The Mizzy Read online

  Paul Farley

  The Mizzy

  Contents

  Starling

  Atlas

  Poker

  Accumulator

  Goldcrest

  Glorious Goodwood

  Clever and Cold

  Lark and Linnet

  The Ship in the Park

  The Mystery

  Glade

  Song Thrush

  Water Nymph at a First Generation Magnox Storage Pond

  Gentian Violet

  Robin

  The Green Man

  Moorhen

  Bananaquits, St Lucia

  The Sloth

  Critique of Pure Reason

  Lunula

  The Gadget

  The Keeper of Red Carpets

  Entry, 1981

  Life During the Great Acceleration

  Moss

  Sparrowhawk

  Adrenaline

  Long-Eared Owl

  Nightjar

  Panic Attack, Tsukiji Market

  Mistle Thrush

  Hole in the Wall

  Swing

  Curlew

  The Story of the Hangover

  Positioning

  Oiks

  Treecreeper

  Quadrat

  Gannet

  Saturday

  Great Black-Backed Gull

  Beach

  Acknowledgements

  This book is for Tim Dee

  Starling

  All I’ve ever done with my life

  is follow the average course of the crowd

  and witter on about my hole in the wall,

  the place where I’m from, to any bird that would listen.

  Ask anyone. They’ll all say the same.

  Did he speak of his wall time, his time in the hole?

  All through the winter gathering and roost

  I spin my line. Others do the same.

  All I’ve ever done with my life

  is steer a flight among an old swarm

  and soon I’ll be dead and the swarm will go on,

  so thanks for allowing one starling a voice

  but if I ‘brood in my hole in the wall’

  and ‘keep one eye on the summer stars

  viewed as from the bottom of a well’,

  well, that’s only you in your human dark.

  Atlas

  It wasn’t a globe, it was the whole starry heavens,

  but before I was sent to stand in the west

  with the weight of the sky on my back

  I did lift the northern hemisphere

  and opened the equator a crack,

  carefully, so the bottles inside

  didn’t quake, for fiery swigs.

  Clan Dew. Bristol Cream.

  The world tilted, then

  I closed the lid,

  gigantic.

  Poker

  You’re told this deck was found

  in some shattered bothy or croft

  north of the Great Glen,

  missing its six of diamonds,

  shuffled and dealt to a soft

  pliancy, greased with lanolin

  and you’re told this deck lived behind

  the bar in a barracks town

  and came out to play most nights,

  cut between the Falklands

  and Iraq, its spring long gone,

  dark-edged with mammal sweat

  and you’re told this deck is the one

  recovered from a halfway house

  where fatty stalactites

  grew in a microwave oven,

  where a bottle of Famous Grouse

  was brandished in a fight

  and it might be a pack of lies

  or it might be a sleight of hand,

  and you can’t tell which is a bluff

  because words are a good disguise

  for holding nothing. I’ve found

  that nothing is more than enough.

  Accumulator

  To think of him studying the form

  on a Saturday morning, his close reading

  of the racing pages,

  the long hour

  when we know better than to disturb him,

  and to think of how it could be poems

  he pores over, anything that adds

  to the stock of available reality,

  raw lyrics in the horses’ names,

  the found poetry of lists; to think of him

  caught in this huge attention; outside,

  a world begins beyond our gate;

  the letterbox holds its breath, the furniture

  stands its ground, the bailiffs wait,

  and this spell he casts

  makes nothing happen

  though sometimes all our silences

  and heavy going are rewarded

  when every door in the house yawns open

  then slams in an unbroken sequence.

  Goldcrest

  The penny drops. You’ve only ever heard

  the goldcrest, till you find one in a mist net

  and the ringers show you how to handle a bird

  not much bigger than a bumble bee—

  who’d notice if you slipped it in your pocket

  like a coin they use to balance up the scales?

  Blown through starlight on an easterly gale

  you weigh the Baltic States and the North Sea,

  arrived from euro airspace into sterling

  to circulate among the highest treetops

  where they live right on the edge of human hearing,

  and as we age and money comes to seem

  the simple trap we fall into to dream

  our days away . . . Just then the music stops.

  Glorious Goodwood

  Saturday. Under orders. Just before the house

  turned upside down, just before the bites and stings

  of horseflies, just before the hooves’ cadence,

  a rise and fall that lasted about a minute.

  There being only that, and no seeing beyond it.

  A plague on our house, living from moment

  to moment, blinkered down to a few furlongs,

  then we were away, all gone, his mad dance

  that could fill a house with silence or song

  recorded only here, the television’s

  fever broken, the house itself, all gone

  while his horse is still running and the horseflies

  still out for blood and in my blood, as once

  forty years ago, up North on the South Downs.

  Clever and Cold

  It’s hard being clever and cold.

  And I should know. Jack Frost came

  to my childhood window one night and told

  me: Look, from now on things won’t be the same.

  Its great stillness is not merely a pose.

  Not coming in from the cold, but cold coming in.

  I try to keep warm but ever since

  our little mind-to-heart, I’ve known

  cold’s wider intelligence.

  How all days should be crystal days.

  You can see cold for yourself at work

  in the shapes it makes

  out of any January park:

  fangs on the lip of the slide; a lid for the lake.

  The sky is thinking hard before it snows.

  You can see how frost hides from the sun,

  keeping itself to the shadows

  of walls and hedges. It has a mind of its own.

  The sun can’t have everything its own way.

  These are some of the things cold knows.

  Lark and Linnet

  So it happens the sun

  and the tilt of the train

  and a smell like stone drying

&n
bsp; and a faint song playing

  align, and we’re back again

  walking the Lanes

  towards the Park

  we enter through old iron gates

  and though it takes the bite

  of planetary gears

  to place me here, the weight

  of years,

  I’ve learned it’s also light

  as air and how to hold it

  is to be held, until

  given names, it disappears.

  The Ship in the Park

  Most parks harboured one, an inland mooring

  but we don’t know that yet. This one is ours.

  Skeletal steel, a biro or a blueprint

  of a ship from central casting, drawing

  the kids who’ve tired of the swing or spent

  hours behind the wheels of burned out cars.

  Galleon style. Old Spice. On a tide of tarmac

  glittering with broken glass—as if some giant

  bottle had been smashed and the ship slipped free

  but couldn’t set sail from this dry dock—

  a playground wind blew straight through it; a crescent

  moon rose with no influence on this sea.

  England’s Glory. We climb its empty frame

  and fight over who’s captain. One keeps lookout.

  The white flats loom like icebergs. A sheet of rain

  twitches with sharks. Deep in a half term’s doldrums

  we lie down in its hull like cargo, start

  to smoke, or learn to drink Lamb’s Navy rum

  and puke over the side. We ran aground

  like that. The Cutty Sark. The Marie Celeste.

  The Hispaniola. The Bounty. The Onedin Line.

  All the ways we found to live and play in the past

  on a riveted-to-the-spot, spot-welded sign

  abandoned in a few moons, lost with all hands.

  The Mystery

  There’s a funfair in the small bones of my ears.

  It’s pitched up in the deep olfactory bulb,

  in the crosshairs of my eyes. It lights the marrow

  of my long bones, with a hoop for every year

  it turned this park into a diamond district,

  each slow excited stride from ride to shy

  beyond the goldfish that would grow a bib

  of mould in time, beyond the smell of straw

  and caramel and two-stroke generators.

  Even the big wheel still turns inside me,

  though the thing itself has long since gone for scrap,

  and every bulb’s blown to an iron-grey dust.

  You must still hang there in the moving night,

  unaware this blank machinery

  is doing such dark work, until a slight

  catch in the throat and shiver passing through

  which we call déjà vu. A thought like that

  can swing one of two ways: either you feel

  yourself the very centre of all things—

  the girls laughing, the cinder toffee, the bulbs

  like hot rivets holding the dusk around you—

  or you can feel the cold all of a sudden,

  a mouse inside a town hall clock’s movement

  frozen before the iron strike of the hour,

  and all at once the fluke, the joke, of being alive

  lies open and exposed, a sheet-steel sky

  shutting the furnace door on Wavertree,

  the spoke that holds him pointing towards nothing,

  an axle groan rising above the music.

  And so he hangs there in the moving night,

  knowing the big wheel has to set him down,

  a stop/start through fifteen degrees of arc;

  that the man who took his money will take his hand

  like any boatman would; but he stays aboard

  a while longer, for one more go around,

  and leaves me standing in an empty park.

  Glade

  From the long loan book of recurring dreams,

  the one where I’m opening the library

  on Ladbroke Grove, entering the alarm

  code, letting off a chain of lights,

  making up a float, chasing out the cold

  and a ring of chairs in a cove among

  the shelves where I set fresh papers out

  then shake a can of air freshener

  and hang a mist in the air. I draw

  the bolt and wedge open the door

  and in they come. They’ve got no faces

  any more, but their clothes are pigeon,

  stock brick, plane bark, pavement greys.

  They make a bee-line for certain chairs

  and are surely most of them dead these days

  but here they’re still studying furiously

  as I guard the peace—I’m the one who’s asleep,

  remember—from headlines to small print shares.

  The silence deepens. The world turns.

  I’ve never been happier in my work.

  Song Thrush

  One used to perch on its anvil

  under the currant bush

  in the corner of our yard, a

  shady spot where we’d watch it bash

  a snail like its gavel

  and leave a broken home.

  This stone was about the size

  of an old dial telephone,

  and sometimes the bird would stop,

  snail still in beak,

  and tilt its head to one side

  as if it were listening into the shell,

  as if it were a receiver that said

  something back,

  something so outrageous or stupid

  it wanted to telegraph the fact

  to us, a technique

  students are taught at RADA,

  a way to react

  so we’d be able to tell

  the caller had suddenly hung up.

  Water Nymph at a First Generation Magnox Storage Pond

  We hook up in the last places you’d look.

  Flooded subways, lift well pools

  where rain holes up, gazed-over gravelled shallows,

  moss gardens on bus stop shelter roofs:

  we’re found near waters just like these since Zeus

  got us on zero hours contracts,

  having deserted springs, dew ponds and tarns,

  taken our severance, joined the queues

  and tell our sob stories of meres and fens

  long drained, filled in, paved over,

  cry me a river. Some babble: new reservoirs

  will create thousands of jobs; purists

  sit on their arses, waiting for water features

  to come to them. But if they’d take a cistern,

  a temporary post beside a rain butt,

  a bath plumbed into quickset for the cattle,

  a leaky fridge condenser, hoof print, divot

  or—sod it—a puddle, there’s always work to be had.

  Lately in the kingdom of the blind

  they’ve built these radioactive oubliettes

  —keeping the lights on means having to forget—

  and after two millennia of mills,

  of aqueducts and sullen moats,

  we gather in their background shine. Those clicks

  are the echolocation of exiled nymphs.

  Listen to this one. A century of gutters.

  That one got stuck next to a dead man’s kettle.

  Another slummed it by a whirlpool spa for years.

  If you’re picturing pale skin and golden tresses,

  my hair falls out in tufts. Maybe we’re turning mortal

  from bathing alongside scrapped fuel rods,

  old thunderbolts rusting and spent,

  where water carries a charge and taste

  like coins banked in a civic fountain’s silt,

  or—this is going back—pools with the taint

  of lead scrolls
scratched with binding spells or curses.

  Words that would burn in air.

  In this lido left to stagflate, I need only apply

  myself to my reflection and there’s a post

  for life, longer than a life: no wishes or spite

  can outlast all this legacy sludge.

  I’m inventorying the waste, just like I used

  to count the flowering grasses

  and clouds that lingered in those earliest springs

  before I watched a world evaporate.

  Gentian Violet

  Finding a roadside gentian activates

  a sunset clause in the laws of common sense:

  as I’m about to nick it from this verge

  the flower sends a little shock to my hand.

  The rainbow runs to earth: beyond here

  it’s all geophysics, worms, Pluto’s blue torch

  in the body-scan, where flowers are the wounds

  they once were gathered to heal, it’s a certain stain

  in a sweetheart deal with bees, cut-flower scents

  during the night feed on a ward, it’s the vein

  that rises for a moment in your breast.

  Now the flower blooms harder, the way a fire

  in a city, seen from air support, shorts out

  a block or two of power around itself

  and cultivates more dark to flare against.

  Robin

  It’s not so much that robins follow us

  more like they lead the way, going on ahead

  like useless guides with not one word of our language

  but fluent in flow and lode, flitting along

  whichever way we walk, breaking into song

  before we catch up, and they’re off again, a few yards

  further into the future. We love them for this,

  for spelling it out, for showing us where the edge

  of the present moment is.

  A breeze has shook

  the holly or whitethorn and the robin has gone,

  leaving me on the sky-puddled tarmac

  straddling the powerlines, along the Black Path

  that forked under a streetlamp, beside the White Bridge

  where the open fields began and the smell of earth

  was strong.

  I’ve stood in all of these places

  and a part of me stands there still, till a robin surfaces

  and I follow it out, as I did then. Robin, lead on.

  The Green Man