The lie-fire

Words bristled

in the starting gates and shook their necks.

I had said I wasn’t married and he’d

What are you waiting for? shot back

quick as the white flash of thought.

Marriage, is it not true, is a blessing

from God?

My eyes dragged themselves from his leathered feet

as he sat cross legged on the floor,

worked up his bare arm,

his neck,

around and past his ear

to tie themselves alongside his.

Dark and flecked with white, his eyes sang a belly full of faith,

but it was what came striding out of them

that beat me back and held me.

Here, at a lope, came the men

we’d passed on the road to Lusaka,

picked up for a moment in the headlights

then dropped back into the night.

Men with briefcases,

backpacks, faggots on their backs, men with pickaxes,

bare feet, flip flops, men with boots;

men with hours to walk before the next fixed light

could remind them home was closer than the moon.

Some flowed down behind us on the road

but some I saw turn off and walk out

past the miombo trees into the bush

to set their rough footsteps sweeping a dust rhythm

with the noises of the night.

I thought of all these men, and looked

at him, and looked down again at my contempt

lamed and whinnying upon the floor,

and lied. And months later, sitting down

to write a poem about distances,

it took until this line to see the ancient fire I’d set

between us, to see him gone

into a darkness of my making

and the ground blackened and cut short

where once we’d stopped to piss,

our twin arcs alive and dancing in the sun.

Words and I

Adjectives are us, getting personal,

gaffs to hook the fin-dark, darting glint of things

and haul it on deck flipping, or dead.

Adjectives are where we take our eyes, our tingling skin,

our cores, fuck-hungry and mean, and turn them on nouns.

Make no mistake that adjectives are desperate things.

Take Homer, the maker of our word.

His Achaeans, from the first book to the last,

are euknemides, well-greaved, thirty one times in all.

Their greaves hold fast in their full bellowed strength,

fixed firm when the men are lounging round the camp,

and their greaves stay shining on when their mouths taste dirt

and Trojan chariots roll over and snap their shins.

Even as some whirling hero plucks their bodies clean,

these Greeks’ greaves are well.

Perhaps someone took comfort to hear it so.

Perhaps, when I stop writing to see in the window

this stone dead city, and think How oppressive it can be!

as the bright blue gushing sounds of countryside come running,

I too should pause, and rethink the relationship between

these adjectives and me, untie them, let them wander

off to a void of air, or fling them like confetti in the wind

to settle with what nouns they please.

Domestic

The sign read “semi-feral”, which he explained

was because one day in their unstable youth,

all swollen knees and juddering legs,

they were driven into what he called a crush

(a wooden ring the foals would circle wild

with fear until they found their mare),

where they were vaccinated, branded, and had their tails

docked, before being left to roam

amid the fading purple of an autumn heath.

All this – a puncture, a scar, a military cut -

meant the ponies running either side of us

as you pulled back on me in fear

were half way to being right. Half way

from being ferae (beasts and wild things) but as far

from the domus (the house, or home) where

life awakes its better breeding. In just such a home

you lie in bed beside me as I watch the news –

your head on my armpit as you half see

more celebrities and paedophiles penned in

another crush, heads lowly like a grazing foal,

watching their feet walk them out of another house,

their membership revoked. And I watch you

dozing, and hope beyond what all I know

that this thin legged little house of ours may last.

And then I too am taken into sleep, that unruly

skating skim of thought, where my hair grows long

and my skin uncleansed, and when I wake

I wake afraid that all my loving you won’t help.

The great divide

Ahead of me was the beaten body of the deer,

its tan legs splayed out across the painted centre line.

To my right the car ticked over patiently

and beyond it, dancing above the yellow of the plains,

Montana rose and fell, its lung-beats green

and long since calcified.

I must have torn one of its arteries

to make it give up so much blood,

which now, finding grooves and channels in the road,

rolled down to pool

by a trailhead information stand,

which taught in flat municipal tones

the song of the great divide.

How explorers

edged towards it in canoes

watching for movement in the peaks,

how geologists, cartographers,

swarmed after them

writing out this gorgeous hydrologic fact

for the always-evening stillness of their libraries.

How years later, through the silence of Montana afternoons,

struck the lonesome, rigid steps,

of rangers planting signs.

But no one teaches this –

when you hit a deer on the great divide

and have to move the body off the road,

which side do you move it to?

To the east, so that its blood runs long and slow

into the tar-slicked Texan Gulf,

or to the west, to tumble through the mountain waters

of the Blackfoot,

Clark-Fork and Columbia,

to be slung back by the mad Pacific

and turned to foam

against the lowest cliff-hugging branches

of some Oregon state park?

And nobody prepared me for that electric fear

as I approached the body

and moved my hands towards its legs,

scared that this once lithe uncertain thing

might flinch.

Then, as my fingers tightened round it, guilt

came tumbling back

to swill around my belly

that this was all because of me,

that instead of being a machine

like this animal deserved

and braking when I could have stopped in time,

my wild heart was on another continent

thinking of a girl in London

where the bus-bombed city

wears the ghost of oceans like a hat.

Tulips

It was only trying to waste time

until I could politely leave Granny to her dying

and take the train home

that I really looked , for the first time in years,

around her living room. How could I

not have noticed it before?

There on the left hand wall (as you face

out through the conservatory

to the twelve tulip garden), Odysseus’ maids

hanging by their necks.

They’re leant forwards so horribly

as if daemons flying or

as if their feet blown backwards in the wind.

Telemachus is looking on bare-chested –

looking older than his nineteen or twenty years

and is that pity or confusion in his face?

One of them, picked out in yellow

on the wash blue sky, seems not yet dead

or wholly drained of vitriol. Her face

pushed forwards as you would

to spit. The bitterness perhaps

that she had no trial, that all this came

and went in an afternoon

after polishing the floor, before

she could grab the words to plead,

explain, beg mercy or farewell –

which words now unforthcoming.

Or maybe that is just the face you make.

Looking now it’s hard to tell.