Merr Christma Everybod

(sic again)

I found a set of unabridged tapes of Laurie Lee reading Cider with Rosie and As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning. It was in Help the Aged and was signed so I bought it to listen to in the car. I was worried that the author would not have the best voice for this but as befits the poetry of the book, his reading is shot through with feeling for the places and events he talks about. The box is signed by the way.
My dad tells me that he once heard Henry Williamson reading from Tarka the Otter and that he just didn’t have the voice for it, doing the whole thing in an indistinct monotone. I suppose that some of this could be down to nervousness; I am sure I would be the same. Anyway what do you expect of one of Mosley’s cronies? TS Eliot is only slightly better. My wife hates my impression of him reading Prufrock. You can hear it here yourself – TS Eliot, not me. There is an advert at the start so keep listening. Compare and contrast with Sylvia Plath who has the same intonation as Eliot though when just speaking she sounds uncannily like Loyd Grossman.

A poem from some time ago because I can’t write anything good at the moment.

This Numb Age

A Milestone,
a lichened,off-skew post,
flashed by me like a shadow,
not with direction,
just telling me
how far I’d come.

All those Bacchanalian girls,
called me from the screens,
or sirens, bell-like singers
waving, blank but happy
as the sun-set,
intellect evaporated
and my mind became
the gunk that made it,
dragged it from the sea
to make it think.

Here’s Scarlet,
a bleach-bombed
set-square for the
middle-aged and bored,
the blank and breathless
family man.

I am in the galleries
of twenty years ago,
made mad by boredom
and stupidity,
a blank (because it works),
black, aged critic,
dried-up and cynical
(because it always works.)

I would re-think,
push a lever here
to free the sluggish
thoughts of this, my
treacle mind,
and fly back,
to those days of heatwave,
where we sledged in summer,
over the hill like Marie
into the forest and the snow.
And Scarlet turns, Lithuanian,
a memory of Europe in her face,
to kiss the screen to grey.


I will filter all these words,
take them through the bushes
to the bottle-dumps
we found as children,
the festooned, secret places
where we lost money
and dowsed for water-pipes
amongst the rocks and trees.

And every line
wants to start the same way,
the world, the earth is mine,
spinning on my fingers,
every woman mine,
and every friend an equal,
in these underpasses,
the links to hospitals
and those we want to hide.

I photographed the clouds
with red and polarising filters,
made them darker,
as deep white against the sky
as any of my demons.
And Marie cried, across the road
from me, a cousin in those books,
the chief mind of New Jersey,
a princess long thrown
across the ocean,
a ballista bolt re-entered
in this gutted city.

And in her Latin,
I deciphered odd words,
felt the numbers
she discussed, as flowers
falling through the scented air
to me as message
and seduction.

This numb age,
makes me real.
This array of visions
is no more than shadows
on the wall
to prove the life outside
the cave is safety.
I pour water on the fire
and hear it
hissing into darkness.