3.
INSTRUCTIONS TO ARACHNE
4.
CRABWISE
5.
EROSION
6.
SKIMMER
6.
DISAPPEARING ACT
8.
UPWARDLY MOBILE
9.
PIER RELATIONSHIP
10. VOTING INTENTIONS 10. LUMBER 12. FULL CIRCLE 13. MRS. ZHIVAGO IRONS 14. POINT OF VIEW 15. STANDSTILL (solstice at St. Deny’s station) 16. AGAINST THE GRAIN 17. Stopover at The Hog’s Head 18. SQUEEZING OUT SUMMER 19. PLATFORM 20. SCALING THE HEIGHTS 21. FALLING 22. A CUT ABOVE
June 2017
INSTRUCTIONS TO ARACHNE Begin with a line. Float it on the breeze of a single breath to another surface: the distance of thought.
From the slack middle, drop your second to form a pivotal ‘Y’. Next, a scaffold of spokes anchor each to the frame. Build a platform at the hub. Make it firm: later, as you hang head down -
waiting latent, your belly will swell with ideas. In the seam of night and day trace a spiral outward. Briefly rest. Then, edge-to-centre back, spin your sticky script.
Be nimble across the trap use your third claws. And punctuate weak gaps with extra thread. You may eat your guidelines. Feel tenderly for the struggle: unseen, its vibrations will reach you
along silk-strong strands. End them with a bite.
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CRABWISE Crouched around the rim, in clusters, kids with buckets. Wordless, I watch a tussle of wits. They’ve come equipped, these hunters, brought string and safety pin. A bolt becomes makeshift sinker, and bacon’s saved to bait their bottom dwelling prize. Stalk-eyes see the would-be catch, alert to a murky rip-off. Risk is palpable, approached through stealthy pincer movement. Two schools of landing coexist: some jerk and swing, flailing in search of an instant answer, others draw their lines patiently by inches to the surface. The day’s take plays scrabble, captive in some plastic prison. Canoe Lake strollers pause and peer,
in a barnacled mantle make out the moon’s crust. Maybe. Or count lost legs of veterans regrown at moulting season like veins around a tumour. Afternoon, and ice-cream, bring this contest to a close.
Tipped out across a concrete page my jottings scuttle to the edge, spill over, and sink without trace.
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EROSION Fidgeting beneath dank veils of fog the half-term day trip begins by ferry. Posterity clamours, yet I only half attend; and unsure where to look, ahead or back, dredge memory’s reach for bearing. No guide but our gentle wake of crossing. Bedaubed with gaudy dinosaurs a veteran tube train waits at the pier head: reduced in circumstance, two coaches on single track.
Taken for a ramshackle ride, we’re rattled along to the end of the line; to where, as nipper, I grew in sunshine. There, with two good ears between them, my parents shoulder their years with modesty: arthritic lives perched safely clear of landslide. Closer to the rust railed edge, newly exposed roots gape at passing generations.
Each set of feet makes its own migration. Candlemas Bells bloom in nodding clumps, their snow-white tears a mark of human hand;
likewise the cliff top shelter some hooligan transmutes with fag butts, spray paint and rancid piss. Via headlong hairpins then our path descends to spill us, like outfall, on rippled sands. That wind-pitted face whose crows nest early commands the groynes, steams in risen heat. Kids beyond ‘KISMET’, a peeling beach hut palace, we near the rearing steps to climb full circle:
‘Falls can take place’, points out the hoarding, ‘at any time, and without warning.’
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SKIMMER Much is in the choosing: how shape fits to the curve of thumb and index finger, the weight in your palm. And smoother the better,
stone and water both, to amplify the bounces as spin and tension clash.
When flicked release is flat as leaning knees allow, then ripples splash the surface, dance in liquid rings. Over tumbled lifetimes, by billion fold collision tide-worn, a pebble waits for you to throw it.
***
DISAPPEARING ACT (Brighton West Pier) Burnt out yet standing still, my lattice dome of rusting girders becomes mind island. Pillars and spars and ties and synapses are wave-riding, wind-whipped vortex: the left skeleton of bare memory, alive only with murmuration of starlings.
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Seventeen chains from shore to pavilion's end: a span first swept by hems full length, with parasols
and gents in Sunday best. Columns, screwed to seabed, cast iron guarantee of briny promenade. The rim of seats leaning backward, offers pause to contemplate; on all sides scrollwork and curlicue reflect our frippery. As years roll by, trippers flock and the features grow. Paddle steamers share their landing stage with anglers, pierrots frolic, daring divers plunge, and bandstand transforms to concert hall. Then decking widens
making room for dodgems, ghost train, helter skelter. While toddlers peer through gaps in planks at sea below, scallywags cadge pennies to play the slot-machines. A pulse of their footfall runs up and down the stale decades of disrepair. By fire, by storm the motherboard gets disconnected, remaining cordless, rooted just beyond reach. Had I still limb enough to swim
the distance to where you shelter under arches, I would meet you on the shingle breathless, unable to explain quite the attraction.
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UPWARDLY MOBILE Locals must have heard us coming, packed in our pug-nosed Bedford minibus its cylinders’ spluttered misfire and gears grinding through their changeful accents migrants from the Midlands. Flat vowels swallowed by green field fortune,
moving to see what we might become. At three days short of ten years old, rare treat to ride up front beside
my father flush with his big promotion. Feet warm on the engine, mother sandwiched in behind with squabbling siblings, grubby and tired of mid-summer, restless to see where we might become. Slipping our moorings, the ferry is roll-on-roll-off basket of promises, deliveries and cheap day trips.
Her squat symmetry and shallow-bottom my very own Dawn Treader. Like hawsers thrown to bollards we make fast, settling to see what we could become. Up budget-stretching cul-de-sac, four-square with own coal bunker and shrunken plum, a white walled floor plan forms our blue print. In that detachment - shaped by boundary of crumbling cliffs, creeks and shores; high downs, woods and hidden caves finding how it was we came to become.
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PIER RELATIONSHIP (for my father) Under a corrugate roof open to the wind, rising brusque from waves below, I wait in dying light as you so often did for carriages to move me on. Out of that photo long gone your greying beard, in straight-faced converse with an elderly guard,
nods recognition. Memory’s pull is strong, here at the head of the line. Thick with paint this iron spine resists its rusting. Nightfall: a cloud of wagtails flitter like distressed moths, seek roost among the stanchions,
from settlement draw common strength. Along the pier’s full length I’ll follow the lamp lit tide,
rippling, broadening to the margin. In sea-black mirror no view to bring back home and dispute, with you, its proof.
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VOTING INTENTIONS (a congenial exercise in secrecy) It is an act of communion, that slip posted in a tin-black mouth. The don’t-blame-me defence for years to come. Once perhaps the everyday note to milkmen, under empty bottle, weighed down by habit.
Its order sometimes blurred by rain. Or maybe a love letter’s captive thought, long pondered, with aching hope sent off.
The entreaty hidden beneath a doormat. Or just the random prejudice of a moment, clutched at, like a tabloid spread in sudden ill-wind swept up and flailing. Then, within a flimsy booth, set down in two fleeting strokes of thick, soft pencil: our only choice, this folded curse. *** LUMBER (an elegy for the Welfare State) Because you’ve grown and grown too tall, too broad, too thick so we must cut you down. Because your spreading mantle does darken all our plot so we must cut you down. For your ambition upward, though long since trimmed each year, means we shall take you down.
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No more that thrash of branches, in spring storms spilling graceful rain from your lopped crown. No more our summer refuge under your shady dappling, leaves by breeze all fribbled. No more the autumn tableau of patchwork turning, green to amber then to red. No more, when lastly naked, will full moon rising silver your tissue paper skin. Yes, old friend, we are intent with rope and screaming blade, limb by limb to bring you down.
And then your trunk, disabled, is creaking hinge of life before the door is slammed. Out from piles of fallen bark, ladybirds diverse escape your diamond fissures dark. Pigeons, where once they paused,
fly through an empty space the enclosed light let loose. So, stump apart, now lawn
is level playing field, while in the ground roots pulse.
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FULL CIRCLE With open arms, unripened June reaches skyward where criss-cross runes,
like cloudy kisses, vaporise. Approaching our meridian on wheels, I duck its overhang, gaze through windows and hurry past; untaken timelines, glimpsed and gone in the passage between stations. Deep sat, my crows feet eyes backtrack, echo distant, tunnel vision. In its shoebox a photo fades lover’s keepsake of gilded years and there before you first fetched breath, all mock demure, your mother smiles. Youth supposes endless encores. But leant on wall, hands tucked behind, the image speaks of no return: leaves me to plumb that pool of genes for common features, weaving stitches
out of scars. The hidden birthmark ageing, losing definition. Decades later, from time to time, the disjoined stories rendezvous,
make cameo appearances along the riverbank. I'm perched in blustery spitter spatter on a barstool with espresso: scanning the walkways' lit parade to fit, in teatime’s suck tide, each quick step in its place. Yet skirting sentiment until - as five chimes out of the grey you stride, across the bridge between us, into view all heels and legs and brimful of confidence. Neck like a pillar;
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bold as once I was, decades since. Then marching off to the nearest, noisiest pub, we talk full tilt
and reason you've reached half my span. So from here on our ratio narrows: as day dims slowly might-have-beens get overthrown, while shared things grow.
***
MRS. ZHIVAGO IRONS (a home movie) Zhivago watches his pregnant wife, hears her purpose in the rhythmic thud of flat triangle stroked over cloth.
She takes its point into the tuck of cuffs, follows the edge of pleats, with heat and weight loosening the long chain bonds.
I look on, share her fixed impatience with the slightest crinkle, straightening in my head the crooked fibres. Collars are flattened wrong side first; even in the yoke of his shoulders creases are pressed knife-sharp, no puckering. Here, we bring you this pile of lines,
smoothed and fastidiously folded. Finish the job: put them where they belong.
13
POINT OF VIEW Citadel of crows: dagger-beaked above the motorcycles ranked out front Mick’s monster burger van. Hop. Skip. Peck up what’s left over; bare-faced their opportunism rising and landing between the wheels. This ridge is fortress, brick bulwark, shelters homeland spread on seaboard like a Lego metropolis.
Look down, look closer down: tight terraces and concrete blocks, CCTV in cages. Unseen divides. Beyond our watery perimeter childhood’s playful hills dissolve as night and mist enfold them. The lit city transforms to circuit board, pulsing with connections
that define us but have no name. Clouds sail over creeks and harbour: not every view is postcard, but always
wind moves the shadows on. Islands give boundary, lend distance, are where – if you want – you can be your own professor of secrets.
14
STANDSTILL (solstice at St. Deny’s station) At junction of thumb and index dusk settles in the platform’s palm: signal colours without word switch, so I halt while the year divides. A scattering of swifts command
their heaven, black on dimming blues, as rumbling dock-bound freight, contained and corporate, cuts through the calm.
My ears, tuned still for wind of change, are empty waggons seeking load: the weight of remembrance fills them full with lingering, cryptic hues. An express hurls a dawdling dove, in puff of feathery snow, to death. When losing track it is what’s heard that counts, not what we can decode. Beyond the iron footbridge, painted green and red, snaking points choose sides. Homeward, parting light from darkness,
my branch line curves and holds its breadth.
15
AGAINST THE GRAIN How sand piles up, here at my door. Strong winds carry countless skipjack granules, bouncing like beach-balls, from the shore. Checked by picket fences yet marching still, there is no way to hold it back.
Reaching through keyhole, it creeps over sill then once inside spreads everywhere. Infiltrates the floorboard gaps. Drowns the joists.
Skin-scratching, smothers my armchair. It mounts and mounts: recasts staircase as dune, gets swept in corners, swallows light. Sand-blind, its inert mouth becomes cocoon. Should bell be buried by this grit, guests are warned – “bring spade”. Mine waits in the hall: soon I must dig my own exit.
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Stopover at The Hog’s Head It has been, as they say, a while. Elbows on grain of pine, with English pints we settle to an earnest unfolding: the maps of our lives. From a plateau either side of sixty, we triangulate scarce-remembered reference points.
Draw comfort from the parallels. School geography – “Never write a word across a line”. Now I follow contours where bitumen
seals the cracks of least resistance. A door swings open, slamming closed; the candle gutters. Wax spots stick to varnish, turning hard, and my pig’s cheek is wolfed without remark. Our empty plates are gathered up: time to pay and go. Pauses signpost then uncharted shores where old age crumbles into sea. But anecdote is not data; you (as I would) point to local redbrick history. It says that as things have been they do not remain.
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SQUEEZING OUT SUMMER We have been here before, prodding at the precipice of a new term. Dog days, the silly season, street corner boredom. Elsewhere riots. Hedgerows are ripening. Crow armies manoeuvre, black on gold stubble. Thistledown drifts in stillness. Ragwort runs to seed.
Cycling back from the beach, flush with swimming, wheels scrunch on old ballast. In failing light, thoughts scurry home to be not caught out by rain. A dredger returned, has disgorged its scrapings.
Bait diggers harvest the year’s lowest tides. The last, deep salty draughts. Evening settles in a blackbird chorus cut through by whine of scooters. Bank Holiday sees the first rally of starlings. Scratching at midge bites, feel the chill on bare limbs. Reach for sweatshirts sooner. The death of a naturalist. Tucked inside his cover, so long forgotten, your letter. I’m taken aback at that courting gift, the insight of its guesswork.
Old fence posts burn in our fire pit and we are putting socks back on.
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PLATFORM Under security mirror and manifesto of adverts, we who wait, watched over. Beneath the fish-eye stare I pace an edge’s yellow warning,
taste dampness in September’s air, and scan the choice of company. Youth adjusts its midriff,
selects new tracks to pass midday content in isolation. Down parallels of to-and-from I look to gauge direction; for unloosed words to run true as that line below bridges: each arch seen through a nearer one. The boundaries, brick and wooded, narrow to distant amber: our signal undecided. My train is overdue. A crisp bag crackles, and silent the first leaf falls, no end in view.
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SCALING THE HEIGHTS Sea-level. Our world at a right angle. Train your view; find in four hundred feet of whitened face, a black spread-eagle, half-way from swell to sparse pine rim. Toes and fingers stretch for fissures,
caress the geology, hopeful seek from each nub, crevice, sill and spur enough inconsistency to anchor.
In that speck of concentration to us no more than drop in the ocean of better judgements - the wedged gravity of mind complete unto itself. Chalk bag and quickdraw, crimp and undercling: I envy the nerve, would belay between overhangs, traverse the crux of it, to become as you wish to seem.
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FALLING (for 25 years) It is hard to pinpoint when I missed my footing and could no longer walk apart from you. Perhaps it began with a fern unfurling from clenched fist into kiss, asking and answering its own question. But I fancy our season to be that of hedges, ripening between start of new school years and the first bare branches.
Every autumn the litter deepens and we kick through, sweep clear: our rustling path reset by what's been learnt. Held in the circle of your smile, always I'm catching up, cupping my ear for echo of our courting song, or – like a waterfall – the resonance of your laughter, tumbling
just a hand's reach away.
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A CUT ABOVE
‘Pollarding encourages new growth and maintains trees in a partially juvenile state.’ Wikipedia The time has come to move. Uncleared for years cut short, our loft like unkempt pollard is outgrown, cut short. I must prune the thickened boughs, bear with me only
leaves that memory will condone and not cut short. Now in a homemade box compact my paper life; jam-pack it full with keepsakes, touchstones to cut short. At this set height to clear the head and light the path, give underbrush its space, in overtones cut short. Today the loppers turn on friend and family: every corner of their postcards, far-flown, cut short. Jumbled bundles of varied gloss and clarity the squeezed dispatches, long disowned, become cut short. Right angles frame the lost face values, and I too beset by reading their halved backbones - am cut short. This is my forgetting: choose some scaffold branches, a gnarl of moments to retain, be known, cut short. Pledges, protests, pleas and censures. When winter-made these wounds save sap from weeping, as it groans, cut short. The lid creaks closed. Held in a knobbly, ivied trunk, such unfinished contexts as Mark alone cut short.
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When spring in leaf makes good its pledge that’s when my rusty spade will bite.
Across the lawn I’ll mark an edge, my unmade bed to plant with light.
And where my trusty spade does bite the grass is gone, left naked earth, an unmade bed to plant with light. Within its bounds no knotted turf:
the grass is gone, left naked earth. Since winter drear at last will break, within its bounds the knotted turf my blade will cut and lift and shake.
When winter drear at last does break, across the lawn I mark my edge where blade shall cut and lift and shake,
for spring in leaf makes good that pledge.
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From Birmingham via the Isle of Wight, Mark Cassidy practices Radiography in Portsmouth. His poems have previously seen the light of day in Pushing Out The Boat, Northwards Now,
Poetry Salzburg Review, Ariadne’s Thread, Skylight 47, and This Island City: Portsmouth in Poetry. Others, including most of those collected here, may be found in previous home-grown pamphlets and are gathered on-line at
https://markbcassidy.blogspot.co.uk/