some early poems by
Richard Coates
© Richard Coates 2012
The moral right of the author of this work and the individual poems in it has been asserted.
Many of the poems have often been reworked since first being written. Any date mentioned gives a notion of when the first germ appeared, and any second date indicates the completion of the most radical of changes.
Two poems have been published before in obscure places, as indicated.
The title is stolen from Kate Adie, The kindness of strangers (London: Headline, 2002), p. 418.
Sacred Chariot is an imprint of Younsmere Press
ISBN 0 95012309 9 9
The titles of the poems (use search to reach the title or first line below)
Fitful Head
Brighton beach
Incident at Baratti
Autumn looms
Oaks
Inverbeg
Le café le soir
Calpurnia
Two whens
Death is not disaster
Morgan’s bridge
Cat Mitzi, 22.02.2006
Epitaphs on the back of the stone
No loneliness will clothe me
Elsewhere
Advent
The lovely Hyti
On arriving at the seaside with a carful of children
who need entertaining
Radical kids’ song
I wrote you a glowing reference
The battle
innocence sweet-strung dulcimer
Starling curls
Sulking on my own rock
The Nosibeam
Mobbed heron
A pun(y) defence of the pun: a hard read
No thanks
Times come
Revelation
Now that we are in love
Now that we are lovers
With me
Sundown by the Severn
When love is not so hot
The loving-cup
How red her eyes?
Telephone
Caught in a landslide ….
Oh how my tallow quickly burns
Gone for a song (qualis artifex pereo)
Paint on the flagstones
The one or two in you
Low
Dropping names
Digging the past
A dark descending
Song of life
Inheritance tax
Schliersee
Zitronenfalter
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)
To Eichendorff
The poems
Fitful Head
How justly your name speaks
the lame shudder of Atlantic light
when long northern day dies west.
A pinch of yellow-grey dusk
so intermittently
powdering slow white birds’ wings.
Today I heard that in my name
the bombers bucked by the two rivers:
relief sent them cloudwards like air-buoyed gulls
and TV laid bare a street
dusted grey with brick and bone.
Dim colours toured the jetstream
and deepened evening
where our tough leaders
had promised to end night forever.
Without calculation
the sea flogs Fitful cliffs
till stonefalls hold its crests
at a safe wavelength, flickering and spiteful.
Only the white birds rise
now and again and again.
Sumburgh, 2003 ‒ Falmer, 2006
Brighton beach
The full tide’s turn sucks water from the stones.
Its stiff hiss speaks of unwilling going.
Keenly the winter sun chaps the horizon,
then the spume’s left lit by the pier’s lights alone.
Night brews. How mild is the dark air?
Night sinks. A twinkling tide impels
the dreary disconsolate, the drunk and doped,
cocksure to dive into its cheating flux.
Can the salt of faith buoy you on this curse?
The dead know and they don’t care to say.
This isle of reason’s safe when we dare affirm.
There are some, though, who well know certain currents
and skim the Channel swell
in high ships with a shallow keel of whimsy,
duping the reefs and undertow with prayer.
A port is not among their needs, they tell you
– come swim, child, to us: despise the brittle land.
Staunch on the shore with tense binoculars
our guard watches bobbing in the offing
those ardent navies’ lights. They probe our lines;
their speculative prows ground in the shingle
that skirts our sceptical rock.
Quick to refloat them on the retreating hiss,
empty of certainty and dread,
human,
wé call the drowning coast proudly predicted.
So who calls the crumbling cliffs His victory?
Rottingdean, 2006 – and thank you, Matthew
Incident at Baratti
A slim strand and so long
licked by summer waves:
so like your imagined self.
Long like an hour of watching.
Ti aspettava alla piaggia,
and if disappointment seems
to clang in that dark imperfect
I’ve coped
through the commedia of Art and Ardal,
extravagant Irishmen
sharing a bikini bottom
to go and flout the summer waves,
oh they gleam like slabs of turkey
in my darkening lenses.
They haven’t seen the Austrian
with the webcam ‒
with a casual click tonight I may
see my friends again
less than large as life though
severely clear in the internet café
but the only tongued long and slim of the longing moment
will be sand in a bright oblong screen
and a thread of indolent pale spume.
Pisa, August 2005
Autumn looms
The day begins. The half-transparent hangs
that quicken the lungs and the sex
thrill the thronging neurones in my head;
they braid sweat on the webs in the fence-posts,
and the brows of suburbs are awash with fantasies.
Beginning is now, beginning the leaving;
departure stirs the first reds
bloodlessly into the seat of living
on merest expeditionary raids.
Shocked exhilaration tenses for flight.
Yes, now, the time of this beginning,
now those opening pathways in the air
burgeon vastly for the new order. Small trainloads
of half-year tourists, electric martin,
swift with squealing wheels, swallow in streamlining,
people the platforms of orchards and eaves,
all on wait for the express
to gloom out of the emptying north.
Cambridge, 1975
Frost oaks
Yellow
autumn and oak
passing out of the spectrum
as they die
stamped into winter earth
of hues unprismatic because
winter’s snapped the trap on its prism
and shattered it
into fine pavement-film
glassing the last leaves
and chasing the late sun’s hue from them.
1970
Inverbeg
Standing on a stone alone,
all around me the loch, I watched
the lithe shadows of now
flit on the gnarls of Ben Lomond.
A shudder passed through their trees
and on down to Rowardennan,
into the nearer shore as foamless waves.
On the bank above the stone
I had thought an instant:
I could take off and break
on that one cold crag
because she is so far from me
but I was a child. A glimmer
of man’s will had held me to the shore
and I had stepped not leapt
to this islet of my choosing.
Grimsby, 1968-2005
Le café le soir
The street might be some aged creature
or a lava flow: at least
today’s wheels rattle over its ribs
towards us on a monstrous
axle, driving a universe onwards,
leaving a beggarly coat of resolutions
to clothe the ribs of this beast
bounded by its past so pitifully.
For those for whom home holds no comfort
a slick lamp winks
and over the emptied tables
the thinnest wine has trickled.
For some its ghost performs a stage-life
on the dead bones of streets and years,
yes, in the heat of wine and anger,
their only two emotions,
the ancient lava runs again.
Into the sluggard stream vanish
tables, today and enemies,
the forms of horrors that prowl
only when the oldest lights of all
illume alone these ghettos.
And when the wheels have passed over
and when the sky’s creaking axle is
fed and greased by those it overwhelms,
only then is the feeble light snuffed
and the bill for oblivion fetched.
Clink in the till and the last of today’s
resolves scavenge the bony cobbles.
1973
Calpurnia
You who have seen sorrow surge
from the entrails of your love,
and death’s acolytes
bear him off on the blood-tide,
can call upon your dreams
for prophecy and memory and comfort.
Think of Mary unable
to pray God even to ease
her hewn son’s dying pain
because it was God himself dying
in the blood-tide,
and you will know,
Calpurnia, life’s derision for those
who live it
let you off lightly.
1970
Published in CCAT Magazine no. 3 (1975)
Two whens
Birth is past and future death,
death a well-remembered breath.
1966
Death is not disaster for anyone who dies.
Disaster is the grit of death that grinds in surviving eyes.
Death is not disaster for anyone who dies.
Disaster is the ache of death that lakes in living eyes.
Rottingdean, 2005
Morgan’s bridge
Hím – the dizzying call
of the old river stopped him
and caught his breath
and opened his eyes
as his self seldom recently had.
He saw his own self’s frozen arc,
the plummeting swirl
and the mallard trails,
fugitive like himself.
His persecutor burned, wrenched,
and his pain lurched him away.
So vivid that it was a built thing
his bridge checked the channel,
put rails to his north. Impervious
to flame and frosts it stood
standing out of him as he sank.
He fled, kin of both banks,
across the ambiguous arc,
not knowing from which to tear his roots.
Along with his shout
the old river took him
with parent firm- and tenderness
and casually daily off his bridge
someone chucks bread
to impassive ducks
bound in their own duckish needs.
Cambridge, before 1976
Cat Mitzi, 22.02.2006
Lie lightly on her, earth, for she
laid hardly anything on thee.
Epitaphs on the back of the stone
She dropped the guillotines of her eyelids
on the helpless body of the word.
1969
Long in the dying and new in this rebirth.
1969
Er lebte dem Rufe nach
und gehört jetzt dem Niegehörten.
1966-2005
He saw perdition, but his eyes,
like passing Levites, turned away.
2005
Tant que ce mort malin tentera tes yeux faux
ma mer murmurera de moments immoraux.
1968
A man of no deep wars, I wept my mind.
1978
I carried my health grimly on a therapeutic street.
1976
Die Rose lehrte mich
dass Wesen so wie ich
gebrechlich sein und fahl.
1967 (after Cécile Caulier)
She danced the drunken walltop till the mortar crumbled.
c.1974
No loneliness will clothe me
When I drop into the grave
My neighbour-folks won’t loathe me
And I won’t misbehave
I’ll have my overnight bag
Full of everything I need
The night will be a right drag
The bag a void indeed
I’ll be with all the others
Who are doing bugger all
But tersely cursed their mothers
When they faced the final call
All knowing what the Law meant …
Indifferent to St Paul …
At worst just endless torment
For making the wrong call
You shouldn’t fret a second
For my dismal solitude
No party invite’ll’ve beckoned
And I won’t be in the mood
Frenchay, 2007
Elsewhere
Frank instals an automatic
trapdoor leading to his attic.
The reason for this great expense
is so that his late wife Hortense
who beat her brains out on the rafter
when in touch with the hereafter
can join in when the mediums make
for Frank’s oppressive weekly wake.
But
Hortense’s immaterial state
enables her to emanate
from somewhere else into the room.
Frank, incensed at this aplomb,
summons up a mighty force
to touch her spirit of remorse,
persuading her to pay a visit
to the desk of her solicit-
or and make a codicil
to thwart her final mortal will
directing that her ouija board
be sold to spite the spirit horde
and that the proceeds from the scrap
should reimburse Frank for his trap.
Advent
Watching water pearl her body
through the soapy incense-vapours,
Donna postures to her mirror
letching from the distant ceiling.
From their minds’ erotic temples
spirits watch this Nausicaa –
breasts on high and hand so loosely
draped across her maidenhood.
Barren from the echoing columns,
serene and solemn,
kyrie cries.
Before the idol Donna dons
her scarlet mourning,
scarlet sighs.
Pompadour at last takes courage,
shifts unshyly with a flourish
hand and caution, shame and prudery,
deifies her burning instinct.
Sensing a profane oblation,
Donna pillages her conscience,
murmurs an unheard confession,
slips on her red party-dress.
Barren from the echoing columns,
serene and solemn,
kyrie cries.
Before the idol Donna dons
her scarlet mourning,
scarlet sighs.
Grimsby, 1968
Published in CCAT Magazine no. 3 (1975)
The lovely Hyti
I can’t name the familiar place that it happened –
an office or a large common-room
with summer billowing through open windows –
that the lovely Hyti came
for my advice about something
which has dwindled smaller than the little point it had.
Of average build and obscurely Scandinavian
she looked at me tautly
and hid beside a window
warm
and translucent with intellectual desire.
We span dry words and I could not keep my eyes
on the boredom in the filing-cabinet
or my brain on procedure, so
I kissed her through the net curtain
it tasted horrible but she ran
aflame and laughing from the room
even as my wife
poked me in the back in the sweaty dawn.
Rottingdean, 2005
On arriving at the seaside with a carful of children
who need entertaining
Happy Hastings! here we are.
Half an hour to park the car.
Come on!
One two into the loo
three four down to the shore at Rock-a-Nore
five six some cheesy bix
seven eight the funfair’s great, except for the wait
nine ten the ghost train! when?
eleven twelve behave yourselves you evil elves
Come here!
thirteen fourteen brat-escorting
fifteen sixtine fish not Rick Stein
seventeen eighteen c’mon we’re waiting
nineteen twenty chips aplenty.
That’s brilliant – let’s ignore the rain
and do the whole lot over again.
Two one real seaside fun:
four three feet in the sea, a grazed knee
six five ice-creams arrive
eight seven toffee heaven : coffee heaven
ten nine √ Dad please don’t whine
twelve eleven dodgems driven, no quarter given
Come here!
fourteen thirteen √ wipe my shirt clean
sixteen fifteen sea-fog’s lifting
eighteen seventeen aching dentine
nineteen twenty wallet’s empty.
Come on!
Find the car and load the stuff.
Seven hours is quite enough.
1984-ish The desperate contortion provoked by the strict form is iconic of the day’s work.
√ is an intonation marker – let your voice follow the contour over the next word
Radical kids’ song
Smoke goes up by our garden wall
smoke comes out of my uncle Paul
smoke finds it difficult to fall
smoke is a mystery know-all.
Smoke drifts around without a sound
smoke makes you cough in the Underground
smoke in the toilet and you’ll get found
smoke is a silent bloodhound.
Smoke comes out of a diesel train
smoke never goes back in again
smoke is a power affecting your brain
smoke is a thumping migraine.
Smoke will show you a burning house
smoke is a spirit that’s hard to douse
smoke on the moors means a singeing for grouse
smoke is death for the fieldmouse.
Smoke is what’s left of a nuclear bang
there’ll be no criminals left to hang
no fat returns from your labouring gang
and never again a birth-pang.
Cambridge, 1974
I wrote you a glowing reference
it smouldered as it shone
small smuts obscured some dubious things
I had not dwelt upon
so, figure-huggingly clad in
grey chiffon mystery,
this dark destroyer fleet did not
invade your eulogy
which showers in phosphorescence
a virtuality –
that undespatched Word™ document
your shadowy cv
Frenchay, 2007
The battle
The battlefield – the swamps of France;
plumes of smoke rise to the sky,
with, all around them,
shrapnel flying,
soldiers dying.
Armies charge; field-guns mow them down;
mudstained, bloodstained soldiers fall,
with, all around them,
crashing mortar,
worthless slaughter.
Grimsby, 1962
This is my earliest surviving poem, written as a school exercise when I was 12. It’s a self-indulgence to print it here but I think my opinion was economical and right. I didn’t express myself so limpidly again for 40 years. Verse 3 was ghastly and I’ve killed it.
innocence sweet-strung dulcimer
never chorded once the sun
never yet won
wisdom snapped-strung dulcimer
can’t play dischords to the sun
all lost in the winning
2005, on a much earlier idea
Starling curls
coiling calls,
clacks at his post;
petrol-breasted
sparkles down
to a perilous landing.
On the lawn
an urgent lurch
like a sprinter with hands
in his pockets:
incredibly lost
with an immigrant’s nerves.
First bearings
are taken on food,
the sure compass-point.
A petrol flash
and the first plunder
is over triumphantly.
Democratic
in ultimate logic,
food is held in common;
I take and you lose –
or then again –
but our kind shall come to good.
Accidental
random provision
is their political economy;
yet starling welfare
is proved in numbers
and never a one shall starve.
If joy through strength
is measured in music,
hear the power of evening –
hear the vespers
of ten million wings
sound away to their free fen hostel.
Chislehurst, 1974-1976
Sulking on my own rock
For Éamon Lankford: Labhair amach!
Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial for a Breton or a Basque of French Navarre to be …. a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship …. than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.
— John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, liberty, and representative government (1861)
Underplay at your risk the metaphor
which welds my language to a body-part;
in forming my inner world its words
have fitly shaped how my synapses fire
and, if I have a death-wish, as you sneer,
the last of a sullen hope
will fuse with my rocks a strong inscription.
They will not deride me before their own dissolution.
2006
The Nosibeam
Upon its noses marches
the Nosibeam onstage,
accompanied by its offspring.
It occupies no page
of any learned web-site,
nor even the OED.
Its first recorded appearance
was put in ink by me.
Upon its noses marches,
or so the case would seem,
accompanied by its offspring
onstage the Nosibeam.
Cambridge, 1972-2005
After Christian von Morgenstern
Mobbed heron
Over the dry hill
slacks a misplaced heron
wallowing like overloaded freighters
on the spiteful sea’s grey heave.
When the ship comes in
the ally tribes of this aloof land
lift misgiving to the air
and jostle the grey hulk in their hundreds.
Do not fall on our land, have no harbour.
Heron plays its last aces
out of its depth, all-in,
hauling on throbs of wide wings
through foreign straits craving its haven.
2005
A pun(y) defence of the pun: a hard read
my bath and my shower
have deposits
my taps
suffer from hard water
and lime lingers at the loo rim –
calcium carbonate clogs my kettle
come pretty acid
CaCO3 + 2 HOC(COOH)(CH2COOH) =
Ca (OC(COOH)(CH2COOH))2 + some
greenhouse gas solution
if I fix them all at once
I achieve economies of scale
I swear you retched at this reasoning,
come on, did you not,
hm?
What spooks folks in a pun?
Disdain breeds for chance things in a world
which we need ordered
explainable
and the two scales rhyme without reason
so you scoff.
But credit me, it’s due.
I seized these words in a fit of glee
and made them chime in unison
like a steeple bell and an electronic pulse
sharing a resonant frequency
in some empty air
and haven’t I made an incident from an accident?
No fluke but a contrivance!
So I wish folks wouldn’t spook:
relax, don’t poop the pun.
They are arranged marriages
small not quite random matings
and no-one should scorn sexual reproduction
that allows wonderful weird mutations
in the parents –
not Darwin nor Lamarck conceived of that.
Can’t you sense that now
scale has scale
CaCO3 has a degree of immensity
and proportion has a precipitate quality?
(And as a footnote:
no zodiac but a paronomastic one
brings far-flung
Libra and Pisces together.)
Rottingdean, 2005
No thanks
She was in the wrong lane, I could sense,
in her BMW 330 coupé
so I eased back to let her move across
which she did.
Don’t mention it, I murmured,
and submissively she acted
on my instruction.
I have that effect on women.
Rottingdean, 2005
Times come
Times come
and cycle monotonously
through sleep
– jolt awake –
when the light form on my forehead
puts my old coat of insufficiency on
and trails its dusty hem in my eye.
And again.
Times come
and cycle monotonously
through sleep
- jolt awake –
when the heavy form
wearing my own disclaimed coat
wrings sweat from my brain.
And again.
Never do I – but how and why –
jolt awake
content that there are things unreachable.
1971
Revelation
Lost beneath snow and shade
long lies Possibility.
Resolution is a quick trick:
the shadow lifts with the shifting sun
and the snow lakes with its lifting.
One whisked gauze and two through one:
such is Revelation.
University Library, Cambridge, 1969-2006
Now that we are in love
the birds sing the same,
the weather does the same old things,
I watch other girls without shame.
But now that we are in love
I actually hear the birds,
the pulsing light seems to mean something,
those girls mutter just silent words
and the harder contours of everything
blur in perilous flame.
*
Now that we are lovers
the old rules don’t hold.
Now we enter highways
unpatrolled.
No guarantees of whether
we fare well or fold.
Our pasts retreat. Allow now
no shame to be told:
keep shame out of it
and guilt can’t be sold.
Let’s come list the treasures
Little gifts of moments
artlessly doled
Many bold persuasions
freely cajoled
Subtle permanences
in abstract gold
Together inrolled
from ageing paroled
scorning the dead-bell tolled
let’s lay down a summer
before the endless cold
2006
With me
Love is nearer now
than no love had me believe.
Like a trusted friend
into my verse
from the first instants
it leapt and slept
with slippered feet
in my pentameters.
When believing I ached
I called love and spoke
what I never had known
by symbol and metaphor.
Knowing now
I am still without words;
barely does love
give itself up to words
but wraps itself
to tonguetalize
in the tips and the lips,
in an eye’s turn, or touch.
Without you I am nearer
to you still and love
than a word is to either;
the dead time is over –
the friend knows his sofa –
and we warmly a onehood.
Sundown by the Severn
Best the forge-red setting fire
fondles the beauty of your face:
I watch the broadening night creep higher,
draw it into such shimmering strands,
and with meek hands
comb into your hair every trace.
Lost here at the brink’s confessional
I write a beginner’s obsessional.
When love is not so hot that it cannot freeze my mind
love is not so cold that it cannot fire heat.
Watching the stars dipping and bowing I briefly
turned to unhook them from their ancient recess
and place them on your heart like a meek
artist aghast at what drops from his hands.
But their unflinching glint would in its coldness
challenge the changing flame within you.
Love is not so cold that it cannot fire heat
when love is not so hot that it cannot freeze my life.
Cambridge, 1969-1976
The loving-cup
Shatter an ancient treasure,
I’ll pick up the bits.
Given time and given leisure
I’ll find the shard that fits.
When the bits are passion
restoration’s tough;
willing’s such a precious ration,
and time is not enough.
2006
How red her eyes?
Shrug a surmise:
your head is wise.
And if she keeps
some minute sighs,
your untrust creeps, your favour dies.
She sleeps,
you reeds and deeps,
even if sadness steeps
her speech with uncertain lies.
To jeopardize
those minute sighs,
out of your eyes
impatience seeps.
For hope to rise,
your spirit weeps, your eyelid dries.
She sleeps,
you reeds and deeps,
even if sadness steeps
her speech with uncertain lies.
1968
Telephone
Tongue-tied
in the red box
stammers conversation
round the wire’s coils
and the saying seems the less
for often coiling by
but the tranquillizer past
steadies the lurching talk
so the act outwords the words
so the lovers use the words
to drug their incoherence
into kisses or the equal
incoherence passing
at their next meeting
or passed once in a dim room.
Cambridge, 1970 – 2005
Caught in a landslide ……
Hi this is my webcam and I’m Alexis
I don’t do words so I’ll show you some pictures
In my house we have CCTV
and I love to see what’s going on
everywhere
let me show you
me looking at my console
and there’s the monitors
There’s my sister and her boyfriend
on the settee they’ve switched the TV on
look it’s Channel 4 you can see the logo
they can’t get enough
of Big Brother
they gag for Matt Hormone
and when Kayleigh goes to do something drab
like wash her jeans
or put surgical spirit on her piercings
Matt takes himself off to the computer
in the quietest room
and logs on
do his fingers wander idly
over the plastic keys?
no – if I
zoom in edgeways you can see from here
his practised movements
writing
I’m staring right into the back of your head
and your eyes
Hello again Matt
this circuit is closed
Rottingdean, 2005
Oh how my tallow quickly burns
and the clocks shoot down
martyr seconds with dictatorial ticks.
I live off their hours
like a scavenging beetle.
Each second’s hallowed blood
feeds me, whilst what I know
compacts the scarlet candle which
I burn, burn down to mark away
my callow sacrifices.
Zwickau, 1972
Gone for a song (qualis artifex pereo)
One more sophisticate
summoned by Art,
crossing the motorway
pissed as a fart,
slips surreptitiously
from an affray,
carolling viciously
once he’s away,
body spasmodical,
hoodie unfurled,
gait unmethodical,
out of this world,
dancing ecdysically,
braying a tune,
mooning exquisitely
back at the moon,
fearing a bollocking,
fleeing the rumour,
now Jackson Pollocking
someone’s Ford Puma –
shattered the cranium;
out of it flowed
sticky geranium
stripes on the road,
brain on the barrier,
gore like war.
Loosed is the ghost of the
M4.
Rottingdean, 2006
Paint on the flagstones
He moved the brush by that flesh
which extended his eye.
A translator, he took
the insubstance of kings and angels,
enslaving them to an infant and a faith.
Home struck the male brush-blows at
the blank, and masked it with flesh
and a doctrine which was the common truth.
He moved his arm on a chain
loose-binding it to an alien mind
and gouged in the moving
with a nail blunt as interpretation
the seventeenth-century story
so lightly-shifting meanings
were interpreted away
and the difference dusted the chancel floor with colour.
His world rioted in his living structure
where fires burned and in burning
burned breaks where fire
could not penetrate, and all of them
burned out hollowly together
till the worldly colours
and any meanings
flickered from sight
as they must in moderns whose common truth
is utterly, bleakly, other.
Cambridge, 1974 – 2005
The occasion for this poem was the damaging of Rubens’ “Adoration of the Magi” in King’s College Chapel by a sick man.
The one or two in you
You’re wired for guilt and shame
and you’re not.
One you doesn’t register blame,
recklessly game −
the other suffers a lot.
Sometimes the one’s in control;
the other submits.
When Screw the World’s on a roll,
life’s a stroll −
loyalties fade in the glitz.
Give Terror of Love a chance
and you’re shot.
It leads you a ragged dance,
rules with a glance
and grips your will in a knot.
You who are bad in the head
have only one you,
either too shy to tread
or aloof from dread:
my sea, my ship, my crew.
Shirehampton, October 2007
Low
At this brink
the end of the world begins.
As eternity sets in
a thin pomp wells
over the streaked north-west
a lifespan away.
The fen has no face tonight;
it has a back-bedroom death.
Quiet and quick before light
it lays down its breath.
How the layers weigh:
the old peat pinned by
the ancient blackthorned bank
a pylon horde bestrides
overflown by planes.
The fen has no colour tonight –
it is drab-filtered twice,
once by imploding light,
again by a dark market price.
About the brink
the hollow towns brew,
brew with a morbid yeast,
ferment at a tread, a long overtread.
The fen has nothing tonight –
it is in drab death.
Dark-downweighted
before some conceivable light,
it disdains to bother with breath.
Cambridge, 1976
Dropping names
Yesterday I dined with Alexander the Great,
paid tribute with his underlings,
the Parthian and the Sogdian kings.
We passed Pharaoh in the Suez strait.
Today I waited on Vínland’s shore
as the full cold sea-waves led
Leif Eiríksson in with his sheepskin score.
That’s what it is to be dead.
1969
Digging the past
I’ve read their poems
and seen their cities’
ossified hearts and
arterial clogging.
Somehow the poems
never quite caught
the furore of the mart,
the drudge of the road,
the toil of the just,
the monotonous pulse
and thrum of the heart
whose best liberation
lay in the warm
surprise of stopping.
The dark descending
What fell away in 1918?
Picturesque toil
The fingered cap
The gentry’s Old England,
Merrie mayhap –
The urge to lay rails
The drive to fill pews
And paint foreign parts
With the Union hues
The glory of war
(When viewed from afar)
Killed by showing things
The way they are
So in this next age
padded by private comforts
free to choose my muse
and place and time of her performance,
I undergo
that drift of timely grief from taut strings
born as if you knew what was to fall
and saw the outer world and the inner
emptied of faith and nation,
brashly betraying the now-fled folk.
Yes, I feel what you knew,
seek landscapes where the old rigours moulder,
those not yet shot through with the new
lifescape alone and colder:
and the lovely notes subdue
an audience of twentieth-century things
respectfully not rapping on my shoulder.
Frenchay, 2006
Song of life
Allow your heir to squander
on lamb’s and peacock’s head
and where the eagles wander
the unction of the dead.
Those who slip from existence;
the treetops in the distance:-
these have at his insistence
the worth of dancers’ steps.
He walks like those whom no powers
are threatening from behind.
His smile lasts out the low hours
when shrouds begin to wind.
To him all places proffer
the mysteries of their coffer;
the homeless man can offer
himself to every wave.
His soul is carried springing
amid the wild bees’ swarm.
The wings of dolphins’ singing
guide his feet in the storm.
His doughtiest supporters
are every world’s four quarters.
The darkening of the waters
constrains the shepherd’s day.
So on the eagle’s flying
the unction of the dead
be lightly lavished by him –
on lamb’s and peacock’s head:
he smiles on these companions.
A garden’s teetering ambience
and lightly-laden canyons
of life support his step.
After Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Inheritance tax
He left his historied wainscot,
his files of forebears gibbeted in paint.
Arm in arm with the smell of toast
and newsprint trivia with the morbid date
he wandered lastly through a loving-grove
into his supple underbracken.
In time they called Your car awaits, sir;
empty it sped when the dusk closed in.
2006
Schliersee
White mountains seek
themselves in the lake-bed.
Their gown of snow
has chilled them and
they quest for warmth
in the iceless water.
Gladly they abandon
great grey sheets
of hostile sky;
I lower my eyes
and before me on
this absolute peace
the mountains lie,
their frigid gown
defying the few degrees.
A scene of 1966 written in 1968
Zitronenfalter
Zitronenfalter,
wann war dein Alter?
Wann rastest du über die Erde,
wie ich es tu und tun werde?
1972
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)
The youngish man died who could see
each shimmer for what it spoke,
grasp each yelp and slither
in accents foreign to most,
and know each scent for a season’s flag,
all as a woven whole.
Who, even dismissing
the flashy bipeds who have made
and unmake the landscape,
could say with whole heart, over his descant,
“Beautiful – every filament”
as fated things retreat
– as inapt life-forms retreat –
to closed archives and the embrace
of David Attenborough,
attended to only at whim for fun
at a button’s click
before a long sleep calls?
Frenchay, 2006
To Eichendorff
The trees are turning golden;
the leaves betray their age
and glory into dying
on a public stage.
Their russet shroud involves them
into a pauper’s grave
where common memory gives them
no face or fame to save.
The trees are turning golden.
Their trunks will live again,
but leaves, like last year’s fashions,
are dust in a fold of the brain.
Master, why should I envy
a poet’s shroud? Because
such leaves pronounce immortally
the little left of us.
1967-1976-2007
I assented with disgraceful eagerness
poems by Richard Coates
The author was born in Lincolnshire and lived for nearly thirty years in Sussex. He now lives in Bristol. This is his third collection.
Previously:
aff eff iff off uff (Sacred Chariot, 2006)
Gatteridge (Sacred Chariot, 2012)
both still available from the author, richardc.yb@gmail.com
The Name To Be 