Exhumation / Final Work / Ach, du

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

I’ve been a naughty boy. I failed to post my final work when my residency ended. Actually, this has been quite useful because after a mild prod from Our Superiors, I went back to the poems and re-read them. I think I was quite harsh when I initially wrote them, but some aren’t bad. What I’d give for another six months to spend more time digging and weeding, and to appreciate the digging and weeding, as opposed to studying euphuistic renaissance novels. It’s also been interesting keeping up with the rest da crew, and seeing the project expand. Anyway, below are the poems, and above is a visual accompaniment – crucial, I find, when reading poetry.

LONDON

Comfort me with apples             And I’ll watch

The white haired wire            – wristed             woman dig.

The sun also sets             and goes down

Hastening to the place                        where it rose.

The wind also turns about            blows north

According to its circuitry.            One comes

One passes away.            The garden abides forever.

What I’ve heard, I’ve heard

What I’ve seen, I’ve seen

What I’ve said, I’ve said

What was, will be; what’s done is done.

There is nothing new                 under the sun.

Comfort me with snow;            the winter world is

An acute lens catching            the crazed solstice

In its crack.            Comfort me with silence.

The rest is vanity;             the winter world is rife

With mirrors.            Watch this sunflower snap:

That stalk is your spine.             That head, your head.

And there’s not a squeak, not a scream            but a hundred white roots

Damp fingers                        tossed on the pile.

Bring out your dead.             Angle of incidence is equal

To angle of reflection. That’s me – covered in dirt

That’s my neck             hanging,

But who is tipping the wheelbarrow?

And who shoves a spade            in the cold, wet, earth

And turns the soil over?            Who will plant me

And bring me back again?

What I’ve heard, I’ve heard

What I’ve seen, I’ve seen

What I’ve said, I’ve said

What was, will be; what’s done is done.

There is nothing new under the sun.

I’m trying to be humble.            I’m here on bent knee

With bent back             unpicking the limp leaves

Of cabbages from this             militia of weeds.

The thick ones are guerilla.             ‘Dig deeper,

Pull harder,’ she says              and shows how to bend knee

Not the back; how to use            the arch of the foot

To drive the head of the spade            inch and inch and inch

Then lift and raise            the soil (worm and all)

Turning over and over                        neatening out

The twin plot of the flower bed            and the grave.

Toolbag

Some kind of wind

To blow the skeletal lanterns

Hanging shadowless

and tangerine.

Some pair of hands to

Cup the last cornflower

And run an icy forefinger

On a frozen tank of green.

Some pair of eyes

To stare in to the water,

The stiffening water, fat

With the luminous

Bulge of frozen fish:

A finger to tap the glass,

A hand to wipe the slush

That settles on this frozen sea.

Some kind of bird, thin and coy,

To pierce with its throat

This wither-lipped white

Wan facsimile

Of final poppies

Drooping their heads

Lamenting their roots

Closing their red, parched, eyes

Placing their red, parched, skins

One sheaf at a time,

One fold and blister

And dew-damaged leaf

In to the snow

In to the teeth

On to the tongue

Of the garden.

Two dogs
1

Early may: I’m weeding convulus when

I see a man with long black hair approach.

His two dogs yelp and run, leap, then

Plunge their wet noses in my crotch.

And he surveys the land, says it reminds

Him of the days when young, radical, free

He lived outside, bare chested, mildly high

In a smash-the-bourgeoisie community.

Those years have gone, what was is now wasted

And he rubs his eyes as if he lately saw

What could have been, as if he’s haunted

By the dull analogy of persistent weeds

That lodge themselves in the memory of the soil,

As I’ve seen him since in Oxford’s indigo eve.

2

I saw him again on Oriel Street

His dogs signaled his approach,

They cantered towards me, lingered by me

And he smiled, saying hello to me,

Threw his arms and chest wide open to me.

“Been to the garden lately?’ he asks

And I say yeahsortakindabusyworkin’y’know

The same spiel I spin to everyone about

Work and art and life, and I don’t know why

But I hesitate, I can’t return the hug –

He senses it. Still he waves and smiles

But as he’s about to disappear, he turns

Hurries his dogs to cross the road and with hurt

In his voice says, ‘I hug everyone, you know’.

My Mum’s House is a Flowerpot

If you look up, high up, way up

At the fifteenth floor flat

Of the tallest building in town

You’ll see my mum’s house,

And you’ll know it’s her house

Because high up, way up

Among the birds and the planes,

You’ll see the balcony fringed

With great, green leaves,

Thick vines of emerald looping

The hand-rail. Creepers like serpents

Crawling up the walls,

The animal heads of flowers

Bright black and deep pink

Bobbing in the wind.

High up, way up, fifteen storeys up,

My mum has turned her house

In to a flower pot

And it teems with insect life:

She’s the one with the venus fly trap

Peering from behind the curtains.

She’s the one with the cactus –

Fat and full of spikes – sitting

Like a shady cowboy in a saloon.

My mum’s flat buzzes with dragon-flies

And horse-flies and butterflies;

Butterflies with wings the size of your hands,

Butterflies the colour of city smoke,

Sucking the nectar from the hoods of flowers.

Around Lunchtime, my mum comes out

With her watering can,

And with dew from the Amazon

And droplets from the Nile,

She showers everything:

The bright geraniums and the secret soil,

The palm trees bursting from her bedroom door,

The lush grass in place of the carpet,

And the whole house twists and shifts,

Quakes and shakes, with roots and shoots

Coming from the walls, the kitchen sink,

The bathroom plug – even the fridge is

Lined with frangipani.

The water runs off the leaves

That hang over the balcony.

The people rushing about

In the streets below

Feel water on their necks.

They look up, high up, way up

And see the sun blazing in the blue sky.

‘How strange,’ they say, clutching their umbrellas,

‘I could have sworn it was about to rain…’

Love Is Not A Potato

The potato fattens in its sleep. Fattens

And thickens like a clod of white clay,

Drinking through its pocked skin rain

Water, watering-can water, water made

Thick with the drainage of soil.

The potato, like a planet, spins as it grows,

Extends its rings through the eerie black earth,

Pushes its green exo-skeleton above the ground,

And sleeps in the dark, wet, grit below.

Planet vivaldi, Maris Piper, the oval tuber

Of the white fleshed Anya –

And there, it comes, and here it goes,

And now it rots and now it sows

The sludge of its husk, the patterns it knows,

The risk and the root and the time it takes,

The knot in the skin – and can you think

How dark, how impacted and glick, how luke-

Warm the mind must be, that is so wise

It sculpted a thing as sturdy and dumb

As this half rock, half root, half flesh thing

Unearthed, striking speechless the woman

Who crumbles the soil between finger and thumb.

The white flowered night

Four women speak of their dreams:

Four women speak of how uprooted weeds

Uncovered, return as they sleep to dream –

Convolus, that asphyxiating weed

Around their throats of meadow sweet,

Almond oil, raw scent on the sheets,

Like the breath of a spectre, sickly sweet,

Numb, mindless growth between the sheets –

Up, from the heap of the night,

Dreams of dead nettle in each of their eyes,

The sweat of the white flowered night

Runs down the inner window of their eyes

And down their necks, so they speak

Of fractured stalks, worm eaten blue

Cabbage laced with silver trails, slug speak,

Slug constellations, corpses of salted blue.

Four women speak of bindweed, milkweed,

Deceptive vegetation rioting the earth,

Sly-by-the-light-of-the-moon weed

Burrowing which-way-ward, Earth-

ward, trembling with disease.

The malicious vines creeping through their dreams,

Wet, soil muck, filth ill at ease,

In the minds of four women speaking of their dreams.

Woman with Bird

Three days of darkness with pinprick sun

Followed by ghost rain from Monday gone

And you start to think you are the last

Garden in the world. You, the present past -

A gash in the mud, black tracery, damp linen

Diaphanous English bird both myth and flight,

Last thing to grasp the silent green at night,

First thing to catch a glimpse of the morning

Jackal, who might be seated on the right

Shoulder of a laughing woman, bent double

At the beds, with a fork and a torn chemise

Leaning a palm against a petrified tree.

She plants purple sage which smells like the light –

The end of a match, struck out, streaming white

Scent of its own colour, citric, brutalized

Tea leaves and an uncle-whiff of camomile.

You, the garden, bearer of petal and spike,

Keep her half alive. Half, I say, because

She digs and plants in the past beyond:

I am a spirit hare, she says. I do what I like.

The song and the yurt

Seeing the earth from a view beyond

The young, green god placed a hand over

The blue jewel glittering in its ring.

And thus I spent the first evening

In black November reading these self-same

Words in a dim, crowded, yurt.

Plato writes of shadows cast by fire

Against the wall; I write of entering

The garden and seeing myself read to you,

You who listen to yourselves –

And I can’t work out which one of us

Is most haunted by the black expanse framed

In the circle sky-light of the roof:

Me? With my double voice,

You with your double ears, – you, audience,

Hushed, attuned to the clear ring of my voice

Expiring in the afterbirth of the word.

Me? Who watches you in this circular room,

Who peers in to each eye in turn,

Then through the door, heavy on its hinges,

Ajar in the wind, and letting out light

Like little ghouls of yellow and body heat and breath –

How close are we to the eyes outside who see

But don’t approach? I know the edges of our beds

Are touched by some nail-less, thumbless thing,

A cousin of our number perhaps, a cousin

Who watches us back, who listens keen and still

To our collective breath, our eye-blinks, our

Heart noise, our blood-drum, rushing and keen,

The sound of air passing through lip and throat –

Just the sound, not the sense.

And I suspect we’re whispered to as we’re watched.

Someone else is speaking as we hear.

Someone listens as we speak.

And all the while we’re moving half aware

From dark, to half dark, to day-break.

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