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| Left, poet Judith Kazantzis, right poet Peter Porter at the Kings Lynn poetry festival. |
Party was one of the first three books published by Michael Hulse's press, Leviathan in 2000. The books are beautifully produced and one of the others in Michael's launch series was Kit Wright's brilliant Hoping It Might Be So. I was honoured to be in such company.
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| At Farnborough Tec |
The room's filling up with people I've known.
They leave wine circles on the mantelpiece,
open windows, change tapes in the cassette,
flick through books and photo albums.
Someone's taken yesterday's paper from the bin
and is looking for a story. They tell each other
about themselves, kiss at the bottom of the stairs,
turn down lights and move into the garden with cushions
and rugs. They eat bite-sized tarts and tread on toys,
twist hair and press pendants into thumbs, scratch and cough.
Some have come back from the dead. They cling to drainpipes
and stand on shoulders, stretch for upstairs windows.
The hall is packed and cars fill the road, spill up side streets -
they've reached the racecourse. Floorboards give way
collapse into the cellar. The music's so loud it interrupts
my heartbeat. My clothes are handed out to those who are cold.
All the paper in the house is torn up to write numbers on.
They take over the cemetery. A hotel pianist
and bass-player I fancied set up a stage with fallen
headstones. Friends with children organise a crèche.
A succession of plumbers who never understood my boiler
spot-weld standpipes. The detectives and para from Aldershot
who once lived upstairs, arrange a military display.
Part-time djs - van driver, computer salesman
and personal trainer from the gym - spin three decades,
45s to CDs. All the men I've ever been out with
are put in discussion groups by women friends.
Women from the ferries, shops, kennels, bars, temp agencies
and language school arrange shift work at minimal pay
for the handful of chief executives who've shown up. Relatives
have comfortable chairs away from the party
and all those cash-only landlords offer free rooms overnight.
Photographers take polaroids of everyone.
A man from the allotments hands out runner bean poles
and the electrician's run a cable to a photocopier.
Every face is enlarged to the size of a flag
as in demonstrations for the missing - husbands, wives,
toddlers, teenagers, street children, grandfathers,
aunts, cousins, neighbours, workmates, friends.
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| Ruth Padel included a poem from Party in her Sunday poem series in 2001. It appeared on 28 January, my birthday. |
Rigging
If we'd taped that rainy night in the car
when we sat drinking with the windows down,
staring at the lights of two cottages
on the island opposite, it would play back
nothing but breathing, the door opening
and closing as you checked the children
in the tent, a cork pulled from a bottle,
the Atlantic below, reclaiming another inch
of the peninsula, wind rustling a plastic
rubbish bag, damp matches scraped uselessly
on the dashboard and you tapping a rhythm
on your glass with a pencil - like rigging
against masts, beached above the tideline,
bared of sails and wet with spray.
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| South Africa - my daughter's a few months old. It's Christmas 1994, year of the first elections. She's in her grandma's arms. |
i
Plums and apples
are gone now. Houses
flatten the old
fruit farm, long and ranch-like,
Dutch Reform. At
night, security lights flash
circles on lawns,
outdoor stages for cats
breaking the beam.
Dogs leap at fences,
rattling mesh the
way their owners might shake
a pedigree.
Gardeners move in slow motion,
avoiding sudden
moves, as if they're pushing thighs
against water.
Released from the snarls
the road home
feels like a dance floor.
This is exile for
city whites; sudden power cuts,
unaccustomed
poisonous snakes, serum
in the fridge,
farmers as comfortable with guns
as slitting the
throat of a screaming pig.
They have slipped
through the necklace of mines
around
Johannesburg: uranium, gold, sulphur, clay,
silver, dolomite,
coal, diamonds; swapping
once comfortable
suburbs for poultry sheds.
The nearest town
is sixties Afrikaaner style,
austere as a
frontier post, without statues or gardens.
There's nowhere to
hang around, just car parks
and warehouse
shops, one bank, one chemist.
It's Christmas Eve
and we're buying meat - steak, sausages,
chops - sold in
brai packs, clear plastic bags.
They could be
windows into a body.
There's no shop
assistants
in funny hats just
the heat, not enough shade,
queues at the
butcher's and guards at the off-licence
stacked floor to
ceiling with beer.
At the bank they
ask where you got your pounds,
not believing your
passport; its stamps from Denmark,
England, Ghana,
Switzerland like pressed flowers
in an inherited
book. It takes more than half an hour
to change money.
You'd think they were giving it away,
each form
handwritten, slow as a child,
large, round
numbers pressed too hard into the paper.
She can't work out
the passport number, I am itching
to argue, you
restrain me, knowing better.
ii
We lie on the bed
watching a game show -
applause and
crackling interference -
sleep end to end
like the wax family
in Johannesburg's
Museum of Africa
past the
reconstructed bushman,
recorded
resistance speeches. We raid
our children's
stockings for the neighbour's.
Your mother peels vegetables
from the 'Deliverance'
market;
feathery carrots,
cabbages - leaves chewed into lace.
Driving here, the
clucks from the chicken
trussed in the
back are all that interrupts
our silence. We
must come before dark,
your mother
commands. People will be drinking.
We're in time for
the coalman. You hoist our son
into his
horse-drawn cart, pay for the bags
the Aga will burn
all day tomorrow, warming
the fermenting
African beer, stewing meat, boiling rice
and pap.
Electricity cables droop like washing lines
above us,
criss-crossing into an unfinished net
above this city of
ochre and tin.
In the morning the
smoke rises vertically
as if it, too, is
determined to escape. Your brothers
arrive, prompting
the first muffled row
about who was
buying drink. Children come early
to share the soap
we brought your mother
then splash around
the standpipe with our son.
Plates are filled,
washed, filled again
and everyone
dances. I cannot.
She insists I must
be out again before dark.
Walking
The man walking
alone on the road
wrapped in a
blanket, knows a lift will come.
A hundred miles
between petrol stations
with his country
beyond a range of mountains
to his east, he
feels his muscles relax
as the gradient
straightens out
after the long
haul up from the wine region
with its
vineyards, water tanks and grass
cooled by mist.
Now there will be nothing
but lay-bys with
trees and no taps. He carries
water, used to
this trek and knows someone
will stop. There's
no need to put out a thumb
on a road like
this, where crossroads are rare
as water, speed is
constant as the scrub.
It won't be
holiday-makers; they flap past,
windows dark as
popstars', languid hands
dipped in air as
if it was a private pool.
It won't be
lorries; pummelling the road
like jack-hammers.
It may be a mini-bus
full of Sowetans with
a spare seat, leaving
for Johannesburg at
dawn, after trading
factory bought china,
hand-painted pots,
for unwanted
clothes. The man walking alone
is tiny at first.
We see him for miles, bobbing
in and out of the
mirage like a seal we saw
swimming in the
bay near Cape Town.
Its tail, ragged
as seaweed, kept pace
as you jogged from
the fish wholesalers
on the jetty to
the beach carpark. Then he's in
the mirror, his
face gone as if it was flashed on tv.
There'll be
another, like the nought
on the mileometer
which keeps coming round.
Lower Bourne
We watch the foxes
over the stream
in rough grass
below the woods.
My mother calls
from the sink
when they bring
the cubs out.
At night we listen
to the vixen scream.
So when the old
man with Jack Russells lays traps
we force his metal
jaws shut,
dig for a day with
seaside spades
a pit deep enough
to break his leg, push
sharpened stakes
into sand, camouflaged
with dead leaves, a
lattice-work of twigs.
Hankley
At weekends, or
when evenings last
my mother puts us
in the old grey Rover
with the dog and
drives to Hankley.
In the pond, by
the car park, fishermen
hunch under
umbrellas big as tents,
nets slouched in
the shallows, and summon
pike strong enough
to take a hand off.
The water never
moves. This is the place
in the woods we
walk away from.
The pond's too
much like home.
On the common we
struggle through sand
churned up by
trucks. She warns us
to stay out of the
heather, where lost flares
and cartridges
hide, unexploded. We walk,
and talk more
easily than in the house.
The sky opens us
up and in summer
it's as if fire
cracks in every stem of heather,
burns in the sun
on our necks
the prickly heat
reddening my mother's hands,
in clumps of
beaters, stacked like paddles
waiting for
canoes, and a river to carry them.
Then it's gone.
Leaving patches of charcoal,
maps of new
territories scored into purple;
landmarks which
will last a year at most.
There were Daleks
here. We know
there are targets
where soldiers lie low
on their stomachs
and wait, like the pike.
Shackleford
(for Rob
Fairbanks)
Andrew has a map
out. He's reading
off names: Nine
Acre, Great Piece,
Thorn Bears, Bar
Field, Middle Horse
Hatch, Stony
Windsor. He can track
his family over
this acreage
and beyond,
precisely as the pedigree
of a bull. Fields
of pasture are lumpy
with burrows,
neatly sown crops
eaten ragged.
Rabbits grey as molehills
flatten themselves
into grass, hunted
by a man from
Special Branch, his rifle
silenced to a
thud. Above him, a cow's digging
a hole into red
earth with her hooves.
Another's
supervising a dozen calves
under trees, while
their mothers eat.
Rooks raid pig
feed. They know Andrew's car.
By the time he
stops at the gate, the sky's full
- a gust of
charred paper, cackling.
Between maps
I watch from the
woods as neighbours dismantle
walls, share
timbers, stones, cows, sheep, goats.
In 16 years the
village vanishes. You can trace
a star - pace each
path, seven of them,
climb to the
ridge, stop to stroke a dead elm,
stoop through
willows along the dry stream,
or jump stepping
stones, stumble through ruts
in the track
south, smell elderflower in a hedge.
The last one
brings you in from cowfields, directly west
- to crouch on
grass where the centre was.
Gomshall
Cattle, a smudged
mix of Belgian Blue and Friesan,
shuffle towards us
on straw, shove heads through rails,
curious. They're
eating oranges, barley brewers
have finished with,
potato starch from Walkers crisps
- like bored
teenagers whose only entertainment's
a bus shelter,
Saturdays between McDonald's and Burger King.
Lucas farms alone,
predicts it won't be long
before fields are
monitored by satellite,
their 80 foot
tramlines, tracked from space
and the places
where charlock, cleavers, wild oats,
couch grass take
hold on weakened soil,
reduce the yield,
will be clear as the Great Wall.
Subterranea Britannica
(for Malcolm Tadd)
A rock thuds in
the dust. Silent children listen
as its echo floods
a wormery of cellars
stretched to meet
the demand for hour-glasses.
It enters the
shells of their ears, sweeps
over Grace's name
carved in a wall
and the date next
to it, 1644.
It passes a mock
Tyrannosaurus Rex roaring
at pickaxe marks,
expands at a rifle range,
ammunition store,
bomb shelter, hospital.
It shakes 200
plates from a nuclear shelter,
finds its way
upwards, to emerge
into a railway
tunnel, sudden warmth, drizzle.
Outside, the echo
approaches a pensioner
folding £10 into
her purse, a bricklayer
stretching his
arms for relief.
There's no going
back. It searches out
anyone who'll hear
- occupying the space
left by a phone
that rings, then stops.
Reigate
I drive under
flight paths. They hum to me,
accompanied by
twin motorways, the way
my seven year old
fills his head with music
building Lego
worlds. At first it's like the sea,
never loud enough
to drown the bell sounds
of birds, a stone
dropping. It nags of routes
to places I've
forgotten or never found.