Greta Stoddart Poems

There's a field inside my head.
It's dark and flat and a moon

hangs above it in whose silvery
negative light nothing appears to live.

It's very mysterious and simple,
on a different planet

to the one outside my window
that moves and is manifold:

each one of the tens of millions of blades of grass
shivers in its singularity;

one sheep's crusty underwool is home
to a greenbottle settling down to lay
her two hundred and fifty possibilities

while another stares out
of the glazed globe of an eye
not unlike a man who's lost his mind
but found there cause instead
to be vaguely, dully, afraid of everything.

And beneath the sheep
and field and flattened buttercups

miles and miles beneath,
all is shift and shale,
burn and boil:

old underearth
unseeable, unexplorable;

who scrambles through your soft weak rock,
who swims through your molten ocean,
what holds court at the centre
of your solid iron ball the size of the moon?

Once I plumbed down
level by level

into the sea,
into the realm

of the falling-debris,
dead and dying-fish-eating creatures

into the pitch black frigid waters
of blind long-tentacled things;

down among the deepwater canyons I went
and still nowhere near was I

to the outer core
of the earth's interior,
its massive indoors

when I saw hanging there
a sole, or flounder

a self never before seen - never before a self

but one who remained unchanged
in the bright beam of my look
(though something may have gone through it
like the mildest electric shock)

and I rose to the surface
like one who had only that to do

where slowly over the years
all that I held dear came loose

and I took to wandering the fields

that covered the earth
like so many soft individual dressings

and I lay down on one
and looked up at the sky

where I saw a fish hanging
in the black, where I saw a moon.
...

Of course I know he meant nothing to me
alive, why would he, a part-time lifeguard
at the local pool I'd only ever glimpse
slumped in a plastic chair or standing deep
in a cupboard leaning his chin on a mop.
The only thing that passed between us
was a look - almost cold from us both -
when I asked him for armbands, the hard kind.
He handed them to me as if I wasn't there.
The day he died I drove past Skindeep
and saw him outside on the pavement, smoking,
squinting into the late afternoon sun,
his shaved head, his bald stumpy legs.
Yes, I remember thinking, that fits, that crew -
pierced, tattooed, the hair (too much or none), the bikes.
And glancing in the rear view mirror I saw
his smooth head almost golden in the dust.
A few hours later I walked into the pool foyer
and there, to one side - a sheaf of lilies
in a mop-bucket and a small table
where a few sweaty carnations were scattered
around three photos in a plastic sleeve:
one of him looking very small on his bike;
another he must've taken himself, it had that
mild looming look of a fish swimming up
to its own reflection; and one of him
hunched over a naked back, needle in hand,
with such a look of care and concentration
I almost felt his breath on the back of my neck.
People were walking past and buying tickets.
Someone was explaining about off-peak times.
It'd been one of those suddenly hot days
at the end of March and there was something high
and reckless in the air. I'd seen a woman
at the lights with huge long breasts in a low black top
and men with their tongues practically hanging out
and I remember thinking here we go again
and the kids in the back were squabbling and my thighs
sticking together and I wanted only to dive into the pool
though I'd never learnt how and wondered now
was it too late and who would I get to teach me?
The road kept on before us, hot and black.
I thought of how big and soft his face was
as if his features hadn't quite finished forming
though already punched with studs and rings and chains
and his eyes seemed swollen and full of something
like he'd cried a lot as a baby or not enough.
He never looked at us. I remember thinking
how could this man save us? how would he know
if one of us just stopped and slipped down
on to the tiled floor? He'd look out across
our blue bright shrieking square
but never at us. Not in the way he is now
like the dead do from their lonely stations
and I'm looking at him in a way I never did
when we lived in the same time, same town
with its narrow streets and muck and diesel air.
Now, when he appears there on the pavement,
smoking and squinting into the light, I see
evermoving water, a slab pinned and still,
a body submerged, a body pierced.
But then, when the lights changed and I pulled away
(let me say this now and without pride)
I had you drugged and disaffected and I marvelled
with some bitterness how someone like you
could ever be sleek and forgetful and strong
in the clear blue streams, could ever have the grace
or urge - however vague - to save a life.
How was I to know I'd just seen a man
in his last light, taking time out for a smoke,
a final look at old Fowlers' smashed windows,
its drape of red ivy and saggy weeping nests,
an hour or so before he swung a leg
over the new bike, dropped the visor down,
wound his way out in the low evening sun
to the A28, the Little Chef bend, the lorry.
...

The crows were black
coming to and to it
and the dog barking was black
and the trees standing
in a row behind it were black-
trunked black-branched
and a black plastic bag
hung torn inside
the black spaces
and the puddles were black
with mud and ice
and the leaves were black
and the lamb
the crows and the dog
wanted so badly,
the lamb with its
small white splintered
hull of a chest
sticking out so
emptily to the wind
you could almost hear
in the bony tines a tune,
the lamb
was the dead
this early spring
the dead centre of everything
...

Hold them there inside that golden room,
their faces flushed, their bellies full of food
and that girl's, surely - look at her smile - with love,
settling its milky pool in some pelvic nook;

hold that man, hale and loud, laughing
down the cleavage of some woman not his wife
whose small black eyes look out at us as if
we might know to keep the secret of her life.

Hold them there before
the old sorrow creeps in
over the bleared plates and sticky rims,
the ruched, exhausted cloth, before the night

has lost all it promised at dusk when the swans
shone their loneliness out on the black lake.
...

Perhaps you know that story where people
step out of this world and into another
through a particular split in the air;

they feel for it as you would your way across
a stage curtain, plucking at the pleats,
trying for the folded-in opening through which

you shiver and shoulder yourself
without a single acknowledging glance up
to the gods, so keen are you to get back

to where you were before you made your entrance:
those dim familiar wings, you invisible,
bumping into things you half-remember

(blinded as you'd been out there
in the onslaught of lights, yes, blinded
but wholly attended to in your blindness).

Imagine our dying being like that,
a kind of humble, eager, sorrowless return
to a place we'd long, and not till now, known.

No tears then. Just one of us to hold
aside the curtain - here we are, there you go -
before letting it slump majestically back

to that oddly satisfying inch above the boards
in which we glimpse a shadowy shuffling dark.
And when the lights come on and we turn to each other

who's to say they won't already be
in their dressing room, peeling off the layers,
wiping away that face we have loved,

unbecoming themselves to step out
into the pull and stream of the night crowds.
...

among us again
telling us - with that accuracy,
and hilariously - what it was like,
wide-eyed, exhilarated to have been there
and now back here in a room again;
you here in a room again
with us all standing around grinning,
filling to the brim
to have you among us again
raising our glasses
to your unbelievable absence
...

Blow you wild in the wilderness
you all who the ever you are
you once of the world - whirl round
it now - whip more and more
into the blear and blaze
of your ever-ending circle



Blow you spirit-wind you soul-gale
you who so searingly outnumber us
howl and haul in all those turning
now to dust - to this hot wind
this planet's bright belt
of charged streaming dead



Blow you blinding storm
you wind of nothing
to the naked eye - turn up the high
white hum of the invisible
ring made up of all manner
of things lost to us



Blow you gone
you still and never-to-be-born
you dead for a century dead for a day
all you outliving us out there
in the catastrophic air
of this black and never dawn



See how you blow you bone
spark you ash-turned air
into this room where I stand
with these small shaking waves
in this glass of water
I hold in my shaking hand
...

I could no more know
myself than this flame
seated in the air
one quarter of an inch
above its burnt root
- so self-contained a form
you'd think it held in ice -


no more know that flame
than one drop of rain
or a single leaf
let alone this draught
slicing in across the sill
nudging the little
corpse-boat of a fly;


no more know you, fly,
than this cat - the cat
perhaps but what about
the way it holds us
in a gaze so void
of an idea of self
our own can only fail.


Were we to return
that look we might learn
to take something from
nothing, might begin
to steady and see,
figure who we are
in that slit black flame.
...

as a boy draws something silver from a river,
an angler from the sea a bale of weed;
as a woman draws herself from a bath,
as blood is drawn from a vein.
You drew breath as thread is drawn through
the eye of a needle, wet sheets through a mangle,
as steel is drawn through a die to make wire
and oil draws up through wick its flag of fire.
You drew breath as a reservoir draws from a well
of ink and a mouth and a nose and eyes are drawn,
as a sheet is drawn from under the dying
and over the heads of the dead.
You drew breath as the last wheezing pint is drawn,
as money and a bow and the tide are drawn;
as up over her head a woman draws
a dress and down onto her a man.
You drew breath as a cloud draws its pall
across the moon, across the car park
where a sky-blue line draws the way
all the way to Maternity; as all in blue
they drew a semi-circle round the bed,
a line and then a knife across the skin;
as in another room someone drew
a curtain round its runner, a hand across
a pair of finished eyes. You drew breath
as they drew you - besmeared and blue - out
and sublime was your fury at being drawn
into this air, this theatre; you drew breath
for the first time - for a second I held mine.
...

Look at us. It must be Christmas.
Our heads are bowed, the lamp close.
We could be cracking a code
or a body, so intent are we tonight


on Spring whose large foreground
of wild daffodils could take us all winter.
We check the lid from time to time like artists
more absorbed in what they're doing than what's there:


a village coming into itself
all at once, in all weathers;
yielding itself to nothing more
than the hours of its own slow resurrection.


It's not often we come together like this.
Nor do we believe for one minute
in this village or its charmed stoicism.
We attend to it quietly, with quick fingers.
...