1.
Backwaters.
Long grass, slow speech. Far off
a truck heaves
its load of rust into a yard
next to a
warehouse full of office furniture
no one will
ever use, unless to stuff
some temporary
room when times are hard.
Across the
fields the sweet smell of manure.
We’re years
behind. Even our vowels sag
in the cold
wind. We have our beauty spots
that people
visit and leave alone, down main
arterials and
side roads. A paper bag
floats along
the beach, clouds drift in clots
of grey and
eventually down comes the rain.
We’re at the
end. It might simply be of weather
or empire or
of something else altogether.
2.
Empire
perhaps. Chapels in the cathedral.
Old airstrips.
History’s human noises
still revving
down a field. Clothes pegs hang
like hanged
men. It is all procedural.
Resentment
simmers in the empty houses.
The wind at
its eternal droning harangue.
I’m wanting to
mouth the word that fits the case
but it’s like
trying to roll a shadow from
the street
where it has been sitting for years.
It will not
go. You cannot wipe the face
of the clock
or restore a vanished kingdom.
You feel the
shape of the thing between your ears.
Your mouth is
talking to the steady light
which listens
to you and remains polite.
3.
How beautiful
the place is. Watch it hold
time still. I
want you to tell me what this is,
this place at
the back of beyond, in the sun
that retains
its distance in a pale gold
mirror,
minding its own brilliant business,
not in the
habit of speaking to anyone.
Here is a man
who loves cars. He has bought
a house on
something very like a hill.
He fills his
yard up with old cars. He mends things -
roofs, walls.
He’s biblical. He does not take thought
for the
morrow, won’t worry when he falls ill.
He goes
swooping along on welded wings,
his children
unruly, his wife losing heart.
The beautiful
is what keeps them apart.
4.
The WI stall.
Jams, flowers. White
hair scraped
back in the draught of an open door.
The butcher’s.
He knows you by name. He calls
your name out.
His chopping block is washed bright
by the morning
sun. The solicitor
down the
street. His nameplate. War memorials
with more
names. Rows of Standleys, Bunns,
Myhills,
Kerridges. Names on shopfronts: bold
reds, whites
and blues in stock typography.
Names on
labels tied with string to shotguns.
Names on
electoral registers. Names in gold
in the
children’s section of the cemetery
by the railway
cuttings. Willows, faint blue
in the
afternoon, light gently whistles through.
5.
Too easy all
this, like a fatal charm
intended to
lull you into acquiescence.
Think karaoke.
Sky. The video shop.
Broken
windows. The sheer boredom. The alarm
wailing at two
am. The police presence.
Pastoral
graffiti on the bus stop.
Think back of
the back of beyond ‘beyond’. End
of a line. The
sheer ravishing beauty
of it as it
runs into the cold swell
of the North
Sea, impossible to comprehend.
The harsh home
truisms of geometry
that flatten
to a simple parallel.
This is your
otherness where the exotic
appears by a
kind of homely conjuring trick.
6.
A
fifteen-eighties mural. A hunting scene
runs right
around the room. A trace of Rubens,
Jordaens, a
touch, even, of Chinese
in the
calligraphic lines. Experts clean
the powdery limewash, two PhD students
from the
university, anxious to please.
A strange dome
appears, out of period
somewhere near
the top. Even here
there’s
something far flung in the code
of a different
language, another God
extolling
other virtues, a pioneer
morality just
waiting to explode.
Flemish
brickwork. Devastation. Riders
exploring
hidden walls with snails and spiders.
7.
You’re out at
the end of the pier. It is winter.
Tall waves
splutter underfoot. Gulls pirouette
and dive into
dark grey. The radio is alive
with music.
Its tiny voices seem to splinter
into sharp
distinct consonants. You forget
the time of
day. It’s someone else’s narrative
buzzing
beneath you. New explorers come
out of the
light to exploit the heart of darkness.
The world is
inside out, exposed as never before.
Water and sky
are a continuum.
A terrible
gaiety rustles the sea like a dress
it must
discard. It sweeps by just once more
then drops
across the beach and remains there
in the memory,
in ghosted, mangled air.
8.
How beautiful
it is, this silence waiting
on salt. The
disused railway lines between
wild
blackberries. The faint hum of stray flies
on
windowsills. Time is accelerating
down the coast
road leaving behind a clean
pair of heels
and a whiff of paradise.
The man with
welded wings roars past, in love
with reason.
His wife leaves in a freak gust,
their children
flying along. Dogs race across
the walls in
search of a lost treasure trove.
Gently idling,
vast trucks deposit rust
in empty yards
with patches of dry grass.
Broad fields
out of town. The slow unravelling
of a long reel
where everyone is travelling.
9.
Travelling
through or ending. The damp house
beyond the
library where an old woman
has been
retreating for some fifty years,
and still
retreats towards a dangerous
blind alley,
towards a corner, where the nearest demon
might swallow
her up leaving no more tears.
There are none
left to shed in the overgrown
garden with
its coarse weeds. It is as if
she had been
sleeping a century or more,
without a
retinue, simply on her own,
growing ever
more querulous, ever more stiff
till rigor
mortis had frozen her four score
into zero.
Country aristocracy.
The dead
fields at their last-gasp fantasy.
10.
A place full
of old women. Hardy, courageous,
muttering to
themselves and others in cafés,
engaging
unwilling partners in conversation,
accosting
young men, making outrageous
advances to
middle-aged couples with tea-trays,
embarassing
husbands with their ostentation.
Old men in
betting shops peering to check
the odds. Old
men, natty in white, creaking
over bowls,
with Beryl Cook elegance.
Old men
tottering, sticking out a neck
at the
neighbour while the latter is speaking.
Old men in the
church hall learning to dance.
The old in
their gerontopolis. At home
in sheltered
housing, under the pleasure dome.
11.
How many times
do I have to say the word: End!
and still not
end. You can’t go further than
the sea, not
on a motorway. And what
are you doing
here, yes, you and your friend
from Morocco,
Uganda, St.Kitts or Pakistan?
Whatever has
brought you to this far, flat
kingdom with
its glum farmers? Surely you
don’t think
this is America where dreams
are the given,
where you swear allegiance
to a new self?
Have you somehow fallen through
the net of the
world to be lost among reams
of legislature
in these alien regions?
Homing. We are
homing to the sea. Back
where we never
were, at the end of the track.
12.
On a
high-cloud day, you could drown in sky
round here.
You see the gentle swaying
of leaves
along a wall. Something under
the water,
under the sky-light, in the dry
cabin under
the ocean is quietly playing
a music of
muted bells in soft thunder.
It is eating
you away until you’ve gone,
like the
spider scurrying up its own spit
back to its
natural centre in the dark,
And the sky
remains enormous. Someone
is watching
the house-martin, the blue tit,
the tiny
insects making their tiny mark
in the grass,
and the small rain that falls far
across the
field as on a distant star. |