to G.H.
Walking in the other place, the poet
turned and said to me, ‘Daumier
kept me going.’ My search engine
ran on apace and brought me inter alia
not, as I’d guessed, to an august salon
but stuff about redressing wrong, the cretin
man in all his folly. (Nearby grave men,
without gravamen, haunted the architecture.)
And I ran on, a dog at heel
(pauvre chien désorienté, sans but
et sans pensée), detaining him as best
I could with foolish chatter. Uphill
all the way? At times I wonder
what the point of life is. Tell me, poet?
Why do I think of Germany here? Witness
and conscience fell from the same tree,
the grafted Apfel. He strode on before me
like a great bear foraging through stars.
I told him what K.D. said of Günter Grass:
‘He lied to win the Nobel Prize…
It was the lie itself, and not its cause:
we could all and many have lived with that.’
His brother ripped apart Deutschland über alles
in the star-spangled style of Jimi Hendrix.
But for cello. How German is that?
‘They should not have bombed Belgrade.’
To find ourselves in such a state…
we’ve seen the best of our times, I’m afraid.
The upright shall live through faithfulness.
Habakkuk
‘I don’t need anyone,’ he said, severely.
Thank you, I thought, and raised my glass
to my lips, pausing for reflection. Why
for god’s sake am I doing this?
I looked my Acheronian oyster in the eye
and slurped it down. Bits of gritty shell
yet might make in time a pearl.
You’d have needed an oysterman’s knife
to open the silence now upon us. Life
in death, or death in life? You lie,
I thought, you lie, remembering the roll-
call from Donne to Gurney,
Rosenberg to Rose. You need the dead.
‘… The Habakkuk blew me away,’ as he said.
Nothing between us and the Urals? Nothing?
Cast your mind back. What memories are these?
Nowhere this side of Siberia bleaker skies
than I remember fieldfare and redwing
starveling darkened in winter’s cold war.
Box-like de Havilland and Meteor
screeched across, ready for the worst.
Soldiers wolf-whistled my mother from a lorry.
Men touched their caps. Manners oppressed.
Hard to know what we think we mean by peace.
Never say worst, there is none? No less sage,
never say best? There was no golden age.
Yet in-between, no small part of the story,
how break of day can still seem blessed…
I’d be wary of pastiche, if I were you,
I said to myself, wondering. But he phoned
that night and urged me on, praising a new
technical advance, regarding enjambement.
Heavy losses sustained to peace of mind.
The lift-shaft of self-doubt yawned.
Work as I might I could not go beyond
the end of any line, for even a moment.
For days I stared as if at years between
advances, the same as spoke volumes
of laboured silence in those times.
Don’t go there, comme on dit, but play the clown?
I too am a very different poet from
the one I used to be, whatever iamb.
Gurney and gunnery, too close for sanity.
Deep in darkness, he was himself once
on a gurney, electro-shock therapy
the morning’s menu… Stunned into sense
not new to his experience. He was himself
once, or so he says – granted glimpses
of providential beauty, like Hopkins, his synapses
wired so. Google came up with nothing
like it in twice the time. He was himself
and after no one sang his song.
He never sought asylum from the world
but had it thrust upon him. Greatness
raved and after no one sang his song.
Alms and the man our sorrowful refrain.
In Waterstone’s stocking up on novels –
I mean detective fiction – poets don’t
read novels, or write them, because they can’t.
Name one? They’re always something else.
Making ready for the long day’s journey
into night, and no poem in the offing,
the game up, the Daïmon withholding.
I thought he might cease at any hour.
No tide-table. No return fare. No special
rates for parties travelling together.
No reservations, except those you’d call natural.
It’s a short ride but while you can see
the wake of the ferryman, you’ve as long
as it takes to come and go there.
The flotillas thronged, heavy as ever.
It was like Venice in high summer
but juddery in Dunkirk-black-and-white.
No leeway for casuistry… We sat
talking towards evensong. ‘I hate,’
he said, ‘the post ’45 generation…
They betrayed literature, despising what they taught.’
Original sin the subject of his sermon.
Sins of emission thickened on the air.
We rode it out and railed against the shits,
leavening our fear with spleen.
‘I wish I was dead,’ he said. And Charon,
after Henry, made reply: ‘My friend, you are…
As far as immortality permits.’