Leaving the cottage

(poem still in progress)

LEAVING THE COTTAGE

1

The grass lies on the land - 

     that set of keys.

Dumb as a bunch of keys, the grass is.

    It’s you who know!

Do you know what you know?
   Take this clutch of grass

and potter back and forth,

  letting out your prisoners.

2

This blue morning is also over Syria;

    this sky is too high for

that kind of division.

   A dove clears its bowels as it

takes off into the air.

   So many have engraved

their messages on the blue stone:

    everyone is writing on the cover, and

yet the pages are blank.

3

This, that the grass unlocks

    when you twist it,

is thronging, like a street when it

    darkens with people. A forest has grown up.

Now it’s so dense with over-writing that,

   as I tell my daughter,

it’s becoming more difficult to walk.

   So now, the walk must begin.

4

Clearing out of the cottage, they showed

    me my wooden tractor,

with its shiny wooden nose and stone-hard

                                           rubber tyres.

Of course I don’t remember anything,

    but oh my clattering comrade. Have we sat apart

for half a century, and endured the

    silence? Morfar bought you

for me, Snub-nose, that forgotten spring.

   It wobbles, the rear axle needs tightening.

5

Purity is so brittle, it is soon in

                              half a dozen splinters,

and then you cut yourself. Karin, you know this.

It is an eternal radiance

                         that is rimmed by filth,

a bridal crown hacked from a bleeding wood.

Oh, leave purity behind you! It isn’t too late

                       for your vows to be emptied

and for your honour to be thrown aside.

    Come! It is an eternal teardrop.

6

The day of sun developed; the wooden church

                                                  spires,

the faint sighs of cloud

                           in a clear blue sky,

the chorus of trees waiting to begin

                           the concert.

Where does the sea find its home?

Where does the beetle in the waste pit that I fill up now with
the sandy soil beneath the young trees, where does it find

                                       its home?

Where do the racing insects of a day

return, but to now and its noise,

like the squeaking of a railway carriage?

7

They’re taking down my tent, because rain is

                                     forecast,

but back in England it’s a heatwave,

       50 in Dubai, while in Cambodia

the rainy season begins with thunder

                                  and floods.

The skin of the planet prickles with

                                     weather,

and for now it’s a matter of the right taxis,

                                 the right hotels.

Time prickles with weather. The fir

                              tree in Sjögren’s

stands with head bowed, digesting

    its weather food. Time and its

                                      migrations

resemble the noticeboard in a faded

                                       town.

This last summer, in 2013,
   I'm in the tent,
because Annika's in the outhouse.
And Miranda comes two days before we go.

The first day, Pelle comes and inspects the tent.
It's an honour; he's so wild now.

Two years ago, he was still a kitten,
playing fiercely with the mats in the cottage,
    but now we hardly see him.

Still the same fierce beauty. A small cat,
grey as a ghost, except for a white ring on his tail.

He belongs to Anny. We're on the edge
of his large, vague and definite territory.

He hunts continually. He's a part of the land
  and will think nothing of our absence.

8

“What car is like a chair?” we asked each other

                                   mechanically,

    dropping with sleep on the M23. There was

                               a crater in the glade,

    the sunset shone into the tree-trunks.

This was by the cemetery.  Dad and I crossed

                                              the road

    to stand at the edge of that longer

                             clubmoss forest

             that never ceases

                    to be worked on.

        Already there’s a new view of it.

9

26^th July, we walked the terraces of

         Radstock in veils of silver rain

and came on to IKEA later, our clothes still damp,

    and nursed the hot white mugs with the

                                            maroon tags

of the “London Tea Company”. The soft

                        rain drew itself up

and fell hard in Clandown by the

                              scrapyard,

but beneath the cypresses, were dry

      coarse semi-circles.

The ants, who build dust under the buried stones,

                                   come forth blinking

into the IKEA restaurant, where is

                 the huge photo of Kungsholmen

and the islands beyond, the land where

                        they seem to knit together.

10

Every evening at sunset or close to

                                       sunset

the painted skies of August

                      display for our walk,

    after another day of computing,

but ever more restless, these

                       twilight butterflies

who mark the sun’s gaze as it begins

       to slide away from northern lands.

The summer, still there, begins to detach

     itself, the night horizon is clouded.

Rains nourish the swelling berries and the

                                  shining ceps.

So much I can remember of Augusts, and

                                                 even

        one chanterelle September.

It isn’t time that hurries by, but me.

[read at Swindon Nov 2014]

11

The grey of dawn,

    broader bands

segregate the lonely

    summer stuga

the empty home

    the bolt, again and again

the fabric sealing night;

    frames of a disintegrating

film, the tear-filled

    pitch of that roof.

      In that film, a hosepipe

directed against a wall to fake rain.

The blue stripe of bank holiday

blue, again and again, and that place

              washing off, like a suntan.

12

Maria’s gold toenails

    slate Bench hoodie

the ceaselessly trembling

    tassels of her arabic scarf

the black scalloped shadows

    of rippled white sand

Maria’s gigantic hand muscles

   from working the clenchers

   all the way round by the river

the sandals getting scuffed

        gold toenails

the miles and the sun

    brand-name forgotten

left behind in that shop

                      in Taunton

and a large tea

    and candy crush maria

walk on gold

13

This boy I’ve never met will turn the strange key.

    Nobody says goodbye. Johan,

Kjell’s boy, will keep it alive –

Now  that I’m turning my back,

    feeling with my foot for the rung,

my whole world turns: the

    birch and you and you and you. The whole

                                                              world.

So I went up. With the wasps’ nest.

We’re going to lock ourselves in.

I’m looking back out of the loft,

You’re down there, but you’re all up here.

The skis, your skis Mum,

    sawn-off child ones,

the sticks with

    leather hand loops

and stiff leather

    tilted rings,

along with the

birch-bark plaited

        basket,

and an army camp-bed,
army hat Dad brought home from Malaria.

Take them,

bring them down the

                  ladder,

take photographs of

us. Explain how to

turn the key once more.

Lay them out on the

lawn, your treasures,

to pack in the car

    and take south, where

a dealer seemed to be interested,
or put them on eBay. 

14

In steady rain, the sodden sedge, the pine splashing heavy cone-water

tangled reed and alder black. The skies emptying,

      the mossy stream, granite boulders, swollen – The light low, skyline shivering

bog-cotton bending, the brown mother and calf, step splay-footed

deep into forest marshes, the clouds pissing light from the day

and the angry wind, and the ants on their break in the misty needlestacks.

[read at Swindon Nov 2014]

15

Maybe I’ll join a botanical society

    and do good work with like-minded people.

Then I won’t write poems any more.

    I won’t bother with that difficult

                   unwelcome business where
       you make something and it just proves

                                   to everyone

that we’re not like-minded at all.

    Poetry is the constant reminder

that without it we could not even

                     imagine each other.

[read at Swindon Nov 2014]

16

What did the summer contain?

    It wasn’t only the pine-scent, wasn’t only

the meadowsides flowing like a bright flag.

    At the river you picked up a handful of

not only red river-gravel but all

    those one-syllable words: air, and love...

(What dumb signposts they are! We who are tired

    of kicking up and down the same old road –

well, we have left some dents on them.)

    But, what was it?

Where the grass rippled up a bank,

    where we danced a mazurka and the

                         sun became a golden berry –

what worm of no syllables

    lay wreathed and smiling in its gut?


[read at Swindon Feb 2015]

17

I’ll number every hour of summers past

and every cast I’ll praise that never took a fish –

The others were praised enough, as we sat round the table

and spat out the pike’s forked bones
                                        and took more potatoes.

I liked to gut and behead, to strip

      out the swim-bladder with a knife-point

and to grub off the shekels of her flanks

      in a mound, to salt and clean,

and to bury all that work in the ground.

But I never liked the convulsive leaps,

    the panicking of her tail,

the fury of the priest by the silent lake.


[read at Swindon Feb 2015]

18

Evening along Mar Azul, biking in October.

Look at these blocks spotted with a few

                       stray lights, one-off constellation.

Does anyone know any more who’s home?

    We can walk and message, stay in touch

                                                24 hours

or arrange that wedding while hiking in

                                            the Picos.

Eventually a great blackout comes. Eventually

    we move through the forests of this

                          great secret house,

felling them as quick as they can grow

    because if there is no engraving there is certainly

                                                                 no staying
in timberless Mesopotamia.

19

The arts of imaging – descriptive words,

    photos and musical scenes,

I would need them all, to begin to reveal

    this morning in October sand,

so how can I think you will take a

                                      single step

into the place I want to share with you

-- one single step, to the smell of warmth

and a summer insect? A place I can’t

                           even go myself?

Go to the cities and the halls, search

               a hundred thousand results –

you’ve excelled, to even meet this poem, to

    be so distracted as to wander this far

away from your own life. It’s all going up.

    Doesn’t your own life need your attention?
                          You’ll do better to raise your head.

20

What’s the use of translating,

    to say e.g. a “Scotch Argus” fluttered

beside e.g. a “Scots Pine”? Not very Jämtländsk, that!

I’m trying to keep a foreignness around my memories.

    I’m trying to be sure you’ll never penetrate.

Only that one rock, only that certain shape

    and the cast of its drift in the sea of moss.

Only the voice of my grandmother, twenty years      

                                                  ago.

Only that rock with the line of ants and the

                                          wild strawberries ---

and a scraping on one flat face, feel it?

A shallow mysterious track

    zigzagging and then ending in a loop.

                                                             MP

21

You can’t understand. There’s a

                 peaceable remark in the

                                    boreal forest,

and the remark is space all around –

           -- all round me – kind of big country.

Climbing an elk-shooting platform,

          well, that’s another thing.

The hunters splashed the “fell-storm

      -hat” with their pissing, it nodded.

The forest is a slot machine,

      maximum payout £70.

The big green leaves splashed by

                         the astonishing waterfall,

and it was truly raining then, up towards the fells

a few years ago. We got waffles

                        later in the shop,

and I was so happy being with Mum and Dad

    that I forgot the remark, until now.

“Exploring Nature’s playground” says the

                       Peter Storm t-shirt.

Yes Peter you had that about right. There

          are several isotopes,

a thousand maybe – most are so

    long, we only know them by their

                     preambles.

The mottle clouds of today are desperate!

22

I went once in the snow. From the moment

                                you breathed it you breathed

the prolonged continuity of that subzero.

It was the beginning of April, the birch-forests

    all black sweeps, the zigzag frozen

river.  And the pylons looked like wheelchairs

                                      outside a hospital.

23

    Something like the forest sea

The beautiful simplicity of their

                                      heads,

whose rounded, knobbly thoughts

    are entirely of them, of the life

that excludes me. The shape of a head

    is a history, as plastic as an infant's

to the simple, subcutaneous, unanalysable

patterns of the nation, the thing that

    shapes us into stereotype. The child

      sleeping on the train, gawky-limbed,

already has the national expression,

    though Mum is Chinese. Is it the

Swedish words that shape the face?

    Perhaps – not how you pronounce them

but what you have to say, who you

             have to be,

the way anyone can live here, and

            the skiing, they,

wild strawberries and

    the factories by the lake, totalities,

                                       toilet paper...

[Read at Swindon, Jan 16, 2017]

24

[   W O O D

M A G I C  ]

The whole wailing body of the nyckelharpa
is spruce that is still being sawn at.
Sun glitters on the river of Joel Böhlén
in the music, but the shade of the woods
drips in the chilly summer evening,
but the music spools without comment
in the sawing hands of the old men,
but the mushrooms bloom on the needle earth.

25

Shell    Gazprom    Murmansk   Putin   Sarin

26

Attachment loyalty sentiment frozen

nostalgia return no return emptiness

guilt and postured guilt, regret and

                                    insincerity.

Emptiness of a teeming forest, deeper

                                             in –

if I was writing this in the forest!

Fake, flounder, blankness, indifference,

dead grass, bond and bonding

    with the last empty never-satisfied

wave of the evening close in

    a wood where you’ve never been,

though you’re still there, terrified of

it, night closes, a chocolatey

      night from the wrong climate

and you fidget on the happy fringe of

      a real life, histrionic performance

hide everything from the moss,

    the fringeing pines and dark

strawy waving of defiance flags.

27

Daylight sees in all the gaps.

    The walls and the door are all

                 thin deal, a box of light;

I could pilot it up into the midnight

                                      pallor

       I feel I could hover

high over the woods, high over the houses,

    the whole hydroelectric valley

28

Moving out again. Last bags in

                                 the falling rain,

photos at the foot of the stairs,

     then posting the key.

Hyacinth. Shrug past the shadow

     of the forgotten cypress

to the van, with a high heart.

Semichorus of hyenas!

We run we walk we run

We’re out of here.

29

It’s here you

      wash bleach and

                        splash

with tap and soap and mop;

you scrub, rub and dab

    swab and drub

       the boards into

                     brightness

ship shelves into shape

where river weir and water

          gush and dash.

30

When I broke the mirror,

                    its gold frame

lay in the winter trees

          showing its legs.

But you know, you know –

    ain’t that how it is?

I sat with Granny,

    overhearing the life outside.

The wind was already blowing,

    most of the seats were taken.

A kind of pearlescent roar

             clouded the horizon.

I saw in the fair distance
   some battle of the heavens
cumulus congestus
   Those men, Granny said,
and we went to church.

31

    “Why didn’t you say?”

I looked over the quarter,

    and I saw them lying down.

My grandmother lay down with the

     cello in her arms.

She was among the first –

    a dog moaned softly and lay down in its

                                   basket,

a child stopped in her tracks.

The crowd began to sag in the middle

    and everyone who stopped

            pausing to snuff the sweet air

    they all plunged, all of the now,

and were strewn like bottles across the

                                       square,

    restless in the wind. Just empty bottles.

                I sat on a bench and brooded.

                                   Inside me

the pines stirred,

    a light moved across my pillow –

cool on my forehead, my mother’s hand.

I opened my eyes

    and I asked again:

              “Why did you hide?

Why couldn’t you say?

Was it wrong?”

32

The gang of children shriek down the

     hot slope, oblivious to tree-roots,

socializing, learning to be socialized,

    to stand up, know, and share.

Nature is only a background for the other’s

                   sticky hand, the punch-up,

the whisper.

                   But suppose a child never

    did learn to be socialized.

Suppose that nature became the foreground.

33

Nothing to see,

    why should I ever learn?

Nothing to say,

    why should I ever listen?

Nothing to show,

    to impose yourself

on where my life grows

    so why would I go

out on the roads, to

    no music, no downloads?

The leaves lie on the land.
They say: I AWAIT YOUR URGENT REPLY.

Which of us would buy
     the bloody double album

34

Suddenly one person

    sprints on ahead

with a puff of outrage –

    flares for a moment

and is resubmerged

    in the throng.

After long search

    for the seven wonders

I came to a rainsoaked valley

    of Karrimor shoes –

a jumble of discounted

    plum/slate 8.5

                     9

Maybe you need another

                        size?

No, I don’t need any size!

A lift less ordinary --

           no, not that either.

I will drown in the

    rainsoaked trench

I’ll rub my face

    on the cement alley

I’ll be the Everly Brothers

    under wet leaves

where the fungus lightning

flashes in the black

    roots of Niflheim

where the bootlace

                  fungus

holds all breath

         and song

in its poisoned

         clutch

35

I’ve never been to Sweden.

We galumphed in

     wellingtons across the

   bog, wellingtons wobbling

        on the foot,

           spacious Tretorn

           wellingtons, kaviar on

               limpa, kaffe under the

                                    birches.

36

All I can say in

   writing is a filtered version

of what I truly feel.

And this, I don’t even know it,

   but I have to find it out.

-- and always, the writing

    tries to say more

but it is clogged

         though for all I know

it’s less clogged than me

     but I don’t think so.

A foulness of breath

    comes from me

The eye can’t lie

and even the mind can’t lie.

It’s the mouth that lies.

Honesty, the life of

       congruence,

starts with words.

37

    You.

You now, with cherry

       tomatoes lettuce cucumber.

Every forkful entirely you,

every scrape of the plate.

    Who are you? Yes,

        that’s still a mystery.

There’ll never be another

                such as you.

You are a unique

     creation of your own soul.

One flower continually fading,

Projection of a rippling bud,
     a rose in the parchment,
     tinfoil roller behind electric bulbs,
One warm opponent.

How does it all flow back into the vanity case,
those silks?

Your feral look, your home village?
What heavy metal
     in your bones is never renewed?

[Read at Swindon, Jan 16th 2017]

38

I'm writing this in the Guildhall Library
and here in the midst of it, instantly
springs up a face of black degraded with age and vegetation.
And I go inside the black cliff of my subject,
my hidden life.
But not with ease, and not by habit.
It is as unfamiliar as a new dream.

Those times we meet up and it all goes wrong
and we are repelled, and are enemies stuck together
against each other for the length of a whole day out,
the weary length of beating against each other,
impossible to understand or be understood,
then in that despairing blankness I glimpse
the terrible strange extent of your soul
and I see too
via your despairing perceptions
the crazy strange offence
of my own soul,
familiar yet unfamiliar too.

And I see it's a coal-black prison
whose cells are cluttered with projects
that explain away its own fears and longings.
These obstacles, these wretched artworks,
incomplete as they are,
have settled themselves into the walls and floors,
and when I wished to tidy up
the warders dissuaded me. They said Brother,
the prisoner does this.
A broom is no good.
It's a stump-grinder you're wanting.
It's a colonoscopy plus.


38

Titta Grå is the Iago
   in a folk-tale from Närke.

She's so wicked that
   even the Devil is appalled.

But why didn't the pair,
   the loving couple of 36 years,

why didn't they compare notes?
Why didn't they question

  her poisonous words
before they destroyed each other?

What the tale doesn't say
   about Titta Grå

is: she lives within us.


39

But what I am quite good at, first thing,
is talking to servants.

At the cottage my parents were my servants.
I could groan to them about waking up
and gratify them with sundry responses,
nods or shakes of the head,
to questions of crispbread, tea etc.
Leave the filmjölk out, I'm using it.

Or later I'd find
something to tell them
out of my book
or the back of the Havre Fras.

I have agonized so long
about how I'm missing the cottage.


40

A blue flashbulb ahead and
the thunder explodes in the sky.

   All round the hissing of rain
sweeps over the tree-tops and deluge

   steadily splashes the roundabouts of west Swindon.
fork lightning splitting the sky;

in a conservatory,
   chick in an eggshell,

cracking zigzag. Smell the electricity,
    this is almost real! And because it is almost real,
I'm Havisham thinking of the Fjällstation in '98;
   thinking of the scribbled windows of '93...
and my surroundings die again:

   the rain dribbling on,

feebler claps, an old pony
  and the new fresh earth.


41

A Thai meal
  at the pavilion.
Walking home on the
"new road", so on the
cut we can look for
dream-stones.
No dreams any more
But there are no last
years any more.
Look at the vast
slopes across the river.
We didn't go there often,
& the last time we did,
it was to see what
Kjell had told us,
the view of our cottage
mysteriously alone
the rest of
the village converted
back into forest.
Thus things simplify,
as when the exhausted Walter Scott
stopped composing The
Siege of Malta and
merely wrote it.


41a

open. kaffepannan. The door scrolls
parish register, dass. Toyota
sunbeam. Shut.

&ire vatten                         ()   87      född
step in the roads of amniosis,
                                    frill of birchenträumer

42

Honeyberry.

Once in a year of
plenty and
possibility
we found two
fruits by
the path in the
wood
In other years only
leaves Thus was it

43

Imagine you
crumple the newspaper
into a faggot and light
one end. The cones and
shavings loosely
loaded, the cavity
must have airflow
The warm smoke
drawn to the rear
hatch, and you hope
that then a scrap of wind will catch it
and suck it all up the chimney.
You hope but you never know.
You hope, with reasonable certainty,
that the warm smoke
straightens and is
drawn straight up,
like stair-rods pinging,
drawn up by a mangle.
the incineration of sinners,
savoury to a householder.

44

Elimination state

And the mist darkened over the mountains
that separate land from land.

On the terraces, where private ownership
shatters into a checkerboard.

But out in the flatlands,
the emperors and a
repressive religion.

Rank pine plantations
in millions of hectares.

And cousins who once
spoke in the same valley dialect

now lived under different regimes
and fought as their medias
thought they should.

You know all this. But do the mountains
even exist here in the yellow stars
where Max is plowing & the lacy plants
frond the surface of a pool
and they kiss not greedily but wetly, sexual people,
clothes wrinkling on the rock,
not knowing  yet where this is going.



45

The organs are packed into a body
the same way that rock is packed into a stone.

The adrenals control the liver's
interactions with the thyroid;
The amygdalae shriek at the adrenals from a peppered cliff

The fowl's hot body as it beaked the man away
though its wings and legs were broken
by a narrowboat's propeller.

The sea wrinkles, breathing in and out.
then the clouded sun dips and elevates the country into its night.

It proves a blustery, spitting night
collected in passionate runnels,
seizing the junctions of the city.

But it's simple as a stone is:
the body's function, to love and to seek for love.




46.

Birch. Is it many, or one?

But whether it's one or many,
it's part of a greater many.

A greater birch-park.

Communes with her lovers in spring;
with her children in autumn.

See the leaves light; the bark still lighter;
mirrors of other birches.

But what is single then?



47.


One season the vole population exploded.

Owls fed their broods on voles.

The parents attacked us, they were strike-owls.

We sat in the kitchen at dusk and the windows darkened
when owls flew noiselessly
                  through the garden, feeding.


48.

Som ni vill har det.

By the dead falls is a summer theatre.

Hard to define the seriousness of this audience,
but it isn't academic, it comes from somewhere else.

The meaning comes from the gnat-chorusses in the vast space of the open valley.

We say, in fact, that we're having it. In this season we're simply shepherds,
and no-one needs to think of going back.

We're Shakespeare's shepherds, a little leisured and a little educated.
Everyone is welcome.

But the stolidity is always there.


49.

A man is carving himself into a wooden scene
while the snow falls outside.

In the carving it's summer.
The man stands up with his tools,

His wife and daughter are making peppercakes;
he converts them into flying birds

on the heavenly up-swell of cinnamon and cloves.


50.

Warm in the shade of garden trees.

How lucky we are!

We walk down the road
to the restaurant by the Thai pavilion.

We can go that far.
I buzz around with the camera.

Things are not as they were,
yet they remain good.

But for you Mum
the strain of that goodness
has grown with the years.
Even for you Dad,
though you don't admit it.

I'm saying all this in hindsight -
at the time I found ways of not hearing.

Now that it's "those" and not "these"...
From those times and those woods
a different animal emerges.


51.


Not exactly in the wilds,
but the hire-car parked
on the forest track,
with prästkrage up to its bumpers,
would do as well.

We Thermos'd overlooking a
glistening stream on the way up.
Now we parked in the same spot.
The sun had shifted to a red gold.

The trip to Strömsund was the
final slender outline
of a senescent summer tree.

Almost like the sapling.


52


But it wouldn't have been the same,
  with your spirit out of it.

Even now you preserved it, even though
 for years you hadn't been happy here.

As soon as you got there
 you started smoking again,  out on the bron in the midsummer air.

Stress? Boredom?

Was it only with me you  picked currants
under the trees,
moving in the swish of grasses,
troubling the elk-hounds in their cage?

Making your garden where hardly anything could grow

Counting the bellfowers

But even now you preserved

When we converged, that last summer,
you wouldn't let us plunder the kitchen sofa

and the linen cupboard. That was
the nearest I came to understanding your religion.

Something had to be handed on;
some sort of household shrine.

Your Mum seemed very present then. Something passed down from the original owner, whose name I never learnt. Why? Because it unified our forty summers. Because it healed them. We couldn't.


53.

blunt love of bed


54.

The forests dance.

On a tree-lined ridge,
the pines barely clothing the rock,
where pines abut the vertical crag,
the forests dance
as we watch from a moving car,
our oil supplying the rhythm.

But go in and there's stillness,
and the fear of something not moving, yet.