One Thousand Nights and Counting Read online

  from town and our life here. It seemed to us

  it was all farm to the start of the next farm.

  It was selling its things to everyone whose plans

  had ground to a stop on the road that afternoon.

  Round here if you stop long enough then boom –

  tall women come in cardigans and jeans

  and everything’s a stall. Car-passengers,

  grey and fit and buckled in there, lifers,

  all turned back to their sentences, but whatever

  opens unexpectedly to strangers

  possessed us, so we slowed, and stopped. The haycart

  was both the farthest and the first of things

  we saw, beyond the gift-shop selling pumpkins

  for luck, and ghosts and Indians for mascots.

  So instead we ambled up towards the sign,

  making an M with Alfie’s arms, Maxwells,

  past pumpkin heaps and jars on the haybales,

  towards the horse and cart and the haycart man.

  He handed the children on and the mothers on,

  and cleared a space for three, till it felt to us

  like the gap was suddenly waiting for us, and this

  intervened. And the look on the haycart man

  intervened. So did the scope of the field,

  stretching away from Saturday like a hand,

  out into Massachusetts, towards England,

  into the past, and from it. The air filled

  with cold and we chose pumpkins at a stall.

  Two, and two toys for Alfie. There was a card

  explaining what their dollar for the cart

  would get them: it would get them a ghost tale,

  some spookiness in daytime. It had rolled

  by then, that wagon. I could see its pale

  brown halted speck from the highway, as if hell

  were littleness, and they were being told.

  The Game Alone

  The Purple School and its sworn enemy

  contend again. I sidle in among those

  seeing it: alumni of the Purple,

  and opposite numbers – literally, each class

  in Magic Marker: womenfolk of ’70

  proffer pies in frilled tents, in an oval

  round the patterned field. I stroll a lap

  in coat and scarf along the generations,

  ’80, ’64, grey men in sportswear,

  already smiling at the leading question,

  and thirty autumns pass as they look up

  to hear announcements crackling from somewhere.

  One mascot’s like a man, one’s like a bull.

  The man’s huge plaster head is done to look

  colonial, bewigged; he’s on the side

  of everyone I’m sitting with, for luck,

  while they deride him over there, they howl

  and make bull horns, bent fingers to the head.

  The Purple flag flies here. Both sides of course

  are cheer-led by those girls and by this brute

  who stomps along the stand in a tracksuit,

  bellowing at the old folks to support.

  Below, the game goes on and a side scores.

  I think of asking how and decide not;

  it suddenly feels like asking television,

  though television knows. In fact I change,

  stroll round, become a White-on-Scarlet guy,

  why not. Our chant is going up – ‘Revenge!’ –

  and a row of girls, all blonde and loyal and frozen,

  try joining in just as it dies away.

  I notice, when the game is in its times

  of rest (again), that this whole bank of people

  is gazing out across the churning river,

  at a world where what is white is coloured purple,

  but otherwise all’s well. A fresh face beams

  to see its twin, souls gladden with a shiver.

  From far away, from that wide field away,

  the bucket-headed mascot from the past

  turns all the rest to background. It’s a game,

  you want to say when seeing him, when faced,

  and your skull small. The stands and hills and sky

  go darker than expected in the time,

  for there’s a light that it can seem the game

  alone is generating. A great cheer

  on mine – the bull side – and it almost ends,

  with the old-timers wobbling up to roar,

  vocabulary boiled down to a name,

  and it does end, when thirty-seven seconds

  vanish from the screen – a voice confides,

  they’re running down the clock – far over there,

  the crowd leaps up, and over here it sits.

  The field lets go its lines; it doesn’t care

  who scampers on to form the ring of weeds

  around a violet mushroom-crop of helmets,

  or the off-white and muddy red melee

  disintegrating to some weary boys

  bareheaded between parents. Now it’s cold

  and finished. Down among the beaten guys

  three girls are searching. All their jerseys say

  ATHLETICS in the dusk. They find and hold

  their treasures, 45, 8, 84,

  and try to speak that body language, bowed

  dismay, though in a secret swirl of joy

  to be the one despondent at his side.

  The winners melt away and can have more.

  The losers hold the field. Too suddenly

  for some, here comes the Purple flag, the guy

  is taunting us – not us, I mean my side –

  by streaming it below our wooden stand,

  lording it with something not quite pride,

  more personal, all his. As he runs by,

  this White-on-Scarlet, talking with a friend,

  shoots out a hand that gets it, jerks the cloth

  half off its stick, and stops him in his track.

  I’m very near. The victor is amazed

  that happened and is grinning but in shock,

  his eyes wondering What now? They are both

  lost for an act. The third one’s realised,

  and, setting free the flag, averts a scene.

  So the bearer wanders on, unsure, long fields

  between him and his home. No one close by

  knows quite what’s to be done with what he feels;

  they file away in time, treading the green

  homewards, passing strangers on the way,

  contemporaries from the long-rivalled school,

  or their own schoolmates who were in the future.

  All things have been exchanged, and I can’t see

  by now who’d cheered for what. It seems much darker

  than anyone could play in. A tall girl

  is carrying the bull mask by the eye,

  and as I look back nothing in the stands

  can stay. Things seem to drain in unison

  down the field and chuckle through the gates,

  things tilted from the world. The feeling’s gone;

  I’m left with it. I scribble with blue hands

  and head home through a car park, by fog lights.

  Refugees in Massachusetts

  Everyone had to leave in a bloody hurry.

  No one had to come here. Those that did –

  the ones who should be sorry were not sorry.

  The ones who shouldn’t be

  run restaurants or laundromats or serve you

  shyly in the mall. Exquisite hands

  show you your change. Or chattily they drive you

  when you’re too tired to say,

  when all the diddy icons on the dashboard

  tremble. It’s your town and not your town

  when you leave tips for them. What’s barely whispered

  where they meet is true:

  they might encounter
him from the old world,

  who came at night, who giggled at their papers . . .

  Might see him smoking by the baseball field,

  padding towards the diner,

  lip-reading in the library. That man

  escaped here, he too sobbed or stared ahead,

  made landfall; he eats pretzels in the line.

  They are aware he’s there

  both when he is and isn’t there. No crimes

  will stick in the new life. There is no court

  in session for the narratives and claims

  their voices split to make,

  no angles to examine. There are times

  they jump and times they clasp. There is a wood

  they come to in a downpour, or have dreams

  they come to in a downpour.

  The Flood Towns

  At the midnight of the August day appointed,

  a thousand or so

  remaining inhabitants of the doomed towns

  popped champagne

  at the abrupt cessation of town business,

  of community

  in any legal sense, the last agreement

  being that spree

  till two o’clock, when all at once car headlamps

  lit the hillside.

  And in the morning those who had been ready

  were gone,

  leaving behind eight ragged families

  with nowhere else

  to be, and these it would have been who heard

  the very first

  tinkering of rain upon the rooftops,

  or saw its fingers

  spot the windows, sniffed it through the door

  opened to save

  the washing, and perhaps it did sound different,

  the rain this time,

  not because it was fiercer, more aware

  than former rain,

  but because it fell for hours in the hearing

  of folk who knew

  none in heaven or earth with any stake

  in stopping it.

  A Hunting Man

  Nothing but snow about. A hunting man

  set out from his own truck and his sleeping son,

  who followed him, found no one, and was found

  five days later frozen to the ground.

  His father had been nothing but a fool.

  He went about his chores, he went to school

  for nothing, and he waited in his truck.

  The days were featureless and the nights black

  he drove into. He hunted in that place,

  he camped there in the trees, he heard the ice

  shifting in the branches. ‘Not the best,’

  his sister told a lady from the press,

  ‘the thing he did,’ and chatted on the path.

  But he’d assured her that his Christian faith

  prevented him from carrying out his will.

  A judge considered thirty days in jail

  appropriate for manslaughter. The man

  dissented, and some yards from where his son

  was found he shot himself. Nothing but snow

  about, nothing but trees, nowhere to go.

  Peace is as poor a word for what he has

  as Silence is for what it signifies.

  Justice softens to sweet nothings here.

  Love holds its own, admit it, as before.

  The Year in Pictures

  For the Year-in-Pictures feature,

  that annual old favourite,

  the man behind the night desk

  was dealing with five thousand

  possibles at high speed,

  a speed at which his blond head

  was shaking and his fingers

  propelling off so many

  the air was never empty

  of the white-backed and numbered

  snapshots as they fluttered

  earthward in succession.

  The Only Work

  in memory of Agha Shahid Ali

  When a poet leaves to see to all that matters,

  nothing has changed. In treasured places still

  he clears his head and writes.

  None of his joie-de-vivre or books or friends

  or ecstasies go with him to the piece

  he waits for and begins,

  nor is he here in this. The only work

  that bonds us separates us for all time.

  We feel it in a handshake,

  a hug that isn’t ours to end. When a verse

  has done its work, it tells us there’ll be one day

  nothing but the verse,

  and it tells us this the way a mother might

  inform her son so gently of a matter

  he goes his way delighted.

  The Poem Recalls the Poet

  This is for him, the writer, him I term

  the creature of two feet, for he’d present

  his face two feet away. He made a warm

  glow to see by, willing and well-meant,

  but not, I’d have to say, for the long haul.

  Things he began were things I’d have to end,

  I sensed immediately. When I recall

  the touch of what he did with his near hand

  the mood comes over me, but the mood goes,

  and that reminds me too. November days

  the thought of him resolves into a voice

  that states it matters now – so does the wind,

  but neither moves a muscle of my face

  before it dies as if it read my mind.

  Hide and Seek

  Of all the things to win at. There I am,

  Immobilised except for my young gut,

  Which does its jellyfish and does its clam

  Because you’ve come to double-check the hut:

  And the relief is evangelical

  That I can breathe again and show my face,

  Until all other faces show that all

  Are found and mine was the last hiding-place.

  Then many draw to it as to a shrine,

  In glum approval, jealous but sincere,

  That of the silences you favoured mine,

  And the last thing that mattered mattered here.

  The Surnames

  for Matthew Bell

  There being no word to hand without its hole for light,

  its origins, its loss as I set eyes on it,

  there being nothing that had come to nothing else,

  I took the recollected way to school and back.

  It was a clear day, in that it felt cleared for this,

  and hedges neat and hedges ragged passed me by.

  The streets were lanes again, the houses cottages,

  my life so far a daydream of a life ahead,

  my life ahead at home in what had gone before,

  my hands in pockets for a mile of afternoon.

  These afternoons are gifted but are left alone

  to dabble in the sun. The thing they leave to dry

  is their own town in childhood and its look in age.

  Each cottage brought a name and surname into mind.

  Each surname brought a face and a recalled event

  that made it catch my eye, hang like a coat of arms

  a moment. At the pace I walked, the pace at which

  they slip the mind, the surnames might instead have been

  white crosses in a formal line, where proper nouns

  and silence meet and all that comes of it are flowers.

  A Promise

  I made my child a promise, so a weight

  was passed to her. I saw how carefully

  its power was handled, that it lit the thoughts

  around it, and I felt it warm her talk

  and urge the hours along. Since I, like you,

  no longer know a word like that, the light

  she gained was lost to me. It didn’t mean

  I’d let her down – I didn’t – but I seemed

  to b
e aligned with those who might in time,

  as if I’d somehow set coordinates.

  A Child’s Wedding Song

  Thumb and finger make a ring

  to see the future through.

  I can see the world through it,

  only the world and you,

  only the world and you alone.

  If I should break this ring,

  where will I find you in the world

  though I find everything?

  One of the Splendours

  The bloom between blue-pink and cherry-pink

  on our north wall was new, began, was out –

  one of the splendours made to make us think

  it’s time to learn some names. We’d done without

  since coming here in winter, in the grey.

  The bird with the three semi-tones, the bird

  that seems to be half air, the butterfly

  that seems to be half everything but word –