘In death as in life together,’ - what parody lies hidden

Beneath the marble chips of the unmarked grave?

Where is the cross of weathered wood and stapled names?

The thirty roses that you left had withered on the stem,

The weeds had spread and spread and you yourself

Were paler than the dead.

There may be little time or time enough for ills

We have to bear for others with our own. Madness

Seems our calling, yours and mine, speaking a tongue

Where words are symbols, signs and symptoms, pointers

To a buried past, clues to an untold murder.

Those nightmares came to haunt us and teach us and take us

To that room in Stainmore Place, your mother’s ghost

At  Banquo’s feast, the guest that never could

Be laid to rest.

III

One stifling July day thirty years on we returned to Honley

Where the hamlet snagged on the hillside, fattened now and hollow

And grown grey with money and success: one cottage joined on

To the next, the common land fenced off, the nearby chapel

Turned to a desirable residence, the tombstones garden ornaments,

The heart of Hall Ings Mill crumpled under mechanical hammers

And reeled before our eyes, dust rising to powder the wings

Of passing butterflies. We watched the white-glazed inner walls

Sink in shame to shattered heaps of stone and shards of nothingness.

I never thought it would be the experience it was-

How could anything be more banal than a visit to Oakes?

Twenty two Georgian semis from the sixties, brass coach-lamps

By glass front doors, irreproachable gardens,

The estate lodge’s great oak doors opening to vistas

Of street on street, the fields and cows gone.

We peered through the polished windows at the hearth

We’d sat around, our hearts numb, all hope gone; but then

A quiet came we had not felt for years, a lens of silence

Enclosed us, a single leaf fell at my feet.

IV

The rat we tried to frighten, trap or poison, saw us off instead;

It seemed as if it grew beneath our very skins and circled

With our blood and hammered at our heads and leered from specks

Of fluff beneath the bed. The wainscot was the worst, it seemed

No whitewashed wall was free from cavities that wound behind

And joined another maze of runs that opened to the boards of yet

Another floor, until the tiny house had grown to one great rat-run

Vaster than the universe, where that single rodent gnawed and slithered

To unsettle finally our fragile peace.

I did not want to go. You did. I could not stay alone. It was

The whispers said and never ceased, ‘the beginning of the end’.

Now, thirty odd years on, I do not know at all, no certainty is certain,

No narrative, however neat, is sure. I know how listlessly we tried

Again in Leeds, a tiny flat with the white telephone that never rang

Next to the Christian Science Church my sad grandmother trekked to with

Her cancer-ridden spine. It was doomed from the start. The previous

Tenants had ended in divorce. If the certain salesman and his gleaming

Bride had failed to make it, how could we? Our moves from Huddersfield

And back became more frantic and our peace more fragile.

You always felt lonely in the countryside, while I longed in Leeds

For open vistas cloud-masses over the blue chain of hills, the silence

Of the lanes, the sheep bells and the endless walks. Was I in flight..?

You had to ask but then as now I had no answer; but  it’s the way I was,

Hating the clutter of the city, man en masse. I thought I needed a mate

For a Platonic cave, a companion for the Martello tower in Dublin Bay,

Whatever it was I never wanted you to go but go you did to stay.

The one became the two again, you shed your ring, we had our son to share.

I read instead of writing, psycho-analysis became a faith of sorts,

A pastime then a passion I kept on with even when my muse returned

Demanding me in dreams. Our children grew, then you wrote, too, by