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From disco to disappearance.
Greater Still
David Swarbrick
1.
NOT HERE
Still dark,
thin curtains resist
a taut March sky;
my room is uncompleted – unoccupied;
my possessions shrink beside books, clothes,
stuff left here by others –
and because you are not near -
not in this village or the next –
not in this thin doctored place
so far from the southern Weald –
because we are not here –
my body moves, a blind man,
proving the place,
calculating distances
between here and there –
a bleak, discordant siren
enticing me to stay,
with a nonsense song:
that there is no other way.
BEDFORDSHIRE, MARCH 1979
2.
EDGE
Ploughed fields
force me to the edge –
a destitute land, barren and friendless –
hedgerows of briar and blackthorn
stiff as razor palisades,
a slammer
of bare trees, flooded ruts thick,
greasy, drowning mud
and a thin, slashing horsewhip wind
to keep at bay my breakout.
BEDFORDSHIRE, MARCH 1979
3.
CEEDED
i
Light haemorrhages,
bleeds through brooding trees, though copse.
We await the storm.
ii
Sound of the quiet moor –
small hours of dark certainties,
sleepless, terminal.
iii
This, the toughest place,
a night long anvil smashing
every dream that comes.
iv
He has let the room –
and now a watcher steals
everything he knows.
v
Come and commandeer
this world, that world, take them all -
we have an excess.
vi
Lift, scatter, dust, wind
down the ragged station cold,
strangers ever stirring.
vii
Blue electric crown –
by the sky, I bring you close:
it covers us both.
BEDFORDSHIRE, MARCH 1979
4.
CEASELESS
A cloudless blue
invites a house, long-lost, white
- honoured guest, seated,
air still as whispers,
friends dining in candlelight;
a record playing, photographs shuffled --
as if a kindly cardsharp dealt redeeming kings
LANGOLD HOUSE, SUMMER 1979
5.
BOMB
Green fists of bud
lurch towards summer –
bring me
to Sussex downs laid on chalk, cut sheer -
tracks to the sea.
I lie - toes out,
following patterns on the waves;
following people spreading towels; following families
sweating in a salty breeze – sun pilgrims, returning
with plastic bags and floppy hats.
The day has killed their talk;
there is only
the sexy grass beneath bare feet –
vast smooth fields below a prosperous sky –
a measureless ocean –
the smell of summer,
spreading like a blast.
BEECHY HEAD, JUNE 1981
6.
SCHOOL
Overnight, our schools have become
strewn streets in ruined cities -
lessons taken
by looted shops, gutted cars –
classrooms reached down roads burning
with debris from the night before;
the playground, a hearth
of petrol flames shared on television;
the curriculum recast
by ragged warriors
in cities north to south –
even unobtrusive towns have traded in
their silence for slogans, as if all this
could ever start a new term.
LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981
7.
BUSTED
This room is busted –
this house is broken –
bolted, a trail of bricks and masonry.
Barbed wire, red with rust,
defines the edges
of a disappearing drive
Birds call - boundlessly friendless.
LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981
8.
PETITION
Forgive us – say a prayer –
let’s dine on blood.
Give us this day our daily bread - the man haemorrhaging
his life on bags of spilt basmati rice.
All kingdom come -
unhallowed bodies bobbing downriver; lepers
trespassing the garden gates (dry to the right, wet to the left).
The Power and the Glory -
the corpse delivered from evil
on a jute bier of marigolds, weaving through traffic.
Ever and ever -
scraps of horse and jockey
minced on earth by a Naxalite bomb, bound for heaven,
Thy will be done.
LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981
9.
TRIBUTE
i
This makeshift air, choked.
The dreams the old men held dear,
mountains poised to rise.
ii
Tapers are unlit;
the alter is empty now,
its trinkets packed away.
iii
Summer twists the knife –
leaves an unwieldly wilderness,
a wreath, remembered.
iv
Still he assails,
as if love would ever be
an explanation.
LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981
10.
FICTION
Why let him dream when really –
he cannot;
why
let him think that he will live without end,
that he will draw
the flame from fire,
that
he can take it to the shadow –
to the silver in the dim –
to burn forever more?
LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981
11.
KID
Oh, little boy –
Oh, little boy –
what do you think of me?
I've not time
to hold the world up –
I’m too busy –
don’t you see?
SUSSEX, AUGUST 1981
12.
HIM, HE, US
This is the best view!
He walked into the room - and it was his.
He walked
into the air and trees –
into the walls of an old barn and they were his.
You are me, said the View.
The blades of grass, the ancient sea agreed -
viewing the View that was he.
We are one and indivisible cried the priest,
smiling
into outstretched hands.
The bricks of the house –
that knew no other form but that of clay -
were glad,
and called to the rocks below –
mother, father, sister, brother we are sky.
Praise be!
LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981
13.
LATER
i
Here now, this child,
undaunted by any debt,
or speculation
ii
The tree is lost now.
Thickets and webs of bramble hide
its tough witness.
iii
No one will find you.
Lounge and laugh in the long grass
till the day is dark.
iv
Later, he put aside
all the things that made him yours –
yet the old day dawns.
v
A fascination;
never by windows can I
just watch your walking.
LANGOLD HOUSE. APRIL 1982
14.
PULL
We have been divided
when – precisely – you bred
another life, another death
inside of you.
Year by year
I shut it all away – place it carefully.
in undisturbed rooms;
I have shut it up
in a big old house;
in a big
old hidden house encircled by a huge dark forest;
in a big
old secret house surrounded by an infinite ocean
teaming with sharks.
And the days pull on - addictive, gripping –
pushing everything away.
LANGOLD HOUSE. APRIL 1982
15.
GAME
I play the game
of guessing motives – as do they –
the carriage, crowded.
Our train is bumping up to London.
Outside things are blue. Suburbia is a dusky red lady
not without her charms.
I am feeding off them., they off me, all of us upon each other -
we cannibals,
we cannibals together.
WOLVERHAMPTON, MAY 1982
16.
THERE HE IS
There he is –
the boy in the sheepskin coat –
the one from the party,
the one my sometimes-girlfriend
is cross with me about -
for not being cross with her
for sleeping with him.
What do I care?
His hair is the colour of the cut wheat
I ate.
ABERYSTWYTH, JUNE 1982
17.
FINALE
You have not asked me this, Fiona
but my answer –
for now at least –
(and now is quite enough) -
that had I just minutes – just minutes left-
just minutes before the world ends,
before the big bang and kingdom come;
if I had just minutes,
then, yes, I would spend them here
as I spend them now –
dwarfed by huge trees –
lit by the silver clouds
of a warm Sussex night,
with me, myself and I.
BALCOMBE, JULY 1982
18.
PROPHET
Yet, by his face,
the peacock, flying
wraps the corners of the world,
where the sea rounds
green in greatness
sun and sand and cliff laud on,
and in his eyes,
the shrinking mirror
never now sees all.
EASTBOURNE, JULY 1982
19.
SOUND
Against the sky a bat -
inside the forest a noise -
beside the lake a splash -
a cry upon closed eyes.
BALCOMBE PLACE, JULY 1982
20.
GIST
i
You live at night now -
have learnt to cover your tracks –
bury black on black.
ii
Telling lines remain –
within a puzzling space.
Winds blow every way.
iii
In the old forest
the fallen seeds cannot grow
where no sunlight falls.
iv
On the high chalk cliffs
a wavering cry of gulls.
The friendless sea sighs.
v
Secret, summer calm,
the wide green sea moves and runs
as the land cannot.
vi
An old secret told,
the sky breaks in strident flames,
its every secret shared.
vi
Finally – nothing.
The storms have ended, the land
breathes unfailingly.
BALCOMBE PLACE, JULY 1982
21.
HEARSAY
The track is rough, its road uncertain:
fields burn in a harvest moon;
and all around
the fragments of stories -
no more than fables now
told to others by those who heard them
when the tales were true,
chronicles in fact,
written in huge illuminated books
the later kings had burnt.
ABERYSTWYTH, SEPTEMBER 1982
22.
TOTAL WORSHIP, YOU
Total worship, you
are the demon, gone,
and grace gliding chariots through the clouds.
Emperors will thrust;
you are the sun, the moon,
the catalogue of universes, rolled up unto your
one
small important
peak.
ABERYSTWYTH, OCTOBER 1982
23.
WALES
i
See how now he hunts
in a dark and teaming wood,
goaded, as usual.
ii
Philosophers row.
We place our conflicting gains
beneath green alters
iii
New tenants lodge here
in rooms of new beginnings.
Ever gone, the last.
iv
A quiet house, this –
outside the day’s arrangements;
a cool Welsh rain falls.
v
The new moon rises
over the mountains of Cors Caron,
a private world unmasked
SWYDDFFYNNON, NOVEMBER 1983
24.
KILLED
We are leaning near,
towards such separate fractions of a whole –
caught in the shallows of quiet days,
between land and sea –
between silences that start unnoticed,
withdraw, unsaid –
and in every room – we have been killed -
down every passageway
within the lobby, attic, spare room, in your room, in mine,
a fatherland mothering its divisions
into one.
DHAHRAN, DECEMBER 1983
25.
HIGH WEALD
My memory hordes the last escarpment -
fields inferring,
with each twist of hedgerow, smudge of copse,
parish steeple, sail of oast
a world reclaimed.
DHAHRAN, DECEMBER 1983
26.
REDEEM
I
Separate space all lost.
In sleep, I admit my limbs,
touch and hold to yours.
ii
I would chuck away
the praise you want, even the songs –
discard a lofty house.
iii
His eyes reveal nothing –
a void, suggesting answers, all
secret, bleak, unshared.
iv
A bare day, today -
the great blaze of light hidden,
a spy behind trees.
v
Oh, but one of us
is destined for servitude,
turning Samson’s wheel.
v
It’s the sum that counts -
after all’s been done, forgotten.
The sum calculates.
vi
Down darkening streets
the easy light is trafficked,
leaving silhouettes.
vii
When the gain is gold -
into view, the watcher's face,
never really gone.
viii
Each takes, takes and takes
I, you, they, the world all had,
kidnapped with kindness.
ix
But for that far line
I would not know this place again –
wide fields, unbound.
HAMPSTEAD, FEBRUARY 1984
27.
IN SEARCH OF
Little boy leaning
in a great green tree –
falling, like leaves to old gods
that cannot finish or rest.
You
turn beside me heavy, asleep -
you slice into me warm, asleep -
you rouse against me trusting, asleep -
and yet
you are not my kind.
HAMPSTEAD, JULY 1984
28.
PASSER BY
In any way but this
I had expected you –
practised what would be said
when we remet;
noticed once more the gait, the habits –
hear again phrases
unheard for seven years.
City summers have no summer.
When we’ve remet
it has always been back in the country
looking across white fields –
the weald
dwindling in a green haze, dog days,
blanching in the sun.
The offices are closed,
the evening restaurants
open to people passing time till Monday.
We are not due to meet
Your faces startles like someone’s recognised –
but it is not the same.
I pass you by, alert, relieved.
I pass you by.
SOHO, OCTOBER 1986
29.
A DELICATE THING
i
You live inside me.
Now I direct your freedom,
daily close the gap?
ii
Almost forgotten -
what’s gone claims the greater part,
roars and roars in me
iii
Nothing hurts much now
but a useless bastard love –
loud as feral psalms.
iv
I see your face again –
and from people I don’t know,
your voice, suggested.
v
Ever to others
a ghosting smuggles you in –
strangers, slight, alike.
vi
Wide as the swift sky:
sun, sail, sea, beating like drums,
beginning what’s gone.
SOHO, OCTOBER 1986
30.
KISS
See how it comes, finally,
late, effusive – a Golden Age –
arousing, with a kiss,
the succession of desire -
the kiss of Jacob – Samuel, Judas, Ruth -
the given kiss that waits –
and all of life
paused, a battle-ready,
well-equipped, armour polished,
boots strapped, stranded –
the real rival - master of a thousand guerrilla skirmishes –
hidden in the insidious creases of a landscape
that is commonplace.
PRUSSIA COVE, OCTOBER 1986
31.
TO J.B.
Did you find peace –
die in peace –
all life fixed to a final point -
I wonder.
I read
of everyone in the Old Boy's Journal:
the dinner at Boodles, the marriages,
births; the old boys who returned,
strangers each one -
until this page, until this turning
brought up your name
pinned to the top of a small, neat paragraph
set in ten-point Times Roman
below a thin black line.
All it said
was that you had died
after a long illness
(and that you walked your dog
across the school rugby pitches
at the end).
And I scout
for what it left unsaid,
the boundaries breached
the thoughts that woke you,
hunted you, lauded you.
Bu tonight
it is simply your beauty I recall,
your clipped, dark face,
your way of playing a piano,
a secret said;
your slim, young body.
Tonight, it is you I see.
MAYFAIR, 1993