High Windows (3 page)

D
own stucco sidestreets,

Where light is pewter

And afternoon mist

Brings lights on in shops

Above race-guides and rosaries,

A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,

But after there follows

A troop of streetwalkers

In wide flowered hats,

Leg-of-mutton sleeves,

And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,

As if they were honouring

One they were fond of;

Some caper a few steps,

Skirts held skilfully

(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.

As they wend away

A voice is heard singing

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

N
ext year we are to bring the soldiers home

For lack of money, and it is all right.

Places they guarded, or kept orderly,

Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.

We want the money for ourselves at home

Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,

But now it’s been decided nobody minds.

The places are a long way off, not here,

Which is all right, and from what we hear

The soldiers there only made trouble happen.

Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country

That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.

The statues will be standing in the same

Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

Our children will not know it’s a different country.

All we can hope to leave them now is money.

1969
 

T
hey fuck you up, your mum and dad.

     They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

     And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

     By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

     And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

     It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

     And don’t have any kids yourself.

H
ow distant, the departure of young men

Down valleys, or watching

The green shore past the salt-white cordage

Rising and falling,

Cattlemen, or carpenters, or keen

Simply to get away

From married villages before morning,

Melodeons play

On tiny decks past fraying cliffs of water

Or late at night

Sweet under the differently-swung stars,

When the chance sight

Of a girl doing her laundry in the steerage

Ramifies endlessly.

This is being young,

Assumption of the startled century

Like new store clothes,

The huge decisions printed out by feet

Inventing where they tread,

The random windows conjuring a street.

G
roping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.

There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow

Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart

(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain

Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain

Of being young; that it can’t come again,

But is for others undiminished somewhere.

S
uspended lion face

Spilling at the centre

Of an unfurnished sky

How still you stand,

And how unaided

Single stalkless flower

You pour unrecompensed.

The eye sees you

Simplified by distance

Into an origin,

Your petalled head of flames

Continuously exploding.

Heat is the echo of your

Gold.

Coined there among

Lonely horizontals

You exist openly.

Our needs hourly

Climb and return like angels.

Unclosing like a hand,

You give for ever.

S
exual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me)—

Between the end of the
Chatterley
ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Up till then there’d only been

A sort of bargaining,

A wrangle for a ring,

A shame that started at sixteen

And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:

Everyone felt the same,

And every life became

A brilliant breaking of the bank,

A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than

In nineteen sixty-three

(Though just too late for me)—

Between the end of the
Chatterley
ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

M
y
wife
and
I
have
asked
a
crowd
of
craps

To
come
and
waste
their
time
and
ours:
perhaps

You’
d
care
to
join
us
?
In
a pig’s arse, friend.

Day comes to an end.

The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.

And so
Dear
Warlock-Williams:
I’m
afraid
—

Funny how hard it is to be alone.

I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted,

Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted

Over to catch the drivel of some bitch

Who’s read nothing but
Which
;

Just think of all the spare time that has flown

Straight into nothingness by being filled

With forks and faces, rather than repaid

Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,

And looking out to see the moon thinned

To an air-sharpened blade.

A life, and yet how sternly it’s instilled

All
solitude
is
selfish.
No one now

Believes the hermit with his gown and dish

Talking to God (who’s gone too); the big wish

Is to have people nice to you, which means

Doing it back somehow.

Virtue
is
social.
Are, then, these routines

Playing at goodness, like going to church?

Something that bores us, something we don’t do well

(Asking that ass about his fool research)

But try to feel, because, however crudely,

It shows us what should be?

Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,

Only the young can be alone freely.

The time is shorter now for company,

And sitting by a lamp more often brings

Not peace, but other things.

Beyond the light stand failure and remorse

Whispering
Dear
Warlock-Williams:
Why,
of
course–

G
rey day for the Show, but cars jam the narrow lanes.

Inside, on the field, judging has started: dogs

(Set their legs back, hold out their tails) and ponies (manes

Repeatedly smoothed, to calm heads); over there, sheep

(Cheviot and Blackface); by the hedge, squealing logs

(Chain Saw Competition). Each has its own keen crowd.

In the main arena, more judges meet by a jeep:

The jumping’s on next. Announcements, splutteringly loud,

Clash with the quack of a man with pound notes round his hat

And a lit-up board. There’s more than just animals:

Bead-stalls, balloon-men, a Bank; a beer-marquee that

Half-screens a canvas Gents; a tent selling tweed,

And another, jackets. Folks sit about on bales

Like great straw dice. For each scene is linked by spaces

Not given to anything much, where kids scrap, freed,

While their owners stare different ways with incurious faces.

The wrestling starts, late; a wide ring of people; then cars;

Then trees; then pale sky. Two young men in acrobats’ tights

And embroidered trunks hug each other; rock over the grass,

Stiff-legged, in a two-man scrum. One falls: they shake hands.

Two more start, one grey-haired: he wins, though. They’re not so much fights

As long immobile strainings that end in unbalance

With one on his back, unharmed, while the other stands

Smoothing his hair. But there are other talents—

The long high tent of growing and making, wired-off

Wood tables past which crowds shuffle, eyeing the scrubbed spaced

Extrusions of earth: blanch leeks like church candles, six pods of

Broad beans (one split open), dark shining-leafed cabbages—rows

Of single supreme versions, followed (on laced

Paper mats) by dairy and kitchen; four brown eggs, four white eggs,

Four plain scones, four dropped scones, pure excellences that enclose

A recession of skills. And, after them, lambing-sticks, rugs,

Needlework, knitted caps, baskets, all worthy, all well done,

But less than the honeycombs. Outside, the jumping’s over.

The young ones thunder their ponies in competition

Twice round the ring; then trick races, Musical Stalls,

Sliding off, riding bareback, the ponies dragged to and fro for

Bewildering requirements, not minding. But now, in the background,

Like shifting scenery, horse-boxes move; each crawls

Towards the stock entrance, tilting and swaying, bound

For far-off farms. The pound-note man decamps.

The car park has thinned. They’re loading jumps on a truck.

Back now to private addresses, gates and lamps

In high stone one-street villages, empty at dusk,

And side roads of small towns (sports finals stuck

In front doors, allotments reaching down to the railway);

Back now to autumn, leaving the ended husk

Of summer that brought them here for Show Saturday—

The men with hunters, dog-breeding wool-defined women,

Children all saddle-swank, mugfaced middleaged wives

Glaring at jellies, husbands on leave from the garden

Watchful as weasels, car-tuning curt-haired sons—

Back now, all of them, to their local lives:

To names on vans, and business calendars

Hung up in kitchens; back to loud occasions

In the Corn Exchange, to market days in bars,

To winter coming, as the dismantled Show

Itself dies back into the area of work.

Let it stay hidden there like strength, below

Sale-bills and swindling; something people do,

Not noticing how time’s rolling smithy-smoke

Shadows much greater gestures; something they share

That breaks ancestrally each year into

Regenerate union. Let it always be there.