Selected Poems (15 page)
Authors: Tony Harrison
as Kermit’s leg or Snoopy’s limp left ear
came out of their collapse, as gas was blown
through each sagged limb, now magically regrown.
Each mammoth stirs beneath its weighted net
straining for the sky it can’t have yet,
impatient to be loosed out of the dark
over the browning trees of Central Park.
From yesterday I still can feel you blow
your love all through me like some helium
that restores my true proportions, head to toe,
and lifts my body skywards. When I come
I’m out of the sandbagged nets and soar away
into release and
my
Thanksgiving Day.
Thanksgiving Day, 22 November 1979
for John Dexter
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
I never thought I’d live to see the day,
or smile my un-
Smile Center
sort of smile
that the Rockefellers threw a big soirée
for the cast of
Mahagonny
by Brecht/Weill.
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
Between mouthfuls on the ACT II EATING set
where Jacob Schmidt ate two whole calves, then burst,
the argument’s:
Iranian
v.
Soviet
–
that is which caviar to boycott first!
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
These are the tight-belt ways they’re fighting back:
each patriotic family should drive,
say, only one per person Cadillac
at the less gas-guzzling speed of 55.
All loyal alcoholics should desire
their vodka stingers without
Stolichnaya
.
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
To say the New York rich can’t enter Heaven
(that old precinct of the poor) ’s as much to say
we don’t believe the PanAm 747
takes off time after time at JFK.
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
Oh, Marc Chagall should come back as a ghost
once he’s checked who’s got God’s gilt entrée
and redecorate the Opera for our host
with fitter friezes for the MET foyer:
blue bread and circuses, lame Pegasi
and camels that hoopla through the needle’s eye!
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
for the centenary of the death of Karl Marx, died London, 14 March 1883
‘… et asperi
Martis sanguineas quae cohibet manus,
quae dat belligeris foedera gentibus
et cornu retinet divite copiam.’
(Seneca,
Medea
62–65)
Though aging and abused still half benign
this petrified PLENTY spilling from her horn
the Old World’s edibles, the redskins’ corn,
next to the Law Court’s Fallout Shelter sign
the blacks and oranges of Hallowe’en.
All that motherly bounty turned to stone!
She chokes back tears of dribbling gasoline
for the future fates of countries like my own.
I stroll round Washington. November strews
red welcomes on the pavements from the trees
on Constitution and Independence Avenues
as if the least pedestrians were VIPs
or returning warlords lured inside to hack,
their lifeblood gushing out this hue of Fall
bulldozed by Buick and by Cadillac
to side drains too choked up to take it all.
Through two museums,
Science
and
Indian Arts
something from deep below the car-choked street,
like thousands of Poe’s buried tell-tale hearts
pounds with a bass and undissembled beat.
With NASA decals, necklaces by Navajo,
Japanese in groups come out to stare
at the demolition that they’d felt below
their feet, choking this chill Sunday air.
The American Wrecking Co
.’s
repeatedly rammed iron wrecking ball
swinging in arcs of rhythmic tos and fros
against a scarcely-50-year-old, well-built wall
cracks cement from criss-cross steel supports,
and, floor by floor, once guaranteed to last
till time needs more museums, Justice Courts,
and enterprises space, collapses to the past.
A red light flashes many times a minute
on the Population Clock here in D.C.
to show the billions the World has in it
including those police, that black youth, me,
and, three years ago today, reached 4.5!
Each line of verse how many people born?
How many of these children will survive
crushed through the narrow end of PLENTY’s horn?
And one red light for punished and for pitied
the FBI displays next to the time
flashes on whenever there’s committed
somewhere in the States a serious crime,
as I imagine that it flashed on when the youth
I see handcuffed and then screeched away
to monuments of Justice, Order, Truth,
committed his, but what it was I couldn’t say.
An All Souls’ pumpkin rots on someone’s porch.
It could be PLENTY’s head, about to die,
her cornucopia a guttering torch
still hot enough to scorch the whole Earth dry.
This pumpkin lantern’s gouged eyes glued
against some unbelievably bright glare
can’t see, as I do, that young black pursued
then caught, the red lights hacking darkening air.
Leaves, some like menses, some volcanic hues,
whirl on successive wafts of hot CO
as Constitution and Independence Avenues
boom to the ball and chain’s destructive blow
and, against Virginia, on Capital and Law
each sunset-reddened window one degree
of vast thermometers that, floor by floor,
chart our fever up to World War Three.
In a poem this long how many new souls born?
How many pendulum swings of wreckers’ ball
that throbs beneath the White House on whose lawn
a giant vacuum’s Hoovering the Fall?
in memoriam
S.T., died 4 April 1985
Death is in your house, but I’m out here
sackclothing kumquats against the forecast freeze,
filling the hole you took two days to clear
of briars, beercans, and bleached, barkless trees,
with hackberry leaves, pine needles, stuff like that.
Next spring, when you’re no longer here
we’ll have the land grassed over and quite flat.
When the Southern sun starts setting it sets fast.
I’ve time to tip one more load if I run.
Because I know this light could be your last
I drain the day of every drop of sun.
The barrow wheel spins round with a clock’s tick.
I hear, three fields away, a hunter’s gun,
you, in the silence after, being sick.
I watched you, very weak, negotiate
the childproof pill jar, panting to draw breath,
and when you managed it you poured your hate
more on the poured-out contents than on death,
and, like Baptists uttering Beelzebub
syllable by syllable, spat
Meth-
a-done
, and there’s also the poetic rub!
I’ve often heard my fellow poets (or those
who write in metres something like my own
with rhyme and rhythm, not in chopped-up prose
and brood on man’s mortality) bemoan
the insufficiency of rhymes for death –
hence my syllabifying
Methadone
instead of just saying that you fought for breath.
Maybe the main but not the only cause;
a piece of engineering I’ll explain.
Each syllable
was
followed by a pause
for breathlessness, and scorn of drugs for pain.
Another reason, though, was to delay
the use of one more rhyme stored in my brain
that, alas, I’ll have a use for any day.
I’d stored away this rhyme when we first met.
Knowing you crawled on hands and knees to prime
our water pump, I’ll expiate one debt
by finally revealing that stored rhyme
that has the same relentlessness as death
and comes to every one of us in time
and comes to you this April full moon, SETH!
In return for all those oily working parts
you took the time and trouble to explain,
the pump that coughs, the saw that never starts,
I’ll show you to distract you from the pain
you feel, except when napping, all the time
because you won’t take drugs that dull the brain,
a bit about my metre, line and rhyme.
In Arthur Symons’
St Teresa
Nazaréth
is stressed on the last against its spoken flow
to engineer the contrast Jesus/Death.
Do I endorse that contrast? I don’t, no!
To have a life on Earth and then want Heaven
seems like that all-night bar sign down below
that says that
Happy Hour
’s from 4 to 7.
Package lounges are like ambulances:
the Bourbon-bibber stares at us and glowers
at what he thinks are pained or pitying glances.
We don’t see his face but he sees ours.
The non-dying don’t see you but you see them
passing by to other rooms with flowers
as you fill the shining kidney with red phlegm.
I’ve left some space ( )
1
benumbed by morphia and
Methadone
When I began these lines could I have known
that the nurse’s registration of the time
you let your spirit go with one last groan
would help complete the first and third line rhyme?
Those bits I added later. Them apart
I wrote this
in memoriam
for Seth,
meant to show him something of my art,
almost a whole week before his death.
The last thing the dying want to read,
I thought, ’s a poem, and didn’t show it,
and you, not dying yet, why should you need
to know the final failure of the poet?
The snake our cracker neighbour had to scotch
was black and white and beautiful to watch.
I’d watched it shift its length, stay still, sashay,
shunting its flesh on shuffled vertebrae
for days before, and thought of it as ‘mine’
so long had I wondered at its pliant spine.
My neighbour thinks it queer my sense of loss.
He took a branch festooned with Spanish moss,
at the cooler end of one long afternoon,
and pestled my oaksnake’s head into a spoon
he flourished laughing at his dogs, then slung
the slack ladle of its life to where it hung
snagged on a branch for buzzards till, stripped bare,
it trailed like a Chinese kite-string in the air.
Waal!
he exclaimed,
if ahda knowed you guys
liked
snakes on your land
… he turns and sighs
at such greenhornery. I’d half a mind
to say I’d checked the snake’s a harmless kind
in
two
encyclopaedias but knew the looks
I’d get from him for ‘talking books’. –
There’s something fairy
(I can hear him say)
about a guy that
watches
snakes all goddam day!
The wife he bullies says:
O Bill, let be!
There’s doers and there’s watchers, maybe he …
Ain’t no doer
, says he,
that’s plain to see!
I seed him sit out on their porch and read
some goddam great Encyclopaed-
ia, yeah
, read!
What does the fairy DO?
O Bill!
she says,
not everyone’s like you.
And you’d be the first man to stand up and say
that people living in the USA
have every right to live the way they please. –
Yeah! But those guys look too young for retirees!
Nothing that I did made any sense
but I think he offered me as recompense
for battering my snake the chance to see
the alligators on his property.
Each Sunday his riding mower wouldn’t stop
till every blade of grass had had its crop,
so that the bald, burned earth showed through the green
but any snake that trespassed was soon seen.
That was the front, but out there in the back
he hadn’t even hacked a proper track
down to the swampy lake, his own retreat
kept as wild as the front part was kept neat.
This was his wilderness, his very own
left just as it was, rank, overgrown,
and into this he went with guns and beer
to wallow in his dreams of the frontier
and shot the gators we were seeing glide
with egrets on their backs from side to side.
The egrets ride in threes their gator skiffs,
Pharaohs’ sarcophagi with hieroglyphs!
He offered me his rifle:
Wanna try?
Go for the big ones not the smaller fry!
They’ve taken gators off the
Endangered List.
I took aim and, deliberately, missed.
He blasted three egrets like a fairground shy
and then the gator they were ferried by.
Then we sat down at his fire and watched the day,
now reddened at the edges, drain away.
This hissing of damp logs and ringpull
Bud
drunk from the can, his seal of brotherhood
(the sort where I’d play Abel and him Cain!)
I can’t stand his beer but don’t complain