Night Photograph Read online

  4 a thousand pigeons racing from France.

  5 Prized for flying straight home they flew

  6 straight along lines that no longer met.

  7 The sky shrugged off its known geography

  8 and spun those birds beyond direction.

  9 They helter-skeltered down on to the Scilly Isles,

  10 sent nervous owners running to the map,

  11 but it might as well have been Outer Mongolia—

  12 the finish was in Newcastle, nobody won.

  III

  1 A phone call after the pub had shut.

  2 If you free yourself of the human scale,

  3 there is only futility. If it is

  4 futility, you cannot be free

  5 of the human scale. Like the answer

  6 you gave me once in a dream:

  7 I can't see anything in this mist.

  8 Then open your eyes! A burst of peace.

  9 You raced home to write till morning.

  10 The computer belonged to someone else.

  11 At five a.m., you pressed the wrong button.

  12 Nobody had stopped to take notes.

  Moby Dick Suite

  1 The pianist finds a phone box by the station

  2 and asks his wife what he is doing in Wolverhampton.

  3 She is tired of giving directions but he cannot read maps

  4 so she tells him to get a taxi to the concert hall

  5 and after the performance to go straight to the hotel.

  6 He has been lost for ten years, since the day

  7 he looked into the mirror, saw the madness of his father,

  8 and started to hunt him with music.

  9 The pianist always said yes to everything

  10 and let his wife talk herself out of all dignity.

  11 He was confused by how she made a room safe

  12 but filled it with a bad smell and locked the windows.

  13 Pursued by the cruel voice of a dead friend

  14 he turned, not to garlic or a rabbit's foot,

  15 but to cutting crosses in his forehead

  16 seen in his reflection as a saving grace.

  17 Tonight, he will surprise the audience

  18 with his fat fingers and flat voice.

  19 He will play the final scene where Captain Ahab

  20 falls from the boat to the back of the whale and drowns,

  21 lashed down by the rope of his own harpoon.

  22 The audience will hear him out, relieved

  23 when there is nothing left but still waters

  24 and the prettiness of seagulls overhead.

  25 These days the pianist cannot have bad dreams:

  26 the disconnection of electric shock

  27 has safely straightened every mirror.

  28 He wraps up warm, watches old films,

  29 and sends someone else after his monster.

  30 On screen, the Captain keeps his distance

  31 and never fails to meet the kind of death

  32 that the pianist himself had always wanted.

  Anchorage

  1 The fish factory wriggles free of the Baltic

  2 and takes a firm grip on the North Sea.

  3 Echo and sonar are its web, so fine

  4 it can snare a single cod at a thousand feet.

  5 Trawler crews used to taste the air,

  6 then lower a lead weight coated with grease

  7 thick enough to bring back the sea bed;

  8 rock, shell or sand was all they wanted.

  9 Grey steel on grey water under grey sky

  10 moving west with the weather map:

  11 Viking, Fair Isle, Hebrides, Malin,

  12 murky republics bound by salt and oil

  13 carry the Russian sailor to meet dry land

  14 where two years and seven hundred miles

  15 have brought me to your wedding.

  16 The streets are too wide, the houses too small

  17 and I'm scared of getting my face wet.

  18 We run into each other's arms,

  19 our hands reveal a brother and sister

  20 of rock, shell, sand. I am close enough

  21 to see the tear form and melt in your eye.

  22 Inch by inch, the Russian sailor

  23 studies the horizon. It never falters.

  24 The ground stays still beneath his feet,

  25 he needs a drink. The cargo is packed

  26 in eighty-pound blocks of suspended animation:

  27 huge, beautiful fish taken from the nets

  28 and returned to water but not enough water.

  ∗

  29 I get tired of whale song and head south

  30 away from five-hour nights and a blazing moon

  31 that tricks me into thinking up mysteries.

  32 Close to the Arctic, nets cast up

  33 uncertain shapes. The North Pole wavers.

  34 Those seven hundred miles are back in place

  35 but confetti falls from me with every step.

  36 I cannot get if off my hands,

  37 this mess of salty, almost silver scales

  38 leeched in a moment of helpless intimacy,

  39 these leftover scraps of faded tissue

  40 once strong enough to carry the ocean.

  Behind the Light

  1 He is happy off the land, out there with his boy,

  2 away from the weight of a lifetime of singing

  3 the mountains to sleep. Out there his boat

  4 rolls through peaks like a tongue through butter.

  5 The boy has grown up without streetlight.

  6 He is drawn to the mackerels' fractured glitter

  7 as they flare beneath the surface, flop into the boat.

  8 His father, too, is blinded by the shining:

  9 last year, dazzled by the hundred fish

  10 that had queued for his hook, he misread the elements

  11 and fell from a dry shade of blue into a deep one.

  12 The sea inched its way into his blood,

  13 then flicked him on to the rocks to be found

  14 by a girl whose brother had drowned here the year before;

  15 a girl who sucked the sea from his lungs,

  16 spat out this stranger's vomit and saliva,

  17 and hammered at the broken machinery of his chest

  18 for the two hours it took the ambulance to come.

  19 Yet tonight he feels so safe out there,

  20 wrapped in the blanket of a summer night sky,

  21 his memory washed clean by the sea.

  22 Later, at the house, he rinses the fish.

  23 He has no need of them and they have no need of water.

  24 The boy is in bed, framing the moment coming home

  25 when he caught the blast of a cat's eyes with his torch.

  26 She cannot sleep and goes out by the back door,

  27 up on to the mountain, away from a husband

  28 who still refuses to learn how to swim.

  29 She climbs to a place where nothing moves,

  30 nothing confuses or catches her eye;

  31 where she can lie down and bury her face

  32 in what little earth the ice age has left her.

  Estuary

  1 air carries the taste

  2 of ocean-going liners

  3 shadows of Canada geese

  4 colour the salt grass

  5 water trickles inland

  6 suggests the threat of nesting swans

  7 black Essex mud

  8 refuses to take shape

  9 I can live with this promise

  10 that nothing is in place

  11 but everything is here

  Closer

  1 Your touch surprises me

  2 like a breath of sea air in the city

  3 and I don't know which way to move

  4 in the opposing landscapes of my senses.

  5 As if, crossi
ng a street I have lived in for years,

  6 the taste of salt comes to my mouth

  7 and I lose sight of what I'm walking towards:

  8 a window that has caught and reflected

  9 all that is familiar; or the edge of this island

  10 from where I can at last look out.

  Love from a Foreign City

  1 Dearest, the cockroaches are having babies.

  2 One fell from the ceiling into my gin

  3 with no ill effects. Mother has been.

  4 I showed her the bite marks on the cot

  5 and she gave me the name of her rat-catcher.

  6 He was so impressed by the hole in her u-bend,

  7 he took it home for his personal museum.

  8 I cannot sleep. They are digging up children

  9 on Hackney Marshes. The papers say

  10 when that girl tried to scream for help,

  11 the man cut her tongue out. Not far from here.

  12 There have been more firebombs,

  13 but only at dawn and out in the suburbs.

  14 And a mortar attack. We heard it from the flat,

  15 a thud like someone dropping a table.

  16 They say the pond life coming out of the taps

  17 is completely harmless. A law has been passed

  18 on dangerous dogs: muzzles, tattoos, castration.

  19 When the labrador over the road jumped up

  20 to say hello to Billie, he wet himself.

  21 The shops in North End Road are all closing.

  22 You can't get your shoes mended anywhere.

  23 The one-way system keeps changing direction,

  24 I get lost a hundred yards from home.

  25 There are parts of the new A to Z marked simply

  26 ‘under development’. Even street names

  27 have been demolished. There is typhoid in Finchley.

  28 Mother has brought me a lavender tree.

  A Letter from Marie Curie

  1 The girl dying in New Jersey

  2 barely glances at the foreign words

  3 but she likes the stamp.

  4 It is a kind of pale blue

  5 she hasn't seen much of.

  6 The lawyer who brought the letter

  7 talks of a famous scientist

  8 who found the magic ingredient

  9 that made the clockfaces she painted

  10 shine in the dark. He doesn't say

  11 that each lick of the brush

  12 took a little more radium

  13 into her bones, that in

  14 sixteen hundred years

  15 if anything remained of her

  16 it would still be half as radioactive

  17 as the girl is now,

  18 thumbing through the atlas

  19 she asked her sister to borrow.

  20 He explains that Marie Curie

  21 is anaemic too, but the girl

  22 isn't listening. She's found France;

  23 it's not so big. The lawyer shrugs:

  24 She says to eat plenty of raw calves' liver.

  The Innocence of Radium

  1 With a head full of Swiss clockmakers,

  2 she took a job at a New Jersey factory

  3 painting luminous numbers, copying the style

  4 believed to be found in the candlelit backrooms

  5 of snowbound alpine villages.

  6 Holding each clockface to the light,

  7 she would catch a glimpse of the chemist

  8 as he measured and checked. He was old enough,

  9 had a kind face and a foreign name

  10 she never dared to pronounce: Sochocky.

  11 For a joke she painted her teeth and nails,

  12 jumped out on the other girls walking home.

  13 In bed that night she laughed out loud

  14 and stroked herself with ten green fingertips.

  15 Unable to sleep, the chemist traced each number

  16 on the face he had stolen from the factory floor.

  17 He liked the curve of her eights;

  18 the way she raised the wet brush to her lips

  19 and, with a delicate purse of her mouth,

  20 smoothed the bristle to a perfect tip.

  21 Over the years he watched her grow dull.

  22 The doctors gave up, removed half her jaw,

  23 and blamed syphilis when her thighbone snapped

  24 as she struggled up a flight of steps.

  25 Diagnosing infidelity, the chemist pronounced

  26 the innocence of radium, a kind of radiance

  27 that could not be held by the body of a woman,

  28 only caught between her teeth. He was proud

  29 of his paint and made public speeches

  30 on how it could be used by artists to convey

  31 the quality of moonlight. Sochocky displayed

  32 these shining landscapes on his walls;

  33 his faith sustained alone in a room

  34 full of warm skies that broke up the dark

  35 and drained his blood of its colour.

  36 His dangerous bones could not keep their secret.

  37 Laid out for X-ray, before a single button was pressed,

  38 they exposed the plate and pictured themselves

  39 as a ghost, not a skeleton, a photograph

  40 he was unable to stop being developed and fixed.

  Science for Poets

  1 We drive to your laboratory

  2 on a Sunday morning. Those incubated cells

  3 are about to divide, and you must feed them.

  4 Behind the hospital's airport welcome

  5 of franchised chocolates, soft toys and flowers,

  6 I'm surprised by the room. Sure, there are

  7 bottles on shelves

  8 and enough radioactive-warning stickers to keep me

  9 standing very still, but the air

  10 is civil service

  11 and the furniture, an indigestible brown.

  12 You open the door of an ordinary fridge,

  13 pull on rubber gloves, select a jar

  14 and dose a plastic tray of dots

  15 with the swift repetition of the conveyor belt.

  16 I want bunsen burners;

  17 the surprise weight of a bottle of mercury,

  18 its threat of death by cracked thermometer.

  19 I want a scalpel, a bull's eye,

  20 its slit cornea and slippery lens, the grubby innards

  21 of an earthworm pinned out on a board;

  22 to catch sight of physics

  23 in the force of a stiletto heel on a dance hall's

  24 wooden floor; to discuss the uses

  25 of labelled jars—

  26 acetone for the removal of nail polish,

  27 sulphuric acid for the serial killer.

  28 I miss the Monday afternoons

  29 of inactivity under the microscope, the Petri dish

  30 and pH scale with its odd capital letter.

  31 Now, I watch you

  32 measuring deep into decimal places to record

  33 each molecular shift, in search of an answer

  34 or an answer that fits,

  35 or else in hope of some wild enlightenment

  36 that without your eye for detail, I'd surely miss.

  In the Picture Palace

  1 I was in Leeds, you were in Southend,

  2 but we were on the same corner:

  3 dog shit, pot holes, no streetlight.

  4 On either side shop fronts,

  5 bill posters and broken glass

  6 where there used to be a locksmith,

  7 a butcher and a woman who sold

  8 a hundred different kinds of gloves.

  9 The only cinema in town

  10 to never make it as a bingo hall.

  11 Original features are there somewhere

  12 behind brushed nylon, red flock wallpaper


  13 and twenty coats of corporation paint.

  14 The carpet is original. It sticks to your shoes.

  15 You must buy sweets and they are all noisy:

  16 chocolates that roll down the aisle like cannonballs,

  17 explosions of caramel;

  18 you miss the punchline and break your teeth.

  19 After the adverts for a local restaurant

  20 and a secondhand garage that's just closed down,

  21 and the trailers for excitement forthcoming

  22 at a cinema near you soon but not this one,

  23 you settle down, open to new ideas

  24 about sex, violence and the car chase.

  25 It ends just after the last bus has gone.

  26 You walk through the foyer and the staff line up

  27 by the door to thank all five of you

  28 for coming here tonight. Safe journey home.

  29 You smile too hard and take a programme

  30 like a promise but out on the street

  31 it doesn't take long to forget how it ended.

  32 Without wanting to you move away from the story,

  33 back to a familiar part of town

  34 where there are road signs you don't need anymore.

  For the First Dog in Space

  1 You're being sent up in Sputnik 2,

  2 a kind of octopus with rigor mortis.

  3 Ground control have sworn allegiance

  4 to gravity and the laws of motion;

  5 they sleep without dreams,

  6 safe in the knowledge

  7 that a Russian mongrel bitch

  8 can be blasted through the exosphere

  9 at seven miles a second,

  10 but can never stray far from home.

  11 You will have no companion,

  12 no buttons to press, just six days' air.

  13 Laika, do not let yourself be fooled