You are my dream
Of the East
You are my life
In the West
Fused in one
You begin my day
And end each day
With a silent smile
When I die I will
Have only my love
To leave you.
You said I had written
No poems for you
And you had written
Only cheques.
I cannot go on loving
The empty air
No matter how many cheques
That air may bear.
I have a headache
And heartache
Remembering another love
Twenty years ago,
Living and loving and leaving
A city for a cottage
On the moors, the
Hyaline air, the silence
And the distant stars.
I am your poet
Officially or unofficially
You may not know it
But I am.
From the hilly north
I came and sang.
I found myself
At least half-a-swan.
Through all my rage
You see a man
Wanting love.
Through all your calm
I see a woman loving.
...
What ghosts haunt
These streets of perpetual night?
Riverbanks fractured with splinters of glass condominiums
For nouveam riche merchant bankers
Black-tied bouncers man clubland glitz casinos
Novotel, Valley Park Motel, the Hilton:
Hot tubs, saunas, swim spas, en suite
Satellite TV, conference rooms, disco dinners.
I knew Len, the tubby taxi man
With his retirement dreams of visiting
The world's great galleries:
‘Titian, Leonardo, Goya,
I've lived all my life in the house I was born in
All my life I've saved for this trip'
The same house he was done to death in
Tortured by three fourteen year olds,
Made headlines for one night, another
Murder to add to Beeston's five this year.
Yorkshire Forward advertises nation-wide
The north's attractions for business expansion
Nothing fits together any more
Addicts in doorways trying to score
The new Porsches and the new poor
Air-conditioned thirty-foot limos, fibre-optic lit,
Uniformed chauffeurs fully trained in close protection
And anti-hijack techniques, simply the best â€"
See for yourself in mirrored ceilings.
See for yourself the screaming youth
Soaring psychotic one Sunday afternoon
Staggering round the new coach station
'I'll beat him to death the day I see him next'
Fifty yards away Millgarth police station's
Fifty foot banner proclaims ‘Let's fight crime together'
I am no poet for this age
I cannot drain nostalgia from my blood
...
Richard Chessick, John Gedo, James Grotstein and Vamik Voltan
What darknesses have you lit up for me
What depths of infinite space plumbed
With your finely honed probes
What days of unending distress lightened
With your wisdom, skills and jouissance?
Conquistadores of the unconscious
For three decades how often have I come to you
And from your teachings gathered the manna
Of meaning eluding me alone in my northern eyrie?
Chance or God's guidance â€" being a poet I chose the latter â€"
Brought me to dip my ankle like an amah's blessing
Into the Holy Ganges of prelude and grosse fuge
Of ego and unconscious, wandering alone
In uncharted waters and faltering
Until I raised my hand and found it grasped
By your firm fingers pulling inexorably shoreward.
Did I know, how could I know, madness
Would descend on my family, first a sad grandfather
Who had wrought destruction on three generations
Including our children's?
I locked with the horns of madness,
Trusted my learning, won from you at whose feet I sat
Alone and in spirit; yet not once did you let me down,
In ward rounds, staying on after the other visitors â€"
How few and lost â€" had gone, chatting to a charge nurse
While together we made our case
To the well meaning but unenlightened psychiatrist,
Chair of the department no less, grumbling good-naturedly
At our fumbling formulations of splitting as a diagnostic aid.
When Cyril's nightmare vision of me in a white coat
Leading a posse of nurses chasing him round his flat
With a flotilla of ambulances on witches' brooms
Bringing his psychotic core to the fore and
The departmental chairman finally signing the form.
Cyril discharged on Largactil survived two years
To die on a dual carriageway ‘high on morphine'
And I learned healing is caring as much as knowing,
The slow hard lesson of a lifetime, the concentration
Of a chess master, the footwork of a dancer,
The patience of a scholar and a saint's humility,
While I have only a poet's quickness, a journalist's
Ability to speed-read and the clumsiness
Of a circus clown.
...
At ten she came to me, three years ago,
There was ‘something between us' even then;
Watching her write like Eliot every day,
Turn prose into haiku in ten minutes flat,
Write a poem in Greek three weeks from learning the alphabet;
Then translate it as ‘Sun on a tomb, gold place, small sacred horse'.
I never got over having her in the room, though
Every day she was impossible in a new way,
Stamping her foot like a naughty Enid Blyton child,
Shouting 'Poets don't do arithmetic!'
Or drawing caricatures of me in her book.
Then there were the ‘moments of vision', her eyes
Dissolving the blank walls and made-up faces,
Genius painfully going through her paces,
The skull she drew, the withered chrysanthemum
And scarlet rose, ‘Descensus averno', like Virgil,
I supposed.
Now three years later, in nylons and tight skirt,
She returns from grammar school to make a chaos of my room;
Plaiting a rose in her hair, I remember the words of her poem -
‘For love is wrong/in word, in deed/But you will be mine'
And now her promise to come the last two days of term,
'But not tell them', the diamond bomb exploding
In her eyes, the key left ‘Accidentally' on my desk
And the faint surprise.
...
Shell-shocked from Korea
A grenade that left him
The platoon's only survivor,
Put him in Stanley Royd
For thirty years.
He tailored there
And out on weekend leaves
He made and mended
Everybody's clothes,
Crying copiously
While he sewed.
When they cleared out
The chronic cases
Uncle Bob came home,
Shopping for Edna,
Doing the garden;
When the lodger left
Without a word, the police
Searched his room,
The garden shed,
Even the chest freezer.
Oesophageal cancer
Is very final.
John, his son, waiting
To take the house,
Departed for a month's fishing
Until it was all over.
As a last rite
They put him in the LGI
But I spoke to the houseman privately,
Pulling together the bits of a life
Wholly given over to others,
Fallen comrades, Edna,
The grandchildren
His pension went on.
The houseman agreed to speak
To the surgeon privately.
Edna went first and
At her funeral John,
In frustrated fury,
Hit him over the head
With an empty fish tank.
When secondaries started
I was not told
And in the hospice
He barely lasted
His first weekend.
...
Just a family get-together in a terrace house in Bradford
High tea with a few stuffy aunts I hadn't seen for years
Their husbands in tow like lost dogs sniffing round for food
But she came all the same, ushered in politely as a friend
Of a friend or somebody's cousin twice removed though
Everybody was a bit put out at first except me so I got
Sat down next to her and started to chat but people would
Keep chipping in, especially the young men, definitely upper-class
Gate-crashers who kept scowling at her and she kept snapping
Back at them and I said, 'There seems to be a problem to do
With suppressed anger, I feel' and even my own son, somewhat
Unrelaxed but a genuine Old Etonian nonetheless, looked a bit
Embarrassed at the kerfuffle, but he kept standing by me wearing
His tails and perhaps it was this that finally sent the young
Men on their way and I managed to get her out for a breath
Of fresh air in the street and eventually we found our way to
Peel Park. Nobody seemed to notice who she was or perhaps they
Were too polite to say or they thought she was another Diana
Lookalike anyway we had some peace at last and forgetting
Protocol I put my arm round her and said, 'You're just ordinary.
Like everyone, even the Emperor of China, that's the secret of life.
If there is one' and she started to cry softly and still nobody
Noticed and then the people and the park and even Bradford itself
Melted away in her tears.
...
I stood there in front of forty-five faces
The first day of term, not especially fancying
'Exercises in Mechanical Arithmetic' and so instead
I read a poem from Kirkup in Japan, about Nijinsky,
Hand-written on a fan of rice-paper.
Thirty years later, taking a Sri Lankan girl
In search of her first job around London schools,
A Head-of-English announced 'You wouldn't get away
With that now!' as though I had committed
A crime-against-society.
I remember sending the boys out to change for P.T.
While the girls changed in front of me,
Was it some kind of incipient voyeurism?
And Sheila, my genius-child-poet, about whom
Redgrove said, 'Of course you are in love!'
Or was it the poetry, some kind of anarchy,
'He's quite mad about it and teaches nothing else',
The barely literate student teacher said.
Wittgenstein alternated between junior school teaching
And philosophy
Leavis ranted but read poetry inspirationally;
Twenty years later a stranger on a bus tapped my shoulder,
'What you taught me at nine got me two O'Levels,
That was all I ever got.'
...
For Barbara
I step off the pavement
like a precipice
Engage the darting sunshafts
in a duel
In the wall's shadow I web
my prints to pattern
The moist stone virgins.
The lawns are white-coated
their throats red
With berries and bird-song;
in petrified gardens
Hyacinth tongues lip the wall.
Leaf mould muffles my heel-taps
the enormous trees totter
In the hyaline air; I hear the
Sunday strollers in their
Mist-making walks, pressing through them
like some voiceless ghost.
...
I struggled through streets of
Bricked-up, boarded-up houses,
Mostly burned-out, keeping
To the middle of the road,
Watching the abandoned gardens
With here and there a house
Still lived in, curtained
Against the daylight and distantly
I saw the iron railings of the school
I'd taught in thirty years before.
The same brick buildings, hop scotch
Squares and rounders posts
And the sign, ‘Welcome to Wyther Park
Primary School'. The wooden prefabs
Where I taught poetry nine till four
Replaced by newer prefabs of I don't
Know what, hidden in trees with
Thirty years more growth, one playground
Grassed over, with benches and tables
Like a pub garden, yet there was the same
Innocence still, my inner sense declared.
I sat on a stone seat by the bridge
Over the canal, watching the pylons
Stretching away to Kirkstall Forge,
By the steps to the railway where
Once the station stood that took us
Every year to Flamborough Head.
...
The grain of the exposed boards
Speaks through the wall of the years
We are back in our cottage
On the wind-swathed hills
Watching late winter dawns
Gather like kindled flame.
We are back with those winter dusks, -
The hyaline air hung in darkness
And a vale of stars, waking in blankets
Laid on bare boards, making a fire
From our dreams.
We are walking through mist
On snow-skirled roads, taking turns
On a swing in a deserted park,
Hearing the rhythmic clank
Of dripping links.
Again I see your smile
I have missed the long years since
Touching your fingertips
Before our exhausted sleep.
...