And so: the cannons, the fountains, the fireworks,
the oratorio and the aerial display by the Red Arrows –
so educational, so good for the children – and last
the dawn chorus of the orchestra and the curtains:
here I am centre stage with a name like John
and hardly a damn thing to say for myself: merely
I am the man that can never spell straight,
the envoy of a country that won’t negotiate.
I wake, I make my first tea in all the world,
surprised the downstairs and the kettle, three
green bottles on the windowsill are present
and correct, not vaporised in sleep,
the sirens weeping through the short night’s
many possibilities: a line crossed, a wire
singing in the radar triggering the rockets.
I am awake, the blackbird’s song against the sky.
I have been walking my domains, where everything
and nothing much has changed. I have been here before.
I have a photograph of who I was then, standing
ill at ease in a borrowed suit of clothes
in the room of bleached light, one workman’s hand
across the chairback, the other halfway to his waistcoat,
the silver Albert and medallion on whose clasp
there is no timepiece, but only I know that.
Most of us with little, a christening spoon
or on the wall a souvenir of some daft war
our grandfathers had died in, before the sperm
homing on the egg on a 48-hour pass from Boulogne
burst all their passion through us to our children,
here in the rainy kingdom, in the long peace
fought for in another country. For my inheritance
I have examined the leader’s brain with my nightprobe
finding not much but fear of God and strong language,
random events I have no vision or power to read.
We are got ready for war again it seems, the hiss
of air released again from the dead, and the band
going down with the ship playing Abide with Me.
I’m jumpy when the allies practise mass graves,
or when a truck goes by that says the real thing.
Listen. Everything is still as a Dutch painting,
forever Sunday. I’m a man clearing space round himself,
one hand signalling the gods, the other a gardener
of balm and sweet savoury, living my secret biography,
my name and a self-addressed, stamped envelope
by return of post: John with his book of anyone,
his bell and light, his exit left, his tall tale
as to our masters’ thinking and where grow weeds.
This moment now someone is mining the waterway,
closing a frontier, someone is arming the missile,
someone makes love, makes a profit, an objective analysis,
someone is torturing someone with telephone wire,
someone is listening, this is routine someone says.
The women join hands at the chainlink fencing,
the convoys the colour of gangrene sneak out at night,
the microwaves weeping out messages we can’t read.
The president is in his rose garden, I in mine.
All afternoon discussing Armageddon with the evangelist,
he’s thinking dammit time to open the good book
and strike first, the work of a moment meanwhile
to admire the fuchsia coxinia, the lawn, the tea rose
opening itself, the white blaze of the magnolia.
Here in the same moment it’s dusk, my love and I
We talk of another rose garden, by the long shore
you call home. Your mother, call her the rose lady,
grows blue flowers there, the shade her eyes
and the seas possess. I have the truth you say
but where the hell’s my purse? Tonight we drink,
we may weep over the floor if we want to. Always
the low itch in the skull to give up, to forget,
go crazy and keep running till the heart bursts.
Always on the shore of great events, almost a witness,
or are we merely a reserve set well apart
in some cupboard in the suburbs working out
our dangerous purposes, here at the finish.
Caught in the playback I’m the man with Time Out
walking the square the moment the other world’s
ambassador opens up with a machine gun: that man.
I’m the missing witness. And they never ask.
The nights end in cat fights and backyard wars,
bad dreams and between a little night music perhaps,
a little work experience. East of the city
the missions are still preaching boxing for boys
and the evils of drink. West at Kew the mandrakes
in their glass mausoleums form my last exhibit,
last offspring of the city’s hanged men, last blip
across the cardiogram across the city’s narrative.
That’s it then officer I’m John with my invisible.
I keep changing my name to fox the government.
I’m John with my music plain speech down at heel
making a muzak of everything, the ice cream bell
and the roar of the crowd risen up, and the sea
on the beach stones that are all wearing white
for the evening. Officer, I’m one among others,
every day we are more and we’re all called John.