From the Neanderthal Read online

  that shoulders out of mud, it seems

  of another order, of the order of memory –

  of the like fragility and farness

  as my father careering down the slope

  on an evening of his boyhood

  as his mother runs up in an earlier year

  and another century, passing through him

  to the place he’s come from and clambering there

  as I did once, on a visit. And so thereafter

  (when I was old enough to liken

  lichen to memory), approaching

  with a slower tread and the fear

  that I would never really know

  this place as they once did, nor lay

  my ghost upon more than paper,

  make no more headway than the last

  hand-hold, no more impression

  than this brief rearing on the lean

  ridge of the keystone boulder

  with its view through the oaks

  of the field’s skyline and the ruined barn …

  The rootless lichen marauds

  inch by inch through the years,

  prey only to pollution – like lemon

  squeezed on an oyster’s frill

  our air tests it until it dies.

  I cannot remember what has changed

  or whether its pattern has remained

  to tease me into seeing faces

  that were always there, or feel

  under palms the reassuring fur

  at the same heave. While the rocks

  wear so well we can be sure

  heirs as far from us as stars

  will look upon the same

  under an ageing sun

  (the closest we will come to eternity),

  at least there is something to guess

  about lichen; whether it was,

  whether it might not be there.

  BALKAN TUNE

  She knew a massive heap of songs,

  her lullabies were ancient wrongs.

  The mad were coming to their senses.

  Beat the washing. Repair the fences.

  Twilight came when sheep cropped faster

  in her sullen neighbour’s pasture

  to one now blind; and she would see

  her father lying like a tree,

  the flock like stones, the plane a speck

  and she again too small to check

  the blood that sped where he’d been strafed:

  the shepherd who had stood and waved.

  But what did she do to be killed?

  For here she lies where she’s been spilled

  by drunks in combat gear for wrongs

  trickling from her throat like songs.

  WINDOWS

  In every job I did

  there was always a soldier, ex-

  but still short-haired, and trembling

  with a great violence.

  Up at the truck-yard, for instance,

  where I was re-puttying the windows

  he’d stride across

  from the body shop and shout at me

  Gerron you fucker as I was wet-

  thumbing the paste on;

  I’d grin aimlessly, loosening the flakes of paint

  from mouth and eyebrows as he

  slammed the pressure-hose

  to clean a juggernaut, water howling

  at the hub-caps, riddling the grille.

  Later on, when I had

  reached the paint stage, carefully sweeping

  leagues of deep blue on the frames I’d filled

  of the yard’s windows, he’d

  come right over on one of those errands

  that involve a lot of clanking

  in a bag of tools,

  and after the usual Lookin at me fucker?

  or Wot’s the game then, la-di-da?

  or You couldn’t paint

  to save your fuckin balls, he

  softened, slowly, and when I asked him

  (running my brush along

  the hardened putty at the pane’s cliff-edge)

  where he’d been in the Army

  he paused, then stopped what-

  ever he was doing and stood by the ladder

  and he talked. I’m not quite sure

  whether to believe him

  on reflection, but then and there,

  as the winter darkened in the glass

  towards the day’s end, and desperate

  engines were revved in the distance

  and the stink of diesel drifted like fog,

  he nodded at what he said: Three

  fuckin years in Northern Ireland, sleepin

  in the backs of fuckin trucks …

  Let me tell yer, when

  it’s said that a Paddy’s fuckin blowed

  hisself up, it’s lies

  more ’n likely: you know

  what they do? Fuckin saw it, too.

  We found one bastard with his Ford Cortina

  stuffed full. I watched it as they

  booted him black, then cut off his tool. Tied him

  to the gelly in the back of the motor

  and ran for fuckin cover.

  Arms ’n’ legs blown high as the sky, along with the tool.

  Don’t leave no fuckin evidence, see.

  An engine chugged beyond

  the gaffer’s shed. The sign said R. E. Bates – who liked

  to join us in the tea-break, talking horses,

  the progress of his vegetables,

  while I’d plough through my Patrick White. The ex-regular

  stared at my brush as I eased its load

  along the critical line.

  I tutted, amazed, and said I found it incredible,

  the blue welling up too thick

  at the corner, too full

  on the brush, nowhere to go but the glass

  of the machine shop, smeared. He left me

  to my clumsiness, my dread

  that Old Man Bates would find me like this, mopping up

  as best I could: it was his yard.

  In a few years’ time

  every blue-eyed shop and shed I’d done

  with such skills as care alone could muster

  would be bulldozed, after the site was sold.

  FOOTPRINTS

  for Sacha

  We’re walking over the highest hills of France,

  my son on my shoulders, and he’s on to footprints now,

  the prints of boots and dogs in the path’s slough

  between the stunted pines and heather and flung grass.

  He wants to know where ours are. ‘Ours are behind.’

  ‘Why aren’t our footprints there in front?’ ‘Because

  we’re not there yet. Footprints come out from us.’

  ‘Footprints aren’t ever where you haven’t been’d?’

  ‘No.’ My wife carries our seven-week-old daughter

  in a sling. He wants to see his sister make some.

  ‘She’s much too young.’ ‘She’ll make them soon!’ ‘You’re aching

  my shoulders – make some now instead of later.’

  He says ‘Oh yes’ and I let him down. He runs

  ahead, then turns and looks. Beyond is already

  what has and has not been: the light fading,

  the wind that over the hill-tops sweeps this rain.

  ON THE BEACH

  The sun is warm, October slants

  across molten cobalt’s hiss and sheen,

  gilding the knuckles of foam around the knees

  of my children: what are our gods, in the end, but these

  few moments in a life when we’re at ease

  with it all, conscious that we’re being taken for a ride

  but helpless to mind between the bull’s horns?

  THE EXECUTION

  What was I to look for in this land of persecution and reprisal … ?

  R.L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes />
  No doubt he’d walk it in stout shoes, two minutes

  to muster thought and clear his throat, pause

  perhaps to admire God’s handiwork of vines

  then enter and fiddle with the candles as always

  in a sober dark, in those constant vestry odours

  shared with the tallest cathedrals of the North …

  mouldy cloth, the cluttered simulacra

  of God’s presence collecting dust. No doubt

  he’d have listened to the river still chuckling past

  to the far weir’s hiss and groped for some metaphor –

  perhaps the mill-wheel’s drench downstream, that flood.

  A poorish man, he’d have found some consolation

  in the loveliness of place, would have heard

  the first boots scrape the slabs between

  peasant mutters with more love than rancour.

  So, no doubt, when the Camisards came, this good

  Catholic was brave: yanked from his wine,

  shoved against the wall, all he’s bequeathed

  us is a flurry of nicks to be fingered for

  long after the flintlocks cleared from their puffs

  (a thing he never saw), along with the loathing

  that steadied them. Yet, putting our door to

  and taking, as he did, the same two minutes

  to gaze on cirrus past a roof of ilex

  bursting out of walls in a place now common

  (the rain only hallowing the mysteries of briar

  I high-step through to where the altar stood),

  it’s doubtless too easy to assume the worst,

  the nave shrilled like this with cicada

  and the river chuckling as it chuckled then:

  that none of this missed him, or could even grace

  what case-shot made of him, blurring our wall.

  THE EXCHANGE

  (Durchausen, Germany)

  We pass a wayside crucifix and Anna

  (four and a half) asks, ‘Why that man, he fall

  in the water?’ ‘Which man?’ ‘That man.’

  She’s pointing at the rood. I’m tempted to pass.

  I look for water, see only withered flowers

  but yards off as we are there might well be

  a basin, closer. This intrigues me. ‘Jesus,’

  I say, ‘that’s Jesus. There isn’t any water.’

  She’s brewing up a storm: ‘Why – he –

  fall – in?’ The tortoise slowness of adults. We go

  over; the jar of blooms is wilted, there is

  no water. Jesus hangs in copper, unpainted

  on a cream cross beneath the apple’s boughs

  laden with fruit. I say again there is no water.

  She stamps her foot and tries a different tack:

  ‘Well why they hung him up to dry, then?’

  My collapse into laughter annoys her, and so I find

  I’m suddenly describing the nails, the pain,

  what it was all supposed to be for. She looks

  at the dappled ground, the cows in the field, and then

  at Him, still as bedraggled. She doesn’t say

  a word. I’ve changed the pegs to nails, and frankly

  I’d prefer her version any day.

  Walking to the recreation ground, she keeps

  her silence. It is as if she’s letting it in –

  the knowledge of this odd world where men do do

  such things then put them on display, like teddies

  dangling from washing-lines, not smelling nice

  but hung to make them sad. Meanwhile I’m giggling

  within, rinsed clean, the world made mad in the right way.

  LOOK

  Only the eye’s lens does not age. Old as us,

  it holds out gamely, gazing into time

  as the rest remakes around it: skin,

  nails, hair – every cell of their grounding,

  every glistening hidden interior thing

  repairing itself, rewiring to newness,

  suckling on the protein of its own thrust

  so nothing remains as it was for long

  except the lens, the gaze of the iris,

  the least impermanent thing about us,

  subduing only to senescence

  in the milky cataracts of my mother

  the lasers seared from her, etch by etch,

  delicately scouring the one part of her

  unchanged from the womb, the diamond

  hardness of the softest bit – the glance

  of the newborn, the child, the lover;

  the calm pool stormed by tears, the blusters

  of growing; by those gritty mornings after bombs

  when history hung to be blinked at,

  the harmattan, the chlorine of the deep ends;

  the salve of distress, grief’s soft curtain

  over the unbearable sights, the old sufferings

  or the squeezed lemons of laughter;

  and I think how fitting it is that the rest

  falls away, endlessly remade, while a glance

  remains immaculate – Donne’s windows

  of the soul, that gazed on the womb’s red light,

  admitting the permanence of unplumbed depths

  others dive into, or query with leads,

  shafted otherwise only by a life’s daylight

  or the serious dreams of the eyelid.

  FROM THE NEANDERTHAL

  1

  In the blank spaces between words

  a bird flies. I would like a marsh

  where cranes alight in the way cranes do

  and geese chase the dead

  all the way to wherever

  for my landscape this afternoon:

  no people have yet been born this year.

  This year, there is something to be said

  for the way that curious, now extinct bird

  has the sky to itself for a second.

  2

  Aspens thrill in the spring wind.

  Our roots go down

  ridiculously far

  for the time of year.

  For the time of year

  is the aspen’s,

  and even a boy

  on his thirtieth month

  may bend an aspen

  hand over hand, not very high up.

  3

  Our bundles have a weight, as if

  there is something about God in them,

  about clouds that hover as clouds do not,

  about shoulders and clouds and God.

  We pant to the brim in our lungs

  where all sorts of boundaries begin.

  We stop. We undo our bundles and cast

  clouds of our own on the boulders

  with the odd tiny bone like a vole’s femur

  and something that might have been well, once.

  4

  One day, we took a boat

  and the reeds welcomed us.

  Geese were hoarse but we ducked

  and where the darkness started

  we decided to cease

  all quarrels with the sky

  and sleep. Mammoths roamed

  in our dreams, contented

  with their lot. When we awoke

  what absence of tusks crowded round us!

  5

  Where the high-rise gives way

  to our time-span at last

  one of us was slain in a wood:

  woods are not where we like to call

  so we left his death to itself

  and made for the air. He was slain

  where the wood’s ferns are large

  and the sunlight courts their spores.

  We don’t know where he was slain, really.

  I made it up on the hoof. Woods are like that.

  6

  There was, indeed, an immense wrong done.

  The punishment was punishment enough:

  exile til
l death, a haircut to shrink from.

  I saw him running along the crag one day,

  and called: a big white sky

  hanging by its talons from the very limit.

  He shouldn’t have been running

  at a time like that. He must have forgotten

  the whole machinery of the seasons

  as I’d forgotten him, or the wrong.

  7

  If I could bear our shaft of ash on my shoulders

  and return the core flint to its former

  unfashioned self, things might look up

  for all of us, since the catastrophe.

  The wind is making play with our children,

  the basic premise has slipped some mooring

  and we aren’t as far advanced as our ghosts.

  We need to move and return to the origin.

  The rumbles are the vying of our stomachs.

  If I could grow a flower, it would be something.

  8

  Keeping pace with the snow like this,

  we move so fast we might meet yours one day.

  Imagine that, as the seers do, cupping their moths

  or pointing to the city where the grass waves

  a long farewell between this one and the next.

  The next will come on the back of a grub.

  It will pretend to be a fir for a while.

  Among the uncountable forests of fir

  there is always the one with a grudge against us,

  biding its time between the snow and the snow.

  9

  Supposing, one of us said ten years before

  where we are now, with a worrying moon,

  one of us was bald all over the face

  like the ghost we saw that day, in daylight.

  The funerary rites: there is something anxious

  about the sheer quantity of petals

  we throw upon the smell. I hope

  the change of climate will be taken by us all

  one day at a time. There is nothing more

  irritating than fashioning a drift.

  10

  The industry of flint work guides me back.

  This morning I needed to study the plover

  for my baccalaureate in things and how.

  It rained soon after, deciding to be sleet.

  I returned with the news that in fact

  the plover’s no plunger; that its cry

  belongs; that the sliding grassland below

  is not necessarily in pursuit.

  The plover I described is not the other plover,

  though the ultimate effect is the same.

  11

  In all uses of the term ‘modern’,

  we are always available. Our hearth is as long

  as my arm. Our smoke definitely longer.