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| ISBN-13: | 9781847779359 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 219 KB |
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Torchlight
By Peter McDonald
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Peter McDonaldAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-935-9
CHAPTER 1
The Neighbours
In the single-bedroom flat I used to cry the night through
as my mother walked the floor with me, rocked me and fed me
past the small, insensible hours, not to wake the neighbours;
though often upstairs there might be half the Group Theatre
going till daybreak – a tiny, bohemian airpocket:
Jimmy Ellis (in the Group, before Z Cars), or Mary O'Malley,
and over from next door, next door but one maybe, George
McCann, Mercy Hunter, John Boyd and the BBC,
talking politics or shop, intrigue or gossip the night through.
But perhaps on this occasion there's only the baby
cutting in and out of silence in a high spare room
where the McCanns have just lodged their visiting poet
who by noon will cross from the Elbow Room to the studios
in Ormeau Avenue, and deliver his talk, unscripted,
on 'Childhood Memories'; whose sleep now, if sleep it is,
remains unbroken through the small, insensible hours
between the whiskey nightcap and a breakfast of whiskey.
The Weather
Weightless to me, the heavy leaves
on a sumach drag down their long stems
ready to fall, and spend their lives
on one inflamed, extravagant
display, when light like the rain teems
over and through them; ruined, pendant,
parading every colour of fire
on a cold day at the edge of winter.
They are like the generations of man
of course, and we knew that; we knew
everything pretty much in advance
about this weather, light like the rain,
the red-gold and the gold tattoo
that dying things can print on ruin
(no ruin, in fact, except their own),
flaring up even as they go down.
The sunshine makes reds virulent
and yellows vibrant with decay;
it's not surprise, more like assent
when they fall, when I let them fall,
to what is fated, in its way,
of which this rain-cleared light makes little,
meaning the day can gleam, can glow:
and not a bad day, as days go.
Singles
Unprotected for the most part, out of their paper sleeves,
and stacked in the sideboard as if it were a jukebox
with all of their nicks and scratches and sharp scores
pressed up together in the plastic-smelling dark,
the singles used to spill out like so many side-plates
once I got started on their daily inspection;
tilting the vinyl into sunlight, and closing one eye,
I squinted across the surface, over a dark
spectrum of grooves and dust, where the smooth run-out
ended at a milled ridge, then the label
in blue or black, with its silver-grey lettering
that I learned by heart, spelling the titles and names
slowly to myself, more certainly each time,
to put together words like Gloria, Anna-Marie,
and whole runs of language in THE HUCKLE-BUCK,
SHE LOVES YOU, or SORRY (I RAN ALL THE WAY)
as I ferried singles across our quiet sitting-room
to the Dansette with its open lid, a spindle
and rubber-plated turntable, ready to play them all
to destruction, till late in the morning, when
the patterned carpet was the map of another world
in some year that's not coming around again,
like the showbands and Them, the Beatles and Jim Reeves,
and THIS BOY, DISTANT DRUMS, or BABY PLEASE DON'T GO.
Reversing Around a Corner
Plato could have handled it: the turns,
half-turns and quarter-turns, the speed
and timing are abstract concerns
to be perfected in your head
before they enter the world of sense
and take you on a perfect course
back and around, intelligence
working with gentleness or force
on your hands and feet, your busy eyes
in that manoeuvre – the very one
I fluffed (to nobody's surprise)
in my first test, and now, umpteen
years later, somehow I get right
exactly, without thinking, here
between your house and a building-site
across the road, in reverse gear
and barely glancing back, at best,
as I point myself the other way
(on what, you tell me, is a testroute)
easily, with enough play
in the wheel to give the look of ease
now it can hardly matter, now
there's no one but myself to please,
and rules, and what the rules allow,
don't figure, now there are times when
nothing is beautiful, or true,
with no great difference between
what I can do and I can't do.
Rainbow Ribbons 1980
At the mid-point of a working day
we are the solitary couple
in the Botanic's upstairs lounge,
I with my sweet Martini, sweetened
with lemonade, where feathers of ice
make little prisms in the glass,
she with the same, as indoor lights
on the thousand and one tight black
curls and ringlets of her hair
create their own fair weather,
tumbling and falling like ribbons.
When we step into a sun-shower,
I press her close to kiss
wet hair that is springy and firm
and turns to a whole dark spectrum
as fast clouds hit and miss
each other over our heads, giving
a light so clear it never goes
back exactly as it was.
The Reeds
On my own now with the lake, lake-water's
suck and slap against a wooden jetty
accompanies the solitary, middle-distance
heron that my eyes follow in its take-off
and heavy flight beyond their farthest reach.
* * *
I can walk for yards across these narrow planks
and touch the tips of reeds on either side
of me, where they come level with my arms:
the reeds move in the water as they give
under my hands, then come back to their places.
* * *
To see her arms and long wrists in the water,
her fingers slim and definite as reeds,
would be too much, and in the building quiet
admit that now, when nobody can hear,
it might be a relief to scream aloud.
* * *
As I turn towards the interrupted noise
where reeds are parting for me like a sea,
my heron circles back from the far shore,
aloof, but still checking on everything
in the water, to see what is really there.
Green Tea
That morning, when I was half-way
to all the way lost, the clouds
seemed to make way
for more clouds in a busy sky;
the path I wanted was one towards
the town, was it? This was country,
and the more progress I made,
it was more, and not less, countryside.
As I confess how I lust after
fluency, and how I distrust it,
fluent with light
our green tea fills the fragile cups
(I am too early or too late,
retracing, is it, my own steps),
cups that are luminous
with a whole language unknown to us.
A day when nothing really gets done,
when sentences break up, and when
nothing avails
against the clinches, snares and toils
of words that want not to be plain,
is it, or not to be held down,
not held to what I mean:
I mean a day much like this one,
between half-way to utter waste
and all the way, when bits of the past
count as pure loss
against the tea leaves' secret signs,
visible, not readable – unless
to my grandmother and her dead friends
where they sit beyond recall,
cups in hand, in the parlour still.
Boiled, but not boiling, water stains
slowly where now it gives back the
glow of the sun
in a cup that's made of porcelain,
and the leaves settle down exactly
across each other, one on one,
each more than half the way
to all the way askew, awry.
A Pair of Shoes
Pencil strokes shine like pewter or gunmetal
over the flimsy paper where you drew
these empty sneakers for no reason at all,
and I look through
them to your words on the other side
that say so little, I can't decide
how to construe
the precise lines and the shadows you worked out
across those crumply shoes, as if they fell
down together, in freakish window-light
starting to fail
on a day full of rain, when the whole sky
comes down with just itself to see by,
so you can't tell
colours apart from versions of grey and white
in the instant that you're taken by surprise –
a silver flash, wings maybe, with eyesight
not the right size
to see whatever's flying; almost
enough, when in daylight the ghost
opens its eyes.
Oxford Poetry
i.m. M.I.
1
You weren't there, but your typescript had arrived
an hour before the copy went to press:
one of us took a bus up the Cowley Road
to get the piece of paper to the printers,
a sheet where every other line was stiff
with Tippex, and over the patches your own hand,
elegant even there, even in biro.
The finished magazines would be wheeled down
in a shopping trolley all the way to Magdalen,
and where they went from there I never knew,
preoccupied with typos I might find,
too late to fix, in something on my watch.
I was the careless one, and still am careless,
for whom your nickname, which was maybe halfaffectionate,
of 'Supermac' was apt,
satirically two decades out of date
(I'd told you about how I sent the real
Harold Macmillan gently off to sleep
by spouting verse in the Sheldonian).
I missed things, often. It wasn't until
one afternoon with you, deep in the Chequers,
at a sunny table, drinking like we meant it,
when we were joined by an ancient, fugitive
Glaswegian who talked rubbish for an hour,
and my accent softened, and your open smile
broadened and shone, accepting, that I knew
my stupid blunder in taking you for English.
We weren't in Oxford, even though we sat
in High Street – not that Oxford, anyway,
where power hatches and speaks to itself:
we were at home in feeling far from home,
and listening to a voice that wasn't ours,
while in the sunlight I could see you make
connections and corrections both at once.
The blunders of a quarter century
all felt like nothing once I stood apart,
a year ago today, watching them wheel
you out from Magdalen, when you weren't there.
2
13 March, 1972
A typist has got it wrong, and so in pen
the Foreign Secretary corrects his memo,
adding the phrase she left out from his last
sentence of para. 1, in which 'Our own
parliamentary history is one long story
of trouble' is missing three vital words:
he dashes in with the Irish, and now it's clear.
The rest is all right: he tells the PM
how they (the Northern Irish) 'are not like
the Scots or Welsh', he tells him how he doubts
they ever will be, how the British interest
is not served best by 'tying them closer
to the United Kingdom'; he recommends
pushing them now towards a United Ireland.
He is himself a Scot: Eton and Oxford
(3rd Class in Modern History), a life
given largely to service, and being spent so now,
adding the weight of his practised signature
as he sends the paper on to Downing Street
like a coda to one long story of trouble
from Alec Douglas-Home (a Christ Church man).
3
Trip-switches tripping, rooms and rooms of them;
all the connections failing one by one;
power and poetry riddled with each other:
the information, accurate and mad,
of a spent lifetime, what does it come to?
One kind of answer is a bare report,
its commentary an open smile – yours;
then a thousand lightbulbs switching themselves off.
The Interruption
Somebody almost takes the call
just when a phone stops, their slow
story reaching the point, maybe,
while three or four others vacantly
wait for the spirit to move: but now
a story with nobody in it
barges straight in, in a flash,
before they can make themselves heard
or finish, before they can start.
Nobody says another word
as all of them hear the silence start;
they just take stock as if, oh,
they see now, and their faces fall.
August, 1998
Draught
He runs cold water into a glass
where he stands in the Braniel kitchen
at the sink, just home from work,
and raises that glass to his stubbled lips
and drinks, and drinks it down in one;
a good draught, he says, of Adam's ale.
* * *
The kitchen where I can reach the tap
with a long tumbler that came free
from the Maxol station at Gilnahirk
and top up the glass with barley water
then balance it back to head-height,
pausing before the first big gulp.
* * *
No more than once a week, he takes
the car down to McGowan's for
ten shillings' worth of petrol, waits
as the lad at the pumps goes to fetch
free cutlery (a knife, a spoon)
or glassware; Green Shield stamps.
* * *
Light from the backyard brings to life
that pale grey liquid in my glass,
and shows how little things have settled;
I watch the turns and twists, like dustmotes,
of all the sunned-on barleyflecks
suspended in the water.
* * *
When I swallow, sometimes there's a long
moment when all the drink is cold
in my chest, when it's a cold hand
laid on my breastbone, and the odd
time when the water fills me up
past any thirst that it can quench.
Canopic Jars
1
Lights
When they had done their job
of making good the air
I breathed, with a last sob
these lungs, that couldn't bear
my weight, gave up on me;
they had emptied themselves out
of speech and secrecy,
of confidence and doubt;
now they could give no more:
silence was really death,
surface really the core;
the soul was really breath.
2
Liver
Hidden again from view,
this organ is at rest
from the thing it had to do
unheeded, unaddressed,
a lifetime long; no more
to work with blood and bile,
here it is deep in store
like an unconsulted file
padded with lost routine,
long past the moment now
when perhaps there might have been
some use for it, somehow.
3
Intestines
Rewound here, and closed in,
these yards of underground
cabling can begin
to turn themselves around
one last time, and as if
they knew what they had done
digesting all that life
slowly, but by the ton,
they must, they can, give up:
just to support a man
who took, from plate and cup,
from jug, oven, or pan
all he could touch or taste,
they made from what he tried
and the small lives that died
in tens of thousands, waste.
4
[Heart]
This jar contains my heart:
when it had beaten its last,
they placed it here apart
from me, or from what passed
for me, as a special case –
unlike Egyptians, who
would keep the heart in place
beneath linen and glue
inside a corpse's chest
to be a quickened seed
as the body rose again,
convinced these were the best
pains to have taken when,
really, there was no need.
Slowest
for Andrew McNeillie
When the first rockets tore
in at an angle
they left behind nothing
but concrete and steel,
flowers, and weeds flowering
over the bitter soil.
After four years, my
first flowers of jasmine
take me by surprise,
five-petalled, weightless,
and all but forgotten
in this dust-heavy garden,
yet their perfume identical
to what I remember
in the marble and worked stones
slowly persisting
close to the sea,
where jasmine curled up
with weeds and wild roses
one evening in Tyre.
Portrush
I don't know if they ever met in life,
but today the spirits of two dead poets
keep us company as we dash through rain
all the way from the West Strand into town;
Jimmy is about forty, his wild hair
fighting the elements; Archie is wearing
an enormous pullover made for the north,
conspicuous still as the only black man
about here: it rains so hard that our scalps
and our backs ache with it, as Jimmy dodges
quickly into the Northern Counties Hotel
(which isn't here any more) to have a last one,
and Archie heads for that Chinese restaurant
where he brought me once a lifetime ago.
But I'm not able to perform introductions
– Archie I met the once, Jimmy I hadn't
seen for a dozen years before he died
(I owed him better, and neglected him) –
and you and I are shocked by the brutal downpour
plastering us when we've only stopped for chips,
for which, now we're here, we don't have the heart.
Later
But for the time, I would tell you
about a garden in Gilnahirk
(above the road, where you drive through
every morning to get to work),
a garden not there any more
around the red-brick council cottage
kept up by Ruby and James Moore,
where flowers flowered over the edge
of a steep path, over the walls
and into each other's beds; where lines
of bright, new-planted annuals
criss-crossed and trespassed from their lanes
all summer; where the roses flared
and flaunted along trellises, and where
a row of vegetables was cleared
of weeds each morning; a place for sheer
toil in a builder's few spare hours,
working the ground for food and show,
the gable wall a wall of flowers,
the glen in darkness far below:
and I would tell you everything
about that garden, now the land
has been churned up and cleared, to bring
a chip shop and a second-hand
tyre depot, now that it's all gone,
now James and Ruby are in their grave
at Comber, tell you every one
of the flowers I used to pick and save
from flowerbeds filled up to the brim
and over it, but for the time.
Augury
A sound from above like ripped material,
but the bright level clouds are nearly too bright
for me to see what's moving there, the small
dagger-stabs and arrows of birds in flight,
hurling themselves, and pausing, and shooting by:
a dozen swifts unravelling the sky.
A Castaway
When he was washed up naked on the shore
Odysseus improvised a suit of leaves
and clothed himself in that: with nothing more
to lose, with nothing to conceal from thieves,
in one sense, if no other, he was free:
the ground was moving still with the waves' sway;
all his belongings were across the sea
and unimaginably far away;
his body, in the glare of early sun,
was solid, battered, with scars everywhere,
and his face, where so much salt water had run,
was creased to the touch, fragile in the air;
his arms, that lately held a woman close
and hooped her waist, and pressed her to the bed,
the hands that touched her where and how he chose,
that stroked her breasts, and felt her lips, now bled
where splintered wood and rocks in a great storm
had torn them; right down to his shoulders hung
the straggly hair, brittle with salt; his form
in its sand-shadow was bent, no longer young,
for he could not see himself as she had seen him,
although she knew he was a mortal man,
and he searched for fresh water that would clean him,
washing the sea from him, and the leathery tan,
but nothing now could rinse away the years
that clung to him, or those pains his body kept
close as its welts and bruises, close as hairs
on his strong chest, where Penelope had slept.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Torchlight by Peter McDonald. Copyright © 2012 Peter McDonald. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Acknowledgements,
I,
The Neighbours,
The Weather,
Singles,
Reversing Around a Corner,
Rainbow Ribbons 1980,
The Reeds,
Green Tea,
A Pair of Shoes,
Oxford Poetry,
The Interruption,
Draught,
Canopic Jars,
Slowest,
Portrush,
Later,
II,
Augury,
A Castaway,
The Difference,
The Harbour,
Penalty,
Hymn,
The Wait,
Sappho fr. 58,
III,
Country,
Riddarholmskyrkan,
Broken,
Least,
Childhood Memories,
This Earth,
The Cheetah,
Notes,
About the Author,
Also by Peter McDonald from Carcanet Press,
Copyright,