WN Herbert Poems

‘…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.
...

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.
...