DAVID HARSENT
At the Bedside
A chill in the nerve, an ache in the bone, enough
to bring anyone to bed . . . where she lies
sweating her own stain into the ticking, herself
in negative, her final shape and size.
That cry is a slip of the tongue; that cough is off the cuff.
How on earth did I come here? Not by the snow-fields, not by
the parched arroyos of the south, not by the desert tracks
with their fragile lilac cactii, their lilac skies, their shy
rock-mice, their iguanas and sidewinders and hawks.
I remember the night-train, the distant fires, the deeper blacks
against the fieldscapes and the cloudwrack,
the girls who were happy to talk
for a while, then would turn or half-turn their backs
and settle to sleep, leaving me high and dry.
I have taken the bedside seat of the bleak executor,
though it's not my place, let me tell you, and not my burden.
She is murmuring something. If I look over her shoulder,
all at once it's first light in the garden,
blue light, the birch bole luminous, a fox
nose down, then making a sudden
leap-and-hop in the long grass by the midden
to snap up the little squealers and break their backs.
. . . beyond which I can see the river, slow green glass,
and beyond that the city stew, a dim
skyline of steel and stone in a mist of fallout
and beyond that the high, bright skim
of the world itself, a meniscus of sea and sky
where the sorrows of earth and the sorrows of heaven meet,
and beyond that the dancing particles of space,
the atoms of dead stars, which is all she is
and ever was and all she will become.
In this long business there ought to be a clock
chiming into silence, then nightfall and the dead air,
things closing down as the window slowly darkens
and I look closer to find them there,
those girls with their thin-faced Slavic looks,
travelling towards a border that still beckons
despite the smudge of smoke, despite the lines of fire,
who smile, or seem to smile, who like to talk
but weary soon and turn to their own reflections,
and set themselves softly, sadly, cheek to cheek.
Barlock
'. . . you can't think,' she was saying, 'beyond the next.
We were underground, closed-out, we'd slammed the hatch,
the two of us, him wearing everything from his stickpin to his Rolex,
me dressed to kill. The first fast batch
showed as lights over the mountains. We barely had time to catch
our breath or point before they sewed a chainstitch
across Katchukama Square and down the Street of Locks.
That's when we went to the cellar: to cobwebs on bare bricks,
a tin trunk, a rusty Barlock, empty wine-racks,
pictures in busted frames, a doll's house, Meccano, Airfix,
all the old stuff, history in a box . . .
I had plaster in my hair that made my whole scalp itch,
he looked like hell, lip bitten-through, a raw patch
on the heel of his hand from hammering home the latch.
For an hour or more we could hear the phone and the fax
cross-ringing upstairs: that, and the chiming of clocks
with the incoming overlapping. I made a bed of sacks
and lay down with him, my hand tucked tight between his legs.
I dozed and dreamed of our place in the south, the beach,
the dunes and pines, the walk between rocks
that took us to the village, no more, really, than a few shacks,
a taxi rank, a bar, where he liked to hang out with the jocks, the jacks
of all trades, patriots, punks, argufiers, the one-time rich,
two-timers, time-servers: salt of the earth, he'd say. I said the dregs.'
These two poems will appear in David Harsent's new collection, LEGION, to be published in 2005 by Faber & Faber.
Available from Amazon.co.uk:
Marriage (Faber, 2002)
A Bird's Idea of Flight (Faber, 1998)