Lecture

The Russian from the think-tank thinks

The gun sights in the Russian tanks are French.

Stop selling gun sights for the Russian tanks

And the Russian tanks won’t sight guns, the Russian

From the think-tank thinks. Closer to home

The teenage girls in the audience find his accent

Hard to read. You think I’m sleeping, but I’m not.

That’s the message that the Russian tanks are for.

I’m thinking of the girls, actually. The Russians

Probably are not. One of them is having a crisis

With her gender; she’s done a survey about

What men think. The young men from the navy

Nod along serenely. They like it when the bombs go off;

The Russian apologises to the rest of us – the sound

Effects were meant to be less painful, like telling you

I think you like me and I don’t. Propaganda

Is the reason for the war, he says. You said

You expected him to be taller. Try telling that

To a tank. They tell you that the world is getting

Smaller, like how cars crumple when they’re smacked.

This is all meant to be painful, I believe the Russian

means, and all as simple as just that. 

nostos

Moving in November meant we missed

the winter birds, the wigeon who seem scared

of loneliness especially. You’d see them

on the mud flats lose a sight line and at once

as one the little plaintive squeals like miniature pigs

came wheedling through the grey dusk air

until they floated down to where the others were

and you could hear the solitary curlews clear again.

Of course these days I can regain all this

here in the downs by calling up their shadows

on my phone. It’s here I learn this longed for bird’s

melancholic proper name: Anas Penelope.

She, rooted to a radius as these ducks to a migratory

route, did recover her other half in the end. We,

my love, go on searching. It must be wonderful,

like these heroic little fowl, to home.

What water means

Through a narrowing, fir stubbled Montana valley,

between highway and abandoned railway line,

flowed the young Missouri, three times dammed

already and steady in its flow. There I stood

each dusk for a week, water to the waist, bare legs,

bare feet, and fished for silver trout. I was not

alone; drift boats passed downriver now and then

like ice floes pulling polar bears further out to sea,

while ospreys circled, dived, then came to rest

on platforms built to breed their nests.

But all apart, housed only by his own robust endeavour,

one resident lingered from another age of industry.

Three times, maybe four, a beaver, retired river master

flapped his fat and shotgun tail at me. The first time

its warning crack slapped flat on the Missouri’s skin

I spun round to see who was hunting so near the shore.

The next evening I had the luck to see him first,

paddling across to the current’s strength then down towards me

until, level with my chest, his eyes caught mine and bang!

This, he said, was his territory and had been so long

before me. To hear him say it, to hold me

as a threat like coyote or wolf: unfastening

delight, as suddenly exciting as the quick shadowy pull of a fish.

For surely this is one of mankind’s urgent, taut desires,

to play some timeless, wild, recurring thing, unstrung

from the ever onward chug to settle life more comfortably

and, like wildflowers left to bloom by railroad tracks,

neither creator, nor destroyer; just for one night’s span to be.

But there’s another elevation here, more revealing perhaps

of these past lines’ own careful bridge: that to be stood

in the Missouri’s wash is to be hid not from mankind’s march,

but from that other tug, which like the pull of a trout’s

home stream, would have me by the balls and bounden.

It is so wonderful to be here without sex. If you, rodent,

could understand my bleating tongue, I’d let you know how

differently we came to this purging waterway, you to build and

build again, and I to run from any building I might do,

to be like a wasted thing in this Montana valley,

as if my every seed, like the cleared debris of beaver dams,

could be sectioned from me, and left in time to run its way

to slick the warmth of a southern sea.