Peter Riley: Excerpts from Due North
from Part II
Far
from “art”. Crannogs and beehive huts / herding
horses
to the docks at Belfast, priests in black gowns
walking
the pavements Tenant farmers
in
the hills around Halifax—
walking mummies in dungarees and flat
caps
life of slopstone and clarts, the curlew
whistling
failure over the top fields and obviously,
souldom
gained and lost, thoughts that bite, dreams told to willows
by
haunted streams
(the muses in a ring about Apollo’s
altar sing)
and
the pipes played The Flowers of the Forest.
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And
there we were, serving new industries
cotton
and print mills, brick cottage rows in
cobble
and dirt streets without so much as
a
tap and the great sky held, the great arch
of
experience stretched over the parklands and we
gained
our own, the long songs and stories
were
ours for the telling and our sad fates
woven
across the night nobody, nobody
stood
any higher than us in the meaning of the world
whatever
mess we made of it our heads were alive
with
our dialect and the end we saw coming
clearly
over the town we lived in.
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The
old men still there, in a row on the stone bench
round
the palazzo, watching the tourists, sharing the wine,
to be willing to talk, to learn from
anybody (Mandelstam)
amplifying
a procedure, a work between stations
work
of day night weeks years on end
to be something, something more
than bits of paper blown in the
wind, more than words,
to be
bound together like
words in
a sonnet, to enact a solution
instead
of replicating violence. Anything’s
better
than
skulking deep in some university
casting
spells and hating the world.
-------------------------------------------------
from Part IV
Smoke
standing over the houses in the valley below
we
tempered ourselves into an ecstasy of forgetting
and
farmed ourselves into the next generation
and
rolled down the hillsides to the town
to
set up shops, and ache with servility when the man
calls
in to take away the profit. Consolation
starts to slide
into counsel, tragedy into accident.
And
where there was a local consolidation is now
a subsidised circus. Our old romances return
freshly
laundered on the backs of migrant workers
from
former colonies and recent war zones.
-------------------------------------------------
en la tarde in the evening, when I consider
the
termination of my life the owls call, meaning no harm,
and
the northern winds rattle the windows.
A
shrinking recess in the dark surface of place
holds
such authenticity as is left. This stinking Eden (clarts etc.).
And
wake in the morning to find the birds have formed a co-operative
and
the children have all remembered their fathers’ names.
Child on bike
it’s all right
I’m still here
holding on
don’t worry
you won’t fall, go
faster.
-------------------------------------------------
from
Part V
...and the people who promote this madness are always calculatingly sane, and build reputations and
careers on the madness, while the people who are mad hate it, and destroy themselves, because they
know they are mad.
careers on the madness, while the people who are mad hate it, and destroy themselves, because they
know they are mad.
-------------------------------------------------
Walking
long streets of house rows
deep
and clear autumn sunlight between cloud masses
all
the fair faces in the rooms and their abandoned destinations
with no hope of repair
betrayed
workers, paid up and forgotten,
their
language vilified, the plain speech we offer the world in
all
honesty described as “a source of evil” by
priest academics chanting etymological
curses
while
the world bears its own evidence on rays of sunlight
all along the rows
of dancers.
Indeed
we know we are nothing, our language is lies
my sighs, my broken words, the sink of my
passion
into
inarticulacy, the everyday which is where we live
in
which we are trapped
Gentle shepherd, rain on the window
It is an honour.
-------------------------------------------------
So
the final descent into madness and death
is down a Pennine hillside,
leaping small streams hung
with elder and hawthorn chest
pain image pain stumbling
over tufted meadows down cinder
tracks, vetch,
ragged robin, cow-parsley,
dandelion, speeding
between hedgerows into the edges
of the town the
garden fences the meeting places
the towers, then
to slow and stagger panting and
fall silently
across the threshold of the
public library in all the gladness and relief
of total incomprehension.
-------------------------------------------------
from
Part VI
In
sleep “we” is restored to the choral “I”
And
the singing can start
the
great chant of humanity suddenly unafraid
under
contract, rights offset to duties
Song
of Myself / the boat on the water / the water on the window
expanding
from unison through all the suburbs
to the cemetery beyond the town edge,
choked with growth
In
which (uncomprehending) we build our singing platforms
and
lie waiting
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Dying, she turned
towards me and gave a last, sweet,
pout.
“I gave my life to poetry.” At the funeral
we got through
nine bottles. Miles of damp fields.
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Peter Riley's Due North will be published by Shearsman in 2015.
