She was a dancer and I loved her once,
perhaps again. I was loyal as the London plane tree.
I simply thought of her to save a phone call.
He was another runner in the relay sprint,
the wind behind him twice the legal limit,
a new breed with an edge running from the front.
How many broken records and a medal, secret letters
from the unknown Tasmanian in the shot-put?
Let’s say a normal sort of life, o solo mio
on the ice cream vans when all the war breaks out.
You don’t have to insist on being yourself.
Never make decisions on the road.
Never put your papers on the table.
And never count your money in the wind.
I’ll close the window he said over the telephone.
Someone may hear us. Ignore my previous telegram.
I’ve played Lear in Hamlet and the fool in the Royal George,
I’ve played Departure, Rumour, Exit, Jack the Lad
and the buffet car from Paddington to Penzance,
the lodgings always filthy and the trains late,
stuffy and over full from Clacton to far Wigan’s shore,
the whisky in the taproom always watered down.
I never had an encore, never saw a proper script.
From the tyranny of everyone sweet Mother defend us.
The other woman with the other man.
The kind of man that bites the bullet that feeds him.
The kind of woman keeps her orgasms under her breath.
Him saying I can be a behaviourist if I want to.
Hers the kind of cake he can’t eat all of anyway.
Him with a wife and a wedding ring and a pussycat.
She in a portrait of wind in a white straw hat.
He with nowhere to go, no one to go there with.
She with no one to show it to, nothing to sing.
He was an actor she said, asked to stay a while.
Just a couple of boxes, a trunk. Six years ago.
He’s from the department of offers she can’t refuse.
The plot is the same as ever: need of privacy,
love of solitude, fear of loneliness. The locale
contemporary London or Truth or Consequences New Mexico.
She knows he’s gone beyond his shelf life.
Way past his due-by date. Mother knows it.
So tell me what use is a stagecoach to an Indian?
My money’s on the pony express getting to Laredo.
Does it have a zipper, does it have enough pockets?
He’s stuck with the myth of wandering herdsmen,
moving by stars between pastures and women.
Summer in another country. In the mountains.
I guess it killed him. How would he know?
Be prepared to work hard the first million years or so
banging about by the buildings asking what’s this for?
Expect little pay and overcrowded conditions.
You should have been born clever.
You should have been born rich.
You should have been born in Saffron Walden.
You should have worked in school and considered
the example of the future Sir Robert Maxwell.
If you get an interview don’t sniff any glue.
You will be offered less than the whole ten pence.
And wear a tie.
This was my first love:
the numerous wind through grass.
Ignore previous couplet. Recode. Reprogram.
Reenter at line 69. Enter: I’ll be myself.
I get in trouble being anyone else.
If you speak up what to say but everything?
You will have a medal stitched to your chest.
You will be called a hero of the silent republic.
You’ll be its spokesman brought home in a glass coffin,
given a state funeral and a very fancy motorcade.
Better sit close to the wall o mi amigo,
dealing the cards tight to the chest as they say,
hanging on to the hat and the pistols well oiled,
a silver .45 bullet clenched between my teeth,
what passes for a smile the bitten leather of my lips.
Miners hunted down the corn by the mounted division.
Sad poverty’s lament around the garden festival.
There’s work in nuclear construction and security.
And yet much bitterness in the land of the butter mountain.
Sad junketing around the wine lakes. And here
the missiles we can’t see move in their circles
on a page deleted in the interest of national security
while we were standing round in groups of one or less.
So the other side dropped out of the guessing games.
Our runners compete best in non-anabolic steroid events.
Just the athletic urine samples are a security headache.
I’m aware none of this means anything or just more guns.
I guess I’m a cynic. What use is this program?
That of itself proves nothing like smoking and cancer.
I was born in California but left no forwarding address.
If she marries him he’ll be a non resident alien spouse.
She just loves London, spent the whole two weeks in Harrods.
Surely money’s not the problem. Doesn’t everyone?
Think I’ll make me some money John, a whole piece of it.
Go live in New Mexico in maybe Truth or Consequences,
eat peyote and breed me some ponies.
Did you ever fuck a horse, John?
She’s gone at last leaving her honey musk
in the white room of their athletics, and no
forward address, no final note, no valediction.
I find her white straw hat with no ribbon,
some stray hair of her head, one blue shoe.
On my breath the mint of adultery, on my mind
the total recall of her skills on me. I send
c/o the wind two red roses and a telegram:
If you vanish I’ll appear. If you go away
I’ll materialise one sunrise on your doorstep,
I’ll find you in your sleep. Across a square
my face will be familiar in some city, country
in whichever life, a voice a mouth you will recall.
Give yourself the benefit of the doubt: nuclear power
is killing you. We have no crock to brew it in,
no bucket to contain the power of the sun.
What we get’s more wire and chainlink fence,
another 32 varieties of police, more secrets,
more prisons and more central government –
and less and less the wild country to go to,
less and less the seas and rivers.
And there is nowhere for the waste.
Daft as a brush, Mother says.
Ignore previous telegrammed emotional outburst.
That of itself proves nothing like leukaemia.
Years of copious enquiry will vindicate my words.
I’m the Minister for St Elmo’s Fire and I repeat
ignore previous unsupported bias. The government says
it’s OK the rain isn’t eating the forest. We think
some topsoil may remain and some of us survive
occasional nuclear holocaust. These matters sub judice
national security subject of course to a D notice
and the usual 30-year rule, the files deep in the mountains,
the long tapes whispering in the nightwebs, all safe
in the hands of our allies the white male Anglo-Saxon
protestants of North America, some already born again.
End of announcement. Perhaps later in the day
there will be a recital of o solo mio on the bicycle bell,
to be followed by the Didcot Sinfonietta of massed sirens
playing Bye-bye blackbird for barbed wire and geiger counter.
There will be scattered outbursts of caesium and strontium,
showers of alpha gamma beta followed by a very bad smell,
scattered backgrounds where loving anyone may be difficult.
It’s OK the language isn’t really a disease like Windscale.
In any case the place is called Cellophane or Sellafield.
They make only spare parts there and routine replacements
for several of the bad dreams you’ve been having.
En route from elsewhere with some rare diseases.
She’s a very sick puppy and ought to be in quarantine
but nothing stops the peace train or the pony express.
Oh they know what it is she says.
Except they never heard of it and gave the Latin name.
There is no cure, no treatment and no charge.
On exotica you get no better price per pound, Bonnie.
I say you’re not guilty of anything but love.
You don’t have to take the medicine.
It is the first condemned building in North America,
a bar on Third Avenue, lunch. Ignore stage direction.
If you got an imagination it’s the ham and barley soup
you want we don’t have. This guy came in I said Mother
he’s either a very good customer or an asshole.
So maybe he did coach the San Diego Graverobbers,
Quasimodo for quarterback, Quetzalcoatl running back.
Anyway I was right. He is an asshole. To the bank
to the bank to the bank the tall man with the stetson
is singing his winnings on the pony expressway.
You think those Indians wanted that stagecoach?
Check the zipper on this whisky, check the pockets,
check can you take the bottle home, make love to it,
will it sing, will it write a sonnet, will it fly,
will it stack the storm windows in the basement,
cut the lawn, clear the bitter snow in winter,
will it keep you warm in age and will it last?
There’s a thing to own a sweater outlasts the girl
that knitted it oh years ago and do you know her name?
Every Tuesday I get even. Today is Tuesday.
For a living I design meats. This ham & barley soup
Mother makes. She knits it underwater, naked,
singing Oh Susanna weeping for the world we inhabit.
The Russians are right: stay drunk. I’ve come to think
the tall guy lives a sheltered life under the hat
but then I never saw the movie. Next thing I know
his wife’s calling on the phone from New Hope Pennsylvania
shitface come cut my grass or I’ll disable you.
There’s no reply but I keep knocking on the third drink.
What can you say to Mein Vater war in der SS?
So what it’s the Olympics with only half a medal?
When does the stagecoach event happen? With Mother
you could have your cake and eat it but you can’t.
And then this crazy killer with a car, the creep
shoots out McDonald’s and wanders off the porch
with a cool can of beer in his fist. And this:
this is Mother’s soup the 23rd today and you know what
it’s like the 23rd psalm it just ain’t hot enough,
it ain’t like Mother.
She checks her waitress pad,
takes down the order, stares beyond the window
past the bar strip’s neon signature of city skyline,
Manhattan deep in elevator shafts, the haze
of traffic-darkened air, the splutter in the airwaves,
peripheries of speech turned advertising copy,
the wordy trains a babylon of territories and codes
that make the fast train anyplace, the women
on the sidewalk minding their own sweet business –
and speaking of the valley of the shadow Mother says
and gets the soup. West of her is heartbreak country.
Fifty states of paranoia. And that the barman says
is a sign of good health round here. I’d say the map’s
unreadable but I’m a stranger in these parts, a man
under his hat moving his shoulders in embarrassment
and looking tough among the towers of speech. I’d say
the trains and scribble in the subway. I’d say
between the whisky sours and ham and barley soup
the language is on fire, shot, taken out, erased
with extreme prejudice, irradiated, burned away.
I’d say the stagecoach. I’d say the previous telegram.
I’d say the elevators or the wailing chasm of the city.
I’d say the sirens. I’d say I’m out of signs
Meanwhile in London Nielsen comes to call.
On the river bank a boot a bottle a wine bucket.
Old brown sails in the seawind by the Prospect of Whitby.
In another life Nielsen we were mates thumped drunk here,
and woke together in the Queen’s Navee.
You want to know what Ezra Pound said to me?
He said Thankyou and walked off in the railway dark
of another black Italian night in his cape and cane.
Pound. Proud. From Wabash College. Weary.
Don’t tell me objects don’t have feelings.
They resent our intelligence and fall down.
Telephones and police never when you need them.
How did it get way past midnight without my noticing?
It’s enough having to remember all day who I am,
how important, my number, my callsign, my cues,
where I keep the suicide pills and the silver bullet.
Am I or am I not the President of the United Shirts?
Did I accept this part? I have to call my agent.
I have to remember all this only to forget it
night after night with Nancy, and no let-up.
He’s wearing a grey suit and not at all like Richard,
and he wants to talk to you dear. In confidence.
He says he’s from the New Church of the Holy Loft Insulations
conducting a survey for the University of Double Glazing,
and this joke’s wearing thin. He dines out
on his famous namesake and he’s famous for it. I hear
her say oh years from now I was depressed my time there.
I guess I loved him. But there was never anyone at home.
You’re wrong she says. You’ll do it my way.
I’m the head girl and all this democratic stuff
is for the firing squad and a short sharp shock
at the back of the gym with a rubber truncheon.
No cure. No treatment. No natural justice.
We have a business to run here. Sell everything.
Give the miners a stiff course in how to sink.
The prefects will know what to do with their hockeysticks.
I think she’s never been lived in, Mother says.
So there I was with an open heart and a closed mind,
in love with the dancer. So where are you now,
the brown Armenian from the house of women?
I barely knew what language to tremble in.
I was in love suddenly with Italy, with Venice,
her many masks and silks and lace, her musks
and all her yellow birds singing in the water city.
A city against nature Chateaubriand called her.
I too danced and sang, a silver weathercock
strutting the Riva where I spoke with Benveniste’s doppel
A normal sort of day, a typical existence
eating mayonnaise and pickles, the sweet red wine
uncocked an hour before dinner, and a fine view
across water to Our Lady of the Perpetual Erection.
I heard women calling from windows Droppa your breeches,
the sign across the waterway translating Two Men Pissed here,
and on the gramophone the voice of Signor Primatur Seniliti
when war broke out and ended all at once.
‘Rajid Patel is a puff.’ That gets everyone.
Good boys, all educated. All good clean girls
in clean white sheets. But no reward for being good
and I was never any good at being bad.
I fuck and sign her, cross the t and dot the i,
and dream the fat rain singing in the applemint.
Her man’s away beyond the mountains,
always moving with the herd. But he visits,
sends money, word of himself in other travellers.
Some of whom love her also. And she them.
Delete rain. Delete applemint. Delete f*ck.
I have to get in touch with my controller.
I have to plug myself back into the electricity.
He is running, he is running, the faces of the crowd
like water scattered in the sun, all eloquence
a blur across the wind in the distant city of the angels,
the fiefdoms of the Barreras and the White Fence Gang.
He’s pumped with cortisone and anti-inflammatory.
This boy needs rest and more rest sing the airwaves.
He hands the baton on. Dark lady of the sonnet,
by now you will have guessed: all we ever do is gesture.
Ah sweet land of green money. Such a life
put together of posters and signs, gestures,
images in the TV flicker of another continent,
another decade, stars of stage and screen,
characters in movies, all good consumers,
loyal citizens in borrowed dialogue
and borrowed clothes bearing urgent news
as to what’s on and who’s wearing it
in languages that don’t compute.
Reasons why they met, reasons why they parted,
never reasons why they were together.
You say OK blackbird that’s far enough.
You say OK I’ll give you the plot but the treaty’s off.
You say you missed the point lady. The butler did it,
or the barman with the ham and barley soup.
You missed the joke about the stagecoach.
You remember the retired schoolmistress?
You remember the deserted cottage on the estate?
You remember the laird back wounded and blind from the war?
He fathered her a child and called her princess
once in his terrible dark, perhaps again. That child
became the priest in the black cummerbund and dog collar,
clicking his lilywhite fingers whistling sanfairyann
at the end of the performance but you never got it.
I’ve had it with your Olympics. You wore the medal out.
Ignore previous marriage. Ignore telegram.
There will be no midnight release from the tower
where the virgin sleeps unkissed. These days
she’s working a funfair sideshow on a block of ice
always melting. Stay off my territory blackbird.
Faithless. Alone and fatherless, a long starry highway.
Here’s John again with his chat in and out of uniform
serving with the blood and guts brigade, cocky,
fly and unreliable. Don’t depend on him, Sunshine.
He’ll do a runner, change his name, reappear
in Stratford Langthorne living with another woman
as McGinty, Bartollini, Juan Day Sam the noodlevendor
selling 32 kinds of ice cream and home improvements.
Men tidying Sundays in their backyard sheds,
the nails and screws assorted in their boxes,
the hooks and fishing flies laid up for winter,
all the windfalls picked, the soil turned over.
The things women put up with from men and stay sane,
enthusiastic even. She imagines his private parts
and walks into the nettles. She keeps going back
to the source of the inflammation.
Maybe she can get a discount on her next life.
He frames her photograph and all his thought of her
twisted into loops of picture wire with pliers,
Words like rain in the applemint. In my trade
I’m a journeyman living the life of waste nothing,
odds picked in skips, scraps my dead father kept,
all the words I can steal so look out for yourself,
my sisters, my brothers. I’m Thief, Joker, Twister,
Departure the weathergrained theatrical beached
at the Colony more often than not weeping in whisky
muttering stagecoach, vulva, rain in the applemint,
anarchist-in-waiting to the republic of survival.
For instance I might say dry white Chablis pray
and the barmaid reply we’ve only dry roasted.
They were led out in groups of five by the interpreter
across St James’ Square. An ordinary sort of weather,
the usual sort of planet. Sir Officer Your Honour
I worked hard and drank only in The Onlie Running Footman,
he that cries the road clear before Their Lordships,
and takes the brickbats, sods, clods, sundry turds.
Now it seems I’m in trouble and nothing makes sense.
I’ve a severe condition of the gyratory system,
my inner ring road’s clogged, I have flyover,
underpass, roundabout and Blackwall Tunnel.
I’ve been hammered in Hammersmith and Battersea,
I’m Tooting and Barking and Ealing and Southend,
I’ve Epping and Ongar head to foot, White City
and Parsons Green and probably terminal Shoeburyness.
I’m a sick puppy going home on the 12.15 to sleep.
For 30 pence you get at least one sort of cheese.
I’m a stone too light for its weight and full of holes.
I’m on the blink and fading fast. In the French
I thought I saw Chicago but I think he’s dead now.
I closed the window on the telephone just in case.
I am become the destroyer of worlds Vishnu himself said.
For the loss of one day one thousand years regret.
By the omission of a letter, the variation of a constant.
In a sense we’re all dead already Milton Keynes says.
And in another we begin every one by crawling.
Thank Christ I’ve recovered my deadly composure,
found my thread again, forgotten my euphoria.
I’m just a normal sort of crackpot. Do ignore me.
Throw me out if I snore, if I bore or offend
or raise two fingers to the photograph of T.S. Eliot.
I’ve been all over England, to Scotland and Penzance,
I died in the Winter Gardens when I saw the ladies dance
(– and pray to think they will dance for me again).
I made a mistake the first time around and settled
for a pair of tits. Her body. Designed I thought
to make men mad, but she’s actually her own business
taking the late air along the Broadway. Pig.
What use is a stagecoat to an Indian in any case?
Who played the Bartender, and who took Mother’s part?
So now you’re all here ignore all previous telegrams.
Delete applemint. Delete cruise missile,
delete Brook Street Girl, delete one blue shoe,
delete and oh the runny honey of her labia.
And cut the sexy stuff. Pretty soon now
I shall deliver my treatise Language as the Management
of Sexuality, bored as ever with my Ph.D notes.
Truth is I’m a Wally with a Walkman listening to tapes
of his own voice in the subway, metro, underground,
tube. Once upon a time this was a live performance.
Once I was a puppy, a young poetrie apprentice
in the school of Whingeing Willy’s blighted adolescence.
Now I get snotty letters from the likes of Anthony Thwaite,
my line is overextended. Is there no end to this?
Will no one switch me off, unplug me at the wall,
disconnect the supply or seal me in a vacuum flask?
Will no one tow me out to sea and sink me at night,
shoot me into space or the pony out from under?
I’m probably the ideal consumer. A million dollars
and a piano don’t speak to each other at all
Quincy Jones says. I’m caught in the rain’s graph.
I’m riddled with statistics, toxic, overtaxed,
overloaded, I’ve barely enough bytes for the program.
I’m contaminated and there’s no discount, no treatment,
no Latin for it and no charge. Will the planet
recover from our wounds? Will the pony rider
make it to Las Cruces? Will Ronnie Armageddon
swat the planet flat and go to heaven in a sheet
and all the believers meet in the rapture?
Send now for catalogue. It’s in the standard.
See it in the mirror in the news in the times
that’s fit to print. Tune this channel next week
to the same exacting performance. In the privacy
and comfort of your own home blow your own head off.
Telegram your representative urgent soonest express.
If not the world save Venice, mother of poets.
For sure there’s trouble in my mill. Surely
the government can do something. I’m lost
in all this complex electronic weaponry to defend me.
What if anything at all goes off, the wrong goose
in the wrong radar in whatever management of error?
May I enquire the name of this place, strange,
dangerous, the centre we suppose of what is known
of spacetime, on every side the anxious citizens
each with his and her different map of the district.
Till now I was content, my voice singing me to sleep.
We need peace Mr President, and quiet conversations.
And for vegetables a patch of good land Mr Chairman,
if the soil be workable, the ground cover sufficient,
the radiation in retreat, the sniper fire fading,
the depredations of the mercenary bands less and less
till year by year we reinvent the wheat, the spinning jenny,
the working of the differential gear and the sonnet.
I fear the program ends abruptly, one day the stereo
playing o solo mio in the city where the other woman
with the other man is waiting for the right bus
at the wrong stop when farewell all the rain:
the rider never makes it with the message, the words
roll off the page’s edge like lemmings to the sea,
the marathon goes on forever with these jogging men
somehow puffing through the long nuclear winter.
How shall I find you in your sleep to whisper
there would otherwise be partings but no end?
Your eyes are soon enough, love. Ask what song
Mother sang us all to sleep with. Speak again
as Lear spoke and the dead in Homer, called again
beyond the ditch’s lip to be an upright bag of blood.