Wolf Tongue (19 page)

I write poetry at the age of seven and daddy wants to murder me.

He does a good imitation of it: beats me with a leather belt

and tears my little book in strips.

I wonder why my little poetry book, which is blue, is in strips,

and falling to the carpet like rain.

Strips and stripes, my daddy. An awesome man.

I sit in the garden reading Homer, shy lad

under a folding one-man tent and daddy wants to murder me.

Daddy, I caught a trout. Honest I did dad.

Daddy, I caught a dace away on holiday in Dorset

and it was argent like the moon when I ran, ran, I ran away

for fear of everything and you. It was argent like the moon.

It was argent daddy, but daddy wants to murder me.

Daddy, the wind murmurs and hoys against my shins

and I am alone upon my little pins in dales and hills

but my heart is chill: because daddy wants to murder me.

Daddy, do you want me to stop using the word daddy

and not write like Sylvia Plath at all?

Do you want me to write about my shrub of bay

which we can stroke on our way

out to the bender to have a hoolie and a ball? Do you daddy?

Normally, in recent literary history, daddy, it is women

who write about their daddies, daddy. But now it’s me.

Daddy, da, pa, everytime I hear your name I want to flee, flee, flee.

Daddy, when the word
failure
fled into my dictionary

one page after
facetious
, I thought of you.

Words were my war weapon, no matter how much

you loved Dickens. All the names and words of endearment

I never called you, and you could never find in your dictionary

to call me, daddy, all the names of dearness, daddy, when I spat

at you in the street, and ridiculed you in public, joying at the response

to the ridicule, and my way with words as war weapons.

Daddy, when the word
hatred
sprang up in class or conversation,

daddy, you were top of the league, you were right beside the word.

And it rained.

And I love the rain, daddy, but you were never part of it.

I was out on the lawn, and it was rosy September.

Mother was addicted to wobbly eggs, and she made herself that way,

daddy, with your tremendous help. You were good at that, dad,

I give you that. Daddy, when the word
broken
fled into the

dictionary, daddy, your oleaginous self was there smiling

to give it a helping hand. Only you would have been there.

When
ostentation
fled to the hills into my upland notebook

I flaunted it right back in your direction, daddy. You knew what

it meant.

O goodness, daddy, I’ve dropped my dictionary,

and my knowledge of words and phrases, punctuation and properly-placed

full-stops, but I know I’m alright daddy. I can steer clear

of my stupid awfulness. You’ll be there, daddy,

with a welter of words. With a punishment of punctuation.

Daddy, you personally placed the sin in syntax.

And I went to the Durham Family Practitioner Committee,

and they were very kind and told me straight, for straight

is what I need, dad, now that drink has twisted me.

One day, daddy, and this is what they said from the

bottom of their professional hearts. One day, with

rain from Sligo sheeting in the poor street, or

rain from the desolate areas of unkindly Strabane,

or from Denton Burn for that matter, or Waddington

Street, where my heart is in storage, in a furnace,

oddly enough, not in a freezer, or an ice-cube

tray (yellow, not transparent) – and don’t forget

my dear da, don’t ever forget. The French verb

is
oublier
, daddy – that when you sent your devil letter

your snide, sneering, you Demon With Knives In The Mouth,

daddy, when you posted it at 14:15 in the beautiful city

of Cambridge, a city that does not need your evil,

there is the letter, daddy, in the grate, where we

burned it, and when we did that, daddy, we burned you.

And when I had been to the Durham Family Practitioner Committee,

and it is housed in a marvellous building abutting the

Western Hill, and I cock my head at it always, and

when I had been to the vale, and all of the other hills

which lie in my soul, and their souls, and the souls

of all of those who have walked them and loved them

and hoped their souls and soulsongs would be collected and loved

by a poet who would always be scorned by his da, daddy.

I stood in the street at four in the day, itch of matins

and mitted palms over the river in the great cathedral.

I pondered it seemed almost forever upon the kinds

of factual annoyance you dislike, père, Mr Not Sit Him

On Your Knee, so I deliver it to you in this poem,

on my way back to the home of my great beloved, whom you

will never meet, evil devil daddy, even in the waiting room of the handsome

home of the Durham Family Practitioner Committee, who

told me, without saying one word, one verb, one sentence,

there were no subjunctive clauses or split infinitives

lying on the patients’ area table, daddy, when they told me:

the rains of Sparty flower all the way from the ferry landings of

Ireland, from the land of spuds and stout, and pipes

and the great glens of poetry, Eileen Aroon and the loughs of swans

and swanning if you fancy on a very soft day, daddy. Let

me tell you how it is now – all the press releases have

been sent, and all those who received them in the world

of poetry and demons upstairs have shredded them and their faxes.

We are approaching the midday of the time of Nobody Zero, a time

of failed locks and pushed back chairs in a hurry.

It will rain, which is a day I love most, daddy. It will

pour and drip like a wound in the funny black sky. And I

will be in a badly repaired car in a field not quite the green

of the paint on at least one of the walls of the Durham

Family Practitioner Committee surgery in its handsome

building, daddy. And I think, daddy, that the car idling

on the sill of the soaking sike will be black too.

And I will hunch out of the driver seat, and

I will look at the rain and strangely enough be glad of the

rain. And this is what I learned, this is what my headwounds

and my heartstrips, and my little bookstrips were written on, pa,

da, daddy, père, this is what they told me in the red

wounds which are woven across me like very bad ribbons, daddy.

They were very reasonable, daddy, most personable,

no slyness involved, no letters unsigned posted in

Cambridge from the Headquarters of Insecure Fathers,

for that is what you are, daddy, after all, a father.

But believe me, the cheeky chappy behind you in the

miserable family photographs, you were never a father to me.

You were never a father and you were never a friend.

You saved my brother from drowning, daddy, you saved

your youngest son. O thank God, daddy. If you

can love a brother more than a brother, da, I love Paul.

Our Paul, da. But it is not enough to try and find a

redundant welder in the Durham Family Practitioner Committee

and after angry handshakes and solidarity exchanges

at the closure of another

worldwide great shipyard that I might in my poetic

unappreciated nightmare about you, daddy, ask for

flux to weld my utterly broken heart to yours in

some kind of common long lost at last agreement. I

cannot, daddy, I just cannot. The keys of my agelong

Olympia typewriter, my brilliant friend, which I carry with

me from here to there, all of those thousands of words

which I heaped against you one way or the other, for

hatred of you, or for lost love of you, and that you

never respected me for what I did.

And what they told me – and they did not know that they

had told me – in the Durham Family

Practitioner Committee, is that one day, daddy, one darkly liquid jewelled day,

I will stand

As the wind and western rain sweep from the Atlantic

into Strabane, I will bulge my shoulders, more used

to pushing open the off-licence door, bulge them

from the driver side window, all the time thinking of my beloved,

but let me tell you, daddy, what they told me, in between

the units leaflets, when I was reading them on the

badly-lit late bus going home, this is what they told me.

I would be getting out of the driver seat of the

poorly parked badly repaired car going home

in the sight of the bungalows, and they are always bungalows, daddy,

and the poorly repaired car is always black, da, it’s

always black in a black spud-filled field, and always

a black day, or another Bloody Sunday, or any other

bloody bad day or month or year you dare to mention. And I will

get out of the car and I will heave my boots

across the turf and beyond the spuds, daddy,

do you remember, daddy, that’s why we all left Ireland,

why we were always so envious of America, dadaddy, that’s

why we were always so Popish proud, and it was raining,

belting down,

you know the rain, da, the rain we love so much, the soft rain

and the hard rain, on the rivers and hills, when we went fishing,

and it swept our very love away. And every day when we woke

it was there

as we walked up it was right in our faces.

And what they told me, was that I

will be almost half out of the black car, the Austin

A40, knee deep, god help me already, in the stricken wastes

of Crossmaglen and ugly Strabane, in the permanent borders

of crossfire, bull-horn warnings, rain-dulled crackle of

walkie talkies barely heard from soaking ditches, and the cross-hairs

of my heart, for this terrain, and terrain is all it is, a word with

a bleakness to it all of its own, despite a false disguise of green,

there my heart will be, steady as a drum for Billy, cold

as the kneecapping street on the outskirts, bizarre

as the surreal paintings on gable ends of those horse-riding men

in grand plumage and cockades.

Rain sheets down Hollywood-style, bigger than it is in nature.

No use hunching against it now. Collar up and the clava on and

right hand in pocket to make sure as the white-painted and pebble-dashed

bungalows worm out before me in their cheap mediocrity.

Rain their priceless diadem.

What goes through my cross-hairs heart at this time, in the final trudge,

are the beatings and berations, the betrayals of one who expected to

be loved. But then the ultimate repayment with thanks after the beltings

and verbal child abuse, when I sped up myself through sport and poetry

to be a robust youth with knockdown ideas of his own. And here was the

bungie, no more than a byre with net curtain, sidelights, bad carriage

lights, and leaden crossed porch torch as depicted on miscellaneous

false Yuletide postcards – and white oblong chime bell, which I pressed.

At least it was not Beethoven’s Fifth and no dog barked: unusual.

All of that gunfire in the choke of the city, just over there. Orange

city council lights psychedelically flashed with Black and Tan

electric blue sweeps. We rocked like that in the sixties when we

fled from the various dictators and authorities. You for example, daddy.

A lad, a snow-haired cheeky chappy lad with little turned up smile

came to the door with eager I’ll get it as he ran down the short hall

to the unsnecked chrome handle and yanked it in. Not more than seven,

just like the deadly sins, daddy, a wee white shirt, short pants and

Clark’s sandals, eyes

still drugged with the wonders of what he had been reading in his

pocket
Aesop’s Fables
. He wasn’t daft at all. You could see the

awesomely distasteful glow of the red bulb imitation coal effect

from the living-room fire, and he ushered me in up the hall

the little snow-haired lad with hand outstretched inviting

me in from outside the pebble glass wind resistant door

as I felt in my pocket and asked him in a voice only loud

enough for him to hear:

Is your daddy home?

Let’s dab a double finger half-pissed kiss on Muddy’s lips. O

she’s sixteen years old.

Tonight in the troubletorn heartland where heroes die and play,

in the knightly arenas of vainglory, demons’ candle dancing

and lancing of the moon’s throat will see us down

betrayed by feverfaith in love. Howl on, my pounding and delinquent soul

until her gunship

is taken up to tapers of the sunne.

Quenched ferocity, blanched faces turned indifferently

are all the twisted bee rave now.

My sleek torpedo will return, fins aflame

beneath the sheets. That’s her promise.

Yet into blood I’m forged, bile and vomit

stranded in the fingers’ stretch

                                                 where nurses cannot come

against demonic upheavals of villainous

dread night.

Here the poet will die, pickled and puce.

Dead man walking theme tune.

Number 13 tattooed on his neck.

Beast caged behind frail and fragile bars.

So when loose

it rips the very forest to an hilarity of shreds, bones

and burns

to join her scalding kisses

just a Canon automatic click away.

She is an angel sure, a privy perle

                                                   set rod-high

against all pestilence, needle and nag.

Rotten boroughs

of wine and gin

by the busload, look out!

In the land of wet brain and liver dysfunction,

subscriptions for coffin not necessary.

Messrs Demon and Sons see to everything.

And one last gargle before the screws

are twisted in.