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PORTSMOUTH
ELEGY
(note)
1 Tide Out and Gull
Angel
On
the farthest corner of the green shore
drops
down a gull seeking lonely food.
Not
until darkness will the hot tide
ripple
its voice through open windows.
Webbed
with sea-scum, the stubbled flats are
cemeteries
of desire swept from land.
The
gull will feast on my dead mother
yet
when the tide turns she will sing still.
Hungry
creature, haunted by your prey,
burning
in the dusk: you too are she.
Devoured
and devouring, slime and gull,
mother,
hear me, mother, for I grieve.
(note)
2 The Stone Wind
The
tone of cemeteries: got by heart
by
the old man with the newspaper.
Every
day he lets the tone settle
round
him like a quiet fall of rain.
Ah,
it isolates the waste heart’s call
as
if on an end-of-season pier.
No
one approaches. They are
all gone.
He
reads his paper. Sometimes
he cries.
And
forgets what he is crying for.
Only
grass moves through the windy graves.
My
father talks to the empty wind.
My
mother ignores him, under her stone.
She
has turned away. Hear it,
her tone.
She
has turned away. Hear the
stone wind.
(note)
3 Imperfect City
Long
before you died they’d altered it;
today
you would not know it at all.
It
is a new city, vitalised
by
a motorway for summer use.
A
brutal glass complex butts across
the
Guildhall and blocks its steps.
Mother,
you’d hate it, this clean
emptiness.
Flattened by war
then
re-cast when the money came
with
this dignitaries’ decision. Was
there
no
idea in their heads of a city before
they
made this dull, corporate, spoiling
lunge
into the future? How long
ago
was it I hopped home to you by
Church
Lane to the Victorian slum—
gone
of course now? Those flats
are cleaner.
Sweetshop,
old magazine shop, butcher’s,
pawnbroker’s,
the undertaker’s alley...
Arundel
Street was life, Ma. But
now
when
I lurk here I talk to the dead.
The
City Fathers were never perfect.
The
place still testifies to that.
(note)
4 Black Mountains
My
guilt is I let you die, mother:
I
had no charm against that shadow.
Let
these mountains hide me. But
you come—
in
the drought, in the night-time hill fires,
so
that my guilt crawls in parched odours:
from
the fur smell of roadside nettles
to
the singed air of bilberry rugs
on
the high bluffs, burnt dry like the dead
sheep’s
skull you have scornfully entered,
always
mortifying—forgive me.
In
this place of simple religions
where
the caked walls are ruined with prayer
will
my flesh atone, be broken by
mountain
water stabbing like needles?
From
a dry knoll above the valley
where
lush muffs of bush follow the stream
I
wind down, bathe in the cwm’s wet:
may
this water cleanse me, brain and bone.
(note)
5 The Sacred Things
Death
came out of the forest hill.
I
asked to see his sacred things.
He
told me: Anything—a mate, a child—
that
makes time unbearable.
I
said I had them: a mate, a child.
I
leant across his stone altar.
I
have these things: you are the Lord.
God’s
wounds, I am on your side.
Wave
up the past: the boiling bed,
the
charmed waif in the little streets;
then
the naked hill of the beginning,
that
improbable, slow-motion time;
that
I enter myth, as my children eat
and
my orgasm makes the night attend.
Death
passed on. My mother
emerged
on
the forest road; made love to him.
The
Fiend, the Fiend, he favours her!
I
am left in the wrong time.
Alan
Marshfield
(note)
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