David Harsent

Deep reaches of sleep until the unforeseen
moment, like fugue, like petit mal, some kind of sign,

a touch from a joker's finger, to let him know what's right,
what's wrong with the dream-within-a-dream. A sudden, slight

shift in the order of things and all the past undone.
He left what was left of himself in her care that night.


•


They went to the river and dropped their clothes on the bank.
She struck out. He followed in the long, slow vee of her wake.

She could sound and surface, bringing back with her what
other lovers had dumped: hotel bill, gimcrack ring, a four-square shot

from the photo booth. Later, they dipped their bottles and drank.
She looked at him and laughed. "You think you're safe? You're not."

•


In this, her fool is deaf and dumb and twirling a pink parasol. In this
he's doing a chicken dance. He turns away and puckers up for a kiss.

He's their stalker, familiar, spy, his slippy grin is all
lipstick and green teeth. Words to the wise, or coffin-laugh, or catcall.

In this, he watches from cover, maestro of the deadfall.
He goose-steps them out of the tunnel of love and into the house of glass.
...

They weighed the human soul — twenty-one grams — a tremor
on the air becoming trance, becoming nimbus. No. It is a deadweight,
a plummet, drawing down to its harbor beside the heart. It is Breath
and Word, they said. No. It is pig-iron and salt. The dying
feel its slow lift as riddance, a bar of darkness hoisting against the light.



Something shifted under his skin, it puckered, as might a worm
going slither-and-tuck close to the nape of his neck, then up
past the cheekbone and onto the sill of his eye
to gorge on the image trapped there, the last of her, the last
lost thing before the sky grew dark and all the windows closed.



The dead are given permission to walk among us.
They smile dead smiles, they have no need for speech.
The familiar goes for nothing. Each evening
they hold up to our windows their silent, smiling children.



Salt flats of dream of memory of dream ... limitless horizons
and out on the utmost rim (can you see?) a house
white-on-white abstract except for the room-within-a-room
which can't be seen but can be known, white being one thing
in sunlight another under moonlight, not oblivion, not revival,
and the soul's song across that windless landscape, unheard;
by night the heart-stopped silence, by day the rising glare.



Graves under bramble and a wet light through the trees.
A quietness something like stealth or sudden absence; it seemed
to gather and disperse. Rat-run, ground for stray dogs, a place
where lovers come to be swallowed whole by half-light.
You could lie down here on thorn, on stone, and find your match.



Wind-driven salt in the crevice of the rock is how
memory works: image, invention, regret. It maddens
with its ersatz colors, unknowable language, sudden reversals,
shoreline, skyline, cityscape, landscape ... There are those who wake
with the whole thing fixed at the forefront of their minds:
a stage-set, people held in a frozen moment who will break
to action soon, one fearful, one laughing, one clawing at her eyes.



He was wearing a dead man's coat: knee-length, snug,
the lining rich shot silk in midnight blue. "As I thought,"
she said, "a perfect fit. Of course, you look nothing like him,
nor do you have that rangy, loose-limbed stride
or straightness of back." One side-pocket was sewn up,
in the other, a letter. He threw it away as he left.



Music at every turn, music by accident, a voice between
the phrases, between the notes, calling, calling, and this
not song but touchstone, blind bargain, last chance.



Dust-devil, derecho, twister, cyclone, clean sweep,
she is locked-off in this and the place is dark the way
a pebble is dark at its center ... then her prophecy-in-song,
eyes wide open in sleep, his hand across her mouth.



What they did to him was unwatchable; what they did
lay far beyond belief — daytime terrors, waking dreamtime,
the lock-up, breeze-block walls, chain-drag, the Black & Decker
kicking in: winged creatures, they sing as they work.



Dust and shadow, come back to that, come back with a heavy heart.
Is there nothing more: is that what you heard yourself say?
Children in the garden, the headlong rush, the wolf pack
between trees and snowfall under moonlight: the story you told
is the story you were told: snow and a frost-moon, as clear, as pitiless.



He untangled the thing that had snagged in her hair, his hand
through a spectrum, spectral, blurring, a rail of fingers,
to lift the thing in her hair. It would rain that day: cloud low
to the hills, morning as nightfall, her window open to that.



Slow sacrament of cheese and olive oil and bread, the creep
of sundown-sunlight on the wall. "How safe do you feel
at times like this?" Laughing, he bared his teeth. A thing flew in
at the open window, bird or bat. "It's like looking at clear water
through clouded glass." They were far off from anywhere.



A salted seam, just fool's gold, leavings of a dream wherein
you give a true report of who you were, of what you could become.
In rainfall you're invisible, in sunlight the same, that's all
the dream gives up: a sense of place and sudden banishment.
...

Consider the rip for a mouth, the rip in the crotch, the hank of hair,
consider the flair for ill-fortune, the empty stare, the done deal
with sorrow, the rich and rare nest-egg of dreams, the share and share
alike in matters of loss, the payments in kind, the liking for blind
bets, for truth or dare; consider the threadbare get up, the make-up
beyond repair, the tin-tack teeth, consider the dungeon voice
wanting nothing more than bare house-room, and nothing less
than hand-in-glove, a pigeon pair given over to make and mend,
to touch and go, to wear and tear, and all it takes is this: forswear
flint and fire, stay silent, be white on white, live in dead air.
...

Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will. Seabirds roost
on the breakwaters, accustomed, of course, to twilight.
The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spill
and the fire burn all night. Some time later a subtle ghost,
yourself  in memory perhaps, might well set foot
up there amid clinker and smoke, the whole place silent and still
except you bring in the tic of cooling timbers, and then the birds in flight.


•


Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will.
...

Lamech, violent and venal, polygamist and adulterer, braggart and glutton, son of Methushael, descendant of Cain, goes hunting though he is all but blind. A creature covered in a black pelt breaks cover. With the help of his servant, Lamech lines up on it and looses an arrow. The creature is mortally wounded. It is Cain. Lamech is torn by regret, though Cain curses him and his children. Cain then laments his life as an outcast, but allows that it was punishment for killing his brother. Intrigued, Lamech asks Cain why he murdered Abel.
From the Cornish of William Jordan, circa 1611: an adaptation of a passage from Gwreans an Bys or The Creacion of the World.
Because he had a mouth on him like sulphur;
because he gave me no respect;
because I was ever brother and no other;
because he smiled even as he slept
(or so she said): because my heart
carries a weight of hatred that will never
lift nor leave me even when I'm dead.

Although in all the world I stand apart
and live within the shadow of my name,
God's curse on my head and on my head
the curses of my mother and my father,
although I lie here at your feet
speaking through blood and bile, I don't regret it;
each night I dream of even blacker fame,
then bad luck wakes me and I rise to greet it.

Lamech, I'm close enough to smell your sin.
I'll see you in hell where all the unforgiven,
the unforgiving, are sworn to come together
bare-headed under a murderous sun
or naked in never-ending winter weather.
...

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me…
Edward Thomas, ‘Rain'
And here it is, slap on the co-ordinates,
nothing special of course,
a tar-paper roof (is it?) nailed to sloping slats,
a door that goes flush to the floor, and grates
when you draw it back. Weather-worn, half-hidden by gorse
in full fire, it being that time of year; the window
thick with cobwebs, clarty candyfloss;
a smell of rot; things spongy underfoot.

Being here alone is easiest.
There are songbirds in the sedge
(I think it is) and a wind to clout the reeds, a test
of the place, as are these clouds: a long dark flow
pulling fast and heavy off the ridge . . .
Easiest given what we make of quest,
its self-regard, its fearsome lost-and-found, its need to know
the worst and wear its sorrows like a badge.

Do you get what I mean if I speak of light - half-light -
that seems to swarm: a mass
of particles folding and rolling as if you stood too close
to a screen when the image dies? The edge
of night . . . those forms that catch and hold
just at the brink where it's nearly but not quite.

I see, now, by that light. Rain finally coming in, the day
falling short, adrift in shades of grey,
and nowhere to get to from here, or so I guess,
with distances fading fast,
with the road I travelled by a thinning smudge,
with all that lay between us bagged and sold,
with voices in under the door that are nothing more nor less
than voices of those I loved, or said I did,
with nothing at all to mark
fear or fault, nothing to govern loss,
and limitless memory starting up in the dark.
...

No wayward promise, nothing to shake the heart,
nothing to warm to, no trace of harm or hurt,

nothing of jealousy, no risk of bliss,
the wide, white eye; the perfect parting kiss.
...

(Jean Dubuffet: Le Arbres de Fluides; Susan Hiller: After the Freud Museum)
David Harsent
As I entered, she had her pinking shears to the backbone,
having dropped the gizzard into the kitchen bin,
and barely looked over her shoulder to see who it was

when I gave the door a little back-heel
then ferreted round in the fridge for an ice-cold Coors
before slipping up from behind to cop a feel.

Another hot day in September, and that the cause
of her half-baked look, brought on
by lying bare-assed in the garden all afternoon,

a flush coming off her, the veins so close to the skin
I could trace the flow like sap, could tongue-up the ooze
of sweat at the nape of her neck: and this the real

taste of her, like nothing before, like nothing I ever knew.
You have to go hard at it, either side of the spine,
all the time bearing down against the sinew,

then lift the long bone entire and get both hands
into the cut, knuckle to knuckle, and draw
the carcass apart, and press, till you hear the breastbone crack.

Looked at like that it's roadkill, flat on its back,
sprung ribcage, legs akimbo, red side up, and sends
a message (you might guess) about life lived in the raw.

So then it's a matter of taste: herb-butter under the slack
of the breast, perhaps, or a tart marinade,
to flatter and blend, spread thinly and rubbed well in.

She favoured the latter — that and a saltire of thin
skewers driven aslant from thigh to neck,
which might, indeed, have said something about her mood.

That done, she stripped off, gathering the oils and the balm
she'd need for however long the thing would take,
and went back to her place in the sun. It did no harm,

I suppose, to watch from an upstairs window: a hawk's-
eye-view as she lay there timing the turn
(face-up till you tingle, then flip) to brown but not to burn.

The marks of the griddle, the saltire, the subtle flux . . .
We ate it with lima beans and picked the bones,
after which we took to bed a bottle of bright Sancerre

and I held her down as I'd held her down before,
working her hot-spots with a certain caution and care
as she told me not here . . . or here . . . but there . . . and there.

I left her flat on her back — flat out and shedding a glow,
or so I like to think, as I slipped downstairs
and lifted, from a peg-board beside the hob,

her mother's (or grandmother's) longhand note on how
to spatchcock a chicken, or guinea, or quail, or squab,
or sparrow, even, with emphasis on that ‘crack';

and lifted, as well, before I lifted the latch,
myrtle, borage, dill, marjoram, tarragon, sumac,
all named and tagged, in a customized cardboard box
...

after Yannis Ritsos
Not that she was fooled by his disguise:
she'd have known him by his scars for sure,
by the way he cast his eye over the dead
and dying suitors. What was there to say?
Twenty years of waking dreams . . . now here he stood
in the light from the dying fire,
a greybeard dappled with gore. ‘Welcome,' she said,
in a voice she barely knew, he barely recognised.

Her loom cast latticed shadows on the ceiling;
the grave-cloth she'd worked to destroy
hung on the frame like something flayed.
Shapes in the weave darkened to ash
and lifted off, black birds of night
low on the skyline and disappearing fast.
...

(To Jo Shapcott)
Before daybreak and we were in among rocks,
rocks and sandy earth, very dry, carrying bags and sacks

however much each man could lift, or woman or child could lift,
water, of course, and food, whatever we'd grabbed as we left,

clothes and blankets, cups and spoons, kettles and pots.
One or two carried photographs. All the old people wore hats.

We came to a place that seemed right. Someone found sticks.
Two of the men had carried fire on their backs

and kept it alive in the usual way, so at least we could cook
rice and lentils, and boil water for tea, and smoke.

Dawn came fast: a summer sun. We could see the wrecks
out on the plain: hobbled hardware. The children played jacks

with the bits and bobs, the shiny castoffs they'd found out there
while the men sat round in a ring and debated where

next, how fast, whether in darkness, what chance . . .
One should be sent out, was the upshot of that; sent in advance

through the next valley, to see if the map was right, to scout
for streams or falls, perhaps to catch sight

of something familiar or safe, to sniff the wind, to choose
the way. I was the one because young and because of my shoes

which had ankle-thongs and soles from Firestone radial ATX
the better to get me across the limestone stacks.

I walked a while, then turned to take a measure with my thumb
holding it up to mark a mile, when I heard this hum

in the air, low at first but quickly growing shrill
like women in grief. I could see them, one and all,

on the rocky rise where we'd stopped; they were standing up
and looking my way. The odd thing was you could watch it slip

between the valley walls, low and going a rare old clip
and I wondered: how did it know, how did it get the drop

on a group so far out? As if it had lost them at first
but not forgotten. What happened then happened fast:

in the second before I heard the strike
I saw them ignite, all fifty/sixty or so at a stroke,

each caught in place, burning stock-still and upright
single beacons at first, then merging, then lost in their own light.
...