WN Herbert

‘…the axes were against each other and while three cubits were left to cut? ... the voice of a man ...
called to his counterpart, (for) there was ZADA in the rock…'
(Siloam Inscription)

‘Why should the kings of Assyria come, and find much water?'
(2 Chronicles 32: 4)
Tunnelling is the simplest labyrinth
where we create direction blow by blow.
Two work-gangs hollowed loudness, chipped below
the city, hoped, between the outer spring
and inner pool, to meet - their labouring
could thus prolong a siege. Each couldn't know,
except by sweat-plugged ear, the other's clinks,
less clear than kings' grand plans, those nearing notes -
twin tocks to their swung ticks - which had to mean
a door could be unlocked: an exit from the dream
of rock into each other's eyes. Along the seams,
that song of stone linked Hezekiah's teams,
and judged them by the tunnel's kinks and torts.
Thanks to that zada - resonance - within
the rock, a blinded serpent route was cut,
which linked Siloam's thirst to Gihon's drink.
Sennacherib and his pack failed to outlive
the angel, plague or some domestic plot -
which leaves us with two gangs who in the gut
of darkness listened to each other's picks.
...

I left my bunnet on a train
Glenmorangie upon the plane,
I dropped my notebook down a drain;
I failed to try or to explain,
I lost my gang but kept your chain -
say, shall these summers come again,
Omnesia?
You'd like to think it's God that sees ya
(while He's painting the parrots of Polynesia)
give your wife that fragrant freesia
and not the eye of Blind Omnesia.

I scrabbled here and scribbled there -
a sphere of peers declined to care;
I roomed with hibernating bears
and roamed where cartoon beagles dare:
protect me by not being there,
Our Lady of Congealed Despair,
Omnesia!
You'd like the universe to please ya,
your admin duties to be easier,
instead you grip the pole that's greasier -
the shinbone of unskinned Omnesia.

I wibbled there and wobbled here,
forgot the thousandth name of beer;
I filled my head with clashing gears
and tried to live in other years;
I passed on fame, selected fear,
watered your name with ‘Poor Bill' tears,
Omnesia...
So you lack ambition and pelf don't tease ya?
still, me-memed mugwump prats police ya,
and Brit-farce forces queue to seize ya
for the purloined pearls of Aunt Omnesia.

I'd like to think the Muse remembers -
not that teaching starts in late September -
but the first of fire's dying embers,
that glow on Cleopatra's members;
my further lovers' choric timbres…
Did I fiddle with their numbers,
Omnesia?
You hope it isn't Fate who knees ya,
the Ship of Fools which makes you queasier,
or Mister Scythey come to ease ya
into the arms of Dame Omnesia.
...

How to re-enter the nineteenth century
with its better class of axe murderer,
its limitless supply of tubercular
courtesans, its autonomous moustaches:
pass through the cervix of a too-hot towel
folded and pressed to your flushing face,
the apparatus of the chair cranked back
like a car-seat in a suicidal layby.
Small panics soften as the lathering brush
approaches with its cool aquatic kiss,
a giant otter on the Tyne's soft bank.
You find there is still more to be relaxed,
vertebra by intercostal cog, your shoes
loll outwards as the blade - an eyebrow of steel,
the moon's regard - begins, as wielded by
this nun-battered Dublin Geordie lass who lifts
your jowls gently in the snow-lit morning
and strums upon the fretboard of your throat.
For this is where all opera takes root,
the pulse of your nostalgia for unlived-in
eras, that sin of breathing elsewhere than
this greedy moment's need to blame, verismo
is only conjured by proximity
to blood. All chatter falls like an old key falls
and cuts the slush, the orchestra of combs
and scissors seems to pause, to concentrate
on this small nearby risping shifting note
as though to cracklings in an infant's lung.
She is the diva of scrape, the spinta of slice,
her tessitura runs from jugular
to nostril till she smacks you back
into the day you'll haunt with alcohol
and soap, anachronistic neck,
shaven and shriven and white as a baton.
...

In dusk, from in among the walnut tree
and its bearing down upon the damaskina,
although we never see the bat unwrap
like a sticky sweet from the paper

of suddenly frictionless voiceless wings,
it begins to bi-, to trilocate, to be
anywhere at once in air's old film, wavering
with half-seen insects - it's in the field,

the garden, even underneath the canopy
of vineleaves that, by day, shades the little patio.
We watch the sky a dropping sun's turned gray
after an hour of lemon, mango, watermelon -

though this still lets some light be gleaned
through a wing like a sallow, puffed-out cheek,
a torch shone through a bloodless hand,
but gone in the second you understand

as though showing how exactly we must leave
each day - and do - a gathering of senses, sights
too small or intricate to count as insight,
too brief to form what we'd call belief.

The bat, that master of departures, is lost
to night, forgetting as it misses each leaf
and every branch: a figure of omnesia,
the way the world desires to be the past.
...

(for Harvey Holton)
Pair Harvey's deid that draftit Finn,
he's crossin owre thon drumlie linn
whaur naethin nesh can noo begin
as green as grief
oor ranks are growein unca thin
wi nae relief.

Thi hoonds that hunt, thi spear that slees,
thi stag that rears his heid then flees,
thi harp that sings o scenes lyk these,
are been and gane:
noo he's been cairried on thi breeze
they're scarts on stane.

Fae Corbie Hill across thi Tay
lyk wagtails wurds are blaan away
intil the Seedlies whaur there's nae
lug they could catch;
ayont, Schiehallion's blankest page
whaur nane will hatch.
...

The second day my hand still trembled from
the sickle. We see it now as attribute,
those ageing symbols' symbol, death and work,
and like to overlook the thing itself,
bulb-handled in warm wood, the cursive blade
a darkened, runnelled metal, cheaply made
and left inside the old tin bath with saws,
fence staples, in the dust-black, padlocked shed
among the furniture and frames thrown out
of the old peoples' version of a house,
the cobwebbed halter for their long-dead mule.
We want to make it moon and question mark,
cedilla of skeletal script, a lip,
but it is quite at ease with all this mess,
the afterlife of things and half-life of
their meanings: it's accustomed to the edge
between the real and the irrelevant.
A little oil would help it sing out as
it's lifted from its bed; serrations, rust,
acknowledge its return to use, to light.
And all I did was cut the long dry grass
behind the outhouse where the washing line
plays out its yellow plastic smile. I took
their three foot nodding lengths in hand,
half baby fishing rods and half the shades
of ostrich feathers, and I hacked them once
or twice, and cut their shins and thistles' throats
until our towels could hang in peace.
And all the time the sickle silently
displayed its neatness, crooking in the strays
and never needing more than three light chops
at any head, and though I cut away
from my leg every time it whispered past
‘flesh of my edge, bone of my blade,' and cut
until it was too easy to cut close,
and then I paused, and put the thing away.
...

Ghaist o a gaw that few hae seen
paintit on fog lyk a fugue o thi scheme
Noah supposit thi Lord tae mean
when aa were drooned,
ither hauf o yin o His een
thon runic roond.

Rope o smoke lyk a loop on a cable,
Grisaille Cain tae thi rainbow's Abel,
ultra-blank tae infra-sable,
auld noose o tow;
Yin that's strang whaur Yang is faible:
faur are ye now?
...

Thi mune is risin rantie reid
abune thi auld sea waa
as tho it werr thi neb o a seal
come at some lassie's caa -
come steam-an-snowkin fae thi deeps
at some pair lassie's caa.

Uts screed o licht flochts on thi firth:
turn heelstergowdie tae
see whit thi lift prents wi a skiff -
whit huz thi mune tae say?
But nicht's aa ink, sae aa it's dicht
is waly walaway.
...

Is frankly disappointed by the gnomes
or apostles as he hears they style themselves
these days of receding gums and shorelines
in their soft-boiled rewrites of his very grain.

He mooches, half-working in the shade,
keeps taking the finished board, the flawed saw
outside, to check them in the light
that turns everything to a species of limestone.

What's it going to take to persuade these people
that some things are meant to be a parable?
Must he drown upon a watery stroll,
rot upon a self-made cross?

He personally visited them all
after that last glorious rumour,
took Thomas to confirm there were no wounds
till he was blue in the ribs with proof.

And still they've spun it their several ways,
all the Jonah-come-latelies on a mission
to convert the light into a few believers
in that which they can only be and not believe.

Nothing spreads like the semblance of a truth.
Presumably Caesar would shut their mouths -
not that any fist puts out that Pentecostal glister
you get from never listening.

A lot of the old zeal has gone out of him these days,
like muscle tone or the falling water table.
He cycles a lot, just round the village,
just to keep in shape, really.

Says less and less, even to Adam
his deliberately illiterate son of a man.
...

Eh amna here tae tak yir caa:
Eh'm mebbe aff at thi fitbaa,
Eh mebbe amna here at aa

but jist a figment o yir filo
conjerrt up wance oan a while-o.
Therr's mebbe tatties oan thi bile-o;

Eh'm mebbe haein a wee bit greet
owre an ingin or ma sweet-
hert: or Eh'm bleedan i thi street

wi ma heid kickd in fur bein sae deep.
Eh'm mebbe here but fast asleep:
sae laive a message at thi bleep.
...

3

The third film was in Beijing when Antony and I decided to hit the hutongs one last time on the morning of our departure for the airport. We were staying in a swish low-built hotel, itself a hutong on a grand scale with rooms around two squares: the first a space where taxis could pull in, but the other a miniature garden complete with opium-boothed bar and a little massage hut where I'd been dressed in pyjamas, methodically pummelled, and given medicinal tea to drink. (At lunch the day before a waiter had wielded a kettle with a spout an ell in length, always getting the tea in our tiny cups from a distance of several yards.) We turned left and left again into lanes full of bicycle repair shops, usually advertised by a single stirrup pump, and what seemed like spontaneous markets formed on wiggles in the road by two or three minivans and their sparse, fresh contents. Tight corridors between grey concrete houses were hung with washing, walls repaired with plastic, doors decorated with posters. We passed men in singlets, a boy who sat on a door-step covering his eyes, mothers slopping out buckets. We crossed a sudden busy road, a man whose T-shirt said 'Hello Boby/yesterday you are...' - and some third line we forgot immediately on plunging back into the grey labyrinth, then emerged into what seemed to be a play park by a lake.



The green area of swings, climbing-frames, and standing-stones decorated with incised characters, gave way to a walk around the lake taking in trendy new bars, boating areas (little gunboats in green with red stars on them were pedalled past), a peculiar crannog of miniature houses apparently built for ducks, and another play-park where small children were pushed back and forth in swings moulded into the forms of giant goldfish. But where we first happened upon the park there was a man sleeping on the grass on a spread-out newspaper; children watching (very disparately-sized) dogs copulate; and a gathering of men gambling in tight little units around cards and mah jong sets. And in the play area, using the bars to stretch themselves, were some trim older people, perhaps in their sixties.



As we leaned on the railings by the water, we saw one of them set up a tape recorder on a picnic table, and the group resolved itself into couples, a few of them woman and woman as the old unselfconsciously, silently do, in the absence of sufficient surviving males. A switch was flipped and everyone began to dance. It was a sedate, swing-based form of music, vaguely pop, vaguely oriental, and so was their dancing, full of elegant little twirls. It wasn't clear from their expressions whether they were learning or rehearsing. The music would get switched off abruptly, and, while a debate went on as to what to play next, and the tape was jammed on fast-forward or rewound in search of the start of something, the dancers would languidly practise some more, discussing and repeating their steps before embarking on another jazzy waltz about the play park. And this is what I recorded, not the moments before or after, in which we went for a bottle of cold beer on the decking of the boat club, or jumped in a rickshaw in order to dash to the hotel, catch the taxi to the airport, then lose my phone with all these films on it - none of that peace or panic - just the short whirling slow distracted moment of their dance.
...

Things are tired.
Things like to lie down.
Things are happiest when,
for no reason, they collapse.

That French plastic bottle, still half-full,
that soft-back book, just leaning on
another book, drowsily:
soon they will want to go outside,

soon you will find them in the grass
with the empty bleaching cans and that part
of an estate agent's sign
that's covered in a fine grime like mascara.

That plastic bag you've folded up
feels constrained by you and wants
to hang from bushes, looking like
a spirit, sprawled and thumbing a lift.

Things are bums, tramps, transitories:
they prefer it when it's raining.
Lightbulbs like to lie in that same
long, uncut, casual grass

and watch the funnel effect: the way
on looking up the rain all seems
to bend towards you,
the way the rain seems to like you.

Things which do not decay
like it best in shrubbery, they like
to be partly buried.
They like the coolness of the grass.

Most of all, they like it
when it rains.
...

Ariadne sleeping in the stomach of the strand
curled in her turtleshell of purple silk
surrounded by declivities, the left hollows
of youths and maidens, the close dip that was
her lord, the sandstuck embers that perfumed
the dark she's dreaming in, that sticky net,
curled like a coracle on
the shipabandoned bay.
Something like a beak
is wakening in her upper jaw, the skin grins back,
something like a hairy branch is stabbing from
her ribs, her belly bloats and blotches like
a drowned dog, a starving child;
tarred and caulked, blackening her dreamy flesh
rolls little, crackling legs and spitting hairs
quivering, airpained; her lids balloon
as eyes split into eyes split into eyes.
The vine
of metamorphosis has taken her,
the divine tree grows in her and out of her
as Dionysus smiles and wipes his chin, stirring
the silk with a tipsy foot, leaving her
to wake to her desertion
to the reflective lap of waters.
...

There is no passport to this country,
it exists as a quality of the language.

It has no landscape you can visit;
when I try to listen to its vistas

I don't think of that round tower, though
only two exist in Scotland though

both are near me. There are figures on
an aunt's old clock, cottars; Scots

as marketed to Scots in the last century:
these are too late. I seek something

between troughs, a green word dancing
like weed in a wave's translucence,

a pane not smashed for an instance
through which the Dingle Dell of Brechin

sinks into the park like a giant's grave
from which his bones have long since

walked on air. Into this hole in
the gums of the language I see a name

roll like a corpse into the plague pits:
Bella. Its is both my grandmothers'.

Beauty, resilient as girstle, reveals
itself: I see all of Scotland

rolling down and up on death's yoyo.
There is no passport to this country.
...

On hearing of the new Scots Spellchecker programme, ‘Canny Scot'

Cannae spell, winnae spell - lay it oan thi line:
when it come tae orthaegraphic skills this laddie disnae shine.
Eh cannae spell ‘MaGonnagal', Eh cannae spell ‘Renaissence' -
hoo Eh feel aboot this flaw is becummin raw complaysance.
If Eh cannae spell in English dae Eh huvtae spell in Scots?
Is meh joattur filled wi crosses when thi proablem is wir nots?
Wir not a singul naishun and therr's not a singul tongue:
we talk wan wey gin wir aalder and anither if wir young;
we talk diffrent in thi Borders than we dae up in thi Broch;
wir meenisters talk funny when they skate oan frozen lochs.
Huv ye seen hoo Lech Walensa's Roabin Wulliums wi a tash?
Huv ye noticed hoo Pat Lally's kinna nippy wi thi cash?
Well yi widnae if yir sittan wi yir heid stuck til a screen
trehin tae spell oot whit ye think insteid o seyin whit ye mean.
...

Leeze me on rhyme! It's aye a treasure,
My chief, amaist my only pleasure...
from 'Second Epistle to Davie'

While London's steekit beh thi snaw
and ilka sleekit chitterin jaw
is ettlin tae describe
hoo drifts ur white, and ice is cauld,
and feel thi lave maun be enthralled -
Eh've Bowmore tae imbibe.
And as the nicht - mair dreh nor me -
draas in, Eh think Eh'll scrieve
a wee epistle tae, let's see,
thi deid and Doctor Grieve -
auld hermits, wee MacDiarmids,
thi ghaist o guid Lapraik:
here's a ravie fur young Davie,
an a rant fur Rabbie's sake.

Fur the tartan telephone is playin
‘For Auld Lang Syne'; some cloud's displayin -
well, it's no quite the Batsign - weans
wull hae nae clue,
but aa thir dominies are prayin
tae Burns's Ploo.

Some anniversary or ither
huz gote thi lot tae plot thigither
and ask frae whaur - Stranraer? - or whither
remeid sall come:
they've caaed aa gowks fur blinks o blether
baith deep and dumb.

In stately manses Haggismen
puhl sheeps' wames owre thir heids and then
descend beh greenie poles tae dens
whaur desks await;
they raise thir stumpy Haggispens
and smear on slates.

While maskless weemen keep ut edgy
an gee wir man a retro-wedgie -
remind us hoo his views got sketchy
on burds and… beasts;
demand thir haggises be veggie
and, glorious, feast.

And aa the waant-tae-bes are Robins
mair willin tae wark hard than Dobbin
and fuhl o antifreeze fae bobbin
fur bacon rinds -
thir beaks, aa chipped, let slip thi sobbin
of achin minds.

Thi anely time that Scots gets read
is when thi year lukes nearly dead -
it seems tae need extremes;
when winterin leaves are lipped wi frost
and wolf-pack winds pursue the lost
and ink, in deep freeze, dreams.
When Naichur jinks yir toon's defence
and bursts yir comfort's net
wi snaw fitbaas, then tae thi tense
come wurds thi waurm furget:
deep-layerin, like swearin,
we dig oot attitudes;
wi stanzas come answers
tae city pseuds and prudes.

Whit Burns wiz sayin tae Lapraik
wiz whit we are's eneuch tae make
a puckle lines that salve life's paiks:
we need nae ticks
nor teachers' nods, nor critics' shakes -
we're no that thick.

Ut's no that anely crambo goes
that jingles oot, jejunely, woes:
Burns claims he disnae ken whit's prose,
whit's poetry,
but see hoo crafty his rhyme flows,
and braid as Tay.

Whit Burns bethankit Davie fur
wiz freenship in thi dargin dirr:
when, pure ramfeezlet, thochts gae whirr,
tae knock back gills
by ithers' ingles, bields fae smirr,
can stave aff ills.

But here Eh sit wi midnicht's nip,
or leh doon whaur thi verses slip,
or rise tae brose and habbies' grip
aa oan ma tod,
neglectin meh professorship,
in the nemm o Gode!

Fur twenty fehv years - mair - Eh've trehd
tae scrieve in Scots and it's nae leh
Eh'm nae young billy - why deny
Eh've ootlived Burns?
Fae Davie tae Lapraik we fleh
wi nae returns.

Ootlived, but no ootwritten yet,
nae superbard, nor Guardian pet
nor whit maist fowk wad read;
tho fit fur (no sae) prehvut letters
wi a dictionair sae crossword-setters
micht love me when Eh'm deid.
But whit Burns foond inben oor speak's
a glede fur aa McSlackers:
gin Doric's heat is kin tae Greek
Eh'll scrieve ‘To a Moussaka.'
And thi ithers? Jist brithers
and sisters eftir aa:
still-hopefu peers and hoped-fur feres -
Eh think thi ink micht thaw…
...

Atween November's end and noo
there's really nithin else tae do
but climb inside a brindlet coo
and dream o Spring,
fur Winter's decked hur breist and broo
wi icy bling.

It feels like, oan St Andrae's nicht,
thi sun went oot and gote sae ticht
he endit up in a braw fire fecht
wi some wee comet -
noo he's layin low wi his punched-oot licht
aa rimmed wi vomit.

We too hae strachilt lik The Bruce
and hacked up turkey, duck and goose;
and let aa resolution loose
oan Hogmanay,
but waddle noo frae wark tae hoose
lyk dogs they spayed.

Each year fails tae begin thi same:
fae dregs o Daft Deys debt comes hame
and we gaither in depression's wame
aa duty-crossed -
but Burns's birthday is a flame
set tae Defrost.

Ye dinna need tae be Confucius
tae ken, if Dullness wad confuse us,
ye caa ‘Respite! Let's aa get stocious -
And dinna nag us.
Grant us that globe of spice, thi luscious
Delight caaed "haggis"!'

That truffle o the North must be
dug frae the depths o January,
but cannae pass oor lips, nor we
cross Limbo's border -
unless that passport, Poetry,
be quite in order.

Sae thi daurkest deys o thi haill damn year
can dawn in yawns baith dreich an drear -
sae thi Taxman's axe is at wir ear
fur his Returns?
We Scots sall neither dreid nor fear
but read wir Burns.
...