Rivers, tow paths, caravan parks
From Kirkstall to Keighley
The track's ribbon flaps
Like Margaret's whirling and twirling
At ten with her pink-tied hair
And blue-check patterned frock
O my lost beloved
Mills fall like doomed fortresses
Their domes topple, stopped clocks
Chime midnight forever and ever
Amen to the lost hegemony of mill girls
Flocking through dawn fog, their clogs clacking,
Their beauty, only Vermeer could capture
O my lost beloved
In a field one foal tries to mount another,
The mare nibbling April grass;
The train dawdles on this country track
As an old man settles to his paperback.
The chatter of market stalls soothes me
More than the armoury of medication
I keep with me. Woodyards, scrapyards,
The stone glories of Yorkshire spring-
How many more winters must I endure
O my lost beloved?
...
Yellow rapeseed
Fields of vision
Whiter than
A shade of pale.
...
Yellow rapeseed
Fields of vision
Whiter than
A shade of pale.
...
Leeds this silent solemn Sunday
Tempest Road is clear of all
But wistful birds, parked cars
And vagrant trees.
The surgery and pharmacy are shuttered tight
'Get your medication straight into your bag',
The friendly GP gravely warned, 'The junks
Lay in wait to grab and run from those no longer young
The building site's scaffolding of bone
Masks pristine piles of bricks where
May winds mourn and moan among
The gaping frames beneath a bannered
Street-wide invitation to a 'Housing Consultation Initiative'
Flapping desultory and unread
Where last year ‘Beeston in Bloom' was up instead.
...
When Blunkett starts to talk like Enoch Powell
I think of Harold Wilson's statue in Huddersfield Station
Caught striding forward, gripping his pipe in his pocket,
Hair blowing in the wind.
could we but turn that bronze
To flesh I would have asked him to meet the two
Asylum-seekers I met in Huddersfield's main street
And asked directions from. 'We are Iranian refugees',
They stammered apologetically. 'Then welcome to this country.'
I said as we shook hands, their smiles like the sun.
...
Mornings like this I awaken and wonder
How I have moved so far, how I have moved so little
And yet in essence stayed the same
Always passionate for the unattainable
For Joan Baez to make me her analyst,
To tour Ireland with Eddie and Finbar Furey
To be made a Chevalier des Palmes for translating Milosz.
I remember one road, many roads I did not take
And my heart lurches and my stomach turns
At the vertigo of mystery
At the simplicity of childhood
And its melancholy
At the silence of the moors
Beckoning, unreachable, tormenting me
As I lie helpless at the border of infirmity
With my soul burning and brimming over
With adolescent passion.
Only analysis with its symmetries and asymmetries
Exactness and paradox, scientific as Heisenberg's
Principle of Uncertainty, yet various as the shades of Monet,
Eases me.
I think of those I have known and know no longer,
Who have died needlessly, disappeared irrevocably
Or changed beyond recognition.
I think of the bridge, river and streets
Of my Montmartre, gone under and made over
Into the grey utilities of trade, the empty road,
Sad as telegraph poles, my Sacrй Coeur silent and boarded up.
My Seine empty of the barges of Dйrain
My Sorbonne absorbed, its students gone
Mornings like this, I awaken and wonder.
...
From the French of Andrй Frйnaud
France was born there and it is from there she sings
Of Joan of Ark and Varlin both.
We must dig deep, o motherland,
Beneath those heavy cobbles.
Country of the Commune, so dear to me,
My very own which make my blood burn
And that same blood will one day flow again
Between those very stones.
It is there when I see people dance
Beneath the veined clouds under the May sun
Especially when the notes of the accordion
Pied-piped them away from the urgencies of the day.
It is the people's special gift beneath the waving banner
To have such gentle hearts. Mine beats still
At the kindness of strangers.
After the Night of the Long Knives
That same heart still beats
At the goodwill of those souls buried
Beneath stones laughing and weeping even now.
...
Dawn's my Mr Right, already
Cocks have crowed, birds flown from nests,
The neon lights of Leeds last night still
Sovereign in my sights, limousines and
Pink baloons, tee shirts with green stencilled
Dates of wedding days to come, the worn dance floor,
Jingling arcades where chrome fendered fruit machines
Rest on plush carpets like the ghosts of fifties Chevies,
Dreams for sale on boulevards where forget-me-nots
Are flowing through the hyaline summer air.
I stood with you in Kings Cross on Thursday night
Waiting for a bus we saw the lighthouse on top
Of a triangle of empty shops and seedy bedsits,
Some relic of a nineteenth century's eccentric's dream come true.
But posing now the question 'What to do with a listed building
And the Channel Tunnel coming through?' Its welded slats,
Timber frame and listing broken windows blew our minds-
Like discovering a Tintoretto in a gallery of fakes.
Leeds takes away the steely glare of Sutton
Weighing down on me like breeze-blocks by the ton,
When all I want to do is run away and make a home
In Keighley, catch a bus to Haworth and walk and walk
Till human talk is silenced by the sun.
...
Memories bursting like tears or waves
On some lonely Adriatic shore
Beating again and again
Threshings of green sea foam
Flecked like the marble Leonardo
Chipped for his ‘Moses'.
And my tears came as suddenly
In that dream, criss-crossed
With memory and desire.
Grandad Nicky had worked
Down the pits for a pittance
To bring up his six children
But nothing left over for more
Than a few nuts and an orange
For six Christmas stockings
So hopefully hung, weighted by pennies,
Stretched across the black mantle.
So Lawrence-like and yet not, grandad
A strict Methodist who read only a vast Bible
Hunched in his fireside chair insisting
On chapel three times on Sundays.
Only in retirement did joy and wisdom
Enter him, abandoning chapel he took
To the Friends or Quakers as they called them then
And somehow at seventy the inner light
Consumed him.
Gruff but kind was my impression:
He would take me for walks
Along abandoned railways to the shutdown
Pipeworks where my three uncles
Worked their early manhood through.
It would have delighted Auden and perhaps
That was the bridge between us
Though we were of different generations
And by the time I began to write he had died.
All are gone except some few who may live still
But in their dotage.After my mother's funeral
None wanted contact: I had been judged in my absence
And found wanting.
Durham was not my county,
Hardly my country, memories from childhood
Of Hunwick Village with its single cobbled street
Of squat stone cottages and paved yards
With earth closets and stacks of sawn logs
Perfuming the air with their sap
In a way only French poets could say
And that is why we have no word but clichй
‘Reflect' or ‘make come alive' or other earthbound
Anglicanisms; yet it is there in Valery Larbaud
‘J'ai senti pour la premiere fois toute la douceur de vivre'-
I experienced for the first time all the joy of living.
I quote of their plenitude to mock the absurdity
Of English poets who have no time for Francophiles
Better the ‘O altitudo' of earlier generations â€"
Wallace Stevens' 'French and English
Are one language indivisible.'
That scent of sawdust, the milkcart the pony pulled
Each morning over the cobbles, the earthenware jug
I carried to be filled, ladle by shining ladle,
From the great churns and there were birds singing
In the still blue over the fields beyond the village
But because I was city-bred I could not name them.
I write to please myself: ‘Only other poets read poems'
...
Sorry, I almost forgot, but I don't think
Its worth the effort to become a Carcanet poet
With my mug-shot on art gloss paper
In your catalogue as big as Mont Blanc
Easier to imagine, as Benjamin Peret did,
A wind that would unscrew the mountain
Or stars like apricot tarts strolling
Aimlessly along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
...