New Poetries VII Read online

  thee, so baby call away. Flowers / not enough / sorry. If

  you think I’ve got a fierce red mind, wait till you see my

  body.

  II.

  Misbegotten positive reality, muffin top just another symptom

  of the excluded middle. Nothing can be both; apple-bellied is

  worse than small beer. Not-A is absence, which is everywhere.

  III.

  Always already happening somewhere, as if the way it is done

  is what is done. You first have belief, which leads to the practice /

  the way it is done is usually for the best. Always already leaving

  without notice, it must have already happened if you want to think

  about it. Flowers are soft and so vulnerable to the diversity of

  interpretation / the way you do it is what actually happens Remember:

  it is natural to be fearful; it is necessary to be tougher than the rest.

  IV.

  There is a fierce grit in the genius of girls; there has

  to be, they’re bleeding. ‘It is interesting, but I don’t

  love it.’ What kind of charlatan says that?

  The Roses of Heliogabalus

  Violets and other flowers, or roses – they

  fill the mouth up all the same. The pipe

  sound streams clear despite the choking

  sound that muffles screaming. For those

  who ate, the meal was enjoyable. For those

  who drowned, their breath at least was sweet.

  Thin girls

  waiting by the phone

  for referrals, if it happened

  to men / it could be happened

  at cash machines. Thin girls

  wait by the phone for the

  plummy voice of necessary

  steps / of reassurance / arm

  to shoulder. They don’t come.

  Angiogram

  Can you inherit

  motherlessness?

  My fat heart says

  yes.

  from ‘Donations’

  TYPE F (CAPTIVE / VOLUNTARY)

  Oil and blood for the bowed grey heads, as Aeson recovers

  his usefulness, oil and blood for my own inviolable sense

  of propriety. Uncontaminated, pint for pint, what’s the difference

  between one dog and another, between dead boy and dead lamb,

  except for those small miracles as blue birth becomes gentle

  continuance. The only thing to do is take it as your own

  indisputable property (though even in a consumption good the

  former spirit lingers) but this is bad news, for the conservationist:

  we will always love most what is diminishing and so as funeral

  barges stream down the marshes you wake weeping in

  your yellow coat, from ruptured sleep, as if these ghosts of

  our own commodities cry out, like kids for milk, in the twilight.

  TYPE C (FISCAL)

  Do you know the heaviness of other types of feeding?

  When the time comes to bolt and deliver to the diligent

  hand, accomplished at dragging up, you must place the

  babe in the tour’s arms, and alert those diligent sisters

  to the processes of abandonment. Accomplishments

  (itemised) include the delicacy of the needle, include

  the practice of drawing back the suck. Overproduction,

  like any other disease, can be treated. The bell rings,

  and that is enough.

  Agony in the Garden

  Why are you walking around my garden, John Ruskin, these

  are Prestige Flowers and you are gnawing like the worm. Why

  must pleasure be a catastrophe? I have dedicated this sleep life

  to statuary I have laboured joyfully for my base wet daughters

  and you and yours have no place building nations here in the

  name of purified water. When will my attention span return

  from the war? Desire, hooked again, there is no inverse relation

  between my dislike for you and the embarrassment you cause.

  She didn’t want to fuck you either her person was not formed

  to excite passion I thought there was no such thing as bad

  weather? Splendid, her skin was luminous, every blood smear

  every hair-like feather. When will my attention span allow me

  to achieve more? Saved for the nation, her fat tongue is full

  with splinters, saved for the nation she deserved, as usual, more.

  John, like sesame, like lilies, you manipulate what you have never

  grown. Constant though unlessoned, stoic in the face of pleasure,

  may we only tread with patience the path we have been shown.

  Leaky

  I.

  And could you swim at Lindisfarne, softening

  with sunrise and never bicker? Good intentions,

  still all thumb. Pray you don’t waste time. I

  pray nightly never to see you too held close by

  wicker, I pray but all day slapdash careful to save

  face. To have been married, I pray nightly never.

  II.

  There is no counsel, no closure, no opening,

  just winter. ‘In leaving you, I left myself’ oh

  bore on, Cara Helena Derelicta. You ask: why

  must all these poems sing to me? I am trying

  very much to work on my intellectual honesty.

  Some cheek, I agree, to wail after a ship I

  sank myself. Hard, to learn refusal is not purity.

  TOBY LITT

  Thank you, Emily Hall. If you hadn’t contacted me – through Myspace (that long ago) – to ask if I was interested in writing words for a children’s opera, I am not sure whether I would have written much more poetry. Before then, it had largely stopped happening. The opera didn’t happen either, but I showed you some lyrics, you set them to music, and then I started to write new words meant to be sung. We wrote a song cycle about love, then one about losing and then having a baby. Although I started writing Life Cycle as a male-female duet, you rightly insisted it all be the woman’s voice. And so I added ‘The gap so small’, ‘Not just milk’ and ‘The first turn’ to poems already written. The earliest, ‘Stillborn’, woke me in the night. I dreamed it for two friends, Jacqui and Steve, and for their daughter, Marnie. ‘Amnio’ arrived after a pregnancy scan for my second son. His bones glowed in cross-section. This was a brief period, before babies in the womb were visualised as 3-D putty putti. Some of the poems I’ve written since were written as poems – not to be sung, and so not for you. But I have kept writing about parenthood and its losses. ‘Self-Reminders’ was written as just that – as a parent speaking to themself. ‘Awaying’ is one parent speaking to another, reassuring them they still exist. More separate is ‘Friday’ – one of the poems that come along in an anti-lyrical way, although I’m mostly (as you’ve made me) that strange half-and-half thing, a lyric poet. ‘Friday’ got written while teaching an Arvon course at the Hurst in Shropshire (the playwright John Osborne’s dank house, before it was exorcised by hope and made luxurious). I stood under a tree near the pond alongside which Osborne used to recline, and send his empties off to go splosh. The bottles were still there, beneath frog-spawn. I saw the image for ‘A glow-in-the-dark skeleton’ whilst walking near The Golden Hinde. I’m so stupid. It was only in choosing a title for a possible collection that I realised I had two glow-in-the-dark skeleton poems: prepartum and postmortem. Very often, I have no idea where what I’ve written has come from; almost always, though, I know exactly where it’s going.

  Politics / 9.11.16, p.m.

  I.

  When you cross a bridge over a river

  you can be definite about something –

  but the insides, altered, leave an after-

  shock of what, and what the fuck is happening.
/>
  It would be neat if one were like the other,

  and the flow and bowels met in meaning

  so that out of it come mother, father,

  family, house, all subordinated into song.

  Instead, I am borrowing several futures

  to explain yesterday’s present moment

  that now is cancelled, and fairly brutal

  was its ending – instead, I have my fears

  gradated between drowned calm, burnt torment

  and the headlong lull of going foetal.

  III.

  Against futility, and the clasped hands

  of century-separated cognoscenti –

  because on dapple-pattern we all can agree,

  and Beauty makes eternal amends.

  The whole scaffold is entirely purposeful,

  and blood-soaked, as a legitimate viewpoint.

  There is an act that forces whatever it will

  and cannot be don’t, you won’t, you can’t.

  Ease yourself into the cell, liberal,

  you have prepared your own welcome

  and furnished with defeats a red chamber.

  This zone will always be comfortable,

  and you know it to be somebody’s home.

  The dead are never without number.

  IV.

  When even a piss against a tree has

  greater significance than a new move

  in a familiar opening in chess –

  we come to a point, sadly, where we have

  to admit to ourselves that what we meant

  when we insisted upon the validity

  of clear and beautiful restatement

  was, in fact, a truth founded on a lie.

  How argument was actually quadrille,

  and laws were signed on Beatrice’s heart,

  and even handshakes were made out of wood.

  There are men who kill the men who kill

  the men who kill,

  there is a death behind the death of art,

  and there is bad is caused by good.

  V.

  Exhaustion was the first fault, loosed

  by lovers of style, the demographic

  that demanded to choose where it placed

  not only itself but every heretic

  that had ever failed to see the funny side;

  and in magazines spread self-belief

  as a gospel that could be flash-fried

  and served with carpaccio of beef.

  Meat was a fact, this could be granted,

  but butchers were not invited in, and so

  butchers bowing their heads went to the lake

  of all the blood they ever spilled, and counted

  waves as they came in, then turned to go,

  or rather turned to come back.

  from ‘Life Cycle’

  STILLBORN

  She isn’t but she was.

  She wasn’t but yet is.

  Perpetual won’t, not can’t.

  All didn’t and not couldn’t.

  Undone; never done.

  Total knowledge, unknown.

  Leaving early, arriving late.

  Wholly incomplete.

  One remaining plural

  yet indivisible.

  Entirely possible

  yet infallible.

  One within another;

  two inside each other;

  three but always either.

  AMNIO

  Skeleton I see and sense

  Baby you become and be

  Innocence lost innocence

  Nothing belong to me

  These things are true about you

  Now they are known

  Absolute in gesture

  Say if you want a soul

  Posture then imposture

  I split and make you whole

  These things are measured and weighed

  These are your facts

  And I am now what I will always ever after be.

  THE GAP SO SMALL

  The gap so small

  between world and child –

  no gap at all

  And every fact,

  however small,

  has an impact;

  your nails can cut,

  the wind can wound,

  bright light can hurt.

  A tiny scrape

  upon your face –

  both of us bled.

  And now it’s here,

  a tiny scar:

  there will be more,

  there will be more.

  NOT JUST MILK

  There used to be a woman in this body

  not just milk

  There used to be a substance to her living

  not just milk

  and carrying

  There used to be a life that was outflowing

  not just milk

  and carrying

  and saying hush

  There used to be a flowering of action

  not just milk

  and carrying

  and saying hush

  and putting down

  There used to be a world still to discover

  not just milk

  and carrying

  and saying hush

  and putting down

  and worrying

  There used to be a world

  not just milk

  and carrying

  and saying hush

  and putting down

  and worrying

  and milk

  HUSHABYE TWINKLE

  Hushabye – twinkle – all – hushabye

  If baby will sleep then mummy won’t cry

  Mummy will tidy and mummy will clean

  Mummy will say something she didn’t mean.

  Hushabye – little – fall – hushabye

  If baby won’t sleep then mummy will cry

  Mummy will dry her tired eyes and will smile

  hoping her sweet babe will sleep in a while.

  Hushabye – wonder – breaks – on my lap

  If baby won’t sleep then mummy will snap

  Mummy will wish that her baby were dead

  Lie down alone in the dark on the bed.

  Hushabye – what you – cradle – a nap

  If baby will sleep then mummy won’t snap

  Mummy will weep all alone in the dark

  Take baby out for a walk in the park.

  THE FIRST TURN

  Now you can turn

  Now you can turn yourself away from me

  Now you can turn yourself

  Forceful you are

  Forceful you are beyond our reckoning

  Forceful you are beyond

  Even a god

  Even a god is weak compared to you

  Even a god is weak

  You’re everything

  You’re everything we fear we might destroy

  You’re everything we fear

  The best of all

  The best of all the world has ever seen

  The best of all the world

  I want to keep

  I want to keep this time, this love, this us

  I want to keep this time

  I know you change

  I know you change each time

  Each time I look

  Each time I look away

  Self-Reminders

  First, please don’t expect them to be anything but clumsy.

  Don’t expect them not to break things – things, especially, which you especially don’t want them to break.

  Don’t expect them not to be as loud as they can possibly be.

  Don’t expect yourself to escape breaking.

  Don’t expect quietness of what you probably don’t call soul.

  Don’t expect please or thank you, even though you must constantly insist upon please and thank you.

  Don’t expect them to love you as you love them.

  Don’t expect them to understand you or even to try to understand you until you are dead. />
  Don’t expect them, as children, to be interested in you, as you were as a child.

  In fact, don’t expect them to believe in your existence until you are dead.

  Expect painful joys and hilarious wounds.

  Expect strangers who do not know our ways here.

  Expect to be wrong.

  Expect their deaths, and hope to be wrong.

  Awaying

  When we are by ourselves, somewhere

  alone – as rarely happens – we

  are awkward with the double lack.

  We miss the two who are elsewhere

  but also the identity

  we have in them. When we go back,

  we think, will we have lost the knack

  of being who we are? The pair,

  the parents, you and me,

  who hold and fix, who cope and care.

  But we remain that anywhere