Yes, I shall write it all down, you old cow,
all: the first time, the last time, all the times
in between, and then all the times I should
have liked there to have been. I shall go on
writing it down even out of habit,
till there is nothing left to exorcise.

You may judge from that the emotional
debt I feel your lovely daughter owes me.

(p.11)

Her face suddenly, on this mountain road:
(cypresses guttering like black candleflames
there in the valley, still hawk over high
eroded limestone left, right lavender
clumps close-shorn to purple-stubbled naevi):
that face suddenly, the shape exactly,
the lost eyes spanning a cleft in the cloud
smiling in the first way I remember:
the known against this visited landscape.

I had ceased to think of her as having
this face, any face: she was an idea,
an area of pain, a wound, a death.

The hawk of the past stooped, ripped at my mind,
left me with an equivocal freedom.

(p.12)

Walking, snow falling, it is possible
to focus at various distances
in turn on separate flakes, sharply engage
the attention at several spatial points:
the nearer cold and more uncomfortable,
the farther distanced and almost pleasing.

Living, time passing, it is preferable
to focus the memory in turn upon
the more distant retrospects in order
that the present mind may retain its peace.

Yet knowing that seeing and remembering
are both of course personal illusions.

(p.13)

fill out her character more
they said
rightly
so I worked hard remembering

and the sad thing perhaps was
all had
been said
there was really nothing more

(p.14)

In the last year ending with eight (cunningly
making it timeless) ten years ago, that is,
I was in this pub with this girl, or that girl,
whichever, the one girl, anyway, one one:
and it was very clear, then, at that time, here,
that she didn't reckon I'd ever make it
(not sexually, you misunderstand me, yes,
that was soon settled, and fair it was, too. Ah.)

Where was I? In this pub, where I am now, yes,
with this girl I was with (in most senses) then,
and she was convinced I would never get there,
wherever it was she wanted me to get.

I sat swollen, drowned in her cruel certainty.

It was all tied up with supremacy, power,
for she could never beat me at anything
(except being a woman, at which I have
never, even in the prenatal stages
of bisexuality, been very good);
and so she used the only weapon she had,
which was unexpectedly to betray me
at Xmas, which has always been a bad time
for me ever since they first told me that there
was not, and never had been, a Santa Claus.

But here I am then, still, fatter and having
got more or less where I said I was going,
in the theatre pub where then even to have
spoken to one of the actors would have been
as hard as writing a play is now. I stand
arguing with the artistic director
(who I now think an untalented cretin)
full of contempt for the lack of serious
intent in what he conceives to be drama.

And what strikes me now is not that she was wrong
(which Heaven forfend! as they say) but that it
would not matter even if she had been right.

(pp.15-16)

The decorously informative church
Guide to Sex suggested that any urge
could well be controlled by playing tennis:
and the game provided also "many
harmless opportunities for healthy
social intercourse between the sexes."

For weeks the drawings in the Guide misled
me as to what went where, but nonetheless
I booked the public courts and learnt the game
with other curious youths of my age:
and later joined a club, to lose six one,
six love, in the first round of the Open.

But the only girl I ever met had
her "energies channelled" far too bloody
"healthily", and very quickly let me
know that love was merely another means
of saying nil. It was not as though I
became any good at tennis; either.

(p.19)

Teaching elements, I quickly washed earth
and sky on to the pinned sugarpaper
(soft as talc) and ran an unlikely range
of smooth black mountains right across my rough
horizon : I placed a full moon low left
and told them they might, reaching this stage, add
such objects as they chose: trees, woods, houses,
animals, cars, roads : or even people.

Silently today I stare through rainpocked
glass as sulphur drifts through brown broadcloth woods
silverthreaded with gaunt leaning birches,
as damp outlines the random crack-patterns
of a grey limestone syncline, stare at the
complexity of this northern landscape;
then turn for relief to station roofs and
names: Ambexgate, Whatstandwell, Matlock Bath.

All teaching must be simplification,
and to simplify is to falsify:
how teach the landscape of the complex heart
to those who have no wish to learn: and why?

(p.20)

The marriage upstairs fattens on conflict:
they were hardly married, a week before
we were woken by the casement thrashed hard
against its frame and cries of Don't come near!

We held each other, more than disquieted,
imagining that we suffered with them:
later we grew used to voices and thumps
above and saw they showed no signs of harm;

were amused when he once came down offering
apologies for having disturbed us
by one particularly strident row
for which we were in fact out of the house.

This is the way they have chosen to live:
their choice, even if it is not our way.
They are still together: and of any
marriage, put like that, what more can one say?

(p.21)

Unpleasurably I remark the coming
of the winter of my last childless year:
pawnbroker seeds, skeletal bankrupt leaves
still adhere, it does not seem desperately,
certainly it does not seem j oyfully,
into December of this barren year.
One leaf for the third day flaps like a bird,
a pigeon held in a high wind feathers
for an instant like a fat urban hawk,
and client gulls pose coldly on the long
dormer opposite: I shall not feed them
this or any other brackish morning,
I who have welcomed winter (as any
season) must see the child is welcome now.

(p.22)

My son finds occupation
in almost nothing, in everything:
my soapy penitential toothpaste,
his mother's loosened hair
orts, containers, useless things;
watches as I pee
as at Victoria Falls,
once pushed his head between my knees
to risk some sort of baptism.

Before his birth I thought
I had room for no more love:
now when he (say) hurts himself
love, consideration, care
(copies from the originals)
as if burst inside me.

Undoggedly I interest myself
in his uninteresting concerns,
grow backward to him,
more than hoping to find
a forward interest for myself.

(p.23)

(p.24)

(p.25)

Hookheaded hairy young fern, springy, curled,
coy greeny thruster set on
its own spread revelation

(p.29)

Common broom confused with whin,
gorse, furse, finds its own-ness in
ternate leaves, coiled styles and jet
black seedpods: yet it is kin.

(p.30)

Beech, from which book: like learning,
pellucid leaves' late turning
slows ending, adds adjourning.

(p.31)

In the long run everything is by some
held to even out, perhaps indeed to
come down on the side of the survivors:

others assert with they imagine more
relevance that at the end of our own
particular run we tend to be dead.

Time is the difficulty, time with space
and causality being relative:
or, as Einstein is alleged to have said
at Oxford (or Cambridge) railway station,
What time does Bradford arrive at this train?

Each point at which to start is arbitrary,
unbroken chains of causality reach
back in time and space indefinitely.

Where start then?

Here

(p.35)

(p.36)

if only for ten minutes

after the mass feeding of schoolchildren
after the careful inanity of the staff

at low tide
this was the place
for calm, for order of a kind

the relief of walking there

and the smell was acceptable
perhaps even preferable

the objects to be
seen
found

principally (I have it still)
a short fat halfpound brass bolt and nut
virgin, unscrewed

other things less permanent

sodden grey bones
scratched glass, rubbed brick, rusted gatebutts
once a chaffinch eggshell

every conceivable other

but mainly dirty shingle
silt
prairies of malachite slime

though was the important thing
that I met no one else there?

(p.37)

(p.38)

On this seventh of November it is
a little curiously the fifty-
second proud anniversary of the
October Revolution, and in my
hired Moss Bros overcoat I walk the cold
splayed streets of Budapest (bright with neon
celebrating Shell and Coca-Cola)
noting too many similarities,
failing to feel farther abroad than France.

It is perhaps useless to speculate
on what Lenin would have thought of all this,
especially the ads, and in any
case I do not know his work well enough:
but it most certainly pisses me off.

(p.39)

one—----I'm fond of women
———---Naked
———---But I like my salad
———---Dressed

two—--—He spoke of his longings and yearnings
———---Then lived off her immoral earnings.

three——Coleridge hated
————Cologne;

————I have been to
————Cologne,
————And I hate

————Coleridge

(p.40)

The trawl of unquiet mind drops astern

Great lucid streamers bar the sky ahead
(bifurcated banners at a tourney)
light alchemizes the brass on the bridge
into sallow gold
——————now the short northern
autumn day closes quickly

——————————the thin coast
(of grey Norway is it, or of Russia?)
distinguished only as a formal change
in the pattern of clouds on our port side

on the deck the strung lights illuminate no
movement but the sullen swill of water
in the washer, but the unnatural way
dead starfish and disregarded dabs swim
in the strict seas surging through the bilges
and out. A fishgut hangs like a hank of
hair from the iron grill in a pound board

brighter now that the sun, the fishfinder's
green bleep catches the skipper's intentness

and the trawl is down, is out, is catching!

(p.41)

All the Marys were Mum to me, and I’ll
willingly grant him a sense of humour:
"Hail Mary, full of Grace!" he once chortled,
and sure enough within two weeks she’d had
a baby daughter, my sister Gracie.

But as if the crucifiction were not
dramatic enough, he goes and does the
resurrection bit as well: follow that!

Not me. I mean, what’s so dead impressive
in claiming to be the Grandson of God?

And then there’s all these scruffy mates of his—
some of them queer as old boots, I reckon—
asking me what I remember about
the old man and then going away and writing
accounts which leave out all the dirty birts
and always contradict one another.

I really wears me out, all this caring.
I don’t want to Leave a Mark, just get on
with my carpentry, the trade he taught me:
they won’t want me in history, anyway.

Mind you, I reckon Gracie’s worse off, though.

(p.42)

In the event of simultaneous
death or when it cannot be determined
which of the jointly insured parties died
first then it shall be deemed notwithstanding
anything to the contrary which might
be of financial benefit to the
insurance company or vice versa
that the elder policyholder pre-
deceased the younger policyholder

Thus the law recognises our rotting

(p.45)

(p.48)

(p. 49)

(p. 50)

Stopping at an intermediate floor
in the old lift at the Eötvös Loránd
University, Budapest, on the
eleventh (a Tuesday) of November
nineteen sixty-nine, I happened in the
long glass panel of the thrown-back half-door
to glimpse a really unpleasant-looking
male profile: it took me several seconds
to realise that this was in fact the same
but full face I chose to shave each morning.

(p.51)

(p.52)

(p.53)

On the third day we came to the bonepit
People it seemed had been there before us
It was distressing that they had not left
The bones as they would have wished to find them

We had first to clear a space for our match
Then we set up fibulae for wickets
The longer phalanges made ducky bails
While for bats and ball we used male femurs
And a whole green fossilized testicle

It is they say important to keep fit

(p.54)

Tonight I looked at it: I don't often

it performs its two functions well enough
in return I keep it reasonably clean

but quite by chance I looked at it tonight
and there were several dirty marks on it

I of course looked harder: and they were veins
underneath the skin, bloody great black veins!

they weren't there last time I happened to look
certainly the light was bad in that place

but there's no doubt that the pressure is on

(p.55)

My awkward grossness grows: I go down, through

I maintain my self in the conviction
that I have as much to say as others
and more apposite ways of saying it

Certainly I feel it has all been said

The short fear is that even saying it
in my own way is equally pointless

(p.56)

I may reach a point
—one reaches a point
where all I might have to say
—where all that one has to say
would be that life is bloody awful
—is that the human condition is intolerable
but that I would not end it
—but one resolves to go on
despite everything
—despite everything

(p.57)