Read Online Selected Poems by Tony Harrison - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Tony Harrison
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wants raking up
.
I stare into the fire. Your skinned skull shines.
I close my eyes. That makes a dark like mines.
Wherever hardship held its tongue the job
’s breaking the silence of the worked-out-gob.
Note
. ‘Gob’: an old Northern coal-mining word for the space left after he coal has been extracted. Also, of course, the mouth, and speech.
Cremation
So when she hears him clearing his throat
every few seconds she’s aware what he’s raking
’s death off his mind; the next attack. The threat
of his dying has her own hands shaking.
The mangle brought it on. Taking it to bits.
She didn’t need it now he’d done with pits.
A grip from behind that seems to mean
don’t go
tightens through bicep till the fingers touch.
His, his dad’s and
his
dad’s lifetime down below
crammed into one huge nightshift, and too much.
He keeps back death the way he keeps back phlegm
in company, curled on his tongue. Once left alone
with the last coal fire in the smokeless zone,
he hawks his cold gobful at the brightest flame,
too practised, too contemptuous to miss.
Behind the door she hears the hot coals hiss.
Two
Book Ends
I
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don’t try.
You’re like book ends, the pair of you
, she’d say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare
…
The ‘scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.
Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.
A night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we’re alike!
Your life’s all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between ’s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.
II
The stone’s too full. The wording must be terse.
There’s scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it –
Come on, it’s not as if we’re wanting verse
.
It’s not as if we’re wanting a whole sonnet!
After tumblers of neat
Johnny Walker
(I think that both of us we’re on our third)
you said you’d always been a clumsy talker
and couldn’t find another, shorter word
for ‘beloved’ or for ‘wife’ in the inscription,
but not too clumsy that you can’t still cut:
You’re supposed to be the bright boy at description
and you can’t tell them what the fuck to put!
I’ve got to find the right words on my own.
I’ve got the envelope that he’d been scrawling,
mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling
but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.
Confessional Poetry
for Jeffrey Wainwright
When Milton
sees
his ‘late espoused saint’
are we sure the ghost’s wife 1 or 2?
Does knowing it’s himself beneath the paint
make the Rembrandts truer or less true?
But your father was a simple working man,
they’ll say,
and didn’t speak in those full rhymes
.
His words
when
they came would scarcely scan
.
Mi dad’s did scan, like yours do, many times!
That quarrel then in
Book Ends II
between
one you still go on addressing as ‘mi dad’
and you, your father comes across as mean
but weren’t the taunts you flung back just as bad?
We
had
a bitter quarrel in our cups
and there
were
words between us, yes,
I’m guilty, and the way I make it up ’s
in poetry, and that much I confess.
Next Door
I
Ethel Jowett died still hoping not to miss
next year’s
Mikado
by the D’Oyly Carte.
For being her ‘male escort’ (9!) to this
she gave my library its auspicious start:
The Kipling Treasury
. My name. The date:
Tony Harrison 1946
in dip-in-penmanship type copperplate
with proper emphasis on thins and thicks.
Mi mam was ‘that surprised’ how many came
to see the cortège off and doff their hats –
All the ‘old lot’ left gave her the same
bussing back from ‘Homes’ and Old
.
I stare into the fire. Your skinned skull shines.
I close my eyes. That makes a dark like mines.
Wherever hardship held its tongue the job
’s breaking the silence of the worked-out-gob.
Note
. ‘Gob’: an old Northern coal-mining word for the space left after he coal has been extracted. Also, of course, the mouth, and speech.
Cremation
So when she hears him clearing his throat
every few seconds she’s aware what he’s raking
’s death off his mind; the next attack. The threat
of his dying has her own hands shaking.
The mangle brought it on. Taking it to bits.
She didn’t need it now he’d done with pits.
A grip from behind that seems to mean
don’t go
tightens through bicep till the fingers touch.
His, his dad’s and
his
dad’s lifetime down below
crammed into one huge nightshift, and too much.
He keeps back death the way he keeps back phlegm
in company, curled on his tongue. Once left alone
with the last coal fire in the smokeless zone,
he hawks his cold gobful at the brightest flame,
too practised, too contemptuous to miss.
Behind the door she hears the hot coals hiss.
Two
Book Ends
I
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don’t try.
You’re like book ends, the pair of you
, she’d say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare
…
The ‘scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.
Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.
A night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we’re alike!
Your life’s all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between ’s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.
II
The stone’s too full. The wording must be terse.
There’s scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it –
Come on, it’s not as if we’re wanting verse
.
It’s not as if we’re wanting a whole sonnet!
After tumblers of neat
Johnny Walker
(I think that both of us we’re on our third)
you said you’d always been a clumsy talker
and couldn’t find another, shorter word
for ‘beloved’ or for ‘wife’ in the inscription,
but not too clumsy that you can’t still cut:
You’re supposed to be the bright boy at description
and you can’t tell them what the fuck to put!
I’ve got to find the right words on my own.
I’ve got the envelope that he’d been scrawling,
mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling
but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.
Confessional Poetry
for Jeffrey Wainwright
When Milton
sees
his ‘late espoused saint’
are we sure the ghost’s wife 1 or 2?
Does knowing it’s himself beneath the paint
make the Rembrandts truer or less true?
But your father was a simple working man,
they’ll say,
and didn’t speak in those full rhymes
.
His words
when
they came would scarcely scan
.
Mi dad’s did scan, like yours do, many times!
That quarrel then in
Book Ends II
between
one you still go on addressing as ‘mi dad’
and you, your father comes across as mean
but weren’t the taunts you flung back just as bad?
We
had
a bitter quarrel in our cups
and there
were
words between us, yes,
I’m guilty, and the way I make it up ’s
in poetry, and that much I confess.
Next Door
I
Ethel Jowett died still hoping not to miss
next year’s
Mikado
by the D’Oyly Carte.
For being her ‘male escort’ (9!) to this
she gave my library its auspicious start:
The Kipling Treasury
. My name. The date:
Tony Harrison 1946
in dip-in-penmanship type copperplate
with proper emphasis on thins and thicks.
Mi mam was ‘that surprised’ how many came
to see the cortège off and doff their hats –
All the ‘old lot’ left gave her the same
bussing back from ‘Homes’ and Old
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