From the Neanderthal Read online

but we were alone on the bank.

  A single boat nuzzled the crowfoot.

  The whoop was when I saw the name –

  I could hardly believe it. I told you

  how I’d played him in the show –

  the killing of Balder with the spear

  of mistletoe (him on the sly)

  and the hopeless ride to Hel

  on Sleipnir, that refusal to cry

  that made him much more evil

  than trickster. Loki was a role

  I’d very much enjoyed, distorting

  my face to make the kids laugh

  till the final enormity of malice

  hissed me off (in tears). Loki’s

  oars were in there, crossed like arms –

  waiting demurely, it seemed. After

  twilight we unlooped the chain

  and sculled towards an island’s hump.

  The pines withdrew, the shore became a whim

  below the huddled stars. That shriek

  was a rowlock. We sped forward

  as the prow chuckled and the hull

  incited us with gleeful squeaks

  to continue, despite the leaks.

  No one roared from the shore

  that we were thieves. The world was

  as it was, before: a huge

  unpeopled wood of pine and fir

  with wealds of water for the moon

  alone to look in. But you were still

  so scared we had to turn back then.

  Tying him up, I joked about Loki

  the shape-changer, how the chain

  had better be knotted fast

  (what the gods had said, I said)

  or he’d slip it with an otter’s neck

  and all night heard him scrape and slide

  yards from the tent – surprised

  to find him in the morning, snout

  still nuzzling the crowfoot, firmly boat.

  But the car wouldn’t start. No reason.

  And in all of mostly dead flat Sweden

  we’d parked her at the bottom of a brief

  but steep slope we couldn’t get a grip on,

  slipping and sliding its scree from under us

  till I, for one, could have cried and cried.

  GHOSTS

  In memoriam. Camargue, 1995.

  What faces haunt us in our sleep

  out of rolling combers

  come from the deep; they are our dread

  that there’s not breath enough to save

  the two whom we shall see

  strolling over sand towards us, an age from death.

  If they are limp in our arms and warm,

  what wall now lies between us?

  Was it the sea that delivered them so,

  or have we blown too softly into their shells?

  Let our lungs be taken with theirs

  and stretched as trophies on the shelves of Tartarus;

  amidst the kite-clattering winds

  that they dragged for the elusive, silvery thing

  there was air in plenty for our shouts

  (as the firm heads rolled in our hands)

  of despair. Let the two go well

  into their separate sands;

  keep about their necks their good-luck chains

  and do not clothe their nakedness.

  If what slipped on their flesh was our hands

  scrabbling for the heart’s impatience,

  its pluck, pounding our palms upon a drum

  that did not sound, then do not blame us

  who hold the taste of their death in our mouths,

  whose skin is tainted by their failing.

  They’ll come to Tartarus with the bruises

  we planted: how they came by these wounds

  is living’s business, not to do with there –

  that life can be left so easily under a flail of blows

  sufficient to strike death cold

  and bring the aghast blood back to its senses

  makes us wonder why the waters

  should ever have delivered us

  from the gilled and ghostless world

  into this, induced by breath

  and the profit of a certain dryness.

  Limp amphibians, those who are drowned

  are guests among the anchors and the amphorae;

  like the other dead, they do not rest for long,

  dwelling in our dreams or the gull’s mute song.

  (Or are in hiding, and have not truly gone.)

  PICKINGS

  Our ogres’ steps of earth,

  dug, yield a trove

  of what they used to chuck:

  keys stuck in rust’s lock,

  lots of bits of pot,

  jabs in glass for goats

  and knobs for doors long shut

  from hands; each clink is luck

  or a stab of sharp loss.

  Jaws laid as if meant,

  hips like open wings,

  the lead weight of a wine

  glass, snapped at the neck.

  Tins, the tines of forks,

  light francs from the war,

  each worth what we find

  to say about it; words

  strung back to phrase a dream

  lost like the old dame

  who lived here when le maire

  was a boy (who’d see her

  propped in the dark door

  with a bowl of gruel, a grin),

  laid to rest just where

  we light up all these things.

  ‘She’s much too deep,’ I say –

  my kids in hope she’ll rise

  one day, tucked on a spade,

  like the small flask I earthed

  once but did not break

  marked Prix 3 Frs,

  ‘La Miraculeuse’.

  EVA

  for our children

  She outwitted history.

  Now the memory of her runs in your blood.

  You have a great-grandmother

  who outwitted it, and may her

  jinking ability course in you

  when the guns come and you need it.

  You might, you might! She, once,

  was a pretty little thing –

  Warsaw, timber-yards, the future as sweet.

  Between that garden and us

  they trundled the unimaginable

  guns you couldn’t crouch from.

  Cousins – she had so many cousins!

  The unimaginable took them, and now

  they are stranded in their frocks

  in albums: pretty little things

  for always. And her sister.

  And her sister’s son.

  She jinked while the others

  stayed put, or ran too straight.

  Her pride, her anger: Germans, Poles –

  all pigs! Forget and forgive

  in that order, that was the problem.

  The tea trembling in its saucer.

  She jinked to the end, in the ward:

  that last, intent stare above the mask

  and the sudden grip that made me lean

  to whatever she was telling me,

  in silence. The writer’s hand.

  That grip on it. Everything else

  slipped, slipping away at last.

  ANOTHER BAD YEAR

  Each time we look for definitions

  the river rubs the bank away.

  No one can say

  where the edge is with any precision

  for the floods come most years

  flailing their detritus of trees,

  the hawthorn seized

  in the teeth of the surge, sheared

  rock whetted on the pelted mountains.

  Here was a kink scythed through

  to a reach, a new

  and ruthless look that’d cuff our shins

  were we to stand where we did

  a week ago: and here our boots stay dry

 
where the swirl once tried

  to shock us, where our bare heels slid.

  Look, a broken chain marks the mooring –

  here nothing’s held sacred

  or for long: the acres

  splash where the barley swung, the floor

  hits the ceiling and a family flees

  or can’t and stops. But the rain has no routine

  and doesn’t mean

  to heft us under, to leave us in trees.

  KING CNUT

  Cnut, knotted against it, toggled and bound

  like a furrier’s bale on the wharf,

  marmenill from the knees down, taking it ill,

  loathes the blatant ocean and possibly spits

  though the wind returns it to its owner.

  Knowing that this’ll mark the annals forever –

  spritelier than battles lost and won, outbreeding

  his sons and the sons of sons, clotted

  and burred on the long cloak of repute –

  he stands and does not turn, but hums

  with the surf outwrestling his shins

  something a child might hum to encourage sleep.

  The people, cudgelled from the cliff’s summit,

  merge into gulls. Cnut would like to interrogate

  the sky or sail for weeks to the other edge

  and shields his eyes with his hand an inch

  under the crown’s unrivalled metalwork.

  Either the sky contends with the swell out there

  or commands it. It is relatively simple.

  Only the land succumbs, lets its pebbles sink like kings.

  HOT-AIR BALLOONS FROM MARSH BENHAM

  None of them fret.

  They bloom from the inaccessible parts of trees,

  creak past our roofs

  then roar

  with, for God’s sake, a tongue of flame

  under the hemmed-in air.

  Insouciant:

  exactly what they make you feel you aren’t

  as the fields yield them

  from where you thought

  you’d be panting towards for their lives

  through lustrous moths of smut.

  FOSSIL

  Nürnberg, 1997

  for Sabine Hagenauer

  The first globe was modelled here,

  in Dürer’s time;

  now we climb the steps of Hitler’s stadium,

  tight-lipped, secretly aghast.

  This is where he flipped

  and the world followed, spun

  by so many leather gloves

  it took this pleasant park to hold them.

  A playpen for demons,

  their beaten childhoods, it’s fanged

  by broken glass and twisted cans.

  It seems too vast to be bombed,

  or delivered from its past.

  These are not steps, but seats;

  the Romans sat on theirs

  for long enough to wear out dips

  but Nazi bottoms barely polished these.

  Then I spot, puffing near the top,

  a small shell whorled into the stone

  like a birthmark,

  a sort of saving scar;

  what years it swam to end up here,

  numbered in the lives this arena took,

  whose wall-eyed thrash was never dignified

  by such seniority of time but mocked,

  mocks also all that loss.

  ANNIVERSARY

  for Jo

  Butterflies iced on the wedding cake

  as if my own had flown and settled there;

  Mike with his home-made reflector out of card

  behind him like a strange bloom, looming up

  on so many feasting

  who have since departed the warmth for good.

  His photos show us how we stood,

  not how full of winter air the cheeks were

  when we kissed them, nor how fast the blood

  came back like luck in the wood-lined, tin-walled hut

  that day of sheer

  steady joy in a polar poise of fields.

  Time’s wedded to what it wields,

  shirks nothing after the day; we do not know

  as the happy couple or as sozzled guest

  how touch and go this is, nor what misgivings

  might give way to:

  boredom smoulders but may not ever catch.

  The crossed threshold, the dropped latch;

  like a furious mist the future veils its shapes,

  but not today. The past is given away

  with the bride, the present toasts itself with pride

  and cannot say

  more than something it will not regret.

  Happiness is caught with its mouth still wet,

  looking shyly at us from the mirror, twelve

  years on; what we really meant that day

  still means, and the candid criterion of children

  holds us in thrall

  to their love, their here-bound and tearful being.

  With glass in hand, each moment fleeing

  our gaze, we’ll again not mind the empty restaurant –

  the first hard frost falling as it always does

  this November night; remembering the mothball vestry,

  the stroke of the pen

  that signed us to this forever in the parish

  register of 1820: our marriage

  drying on the page there only to stay

  among shepherds, spinsters, clerks and milkmaids,

  binders, thrashers, all the vanished trades

  and teachers like us –

  right back to the first, that awkward cross,

  its butterfly kiss long flown from loss

  not cited here but through the vestry’s door,

  outside, where some names share a page again

  of stone this time, and mossed, and hard to read.

  So to the death,

  my love: as it was said, and as I still believe.

  PLAYGROUND ACCIDENT

  My son’s forehead’s snickered across

  yet again by thread; like tiny flies

  the stitches have settled for days, but a year

  and a half is the scar’s reign,

  according to the doctor.

  All his life remains

  to bounce off where it’s hard enough

  (this time a gate) for boys of eight

  to bloody themselves, for grown men to wail.

  Where the font-shell’s sacred water

  made him cry that day in church,

  I press the lint. He’s brave, now.

  I remember the stain his birth made

  on the carpet, its rose preserved

  long after his head had been washed

  of the perfumed afterbirth

  that streaked it. He admires his wound

  in the mirror: walking back from school

  this evening, he was feinting (I saw)

  with a rapier cast from air

  and God knows where he was, then.

  I think of war and all that wars

  have done so far to our families’ pasts –

  his hurt is his, not mine,

  but what I bear less well

  than dabbing at the flesh of my flesh

  lightly split by iron

  is the thought of the unknown

  iron that remains:

  of all this head must pass.

  LICHEN

  Winster’s rocks my father clambered over

  welcomed you and I each morning

  from the cottage window, back of Main Street.

  Laval lumps like a giant’s porridge

  left out all night, flanked by oaks

  yet gaunt and still on the skyline.

  I’d lean on the sill and stare it

  into my father’s boyhood, immensely

  long ago but close enough to touch,

  and he in turn imagining his mother’s –r />
  and she her mother’s in a strange skirt,

  clambering the clefts and ledges to the ‘summit’.

  This is my pedigree. I cling to it.

  I cling to the place where the lava cooled

  for as good as forever and the clump’s

  endurance was surer than sunlight

  for God knows how many souls in this stony dale,

  measured by whatever weather brought them

  to the coffin. Trees come down or grow

  but rocks don’t. Neither does a skyline offer

  more than the changing of light or the rim

  of what is loved or hated. Nor do the houses

  mean more than what is scrabbled for within –

  the faces that alter as the sky does, and the barren fields.

  Only the rocks were the hub, I think,

  the nave through the turning wheel;

  those ugly, lovely lumps I’ll one day

  bring my own to (the cottage sold)

  and let them clamber; and tell them how,

  once, on a visit, I did the same

  in schoolboy shorts and odd haircut

  while my father told how he’d done likewise

  day after day till the war came.

  So flimsier it grows, the chain;

  prehistories of hand-holds and lost squeals,

  my father’s boyhood careering down the slope

  in a race only the rocks reveal

  the outcome of, bare against the twilight:

  landmark of lives and lava,

  bearer of tiny fonts in the wet,

  gathering acorns in the folds

  of its rough skirt between the fairy flax

  and sea-complexioned assimilations

  impressed on it in furry crusts

  neither quite living nor dead

  the clumsiest boot won’t mark

  but softer to the grasp than where it’s not.

  Softer, and with a million delicacies

  of coarseness, of points and frills

  and microscopic continents of mouths

  sucking in the clean air’s wet,

  the pelt of the lichen remains

  rootless as paint on the outcrop,

  on the bumps and ledges, in the clefts.

  It grows so slowly, but it grows

  and dies out under itself, carbuncles

  to a bristly grey or ripples to a stain

  or crawls its moss over itself once more

  so rock just there looks as if it’s breathed

  and has a mind, has awareness.

  For lichen is more the phantom of the rock

  than the desire of the rock to be covered

  in fur, to rise as a living thing;

  so barely clinging to the world

  we know from the leaves, from the stem