Someone Comes Between

Your little review of John Ashbery
that didn't appear in the Tuesday
paper. Wasn't a secret code meant only
for me: No poet has a longer finger
or more extensive menagerie than

I googled you and him together
jealous as a twin and a lover
but pooling your minds proved
luckily difficult the flex of his dream
and the female curve of your rationale
remained unhelixed. What's chipped
away at by hard rains of words is not us:
you are a solenoid that must be kept dry
he is an eighty-something yank

his carpal grasp on the keys
to a ruined castle that I handed over

A Letter Came

A letter came. On the envelope were the words MR P. A. GUDGEON and an address. Mr P. A. Gudgeon recognised the address as his own, or that of his house. The envelope was white; the address was on a white label stuck onto the white envelope. The stamp was blue, and had a picture of an ageless woman - the head of state of the country where Mr Gudgeon lived - in profile. He opened the letter with an unwieldy decorative paper-knife with the dead silver head of a duck as its handle. The beak left a semi-circular imprint in his thumb which disappeared as, looking through a magnifying glass framed in soapstone, he read the letter.

CORK, said the tame rook on the windowsill. COOORRRRK. Mr Gudgeon threw it an old cork from a bottle of damson wine and the bird caught it in its bill, spearing it and gargling with laughter, tossing it from side to side and flapping inanely.

Mr Gudgeon replied to the letter using a pencil that he sharpened after every word with a penknife that he sharpened after every word on a stone that he cleaned after every paragraph.

When he had finished the letter Mr Gudgeon put it in a yellowish envelope and went to feed the pigs. A year ago there had been four pigs. One pair had had piglets, bringing the total up to eleven. Now there were four again, but a different four.

When he went to post the letter darkness was beginning to crawl over the low hills and reach around the bubonic groins of beech trees thrust into the air. Mr Gudgeon did not care much for the stiff milky darkness of a country night, but neither was he afraid of it. He knew exactly the distance between his door and the post box. It was three miles and three furlongs straight across the fields. Going along the lane added an extra furlong and a half. Mr Gudgeon left his coat behind. He knew more about the weather than I do.

The walk to the letter triggered the following memory (in fact many things triggered the following memory because it was a memory that was different from all the other memories): The last time he went into town had been it nineteen eighty-six. His brother had taken him to a public house in the old part of town where men and women talked about things that made his face turn white. All the drinkers seemed to be dressed in black leather. When they moved their arms he thought of cockroaches moving across a dirty kitchen floor: his floor. After a few nervous port and lemons he decided to catch the late train rather than stay the night in his brother's house. The sky reflected the metallic brightness of the world. He walked through the world. It whispered and breathed around him though it seemed to be made of foil. He walked through the world of residential buildings, grew tired and leant on a wall in front of a three-storey house. Over the expanse of front garden he could see clearly into the living room of the house. Women with the faces of foxes and men like giant bats were seated around a table, with mouths extended in terrible grins. A man with a heavily greased moustache, his arms the tendrils of a predatory plant, poured black milk into a pyramid structure made of cuboid whisky tumblers. The liquid flowed down in a dark mountain waterfall; the pyramid glowed like a pointed obsidian tooth. The people in the room were looking at Mr Gudgeon. One of the women pulled down the straps of her black evening dress. Her nipples were black as wet flint against her nakedness. Mr Gudgeon vomited. Purple droplets cascaded off a privet hedge. He ran to where he thought the train station was; paving slabs heaved up in front of him like a sea. There was a firmament of windows, bright with fragile life. Nowhere was there a stand of beech trees holding the earth's crust together with rachitic roots.

He posted the letter. A papery sound, or a sound like the inhalation of a single breath, escaped from the mouth of the pillar-box. He touched the red sides. He placed and ear against the red bulge at the top. It felt a little like the cold, tight skin of a piglet. He listened with his ear, with the skin of his ear, with the skin and vegetable flesh of his body, and he heard a pulse like the pulse of a pig, a human: the pulse of communication, of shared existence. The skin was cold. Blood flowed somewhere. He lifted his head up and blood flowed everywhere. As he walked back along the lane he heard no pulse, except the plastic beat of his shoes on the grey crust of the human world.

Old, Imperfect Sonnet - The Way We Live Now (2004)

We have a dog called Como. Sometimes
the hot water works and the bathroom steams
in the mornings; often not. There is always
hair in the plughole. The space between
front door and front gate is covered
by a brownness of used-to-be leaves
frozen into a range of toe-stubbing
little mountains. One of us will retrieve
the old ground in the spring, probably.

Como sleeps between us on the coldest
nights. The way we are is dangerously
safe, like heavy drinking or incest.
Everey night before bed one of us calls
the dog. If he doesn't come we fuck. Day falls.

Life's Too Short To Save The Fucking Panda Bear

A lump forms in her throat when she reads the leaflet. It's not so much the picture - sad though it is - of the giant helpless creature with its paws in its lap. It's the text. Badly written and melodramatic, rife with the kind of hyperbole you usually associate with salespeople, it nonetheless speaks to her on a visceral level. She nearly cries. She must still be half-drunk from last night.

It might have been the postman that had woken her, or the blade of light that had moved from her fiances face to hers where she had failed to draw the curtains tight in her night-drunkenness. Anyway she had woken earlier than normal, warm and light-headed.

The panda leaflet is her only post. It came in an envelope with her name on it and a free pen inside to make her feel guilty, although the first thing she feels on reading about the plight of the panda bear is not really guilt. At least she doesn't think so. It's more like a tinge of preliminary sadness. Then almost straight away she wonders how the hippies got her address to send her this stuff. She is always very careful about giving her address to people.

But back to the sadness. It isn't anything to do with the individual giant panda, the fluffed-up asexual clown looking out hangover-eyed from the piece of paper in front of her. And it's not the kind of sadness you feel when your pet dog gets stomach cancer and has to be put to sleep. It's more of a personal kind of despondency, one that you can only feel in the early morning after you've been drinking and making plans that you are unlikely ever to fulfil, when your head is clear and you are fully awake and have just eased the dry horror of your mouth with half a pint of really cold grapefruit juice.

This is when she nearly cries.

She nearly cries because she never gives money to tramps and has never been to a Scottish island, because she kills moths and doesn't care when the cat Erwin brings in partially dismembered frogs that dance circles in their own cold blood, because she is nearly thirty. And because she lives with a man who wears shit-coloured suits and works for English Heritage putting things in boxes, and who still brings her flowers and talked her out of becoming a pesco-vegetarian.

She doesn't cry.

She turns on her laptop and Googles 'conservation volunteering', gets a string of websites showing persuasive photographs: a proud Eritrean farmer with immaculate teeth, the tragi-comic lump of a giant tortoise. It seems you have to pay for the privilege of saving the planet these days, but even so she registers her email address with one of the sites before her headache materialises out of nowhere.

The tine of sunlight in the bedroom has not moved: it bisects her pillow. She draws the curtain and gets back into bed without waking her fiance, who is called Steve and who will only cheat on her once before he dies in car accident at the age of forty-one. A brown suit hangs on the back of the door. She sets her alarm so she can iron his shirt.

After the Party/Cibus Interruptus

It was some time after the anorexic girl's birthday party but still a little while before the general election that I went up to the hills to walk. In FACT it was probably only two or three or four days after the party, and I was walking off the effcts of drinking for a weekend, teaching myself to sweat and suffer and drink water and sweat again.

My plan was to take the path onto the low gorsy plateau, then the sheep path, the hare path, the unpath, and finally to sit in some cleft or other, sheltered and hungry, where I could unwrap a healthy lunch. But I had to take a diversion. The first tractor reared up over the brow of the hill, red and belligerent, and threatened to follow the track I was walking on, so I bore left to skirt the hill's base and climb from another angle. I have no problem SHARING the countryside, but I have an aversion to farmers. Farms are fine, but I can't deal with farmers.

Two birds flew up from a tall hedge of trees, or more likely from the field behind the trees. At first I thought they were pigeons, but their plumage was a map of dark and light: lapwings. A pair of starving lapwings, recent migrants. I heard the sound of an engine, too high-pitched to be a tractor, and thousands, tens of thousands of lapwings errupted over the hedge into the sky in a spiral column. I thought at first that it was the birds making the engine noise, but through the cloud of wings there appeared a WW1 biplane. Strung behind it like a liquid tail was a banner. The writing on the banner was Cyrillic, and I could make NO SENSE of it. Lapwings still poured into the air: many were chopped to pieces by the plane's propeller, bits of darkandwhite bird like torn newspaper floated back down to earth. I hid from the rain of broken bloodless creatures in the SHELTER of the hedge and remembered for the first time in years a recurring dream I had had as an adolescent in which a green sports car came towards me. In the car was a man in a suit with a megaphone who had shouted 'WHO WILL YOU VOTE FOR?' The car always ran me over before I could think of an answer.

There is a patch of trees cloaking a pond and beyond the patch there are no more fields only scant grass and gorse and sandstone stumps. I went through the trees with pheasantsounds keeping pace with me on each side, towards and old gate that I knew, but the gate was gone: there was only a barricade of briar, and the pheasantsounds followed me back to the field, and I had to skirt the wood. Here I escaped the second red tractor: a beast with mechanical appendages that looked like the stingers or ovipositors of some malevolent or motherly insect, mantid arms outstretched, bursting its coquelicot skin.

The wooden stakes that are USED as fenceposts are uprooted/deracine/entwurzelt, matchwood on the fields. They are giant retarded leadless pencils marking invisible crosses on the landscape.

Up on the gorseland there is a stone near to where the sick sheep go when their bones feel the need to shed their bag of skin and bleach in the sun. I sat down on the stone and removed from my bag a plastic bottle of vodka and lemonade I had painstakingly prepared. I drank and discovered that the drink had turned into water, so I drank some more to make sure and it was definitely a bottle of water like all the other bottles of water I had consumed that day (there were many) so I drank out of spite until the bottle was finished. I began to compose a letter on the back of a postcard showing a blazing white chalk figure gashed across a hillside. The letter was to te short girl I had met at the anorexic girl's party. There was not much space on the back of the postcard.

dear trudie my toesandankles still hurt from saturday I think the old Port has brought the old Gout back/I cant blame you fr this or anything though im sorry I acted the way i did and so shoud you be perhaps/perhaps you really didnt want to do anything as i didnt and if you were wineless and cold here with me now and with the sheepskeletons you wouldnt be asking me to jump your little bones or maybe.../I'm sorry/I'm sorry if you are hurt and sorry tht you are a catholic and a socialist/either one of these on its own i could deal with but not both/but as is often the case with catholics and socialists you do have great breasts/what am I saying

At this point I must have fallen asleep because in my mind was the vision of an open-topped car coming towards me at speed. The man in the car had a megaphone but it didn't seem to be working. I think he was saying 'What is it that you love,' or 'Where is it that you will go.' As with all dreams it could have been a meaningless amalgamation of the two. Anyway I couldn't answer because the car stopped and the man bundled me into the back seat and I woke up sweating because it is worse to be bound and gagged and thrown into a car than it is to be run over by one.

An Exploration

Duller even than hypnosis, this,
the sky bulging with its charity
of snow. The crested, toothpaste-
topped houses are mountains
a team of dogs could not traverse,
or waves that have drowned kittens
and preserved mammoths. I think
about the warmth of pubs, and twinkling
Christmas songs, and the polar explorer
whose ring finger became a frozen
blood-sausage and snapped off,
about how he was miles away
in a room as warm as your loaf-
headed house before he noticed
the pain of a phantom thaw, the dumb,
numb sleep of a bit of himself
left behind in the linelessness of snow.

She Still Collects the Eggs; He is Lucky

A man came to dry out the kitchen with something that looked like an industrial vacuum cleaner. It was easier said than done. The boy (let's call him that despite or because of the fact that he was twenty-two, only three years younger than the man with the vacuum cleaner) made two cups of tea and watched the water as it slowly left the kitchen floor by way of a fragile and papery pump. Watched the accident disappear. The girl was not there.

The boy caught the man's attention and mouthed the word sugar at him. He wondered if he had managed to convey a question mark.

The man nodded elaborately and raised two fingers. A peace sign. The boy put two sugars in the man's tea and two in his own.

The boy listened to the gurgled sounds in the pump where water commingled with air. Subterranean sounds. The man had one arm on the draining board. He drank the tea before it could cool. His stance was nonchalant and slouching. He was looking out of the window into the back garden and not at the tools of his trade.

He shouted, You've got some chickens out there.

The boy was thinking about that morning. He had come downstairs and his kitchen was flooded. Pavlov floating happily in his basket. Not howling.

He did not want to shout above the sound of the sputtering pump but neither did he want to appear rude. He said, Yes, we've got three hens. My missus likes eggs. He regretted using the word missus.

He remembered panicking, shouting upstairs to the girl, We're flooded, come down quickly. She had said, You'll have to deal with it. Call someone out. I'm late for work as it is. At first he had not known who to call. The fire brigade perhaps.

He watched the hens. They both watched the hens. Two of them plucked gravel from the ground in the outside run. The third was out of sight in the coop.

They sat down in the upstairs study where it was dry and the boy turned on the battery-operated radio. The living room was still damp. Bin liners on the floor. Out of sight the pump did its muscular work. News of a snooker match on the radio. On top of the blank television set was a small framed photograph of the boy and the girl on the outside deck of a ferry to or from Dublin or Dun Laoghaire two summers before. He had forgotten who had taken it.

He said, It was good of you to come at such short notice. You must be busy.

He had no idea why the he though the man would be busy. He thought about the last words the girl had said before she went left for work. Don't let him do a half-arsed job, and don't give him any money until we know it's been sorted out.

The man talked about snooker, and betting.

An idea came to the boy. Not a good idea, he thought. Yes, a good idea in its own way, I suppose. He went down to the kitchen and got two cans of lager from the fridge, which was still cold despite the electricty being turned off. He tiptoed on the still-wet floor.

He said, You want one of these?

The man said, You know what, I will. It's not often I get the chance to sit down on the job.

The man opened his can. It had a picture of a bear on it. They talked about whatever was on the radio, called each other mate once or twice. The boy looked at the photo on top of the television. Pavlov, shut in the spare room, barked. The girl looked happy. It must have been taken on the way out and not the way back. He thought he was lucky. They still had sex. Sometimes he thought of that picture, or of other pictures, while they were doing it. Pictures of her smiling. She still liked to collect the eggs every morning. No, not every morning, because the hens weren't that reliable, but whenever she could. To the extent that he no longer liked the omelettes she made. He had been lucky in Ireland. She had returned with him over the flat sea, although he was sure there were no photographs of that return journey.

He drank from his can, which was yellow.

He was still lucky. He had told her things she had never meant to find out in Ireland. It must have been the drink. That was where he had really started hitting it. Where they had really started hitting it. Or was it afterwards? He had been forgiven, in a sense. He thought about the duality of forgiveness, or the infinity. He felt betrayed by her forgiveness, although he thought he probably had no right. Downstairs the pipe slurped and sucked.

When the pipe had done its work the man hauled it dripping over his shoulder with the adroitness of a sailor and said, That's all I can do for now.

The ground floor was still too damp to be lived in but at least there was no standing water. The boy said, You don't fancy another can before you go?

The man said, No, thanks. Busy afternoon ahead.