Potential Birthday presents

Guitar tuner
Caravan thieves
Revolution in the Head
Mule Variations / Swordfish Trombones / Raindogs

Dream

IH - 3 people said 'Surprise.' I opened it and read the card/gift. Verse. I couldn't understand what it was till I realised that it was a gift itself, not a card. A kind of 'pin' to wear, with braille that felt good to run your finger across and a logo like 'Burberry'. It was cool.

Then Alun (Czech Rep) gave me a card. 'Who are you?' I asked. 'I'm Alun.'

Distraction and I left. Walking down street. Remember other gifts still to collect. Head back. Building full of students now.

In Exeter, on Monks Road. Sign in window: 'Found: Small Ornamental Dog.' I knocked ...

Last night - eating beans, a cup of green tea watching Brokeback Mountain before the heater.

Wild and Wounded

I

Visit or visitation, when in frost
A heron descends to the garden pond
For any snack, late frog or goldfish fry,
Frustrated by the cover’s netting stands
A monument to hunger, motionless.

So it has always been.
But on the snow-flecked lawn
As never yet in twenty-six winters here
A swan sat, whiter, hissed when we fed him bread,
For two days barely shifted, though he grazed
Within his lithe neck’s radius,
Calmer than we were after another death –
Until he made to rise,
Dragging one leg, a wobbling majesty
Not come by choice, for refuge
From riveret pasture puddle now and iced,
Crash-landed, gashed while in flight or fight:
A casualty, a case,
Therefore to be removed, hospitalized.

2

Meddling is human, Adam said, and Cain,
Remembrance mortal too. The haunting ceases.
Get out your guest-book, then,
Your cenotaph of the fallen, who knows where,
No matter if incomplete:
For winter, jack-snipe, furrowing, red-legged partridge,
Fieldfare and redwing, song and missel thrush,
Three kinds of other rank sparrows, noted when they were gone,
The whole long field mottled with plovers daily,
Dusk marked by barn-owl’s passing
And for top brass marsh harrier’s whirl at prey.
Oh, and the swallows, martins more than missed
For their low muttering, wilderness brought home.

3

No loss to them, merged in their time unmeasured,
Nameless identity
That suffering, maimed, wants nothing but to be
Or perish, so humble their indifference.
Roused from complaisance, looking, walking, we
Clash with an empty cage
Which, wildering, we for our not their defence
Blast in self-injuring rage
At absence, ours to feel, of trapped lives treasured:
End of an age, our age.

4

The tamed, no less, the petted, the still tended,
our cultivars driven wild:
clenched rose in January, primrose and violet
amid the aconites, growth without rhyme or season
by the mad weathers tricked, beguiled:
a warm breeze after hurricane, frost and rain
that seemed unending, flooded the kitchen floor,
those weathers in our doings, in our minds.
When friends and strangers met for this New Year
The small-talk halted, ripped by small detonations –
Of course, the firework rockets in the street,
Defiant celebrations,
Larger explosions imminent, not here,
Too near the fission works long obsolete.

5

Dreaming, I see my father sixty-three years dead
come to my work-room where engrossed, engaged
I ask the walking wounded
To wait a little in the sitting-room
Before I join him there.
But then it’s travels, devious and drawn-out,
Uncertainties, delays.
At a forgotten house
I see my mother opening some back pantry door,
Her who died forty years later,
Remember who I am. She seems preoccupied,
Almost fades out, the scene – a home? – suspended.
Perhaps, though, turning, less absorbed, she whispered:
‘come back when you have died.’

6

Frost has returned, rime to the swans’ terrain
Beside the riveret
Where, whiter, distant, a family crops and wanders,
Even or odd, symmetrical, incomplete.
I’ll count no heads now, lines or syllables
To fix this whiter whiteness quivering.

Michael Hamburger

A Reminder of Poland

The most interesting thing in my culture are Christmas. On that time a year in Poland is cold and most of the time snowing. Traditional Christmas table have 12 meats. Each family keep one diner set for somebody strange or who wasn't expected.

Each family we get to gather at Christmas.

I know I am responsible for my life and everything is in my hand.

'Experience is cheap'
Crowded House, Into Temptation

Did you ever skate?

I used to make skateboards out of plywood and go down to a roller rink called Skate Ranch and buy just the wheels. We used to skate down this hill called Robert Avenue and it was a great curve and you dug up a lot of speed. It went by our neighbour Mr. Stitcha. He lived in the beauty of the curve, where all the momentum culminated in a beautiful slough of cement. It took you right past his house but as close as you could get to his porch. Mr Stitcha drank to excess. This was common knowledge in the neighbourhood. He had the red face and the red wine stains down the front of his T-shirt. That's like I look now. Anyway it was the only place to get that kind of speed and thrill, so the front of his house became a sort of festival for all the skateboarders in the whole area. On Hallowe'en he had a heart attack and died on his front porch and we were all told he died because we skated by his house and that each and every one of us killed him in our own way. And we were all left with the memory that we all had a hand in his murder. It was like a Shakespeare thing, everybody had their hand on the knife. So I carry this with me, but I just want to say here and now, in Thrasher magazine, that I did not kill Mr. Stitcha. It took a lot of therapy and it took a lot of liquor. Mr. Stitcha rest in peace.

Tom Waits

Storm Tapes


Your songs are like bottles of rainwater -
milky, of different PHs, minerals -
in your garden of ivy-trailed earth
guarded by tombs primed for moon-faced
children with wax paper and silver
and gold crayons. They peer, hands
around railings, deadly red berries
smeared open on the path dotted with starlings.
People have been coming here for years,
while failing schools have closed, the adolescent
moved out, obtained a license,
cousins moved in to complete a course,
drumsticks spinning like the spokes of a wheel.

The ground is choked with ivy, the borders
close bushes. An upside down Smarties lid,
the letter A. The arch of his chain-mailed
head. The sockets of stones studding the earth.
The dew running lengthways down a railing
before it is absorbed by a glove.

The weather-centre was in public view,
actually in the middle of the pavement
on one side of the street.
There it is: the needle scratching theatrically
onto graph paper
great clouds of profit and loss, unspooling
endlessly. So finely calibrated,
a baby's skin instrument
a sculptor carving a baby's face
from stone, so subtle beneath his knife
you cannot help but say 'Shhh! He's sleeping.'

Fable


Once upon a time
there was a lonely wolf
lonelier than all the angels.

He happened to come to a village.
He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls
the caresses of its bricklayers.
But the windows stopped him.

In the room sat people.
Apart from God nobody ever
found them so beautiful
as this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.
He stopped in the middle of the room
and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes
and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.


Janos Pilinzky
Detail from the KZ-Oratorio Dark Heaven
from the Hungarian (trans. Ted Hughes)

'Close ups exclude... It's far more interesting to see what the actress's body is doing - how she interacts with the pillow, her fish.'

Eric Rohmer, on The Aviator's Wife