FAREWELL TO THE EARTH
CHRISTOPHER JAMES 1
Farewell to the Earth
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Farewell To The Earth Christopher James
2011
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Published by Arc Publications Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright © Christopher James 2011 Design by Tony Ward Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Book Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn 978 1906570 70 5 pbk 978 1906570 71 2 hbk Acknowledgements Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following magazines and anthologies in which some of these poems first appeared: The Bridport Prize Anthology 2006 and 2008, The Forward Book of Poetry 2010, The Frogmore Papers, Interpreters House, Iota, Magma, Poetry Nottingham, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto and Smiths Knoll. A number of the poems in this collection have been awarded the following prizes: ‘Farewell to the Earth’ won first prize in the 2008 National Poetry Competition; ‘John Lennon on the Great Wall of China’ won first prize in the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2006; ‘The Novices’ was a runner up in the Bridport Prize 2008; ‘The Light Age’ was a runner up in the Bridport Prize 2006; ‘Backpacking across Pangea’ was longlisted for the Bridport Prize 2009; and ‘The Cat on the Dashboard’ was shortlisted for Open Poetry Sonnet Competition 2007. ‘A Star Shell’ was commissioned by the Tate and written in response to the painting of the same name by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson. The author would like to thank the Authors’ Foundation (administered by the Society of Authors) for a grant which assisted in the completion of this book. The author would like to thank the James and Keeble families; Bob Mee and Janet Murch, Maria, Polly, Noah and Martha. Cover picture “No. 6 Allotment” by Emma Dunbar, 290 x 305 acrylic on board, reproduced by kind permission of the artist www.emmadunbar.co.uk. This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
Editor for the UK and 4Ireland: John W Clarke
Contents
Farewell to the Earth / 9 The Retired Eunuch / 10 The Light Age / 11 Detective Fiction / 12 55 Mill Hill Road / 14 King Midas in the Golden Valley / 15 John Lennon on the Great Wall of China / 16 Backpacking Across Pangea / 17 The Small Architect / 19 The Novices / 20 Running with the Polish Airman / 21 Road Trip / 22 Solo / 24 The Lakeland Poets High Jump Contest / 25 The Elizabethan Stag / 26 Noah / 27 How I Learnt the Fingerpicking Style / 28 1 Graham Street / 30 Triathlon / 31 Saturday / 32 The Flood / 34 The Windmill Conversion Neighbourhood Watch / 36 The Queen’s Master of the Swans / 38 Seamus Heaney’s BlackBerry / 39 Wading the Humber / 40 The Skimmer King of the Antrim Coast / 42 Captain Sydney Smith / 43 The Cat on the Dashboard / 44 The Chitraker’s Allotment / 45 Second Honeymoon / 47 The Royal Yacht / 48
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Ring / 49
Returning / 50 Another Fine Mess / 51 Halos / 52 Exposure / 54 Out of the Bag / 55 Cortege / 56 The Tower / 57 You Do Not Need Your Wristwatch, There Is a Clock on the Wall / 58 The Divebombers / 60 Amends / 62 Unheard Music / 63 Fresher / 64 Firewood / 65 Exile Blues / 66 A Star Shell / 67 The Girl in the Piet Mondrian Dress / 68 The Benevolent Plague / 69 Disinterring the Archaeogist / 70 Waiting for the Stick-Man / 71 The Mist / 72 The Wonder-Smiths / 73
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Let the tape-machines go drunk Turn on the purple spotlight, pull out the Vox Humana Louis MacNeice
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For Martha
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FAREWELL TO THE EARTH
We buried him with a potato in each hand on New Year’s Day when the ground was hard as luck, wearing just cotton, his dancing shoes plus a half bottle of pear cider to stave off the thirst. In his breast pocket we left a taxi number and a packet of sunflower seeds; at his feet was the cricket bat he used to notch up a century against the Fenstanton eleven. We dropped in his trowel and a shower of rosettes then let the lid fall on his willow casket. The sky was hard as enamel; there was a callus of frost on the face of the fields. Dust to dust; but this was no ordinary muck. The burial plot was by his allotment, where the water butt brimmed with algae and the shed door swung and slammed as we shook back the soil. During the service, my mother asked the funeral director to leave; take away some hair and the resemblance was too close, and yet my father never looked so smart. I kept expecting him to walk in, his brow steaming with rain, soil under his fingernails, smelling of hot ashes and compost,
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THE RETIRED EUNUCH
Today I crashed my last wedding, hung up my bells, kissed goodbye to my maracas. From now, I will dance only for myself, choose turquoise stones from the village bazaar and walk between the grass and the green wheat. I will wear a yellow turban and striped shirt and, when I draw my pension, will put aside enough for the silver stilettos I saw in the shop in Chandigarh to be worn on the anniversary of my mother’s death. At night I will wear the white headdress shaped like a swan, dream of the City Beautiful and Lucky Ali with his denim shirt and Dean Martin eyes. In spring when my skin is still as pale as the palace of the ambassador, I will walk the high paths, pick the yellow flower and feel rain on my feet; I will not speak of the past. In my last days, I will play at high volume the big hits of Daler Mehndi, the Bhangra King, learn the sarangi and, once every year, journey to the shores of the Bay of Bengal. My soul I give to the stars, my eyes to the orphans. I will leave behind nothing but yesterday.
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THE LIGHT AGE
In the badly drawn world, when England was as plump as a summer marrow, when Essex changed places with Kent and no one much cared, the shape of things was not what mattered most. Scotland was squeezed between finger and thumb; Eire was a flattened gourd. When the possibility of dragons had not entirely been ruled out we made our way from Berwick to Canterbury in under a month; our forecasters cast their eyes across the clouds and feared the worst: a dark future of science and order; of lands that would not shift and rivers that refused to bend. We held out our hands as the dragons took flight, catching the sapphires they shook from their scales.
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DETECTIVE FICTION
It was a strange day to begin with: as I left the office I found a fifty dollar bill gummed to the bottom of my shoe. Good luck, you’d think, but it just didn’t feel right. It was like a beautiful woman you didn’t know blowing you a kiss across the room. On the street a sheet of newsprint was frozen to the sidewalk laminated in ice: the headline read: Detective found dead. I went down to the park, where I saw Liwina, the poor sick Dutch girl in her bonnet and long skirts, still skating on thin ice. I had to clear my head and went to the sanest place I could think of – the zoo, where I shared a bag of nuts with a polar bear. This was some mean December, I thought. My hands were like spiders dropped in the deep freeze. I hailed a cab and went down to Forty Third where I door-stepped an old friend of mine who fixed me an espresso as thick as tar. I explained about the fifty dollar bill, about Liwina and this crazy bear who chewed up my cashews. He nodded and poured me another.
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Maybe there’s some connection, he said. Blackmailers sometimes like to scare you first. I looked down at my cup then up at the crystal chandelier; we listened to the cars as the windows frosted over with ice, like eyes passing from life into death.
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55 MILL HILL ROAD
Moving in, an armchair got stuck in midair, lodged in that thin first floor landing; I read Arthur Miller four foot off the ground and sipped tea. It was the shape of things to come. The next day, I returned with my grandfather’s TV, already an antique which exploded on contact. I ran with it through the house, in green flames, and hurled it into the garden, where it stayed all winter. Our neighbours drove a black motorbike and sidecar and had sex on Tuesdays; I would sit frozen on our front step in a bin man’s hat and watch the North Star fall into the glove of the moon. Next to the spice rack, my flatmate kept a bottle of Teachers but never touched a drop. Only when I broke it open after hours did I feel the olive oil slide off my lips. Each morning I dialled the speaking clock then plunged my head into the sink. We spent four months without hot water, knives or forks; it was the Year of the Rat. Only with my grandfather, did the pretence remain; I wore a tweed jacket and bought gin for his wife for a hot shower, clean sheets and a fridge full of tonic. I never turned down offers like that.
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