The Mizzy Read online

  The boy who taught us how to charm the worms

  by throwing Fairy Liquid on the grass,

  then how to bait our hooks and cast a line

  into the pool where little perch would rise,

  who knew the Vulcan pinch and the Cruyff turn,

  who whistled with his thumb and forefinger,

  who understood how damp and sappy wood

  burned slowly with a yellowy-green flame,

  who showed us how to slap life from a fish,

  who knew that hogweed bled a poison sap,

  who taught us how to bluff at stud poker,

  who told ghost stories in a broken whisper,

  who took the first watch and the only watch,

  who left the tent at dawn to steal the milk,

  has been kicked to death in the car park of a pub

  on the other side of the year two thousand,

  a land we liked considering at length,

  the things we’d do in it and who we’d be,

  before we fell asleep while he stood guard

  as the fire died and the stars formed up above.

  Moorhen

  Shy, maternal, unknowable

  haunter of water edges, bearing a red

  shield like a cross. There is no danger here.

  Primitive three-pronged claw

  designed for the packed mud and its sheen

  of algae: a print from central casting.

  Prey-bird in your forest of reeds,

  a few scene-changes from being flightless,

  you could walk back there again.

  And why stop there?

  Keep going, little moorhen.

  You carry in your heart the code

  to scale up, to sprout true teeth,

  to rise with the ruby eyes of a dinosaur

  from the lake where we hire boats by the hour.

  Bananaquits, St Lucia

  Floods and landslides block the airport road.

  Bridges are down. We’re greeted by a bird

  that urges us to quit.

  Then days of firsts:

  flying fish, twilights that fade in seconds,

  a table laid with water pistols to squirt

  any finch that rocks up thinking it’s Bede’s sparrow.

  The Palm House in the Park gets off the ground

  easily, a wrought iron memory palace

  filled with light, where I’d sleep under glass

  in my pram during winter opening hours,

  or so the story goes.

  A hummingbird

  that doesn’t know the words docks with a flower.

  This is only a flying visit. We leave tomorrow.

  The Sloth

  cold vision

  Will have no counterfeit

  Palmed off on it.

  —Sylvia Plath

  From the Deadwater Fell transmitter, a long walk down

  towards the lake through planted slopes,

  through stacked birthyards of timber sown

  in groups

  of Norway Spruce, Greek Fir, Scots Pine

  neat as new towns, down quiet avenues

  of firebreaks, stitched by the pitchy whine

  of chainsaws—close by/far off: hard to say—

  and after walking miles, through many years

  of unclimbed heights and pillared depths, the day

  has dropped its guard and a figment hangs in plain view

  stopping you in your tracks. Either this is interference

  from television (that bad medium

  and fate for beasts like sloths that chance

  their arm

  quietly and in slow motion:

  to be chopped up in a forest of fast editing),

  or you are channelling a specimen

  from an underfunded regional museum

  where keepers tried to carefully compose

  a dead tree’s dioramic universe

  and there, arranged about its height and root and span

  other once-living things—from a dual carriageway of ants

  whose columns raised the tall standards

  of leaves, to the windless canopy’s haunts

  for birds

  pinned into attitudes of song—

  coincided as they never did in their days

  or damp, electric nights. The whole display

  could be viewed on two levels, so divided

  species. You’d wonder: was it the same for us,

  if those who gazed from the lower deck of the bus

  that brought them loved the leafmould, where scarcely a ray

  of skylight reached, and slowly the jaguar would appear

  and then by following its eyes

  into a deeper shade, the shy

  tapir;

  hunter and quarry tightly bound

  in the coiled spring before the pounce and cry

  that never came, an outcome undecided

  so all the stronger impressed in a mind

  drawn to the dark. Others preferred to wander

  up serpentine stairs, past the fronds and vines

  of the understory, true home of houseplants, the anaconda

  that shivered the perpendiculars into life,

  where, at the end of a short climb

  into this world of bough and limb

  and leaf,

  you’d find the sloth. You’d think: The sloth!

  It smiled back, always a model of good grace

  in its airy offices, grateful for each throng

  of gazes crowded in its field of vision.

  It read your minds. I’d shinny up and hang

  like that, given half a chance . . . Seeing the face

  of a classmate cloud with the facticity of its former being

  could blow-dart this: That sloth’s got sawdust in its skull –

  Still, it thrived beyond the elements

  where no sap rose and no rain fell

  which meant,

  next to the plasticized tree toad,

  the Spanish moss, the monkey with the eyes,

  and the tree itself, as rootless as a flag pole,

  it became the quickest creature in this jungle.

  Stared at long enough, you’d swear its mouth

  suppressed a steady deepening, a grin

  returned, with interest, and slowly you came to realize

  how those shirt-hanger toes were moving by degrees

  (you used to take magic on trust)

  around the clock-face of the tree

  and crossed

  the shiny, equatorial bark

  by increments the adults couldn’t see.

  What an afterlife. To hang there, upside down

  in another hemisphere. After the moist

  and rich rafters of the Atlantic Forest,

  the journey home seemed drab and undershadowed.

  Years passed. Time lapsed. Some kind of slow ingress or drain

  meant every pilgrimage to this land of zero growth

  grew less revered, until you shot

  a glance so quick that you forgot

  the sloth

  soon as you re-entered the day,

  while it listened to rain drumming on the skylight

  during unvisited hours, the short-cased tick

  of museum beetles, the totem pole’s dull cracks

  as the building cooled. Downstairs, the jaguar laid

  his long ambush. All lived their second lives

  like that, far longer than their firsts. Until, one night,

  a fire burned the roof off that world, and the rain

  —for the first time since time stopped—

  beaded its fur. The sloth was trapped

  again

  and cast to star on a ghost train

  as Pan (unbilled); singed, motheaten, bent

  upright, an interior gargoyle set to pounce

  on paying passengers like you, who went

  and saw, among the skeletons and bats,r />
  the sloth, caught in a flash, just like it once

  appeared to a troop of sheltering monkeys in the light

  of an ancient storm. Your childhood wasn’t properly earthed:

  the carefully curated tree,

  the ghost train in its tented fair

  were free

  to flicker into life, or fall

  from view, every discarnate spectacle

  and image creeping to some further lair

  like this, where the biomass retires to lick

  its wounds. Sitkas and larch tower in their dark

  postwar vertical hold, silent and still,

  and you catch up with yourself. Neither hide nor hair

  of the sloth has been seen in years, but this forest you stand

  inside is a kind of mind, the rain

  its cold vascular system, planned

  to drain

  into a manmade lake or climb

  the living wood to meet itself in time

  on the ends of needles, dendrites, pineal

  seed cones human eyes will never see,

  where a shy dryad has found a place to dwell

  high in the branches of its modal tree

  and refuses to have anything to do with you again.

  Critique of Pure Reason

  Who hasn’t thought of two raindrops

  that, by some hydrostatic fluke,

  fall side by side the whole way down?

  And talking to one another, too!

  Like skydivers before they pull

  the cord lip-read, except raindrop falls

  are graceful, free from all the roar

  of air—this being what they were made for.

  What conversations to imagine,

  though there’s scant time to get beyond

  pleasantries, chit chat, the weather,

  and seeing as this won’t happen again

  their talk turns urgent, to the point.

  Entering the last hundred feet

  through a broken pane in a station roof

  or towards a road japanned with rain

  or the opened chute of a sycamore

  is an ecstasy of parting—Be good.

  I doubt I’ll see you anytime soon—

  and at this point the daydream stops

  and raindrops stop being raindrops.

  Lunula

  after Yakuo Tokuken

  The moon curves through its million-mile course . . .

  You can spot the weirdos a mile away,

  telling us how its orbit strays

  from earth at the speed a fingernail grows.

  The Gadget

  An algorithm yoked to a smart microphone

  means it can throw my voice. (Years ago, this meant

  the cutting out of a comic book coupon

  down the dotted line, a postal order sent

  to a PO Box on the Avenue of the Americas

  where every handshake buzzed and sea monkeys swam;

  on the wing and a prayer of knowing what a ‘zip code’ was,

  in the hope the whole thing wasn’t an elaborate scam.)

  Is that me, trapped in the anchorhold of a post box?

  Is that me, in my own pocket, on ringtone?

  This is more fun than black soap or x-ray specs.

  I laugh on the edge of the centre of attention.

  But the gadget can be serious and tactical.

  It can throw a thousand lumens and singe eyebrows.

  It ships with an optional anodized strike bezel

  and defends itself with an avian shrill that could ‘rouse

  Saint Michael the Archangel’s flapping host’

  according to the literature. More practical

  perhaps is the way it calculates how lost

  I’d be without it, and chirrups reminders, missed calls.

  I’d tell you its name, but then you might guess my password.

  I’d tell you its name, but it won’t recognize your voice.

  If found, it will thrum in your hand like a frightened bird

  as it arms itself and becomes a small device.

  Can yours do this? Positioned at my temple

  its alchemic palladiums and golds

  excite me, bringing pleasure. Or, with a simple

  click it can open a vein in spring lancet mode.

  Box of sobs, bearer of pipesmoke, putty,

  the inkiness of a comic read by torchlight,

  it can dowse a water main in the darkest city,

  and I’ve wondered if it feels me feeling sorry for it;

  this thing that fits in my hand but can never outlive me,

  this thing that sulks on standby facing the iron pole

  of the planet, that knows my blood type and search history.

  It points towards the presence of a soul.

  The Keeper of Red Carpets

  Come in. Please be careful. Mind your step.

  He keeps them in the dark.

  It stinks, I know. Like a stable or a paddock.

  Perspective slackens like an ankle rope

  in a gallery. Carpets sleep off the world,

  digesting its flash and glamour,

  its royal visits and movie premiers.

  He’s dragged last night’s returns in, tired and soiled,

  to see to their cigarette burns, studs of gum.

  Always the indents of heels:

  money’s bitemarks leave a trail.

  A few lie about—unfiled—like ruin columns.

  Armed with a dandy brush he settles them down

  with a beating and a groom,

  and talks to them when the stain removal fumes

  fuddle him and make his eyes run.

  Safe now from so much as a glance,

  he sleeps among them in the racks.

  The stockroom phone is ringing off the hook.

  Somebody’s always looking to make an entrance.

  Entry, 1981

  There must be catacombs, bone shops,

  potters’ fields, barrows, plague pits

  that contain the only record of lives

  lived—no cuneiform, glyph, or notch

  on a stick, in clay, to mark they came

  this way, got taxed, dwelt here, did that—

  those who escaped paper and ink

  to leave their traces downriver

  in blood, colostrum, marrow. So,

  to discover we had personal data

  was a big deal that April. School hours,

  when anything that broke the humdrum

  was welcomed—somebody bringing in

  a piece of Skylab, the x-ray van, a poet

  in class—or the Careers Officer

  who pitched up in the sickbay. Summoned

  from History, we formed a queue

  to have our fortunes told. His machine

  shuffled and riffled—blackjack inside

  a tumble dryer—our aptitudes

  and details matched at dizzying speeds

  to a shrinking sector called utopia,

  and five minutes later dealt our cards.

  The Careers Officer had other schools

  to visit, and many more predictions

  before sundown. I’ve a memory now

  of him pulling a plastic shroud over

  his big machine, bossing around

  the two caretakers who lugged it out

  like a mandarin’s sedan, with him

  leading his own procession, a man

  whose card was marked but didn’t know it.

  Life During the Great Acceleration

  I was a data furrier. After mink came sable.

  The two escaped and ran down the same cable.

  I was a datafarrier. I shod the switchers

  that galloped on the spot in air-cooled pastures.

  I was a data cooper, a hooper of light:

  gallons, firkins, barrels and hogsheads of bytes.

  I was a data monger. I sold your historiesr />
  to the highest bidder among disinterested third parties.

  I was a datafettler, defragger of drives,

  a grinder of rough edges, a filer of lives.

  I was a datacollier and went down the pit.

  At the end of each shift I was strip-searched for pixels or bits.

  I was a data tanner. I lifted your skin

  while it was still blood-warm with information.

  Moss

  At the junction where The Wrong Side of the Tracks

  meets Memory Lane where the mighty sodium mast

  looks down on everything from a kestrel’s height

  as the cutting passes through the fossil record

  and filed horizons where sandstone turns the green

  of a sea wall ferns the green of a banker’s lamp

  beyond Broad Green where we trespass on the line

  and put our ears to the rail like they did in films

  where an Iron Age head listens to the party wall

  of a pond where thrown-back carp bask in their status

  and all are shaken by timetable where the moon

  fits the description of the smoked-out sun

  over Manchester to the east which we can hear

  as loom rumble through the steel where buddleia

  holds the signal at maroon for miles in summer

  where we time our blinks with the freight train’s red lantern

  so as not to miss a thing where stones pulled up

  to cast leave an empty chocolate tray in the earth

  where the great spoil banks of the motorway are seeded

  and goblins weave down minor roads on mopeds

  with the horsepower of sewing machines in fishtail

  parkas where the fields brew runoff and plinths

  of concrete stand with no discernible function

  where the night glitters in a ring around potato drills

  and we are young and green in the old and afterwards

  stood out in it not knowing the storm has passed

  and the first landscape of speed is gathering moss

  Sparrowhawk

  I’m all in. This I can get behind.

  I’m doing my Dracula cape routine.

  You look horrified. The starling’s beak

  opens. Fuck, help me out here

  are the words you’d feed it. Embarrassed

  to be caught in such a shameful act?

  A pillow fight? A slash through the puffa?

  I don’t think so. Just distracted.

  Your move. Stop watching me eating.

  Hard to tear your gaze away