One Thousand Nights and Counting Read online

  Glyn Maxwell

  One Thousand

  Nights and Counting

  Selected Poems

  PICADOR

  in memory of my friend

  Matthew Burrows

  and my cousin

  Simon Powell

  Contents

  My Turn

  Just Like Us

  Drive To the Seashore

  The Albatross Revolution

  Flood Before and After

  Mattering

  The Pursuit

  Tale of the Mayor’s Son

  We Billion Cheered

  The Eater

  Sport Story of a Winner

  Plaint of the Elder Princes

  Rumpelstiltskin

  Out of the Rain

  Helene and Heloise

  The Ginger-Haired in Heaven

  Garden City Quatrains

  Invigilation

  Love Made Yeah

  Stargazing

  Watching Over

  The Sentence

  Either

  The Margit-Isle

  The Sarajevo Zoo

  The People’s Cinema

  The Sightseers

  From Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun:

  Cine

  The Horses’ Mouths: Pyrois

  The Horses’ Mouths: Eous

  The Horses’ Mouths: Aethon

  A Scientist Explains

  Clymene’s Coda

  The Horses’ Mouths: Phlegon

  The Wish

  Someone at the Door

  A Low God on Krafla

  The Breakage

  Hurry My Way

  Rio Negro

  For My Daughter

  Under These Lights

  Edward Wilson

  Valentines at the Front

  My Grandfather at the Pool

  Letters to Edward Thomas

  And Indians

  On a Devon Road

  Dawn on the Midi

  From Time’s Fool

  ‘When the train stopped I started and woke up’

  ‘In recollection what descended then’,

  ‘At times there’s little mystery to how’,

  ‘They are assembled in the room’

  Playground Song

  The Sea Comes in Like Nothing But the Sea

  The Nerve

  Gatekeepers on Dana

  The Leonids

  Haunted Hayride

  The Game Alone

  Refugees in Massachusetts

  The Flood Towns

  A Hunting Man

  The Year in Pictures

  The Only Work

  The Poem Recalls the Poet

  Hide and Seek

  The Surnames

  A Promise

  A Child’s Wedding Song

  One of the Splendours

  The Snow Village

  From The Sugar Mile

  Granny May at the Scene

  Harry in Red Sunshine

  Sally Tying Her Sister’s Shoe

  Robby Stretching His Legs

  Sally Playing Patience

  Home Guard Man Breathless

  The Old Lad

  Forty Forty

  A Play of the Word

  One Thousand Nights and Counting

  Flags and Candles

  Rendition

  The Tinsel Man

  Mandelstam

  Element It Has

  Dust and Flowers

  Anything but the Case

  Empire State

  Kaspar Hauser

  Cassandra and the King

  Hometown Mystery Cycle

  Thinking: Earth

  It Too Remains

  Dream-I-Believe

  A Walk by the Neva

  Cassandra

  My Turn

  I have been so enchanted by the girls

  who have a hunch, I have been seen

  following them to the red and green

  see-saws. There have been a few of them

  I recognised. I have been recognised.

  I have stood on the roundabout and turned.

  I have swung, uselessly, not as high as them.

  Then seen the parents coming, and the rain

  on rusty and unmanned remaining things.

  I have calculated west from the light cloud.

  Cried myself dry and jumped

  back on the roundabout when it had stopped.

  Started it again, in the dark wet,

  with my foot down, then both my feet on it.

  Just Like Us

  It will have to be sunny. It can rain only

  when the very plot turns on pain or postponement,

  the occasional funeral. Otherwise perfect.

  It will have to be happy, at least eventually

  though never-ending and never exactly.

  Somebody must, at the long-last party,

  veer to the side to remember, to focus.

  All will always rise to a crisis,

  meet to be shot for a magazine Christmas.

  It will also be moral: mischief will prosper

  on Monday and Thursday and seem successful

  but Friday’s the truth, apology, whispered

  love or secret or utter forgiveness.

  It will have to be us, white and faulty,

  going about what we go about. Its

  dark minorities will stay minorities,

  tiny noble and gentle, minor

  characters in more offbeat stories.

  Its favourite couple will appear in our towns,

  giving and smiling. Their tune will be known

  by all from the lonely to the very young

  and whistled and sung. It will all be repeated

  once. Its stars will rise and leave,

  escaping children, not in love,

  and gleam for a while on the walls of girls,

  of sarcastic students beyond their joke,

  of some old dreadful untimely bloke.

  It will have to be sunny, so these can marry,

  so these can gossip and this forgive

  and happily live, so if one should die

  in this, the tear that lies in the credible

  English eyes will be sweet, and smart

  and be real as blood in the large blue heart

  that beats as the credits rise, and the rain

  falls to England. You will have to wait

  for the sunny, the happy, the wed, the white. In

  the mean time this and the garden wet

  for the real, who left, or can’t forget,

  or never meant, or never met.

  Drive To the Seashore

  We passed, free citizens, between the gloves

  of dark and costly cities, and our eyes

  bewildered us with factories. We talked.

  Of what? Of the bright dead in the old days,

  often of them. Of the great coal-towns, coked

  to death with scruffy accents. Of the leaves

  whirled to shit again. Of the strikers sacked

  and picking out a turkey with their wives.

  Of boys crawling downstairs: we talked of those

  but did this: drove to where the violet waves

  push from the dark, light up, lash out to seize

  their opposites, and curse to no effect.

  The Albatross Revolution

  1

  The Residence was coddled by the light

  of albatrosses, many of them silent.

  The summerhouse had had a green door then,

  which banged and banged and shut, and the relevant

  daughters of their Highnesses were to be seen

  nowhere – probably putting on a pl
ay

  or, at that flashpoint of the century,

  heading somewhere new, reluctantly.

  2

  The albatrosses having flown inland,

  the green door flew open. The daughters and

  the friends they had were two groups that were not

  there, and starlings were a small group that was,

  though not for long. The lawn was wide and cold

  with all these new commotions, and the sea

  licked at the bony ankles of the cliff

  as if it was their Highnesses. It rained.

  3

  Somebody laughed hysterically when

  the full whiteness of the Residence

  exposed itself to all – the random all

  who shoved each other out of the forest now.

  The starlings jabbed in the orangery.

  The albatrosses did something different

  elsewhere, the details quite available.

  There was some sour cream in the Residence.

  4

  There were some bottles in the sea. The cliff

  had stood ten centuries of them, and would,

  to be honest, stand twenty centuries more.

  Men climbed the chimneys of the Residence

  even as podgy womenfolk exchanged

  recipes involving cheese and sour cream.

  And they flew flags, the men. And starling crap

  made constellations on the cold wide lawn.

  5

  It rained. Whatever the flag meant, it sulked

  or, at that flashpoint of the afternoon,

  resulted in all sorts of things. The cream

  was put to its sour use. The Residence

  was multi-purpose, snaps of albatrosses

  hung all about. The air grew dark and green

  as uniforms, and, catapulting out

  of a high window, the Albatross-Man.

  Flood Before and After

  It reeled across the North, to the extent

  that even Northerners cried ‘This is North!’

  and what would you have said, to see a sky

  threatening the children with great change?

  Extraordinary clouds! Spectaculars!

  There was the Dimden family, in their barn.

  And long, quite vertical rain, the three horizons

  hunched, different formulations, browns

  and oranges. Then the unlucky Greens

  running with their sons to find their sons.

  The scarecrow and the crow, they did okay,

  getting dark together, but unfrightened.

  Fists of clouds! Genii of glamour!

  Not to mention thunders – not again!

  There stand the Dimdens, safe for once and sad.

  The Greens have found their sons! Now for their daughters.

  But out goes the lightning, giant’s fork

  into a mound of chilli, steaming there

  and where’s it gone? Into the open mouth,

  barn and all, flavours and seasonings!

  Cuddle in the rain, old favourites.

  There goes a Noah, borrowing a plank.

  Little slow to move, we thought. It ends

  with tangles, the new rivers, and the sunshine

  formally requesting a rainbow. Granted.

  The creaking and excusing back to work.

  A valuable man was lost in it.

  That was in the paper, with the picture.

  All the Northern correspondents went

  reading to the telephones, all cold,

  which brought the dry onlookers from the South,

  gaspers, whistlers, an ambassador

  and leading lights to mingle with the hurt.

  The clouds were diplomats of the same kind,

  edging over to exonerate

  and praise. And then the royal son arrived,

  helicoptered down on a flat field,

  glancing up at the sky through the whup of blades,

  attending to the worried with a joke.

  Hell, I don’t know what – we were all cold.

  The landscape looked an archipelago.

  The Dimdens finally twigged, the Greens were found

  beating the Blooms at rummy, in a cave.

  All were interviewed and had lost all.

  All saluted when the helicopter rose.

  Only some came up the knoll with us

  to check our options. Only two of those

  saw, as I did, Noah’s tiny boat

  scarcely moving, at the edge of sight

  below the line, and only I’d admit

  the crow and the scarecrow were rowing it.

  Mattering

  But the next day I was a hood with teeth,

  and the red leaves were ankle-deep. Utter,

  gaping memento mori to myself –

  Alas! To cherish these things so – bobbing.

  And this I memorised: if, in a yard,

  you swear you see something, it’s nothing but

  another guileless chemical moment. –

  When the bonfire-smoke mourned into the sky

  forgetting murders, I was holding out:

  my hands were these accomplishers, but blue,

  distressed with what was animal in them

  and wouldn’t stop its mattering. ‘Alas’ –

  an old word on an old cloud, like my God

  when I was frowning at a picture-book.

  The Pursuit

  Running through woods he came to the wrong wood,

  the round wood. And he stopped there like a man

  would in a sudden temple, and his own blood beat

  on the cocked side, his hurt side, his red portside.

  Running through trees like a deer, victimised,

  a sprinter, of a minority, he passed

  on into blacker greens and deep betweens,

  lost to sight. We shrugged the Home County shrug.

  ‘Running,’ muttered those who report and wait:

  ‘through woods,’ added by them with a hunch and pencil:

  ‘heart beating fast,’ attested by the cadets:

  ‘from here,’ thrice-underlined by those from here,

  he was seen. The relevant people looked for him,

  I know, because their vans were parked on the rim

  of the right wood, and they took their torches with them,

  and left their maps and their furry animals hanging.

  ‘Running through woods, heart beating fast, from here?

  Let’s go.’ The reconstructed Xerox faces

  appeared on walls from here to the uncrossable

  M110, and it was said

  the outer elms came back to life when the wire

  linked them, to politely counsel Don’t,

  and in the ring of fire the rare and common,

  darting, hopping, slithering, trudging, dragging

  towards life-leasing coldness, from the smoke,

  met in the heart of the wood and stared and were doomed.

  It was said in the crackle and crack the stars went out.

  The birds alone took life and the news away.

  In the dry filth of the aftermath the drivers

  found belongings, bagged and took them and waited.

  Then radioed superiors on the rim.

  But he ran elsewhere, though a red X was him.

  Tale of the Mayor’s Son

  The Mayor’s son had options. One was death,

  and one a black and stylish trilby hat

  he wore instead, when thinking this: I love.

  The town was not elaborate. The sky

  was white collisions of no special interest

  but look at the Mayor’s son, at the bazaar!

  ‘I’ve seen her once before . . . ’ Her name was this:

  Elizabeth. The Mayor’s son was eighteen,

  his mind older than that but his mouth not.

  And had no options. ‘Hey, Elizabeth!’


  I could say what was sold in the bazaar,

  I could be clearer on the time of day,

  I could define Elizabeth. I shall:

  every girl you ever wanted, but

  can’t have ’cause I do. She was twenty-one.

  ‘Hi, – ’ the name of the Mayor’s son? Anything.

  ‘Let’s get something together!’ someone said.

  ‘The Mayor’s son out with Lisa!’ someone gossiped.

  The afternoon, about to be misspent,

  stirred coffee with its three remaining fingers:

  ‘They are sugar-crazy, they are milk-lovers

  and they won’t last.’ Some things about the town:

  blue-printed in the days of brown and white

  and laid down one fine evening, late July.

  Musicians lived there, painters, people who

  did murders they’d mulled over, councillors

  for other towns, golfers, golfers’ widows,

  widows of chip-eating carcasses

  dipping their chips and watching, wannabes

  who are by now and has-beens who aren’t yet,

  people, ex-people, exes, seven mates

  of mine, no friends of yours, not you or me,

  a footballer, a brothel-keeper, linesmen,

  a Cabbage Patch Doll buying her own home,

  a band of Stuart Pretenders, a fire-hose

  on a motorbike frequenting the one club,

  and the man himself. No, strike him, he just left.

  Divide the town into eleven parts,

  throw ten of them away and look at this: