Natural History

The sign as an instruction, and not just in a physical sense: go up to the next floor, and you will see the insects: this commonish mayfly, ephemera danica: notice the constant: the vacuum: the airless fly, and danceless.

In the next case: moths, melanised against the city: see how they disappear into the illness and health of a city: the dust of a city stacked in their pigments: dormant cancer.

Think of the museum as a failed hospital where patients are left pinned in death’s-head mask: toys in a macabre toyshop.

Open a row of identical drawers, one by one: a bee-eater, a brown rat, and, coffin-shaped, a barn owl on its back, preparing for dignity, eyes out.

Stoat in summer, stoat in winter: side-by-side: russet and white.

The shrew-box holds little slips of fur and skin aligned parallel, not topping-and-tailing: notice how small they look, and real: realer that when alive, and warm, and wild.

Step out of the lift: remember, for some reason, your grandfather having TB: remember that the last time you came hear you had a cold: spat bloody brownish phlegm into the sink: ask yourself if people can even get TB these days: notice how someone has taken a red marker and drawn a deathly trickle on the off-white fur below the stuffed badger’s angry mouth.

The same person, maybe, who took a tooth from the crocodile: for luck.

Forth

Here’s an idea: let’s listen to the onset of spring
with, perhaps, eyes closed. The sound is of
an internal drip, you think. So, what’s the problem?
There’s a grandfather clock in the hall
that does this sort of thing all the time.
We simply can’t sit still. There is newness in everything,
and blondeness – the hinge of the white cupboard
creaks, you know it’s brass but it will always be the gold
of the best of The Hay Wain. Just can’t sit still. Much less
the flowers, the intricate noses of daffodils
that have no smell like a bad joke. The cape-like
ears of spaniels. The city has drifted out to sea somehow
like Arthur Cravan and has left nothing of itself
except a pair of unused boxing gloves, a box
of bad poetry and a beautiful, trite American wife.

The smell of bus fumes can permeate sleep, sometimes;
the trick is to lie on the pavement. What is more
distinguished than that? The rain, when it comes,
will bring everything you need to your nostrils.
Thanks for being there whilst I have done this.
It is nearly four o’clock, people. People
are like posters of Che Guevara, the way they replicate.

I have caused something to exist – and whilst he is
blindish, or can see only in monochrome,
he has the ideal tools to observe the arrival
of house martins. Yes, sitting motionless is not
a prerequisite of observance. Today, I have pushed
a pram over bubbling stones, but I did not feel
like a stream. The city returns in an MPV
weaving through static sports cars
in a way that reminds us inexplicably of salmon.

It has always been spring. I cannot leave
anything behind and I am going to have to learn.
There are two ways this could go. We could open our eyes.

The Girl in Kolonaki

What is it that makes the girl in Kolonaki such an excellent subject for a short story? Is it perhaps only this: that she is in Kolonaki but not from Kolonaki? That she is in fact not only not from Kolonaki but not from Greece at all? That she is from England, from a small town in England somewhere on the border of Kent and East Sussex and has come to Kolonaki, so she tells herself, not because it offers her any greater chance of making money in her chosen field but because she has a more developed sense of adventure than any of her peers, who all seem to be working in schools in impoverished parts of London or Manchester?

Or is the girl merely an ornament? Is it the mother-of-pearl and orange coloured district of Kolonaki, self-centred, genteel but robust, that is the truly noteworthy protagonist? Does it matter if the girl has no idea that the district of Kolonaki is named after the little column that was erected there before even a single house was built on the area? Is it more important that Kolonaki’s shopping streets are among the best in Europe?

Have you seen the column? What does it remind you of? Would it appear rude if I asked you to lie down on the couch? Does it remind you of a phallus, or is that just me? Were you subconsciously stimulated towards this phallic interpretation by the use of the word ‘erected’ in the previous paragraph? Or is the word ‘column’ enough on its own to do it for you? Doesn’t it strike you as odd that this two-metre rod of stone reminds you of a dick? Isn’t it strange that they call it the ‘little column’? Would you be surprised to learn that the author, at the age of 8, spent most of his free time in efforts to design his own spring-loaded mousetrap, or that all of his designs contained mazes or mirrors, and sometimes miniature traps within traps: guillotines made of razorblades, hidden doors, poison-tipped carpet tacks?

Is it stating the obvious to say that the reason the girl in Kolonaki is in Kolonaki and not Kent or Sussex is because she was running away from something or escaping something or fleeing something? Is it for this reason that she is just glad to be in this warm, blind part of Athens with other English speaking families? That she hasn’t bothered to learn the language, or find out a little bit about the history of her new home? Does she realise, and does it even matter to her, that Kolonaki and its giant stone dick, its sapless six-foot totem, are infinitely more important than her interchangeable new friends?

What is it that the author has in mind when he asks if the girl is really only an ornament? Is it to devalue her? Is it an attempt to devalue her by making her seem less important than an upmarket area of a capital city of a country the author has never been to? Is the attempt to devalue her flawed by the very fact that he has taken the time to write about her, and in doing so admitting her importance to him?

What is she doing in Kolonaki? Is this question a sign of the author’s continuing interest in her? Or his growing interest in Kolonaki? Or is it simply a way to introduce the girl, or the streets and squares of Kolonaki? Does the girl frequent the tavernas and ouzeries? Does she support AEK or Panathinaikos when they come up against English teams in European football? Does she spend her evenings indoors or on a terrace writing letters to her friends in England on paper she bought from one of the posh artisan stationers in Kolonaki, letters that are essentially lies, letters that talk about the sun, the pollution, the pleasantness of the Greek family she works for, but in reality tell the reader nothing about Kolonaki or about Greece? Does she have a wastepaper basket in her room filled with letters not sent, letters screwed up, letters she is embarrassed to read back to herself because of their frankness or their duplicitousness?

Is there an end to this story? Or should that question be, ‘How can the author reconcile himself with the girl in Kolonaki?’ And what is the meaning of the dick-like structure that towers, hard but impotent, over the story? Does it represent the idea of a resolute, single-minded Mediterranean mindset that has been embraced or partially embraced by the girl in Kolonaki, but cannot be embraced by the author, the flaccid English author? Can you answer questions put to you by an English author who spent his childhood poisoning mice? And how would you make him hear the answers? Is it possible for a question to be the truth? What would you say if I showed you a picture of the girl in Kolonaki, a photograph in which she appears to be drunk, with a group of people roughly her age, some English-looking and some Greek-looking, some with football scarves? And if, in that photograph, she has her arms locked around the stone column as if it is a living thing, as if it is a favourite tree or person, would you believe anything you hear?

Visit

I came back armed with a list of films
I wouldn't mind seeing again

The Usual Suspects
On the Waterfront, Casablanca

Because there's no way two people
can sit and write poems together
over popcorn and cans of Ringnes
and in the window of a long weekend

I have sworn allegiance to port cities



Here is a poem called Poem for Beggars:

scatter!

The girl digs heels in at this,
a boat in dry dock

She has had better and can wait



On the waterfront two days later
she catches sight of an act of cannibalism

a herring gull puking in reverse

There it is, she says, there
is your poem, you have what you came for

now go, before you miss your flight

The Invention of Poetry

When the scream dies
there is nothing left:
not the letter x or a windblown tree

only men riding
in the black back seats

and women draped over bonnets
habitually


It can happen, say, at 25
or at 19
but it's not like a typical urban suicide

it can happen out on dusty roads
or wet roads


I came up with a ghastly invention
and saddled it with matter

Watch the poet, don't listen

His feet are moving on the stage
like someone who lurks beside
wet roads

his hands are shaking but that was years ago


I lived in a house with my mother and father
I brought old women back
Holy fucking shit

My mother and father invented poetry
in the 1970s

every single liberal or Neil Young fan
invented poetry in the 1970s


So the women who employ the girls
who serve me with coffee
have all experienced the vital terrifying death

Poetry is a thing that wipes memories
You must wear dark glasses and leather
and learn to drive or open your legs

It is the only way to survive
when the last scream
has uprooted trees and fucked everything

Edvard Munch's Madonna

A few days ago I ordered a cheap print of Edvard Munch's Madonna and today it came in the post. I took some time getting it out of the cardboard tube, relishing the potential creative inspiration it would give me. I thought that my thoughts on seeing the poster would be, like the painting, divine, pure and honest on one hand and modern, willful, strange and passionate on the other. But when I unrolled the Madonna I thought first of Madonna, the singer, and this made me think of the music video of hers which involves a bullfight, and this made me think of Hemingway, writing his balls off about bullfighting, and Hemingway made me thing about the Deux Magots, where he did a great deal of writing, and this in turn made me think about my impending trip to Paris, which I am looking forward to but am also somewhat apprehensive about because it will cost me a lot of money and I haven't got a lot of money - I am essentially poor, certainly too poor to make a habit of buying art prints just so that I can look to them for inspiration.

The Poet Geoffrey Hill and the Poet Jeremy Prynne

In a city - let's say Cambridge; in fact, let's pick somewhere more neutral, Coventry for example - the supporters of the poet J.H. Prynne decided to erect a giant statue of their hero, a statue that would dwarf the city's cathedral, a bronze statue with a high forehead and an unfathomably muscular torso. Of course, when the supporters of the poet Geoffrey Hill heard about this they decided to erect a similar statue, also in Coventry, to match the gigantic statue of the poet J.H. Prynne. The tall statues faced each other over this cowering city that had been destroyed and rebuilt comparatively recently. The opposing factions were proud of their statues, but they were also envious of each other. Of course, arguments broke out, then the odd limp-wristed skirmish, and after a while, without knowing how it had happened, the two groups of poetry-lovers discovered that they were officially at war. Nothing happened for a while, but what could have happened was this: a renowned wise man - the type that still existed in the Midlands at the turn of the century - came to the city and called a meeting between the leaders of the two groups. In his wisdom he told them to give up on their bitterness and envy and learn to like, or at least to appreciate, or at the very least to respect, the poetry of the opposition. Of course, the berserk captains of the factions fell upon him and destroyed him as he attempted to leave the cathedral. Their bloodlust was sated; they forgot their poetry and went back to teaching creative writing classes. But that didn't happen. The war is still going on, though no-one has yet died. On the upturned palm of the poet Geoffrey Hill sits a sniper, his rifle trained through a crack in the poet Geoffrey Hill's fingers onto a spot somewhere on the poet J.H. Prynne's groin, where it is believed there is a secret door, behind which the supporters of the poet J.H. Prynne are said to be hatching a plot, although no-one knows what this plot might be.

Ironing is Equal To or Greater Than Jazz

He is in the living room, writing and listening to a critically acclaimed jazz record from the mid-1960s. She is in the kitchen, ironing and watching a popular primetime hospital drama on her laptop. During the short periods of silence between tracks he can hear the programme through the closed door – they have a cheaply rented flat and the doors are thin, little more than plywood. After a while he becomes aware that she has turned the sound up on the hospital drama – he can hear dialogue through the quiet parts of the compositions. A nurse says, ‘Ready?’ and a man groans. Another nurse is chatted up and then threatened by a doctor, and so on. At one point during a searing trumpet solo he hears a screech of tyres and the sound of glass smashing. He is a little annoyed, as she has told him that the reason she is using the kitchen rather than the living room is to give him some peace and quiet while he works. ‘Peace and quiet’ was the exact phrase she used. He thinks he would be well within his rights to go and ask her politely to turn it down, particularly when over the top of a lengthy, trumpet-led ballad he can hear people being dragged from wreckage, the wheels of stretchers on concrete, screams of jobbing actors. But he doesn’t get up. It’s not really distracting him that much. He has nearly finished the first draft of a short story and doesn’t want to interrupt his flow with the mild altercation that would inevitably follow if he were to speak to her. And, he thinks, if he can hear her TV programme, she can probably hear his jazz, and would therefore be equally entitled to ask him to lower the volume. Besides, he is writing and she is ironing. She is ironing his shirts for work because he can’t make enough money from writing to enable him to quit his crappy job, and he is writing a short story in which she appears as a character. These facts instantly give her the moral high ground. He thinks, what kind of person would do that? What kind of person would ask his girlfriend to turn the sound down so that he can listen to a once ground-breaking but now slightly anachronistic jazz recording whilst she is ironing his clothes and he is using her against her will?

Im Visits the North Pole - excerpts

Im throws open
windows
so that any
sunlight trapped

can escape before the year
turns dark and small

*

Of course Im encounters
death every day.

She removes a glove
to stroke a live

damp nose –
a huge husky perhaps

*

Between sheer walls
a joust
of narwhals

whisk through icing

*

Im lurks below
the treeline.

Everything is fur
and bristle and ire
– cries of owls, irks.

In the starkness of
perpendicularity
Im inspires a religion

of trees
whose spires
seek to bend

whose dead
limbs and needles
are her pyres

*

There is another.
Im salutes a furred
human face
over tundra,
young and
unfolded.
A moon
inside a boat.

He traverses the rink
of tundra. Im

writes her name
in the snow, sees
a bare tree
and two mountains.

Im Visits the South Pole - excerpts

Im listens for the babble
of internal organs, hers –

hearts, hot intestines
and suchlike.

Her bones are the ice
sculptures of Erebus

*

The sun a ring
– tambourine and cornet

the salt snow bakes.
A crust

and a cauldron
cone and rotunda

belly of breath
Im skims off –
fat off milk

*

Im plays at witching
forges molten snow
into a cat-shape

a grotto, grove of folded
paper animals, Im speaks
with her fingers

to annihilate them
unfold

*

A fold is an irrevocably
straight line
where white sheep live,
Im thinks

*

Snow like sand. Im
luxuriating, eyes closed,
loses her toes in it

For Malena Mörling, ‘Standing on the Earth among the Cows’

There is a cow in the field. Madly,
just one, and a docile lady at that.
Underneath she is full and bored.
She feels that there is a breathing
on the other side of the fence.
She stops to drink a can of Coke
before plunging her nose – which
is like cold wax – into the night air.
I eat some grass and spit
like a cowboy of dubious morals
in an otherwise black and white
film. There is no shooting star,
no slight twinge in the spine
of the earth. One of us gets
into the car, but does not drive away.

In Bergen Harbour

stalls fill with
a day’s haul, a range
of little clown mouths
all pointing upwards
to catch salty rain – it helps
me to think about you
and I have to laugh
because your love is great,
European, pan-European,
Germanic or Hanseatic
and the mouths are tiny
and small like a harbour
mouth or a choir.

Two Poems from Norway

Finse #1

From the Bergen-Oslo Train

A wooden hut
is a small thing.
There are stones
bigger. Inside a train
is a warmth made
by the train.

A wooden hut
has none of its own
power. You have
to walk, to collect
and cut and burn
to give it power.

There are no trees,
only the yellowing tongue
of Hardangerjøkulen,
and turf for warmth.


Finse #2

A wooden hut is
a mathematical symbol
meaning something like
equal to or less than
but with added pride,
or an outward display
of class-consciousness.
It is the first of many
such symbols that can be found
on the squared hillside.

Ways to Learn About a New City

Go it alone. Look at the buildings: the last time you were here they were wet and the local stone shone like so many bleached bars of coal tar soap. Lie to the waitress; don’t let her in on it, on the horrific and degrading fact that you are on a day trip from a town less beautiful than hers. Tell her that you live here but work away. Tell her about the your little garden apartment and the story of how you rescued the kitten and how it was attracted to your kitchen when you played Aztec Camera whilst washing up and how it like you doesn’t much care for The Who even though your ex loved them. But only tell her at the right moment, when the occasion arises, shall we say. Do the research. Tell her you are writing a restaurant review for the local paper, the Chronicle or whatever it’s called. Show her your Parker pen. Ask her if she knows if there’s anything going on in town tonight. If you do manage to get her to go out with you, make a point of explaining to her that you can’t get that drunk, you’ve got to finish the review. Make sure you buy her the first drink, but that’s obvious, right. And if you go somewhere not too dark where all her friends are drinking, offer them a drink too. Try not to go somewhere your ex might go. But she wouldn’t, of course, because she lives in another, shabbier town. If it was still dry outside when she finished her shift, and if you’re clever, you would have made sure you walked her through the last of the sun. To the botanical gardens, maybe. You would have pointed out the interesting trees like they were old friends. Maidenhair, corkscrew hazel. You would have said that you once got locked in here, slightly tipsy, and had to spend the night under the spreading arms of some fir. Lie, basically. Get drunk by about ten o’clock so you’ve got an excuse when your review doesn’t appear in the next couple of days. Tell her that the last time you were here it pissed with rain, then realise that you’ve almost given the game away. Make certain that she is aware of the fact that you have been working away for some time, and this is your first night back in the city. Call it ‘the city,’ as if it’s yours. Don’t call it by its name. Know how to cover your back, even when you’ve had three pints of Belgian lager, a bottle of wine and uncounted sambucas. Then, inexplicably, tell her that you’re lying to her, that you are really from Swindon and only got on the train because you were going mental with boredom on your day off. Hopefully by this stage she will take pity and you will wake up next to her blonde student smile and ask how to use the toaster. If not, go back to the botanical gardens, climb over the fence, find a place where tramps have been but not too recently. Or even better, attempt to climb into the low limbs of the maidenhair tree – but don’t make the mistake of thinking of them as tresses – and learn to live in the boughs. You will get to know the city soon enough, I assure you.

And Mirrors

Without the town the silver exterior
would just be a flood plain.
The girl with the hair makes
noises with her face and sees
them back again. This is where
I grew up. A loophole in a hill
a hundred and ninety thousand people
fell through. Under virtue, rising,
the torrid fleeting penance
of sitting down with the express
wish of getting smashed up.
Here we find low ceilings, swifts
roam above like little evils
and at night foxes shuck soft eggs
and dribble unseen up alleys.
Simply it is unlikeable, as if televised,
but you can’t see anything worth hating
in the night, drinking off the knowledge
of waking up to piles and periodontitis.
The whole town fancies itself
as none of its inhabitants are capable
of doing. It is its own looking-glass
and it directs the first sun
onto the nearest patch of grass
or lasers in on a pissed-up stag beetle.
In gardens later sobriety aches.
You know that moment when the latening
sky drains clear of swifts, and then they
all return, screaming and bunched
like cyclists? Well, it has happened
and the cats have gone indoors
and the next-door neighbour I thought
was gay is fingering some blonde
Nationwide girl half his age. Standing
on the garden table allows for a view
of the next town: imagine a multiplication
of images brought about by introducing
two reflective surfaces to each other,
slightly skewed like pissheads about to fuck,
and think of an infinite line
of not quite identical towns, and remember
getting your hair cut as a ten year old
on Radnor Street, Josephine
with the permed mullet positioning herself
behind you, asking if the back’s alright.

Poem about the Previous Poem

At the derelict end of
the day it fell to me
to preserve
something – a serial
number by which
an archivist can
locate an unpadded
drawer containing
scraped bones or
a photograph – b&w
obviously – of someone
who looks like
Louise Brooks
wrestling an incompetent
dance partner. Quickness
is passé now like
the gift of a rose –
instantaneousness is
where it’s at,
and the puking
of poems bulimically.

Lateness

beached
statements and unworn words.
the pleasure in watching
a dancer is in seeing
what is left behind –
what happens in the blur
of limbs in the microunit
of time after movement
has occurred. We once
watched an elm shiver
as starlings left it in the dusk.

Poem in 35.22 Seconds

Unlate and full of coffee as
you arrive on the trembling
apex of the morning your
car bends sinews into
a temperate bay. Shells
and wrack and the pastoral
old flame of postcard
writing on the silt humpbacks
where dune-buggy eyes of
waders mark the sand screed.
Sensible and electric you find
in my hair a sea-washed grain
and remove it with a peck
of fingers. An insect purrs
and jumps inside the car.
You have my mouth and my day.

Poem in Ill-Fitting Clothes

Walking in the vague
direction of a doctor’s
surgery or café in the old
town on a Friday lunchtime
is neither the time or place
to be thinking about
a power line or two
on a Welsh hillside but
there you go that’s what
happens I can never be
unashamedly urban like
Frank O’Hara or someone
because I can never be
unashamed I suppose
which got me thinking
about how the people who write
blurbs for the backs of poetry
books use the word unashamedly
as a synonym of resolutely
resolutely perhaps not in its
Heideggerian sense but even so
outside the hardware shop
an ignored row of brooms
what I haven’t decided
yet is whether or not
to go for a swim or
possibly to get drunk
and lift diligent pints and taste
toasted or even burnt
almonds for days afterwards
without really knowing
where they came from but
as I said still undecided
and the reply hasn’t come yet
that would decide for me
and if I sit in this
café until it does I will hear
this unknown cover
of Femme Fatale for a third time
it’s harder to see things in clouds
when they’re grey when they’re white
it’s easy and what is it with
this trend for sensible
shoes with fluorescent laces
it’s a kind of schizophrenia
suffered by waitresses I think
and I wonder can I
pinpoint the exact time
and place that writing a poem
became antonymous with work maybe
it was when I first started to work.

Rough Copy

The rain is not quite
English in its heat
and poise, and then

a Filipino in a trucker's
hat shouts at a dog
and nothing is
shattered. The image

of a tea clipper being dragged
through streets
in the old quarter

of a proudly landlocked
city, not though as part
of a carnival. Navigating

blimpishly with a wake
of indocile hoydens -
cafe girls without babies,
drab and emu-necked.
The trappings of perfection:

zoos, massive ships
under telephone wires
disguised by bunting.
It has come to the attention

of important men that
particles are mesmerising
the universe with beauty
and coincidence and leaving

by the back door, as we shrink
to fit moulds. When you die,

baby, it's rude
and careless not to take
somebody with you.