Millennial
The
train arcs into the station,
the
platform roof is bronzed
with a
morning lick of rare sun,
the arc
makes sunshine flame
and
spark the bronze
like a
forger’s sword work.
Shall I
savour these announcements,
salute
fellow passengers with ave atque vale
or tear
my coat off into the forecourt winds?
Sky was
red
but now
above us all it lowers
bonfire
powder and grit.
Avoiding
each other’s looks
we walk
down separate paths
to Münster.
A
rutting pig, bloat in his bed,
speaking
in tongues,
a new
House of Atreus:
he will
fertilise the earth
with
death, quicken it with fire.
Our
downward faces in puddles
discern
the sky’s face
and some
discern the signs
whiffs of morning assail, meat perfumes
and the sour patience
of passengers
boarding a bus across the river.
Cold embraces, more
intimate than a lover:
the river should warp,
crack upwards in a glacial thrust,
shatter the glass exoskeletons of City sentinels
and make flinders of blue and dirty sky
tinkle down on crystalline juts of wave
as all the temples tumble.
A tree burns
in a sudden plate-glassed sun storm.
Who is
this other one of me
who
sometimes beckons,
sometimes
edges in beside me
and
delicately touching my shoulder
whispers
something? I smile,
nod and
chant along.
6000
years is long enough.
We’d
looked up into dawn’s remains
and the
stars had fled before we reached them
even
Venus
which
held longer in the smallest ember
was soon
away
and battered and terrified the moon has
fled.
The
river is high.
The
preacher’s muted tuba rumbles on Jesus.
A bus
brake screams like an eagle.
New
scavengers may comb abundance,
rummage
unsullied through filth and char
and make
our refuse beautiful. In assurance
let them
build upon the fathers of death
there will
be something else, for now
already,
newness now and strangeness
fumble for
the land a moment,
grasp the
land then moor securely, and look
look
everywhere,
the new
possessors are here already,
birthed
easily, tall,
their
steps earthed and purposeful.
Give way.
I am blind
in the day’s night-time
or see
night more clearly in the day
I can’t
belong
I am a
former thing
ignite me,
make me fire
blacken
the sky with me
I reach
for your hand and yours
but you
are gone into the blank
or into
the freshness. I foresee it all
and fall
into nothing now
and fade.
I won’t
await another call
even if a
call could come
and
hailing the receptionist
across an
acid gaze
that shows
agreement or else
shows
nothing and that’s agreement,
I mock the
acts required,
Mr Wolf in
every office smile,
what’s the
time,
but
populate the risk register,
what’s the
time,
with new
information,
stats
marked red,
the time,
it’s late,
it’s dinner time,
but
everyone is calm and I am calm
and
awaiting the broad finality, or mine
presaged
by a rot-deep shade
my outline
in the plasma screen
I know
with sandwich-board precision
there’s been enough of this
They
bristled near him in the settlement as they bristled
at rats in
the granary and coughed recognition at him
as he
walked in silence to the fields and threshing.
He
shivered them out from him, and they reformed
in milling
circles of ungainly reverence
then fell
back towards routine’s stockades.
Some
whispered doubts: that eggy stain,
a finger
of smut on his face for days.
Few gave
him fellowship’s straight looks,
while he
never reached for fellowship,
lived
alone, venerated outcast,
and shared
only cautious necessary words
with the
other hands.
The
Old Smith,
shoulders
aslant, wave-steed in storm,
purblind,
was the last who’d been there, apart
from him.
The seeress danced a spell
a-jig many
moments on a table-top.
She wailed
conjurations, recalled the Smith,
fell words
of warding from lips
cracked
and frothy, her eyes asleep.
Then with
a surprise bound into the bodies
she
dismounted, her eyes blazed open
and she
walked among them. She muttered and snarled
in the old
tongue, hands clasped,
the
left-hand forefinger pointing upwards
a cupped
candle sharp and long,
then
stopped before him. Six he was,
seven
maybe, waiting at table,
a visiting
chieftain’s ward, offspring
of a
favoured slave freed near death.
The
chieftain died a fortnight later.
The
seeress stretched and exhaled at the heavens,
breathed
all over the boy to mark him,
grovelled
before him, motioned everyone
to grovel
before him, then rose and left
in
silence. ‘We never saw her again,
some said
she walked into the sea,
others the
wind.’ The Old Smith
spat and
goggled warnings, then slept.
Smoke rose
from the solitary hut,
the
listeners shuffled a moment in fathomless
embarrassment,
then dispersed.
For twenty summers
after the
seeress danced and disappeared,
more
perhaps, princes of the blood,
drunks and
children had brought their speculations
to ringed
assemblies – rule and judgement,
perhaps,
foresight for seafaring, battle,
or
planting and the harvest, plucking out
diseased
innards and sickening souls
with hands
and glares and sorcery. He’d flailed,
grunted
his resistance then hurled himself
before and across thresholds of trial
then back and through the jambs of failure,
sprawling in blood as each door slammed.
The public
shows grew rarer as he aged.
He quashed
the sights that rose on his wandering,
quashed
the night-sweat promises, silenced
his
solitary chants in mindlessness, and thought
he’d wait
for better dreams, improve them
or better
lose them all and dream
no more.
Sometimes, visiting headmen
would stay
him, stare demands, voice them,
even mock,
‘Tell us, fellow,
your
secret purpose,’ then draw abashment
and
mystery from the man’s mumbles at the dirt.
His acts
wore away at belief,
the
drool-tongue and grunts in the grinding house,
but fear
rekindled in the wariness of virgins
or dogs,
in sky fires and birdsong,
in the Old
Smith’s stare, and the headmen
craving
advantage, renewed the taboo,
watched
and left.
Mist cracked
above
them. Isolated handfuls of hail
scattered
around. Their new chieftain
chuckled
at their wonder and drove them on
in the
season of egg foraging on the clifftops.
He ran his
fingers in his beard, shaped it
with
morning’s delicious dew then turned
and saw
him, aquiver, at parley with the ground.
He walked
towards him, hesitated,
then felt
his own mark, abashed a moment,
swell
again, felt it spread across his chest
and
shoulders into his hands and gaze.
He stared
at him and thought, ‘He blasphemes
worthiness
and hope by standing useless,
or is he a
trial of fidelity?’ A riddling
sanction
or a moment’s worthwhile sacrilege
to quell
the idiot shakes and muttering.
Fearing
soil on his hands or nothing,
fearing
flight or ghost returns
like foes
or forefathers in dreams,
then
fearing no man and no prophesy,
he
snatched the slight, unprotesting trunk,
nothing
he’d find a use for, watery,
irresolute,
which juddered him yet with its slightness.
He
wrestled it crossways and athwart his chest,
pinched it
almost to the bones, and saw
the
chewing mouth, an empty eyeball,
then
hurled it at the wave-swept rocks below.
Frontiers
are endings.
At
Dunstanburgh Castle, rocks
pool with
satanic green
while
beyond them a pod of monsters
dolphins
the waves. The cliff-face
riots with
nursery keening,
the
kittiwakes’ hell-child scream
of
forbiddance. Basalt causeways
are
stained sulphurous. A giant
has
trodden on a rock plate,
almost
capsized it slips away
endlessly
towards its brink.
Sandstone
walls are scraped
with salt
fingernails
into ribs
and veiny organism.
Remnant
alcoves in the wells
of
hollowed out towers
flensed of
floorboard flesh
jut
inwards and loom,
a soiled
Nabatean necropolis.
There’s no
one here:
the
Harrying, the Thirties, endless
apologetic
then relieved migrations
to hordes
of clamouring southern
opportunity.
A lone
rider
sauntered
a Bamburgh strand
vast as
sky.
In the
sparsity
God’s
voice echoes throughout
like
waves,
he hopes
for nothing
but fading
of concern, consequence
But
endings are frontiers
the
stupidity of a globe is endings
are
frontiers
Hadrian’s
labourers left villages
and broad
skies in low Tungria,
in
flood-lashed low Batavia, then built
and
climbed the Housesteads walls
and
watched, grumbling that
eternity’s
end was more eternity,
their
limit one of many limits
where they
stood and narrowed
across the
boundless threat
Alone,
high above desolate coastline
beyond the
marshland on Lindisfarne –
unspared,
despite the chantry –
he
quivered and looked about,
fearful
someone else would come
with
ruinous chatter. His reveries
collapse
in the same thought
at lonely
rockpools. That couple
stalked
him on the deserted beach.
In
Lindisfarne’s barren carpark
a
campervan had hugged in snug
beside his
isolated Fiat, like someone
shuffling
towards his adjacent seat
on an
empty bus.
Later in
the town, hikers loitered
for ages
near the poo-bin
beside the
Priory field
in
shuffles of backpack,
alpenstock
clatter, map consultation,
as he
lunched on the bench opposite
and tried
to recover
the
morning’s composition of spectres,
before the
sun’s democratic cathode
had
bombarded dawn’s filminess
springing
colour, weed and
adventive
sprays of people.
Standing
still in the haze
against
the abbey ruin,
in front
of the church,
on the
skirts of a sloping field
checked
and billowed by crows,
a solitary
horse had poised a striped nose
and looked
beyond him
through
air watered grey
at St
Cuthbert’s Island,
across
scavengers on the low-tide causeway
towards a
horse oblivion.
Now he
looked for the horse again but now
or long
since it had turned aside.
As he
watched, it shook itself out
and
wandered away.
Did
Cuthbert need separation,
huge
draughts of God,
to gird
for ministry, temper healing,
like
Wordsworth’s Wanderer?
Taciturn
sorts are alone
even in
workplaces,
or at the
Christmas table
like his
long-dead uncle Pete.
True
cenobites are alone
despite
their fellows, despite
the
bartering world’s racket
at the
abbey threshold. But craving
eremite
annihilation
he carries
crowds to the wilderness,
a vacuum,
he sucks throngs
towards
him
No
escaping its tedious roll
he thinks
on the castle ramparts
as he
looks across the sea
for
nothingness but almost spies
the hilly
descent of sea beyond
then
flattens the world.
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