Thursday, November 11, 2004

The Dirty Mouth of Edmund Burke

I took an alternative route to work this morning. I have recently found myself extremely dismayed at how many different ways I have of getting home in the evenings and yet each of them takes about the same time. I then get further depressed by the need to actually make these journeys. This hatred of the journey home regularly has me through the floor, stuck with all the other commuters in some traffic jam. In contrast, the few times I have had to take the train and bus have made me quite happy. I actually used to write poems on the bus which risks some derision in this city I suppose. Despite the tradition of musicality, I can avoid the generalisation made by Boris Johnson and say that poetry is still seen as slightly fey and suspect. Years ago, I used to write manual (i.e. using a pen) poetry during lunch hours, what was described by one of my colleagues as 'Wandering Lonely'.

Strawberry Picking

Treasures for us have to make me remember all that takes place this day. There is me so many years ago, wishing in the sunshine as that sweet fruit dipped and sugared made me happier. We were friends together in those fields at the start of your diary, two boys singing Gino and throwing strawberries at each other while the cold-war raged and fell apart. The farmer’s rich children came out in their whites for tennis and I thought they thought of me not much, a rural accent made glassy at the limit of my hearing and I am better than them, sharing this moment with what becomes literature.

And then it rained, rotting the fruit in the plants and they paid us to just pick, by the hour, how to save the field from mud and mush. It was flat but twice the piece rate to just extract that mushy red rot and burn it. Think of the sound of the rain on the dayglow coats, the pat-pat on the hoods. And the Gino boys were not there today. I thought of them, cool and rich from many punnets picked and rated highly by the matronly overseer, laughing and drinking in some city bar. I thought everyone was a poet then, not just spirit fiends and avaricious drunkards. Strawberry liquor ferments in the pools between the plants, a sticky glue that burns with the discarded fag ends, a slow drug promising an oblivion in the clotted congealed mess that flows against some lunar gravity, down my arms like scars.

Those fields are all flat now. We drove by the gatehouse the other day, a burned out flaky painted wreck that seems to say that the whole farm has folded. What happened to those bright girls in their whites? They have their bald husbands now or maybe some in tow for maintenance at least while they drink and spend the last penny I made for them in the fields. Taxed by tax and paper work, the farm failed and returned to the moor and deer. My children are still to young for this story but one day I will show them the comparison that hit me the first time I opened this book, this three-bookmarker that takes a year to read.

and so yes those boys came for me that night breathing fumes of rough cider I lived for just one night up to my ears in the smoke and music the walls of mud and straw just like they were for older kings against the smoke four hundred years ago no commas in any conversation marion made older in that bar we fell slower over the tables until the lock in came the landlord trying to throw us out gave up and gave us more drink until we slept as dawn came grey light over the trees and strawberry fields coy mistress in the upper clapboard kissed them teasingly and ran home laughing to the telling off for staying out she expected from the second i saw who came that night before mythology and ghosts in the woodwork teeth around the doorposts and then we were away to college alone again giving up naturally and starting again with a new set of friends boys who tried to be the gino singing angels and failed in the city rain fruit made sweeter by its rarity gave me pause and how we loved everything that was to come and is now


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