Meanwhile Trees Read online

  MARK WALDRON

  MEANWHILE, TREES

  These poems may sometimes pretend they’re joking but they never really are. And what is it they’re not joking about? Death for one thing, and the fact that we don’t actually know who we are, and the fact that we don’t truly know who our loved ones are, or what art is, or anything else for that matter.

  Sometimes it feels as though someone has run off with meaning. It’s no longer to be found where we could once expect to find it, perhaps in religion or in nature or in art, and these poems set off in search of it. Their aim is to see if there’s a way of looking and a way of using language that can bring some meaning back to the world, because without it, we’re lost.

  Meanwhile, Trees is Mark Waldron’s third collection, following The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), both published by Salt.

  ‘Mark Waldron is the most striking and unusual new voice to have emerged in British poetry for some time.’ – John Stammers

  ‘Waldron has been busy forging a new language of deadpan, twenty-first century surreal, as receptive to John Berryman’s influence as anything written in the wake of The Dream Songs, as sceptical of the lyric self as anything in John Ashbery, and usually a lot funnier.’ – Dai George, The Boston Review

  ‘The post-Beckettian self-inquisition offered up by Mark Waldron (a poet, incidentally, writing consistently better than virtually any other at the moment).’ – Ahren Warner, Best British Poetry

  Cover artwork: Meanwhile, trees, from Abtei im Eichwald (1809-10) by Caspar David Friedrich

  Mark Waldron

  Meanwhile, Trees

  For my mum and dad

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Some of these poems, or versions of them, have appeared in Blue of Noon, Kaffeeklatsch, Magma, The Morning Star, Poetry London, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, Rising, The Quietus and Transom Journal. ‘So I hid my song’ was commissioned by Rachel Whiteread for her 2013 show at Gagosian in London. ‘Denmark Brochure’ and ‘All my poems are advertisements for me’ were published in Follow the Trail of Moths published by Sidekick Books. ‘The Decline of the Long s’, was written for Likestarlings in an exchange of poems with Jena Osman; ‘The Sea’ was commissioned by Jackie Saphra and Kate Potts for Somewhere in Particular; and ‘A cat called Orangey was in a number of movies’ was published by Sidekick Books in Lives Beyond Us. ‘Collaboration’ appears in Best British Poetry 2013, ‘First off appears’ in Best British Poetry 2014, and ‘I am lordly, puce and done’ appears in Best British Poetry 2015, all published by Salt.

  I’d like to thank Roddy Lumsden, John Stammers, Ahren Warner and my wife, Julie Hill, for their advice and suggestions on these poems.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  So I hid my song

  You know when you drop

  All My Poems Are Advertisements for Me

  Meanwhile, Trees

  So I was at home doing the washing up

  The Sea

  The Madding Wind

  When You Come in, Poppet

  A train, pale white in colour,

  Look at Our Faces – How Dead We’re Going to Be!

  The Shoes of a Clown

  A cat called Orangey was in a number of movies,

  The Uncertainty Principle

  You know that intermingled time of night and day

  The Fire

  Uh-Oh Sweet Wife

  As Though We Hoped to Be Forgiven

  A Glib

  Yes I admit that I have ate

  King Richard I

  Confessional Poem

  The Meeting

  Poem in which

  Innovations in Naval Gunnery

  Underground Beekeeping

  Vegetable Magnetism

  Outdoor Philately

  No Moose

  Sucked

  Sometimes a Phallus Is Just a Phallus

  The Dead Are Helpless

  The Voice

  Those worms that inhabit the bowel,

  In the Boulangerie

  Guns in Films

  It’s hard to see Hamlet as some kind of everyman,

  The Decline of the Long s

  No More Mr Nice Guy

  Professor Hydrofoil Is Attending a Matinee

  The Tenant

  We rested our hands

  Grace

  Manning

  I Collaboration

  II The Stage Is Set

  III Does a Filmic Wind Tousle the Photo-Real Grass?

  IV Denmark Brochure

  V Manning in the Rock Garden

  VI Out Here in the Future, Everything Is Doubly Suspect

  VII I am lordly, puce and done,

  VIII Don’t talk to me about ghosts,

  IX Enter a Ghost Smelling Minty

  The Common Quail

  The Lawn Sprinkler

  First off,

  About the Author

  Copyright

  So I hid my song

  in a disused shed. No wait, that’s not right, first I hid

  my song in a tin,

  and then the tin I hid in a sock, and the sock in a shoebox,

  and the shoebox in a hatbox, and the hatbox

  in the box that the breadbin came in.

  So I concealed that box among a rummage of others

  of hundreds of sizes and sounds-when-you-shook-them,

  in that shed above-mentioned.

  And I’d begun to walk away when I turned and I saw

  that the shed was all lit with the sun,

  and I resolved there and then that I must squirrel the shed

  under the ground in a dilapidated field

  where dirt grew and ephemera lay scattered about

  like butter.

  And once I’d buried the shed then I hid the whole field

  in the blue-red mountains,

  sliding it into a slot that I’d made beneath trees and foxes

  and ants.

  And then those mountains I shoved, like that, upside down

  in the sopping wet bed of the sea,

  and the sea I secreted beneath a particular sky, and the sky

  under space,

  and space I buried beneath that pernickety edge of nothing.

  And now it’s still not safe.

  You know when you drop

  something, a bottle or a vase perhaps, and when it first

  contacts the ground it does so in such a state of shock

  that it pauses there stunned, just for a fraction of

  a moment, before it comes to, and expeditiously collects

  itself, summons, despite its near panic, a sense

  of obligation, recalls just what’s expected of it, before it

  tenses its body, scrunches up its eyes, fabricates

  from nothing an explicit pop and a mass escape

  from the suffocating incarceration of existence,

  a breakout that dashes obediently to its slot, that being

  the ordained scatter-pattern of pieces and bits, where it rests

  then in an array of elfin smiles that seem to celebrate relief,

  to relish languidly what they, for this moment, take to be their

  liberty and to smoke thin cigarettes with their small feet

  up in front of TVs showing film of countryside in Spring,

  the next cell door having not yet swung entirely shut.

  All My Poems Are Advertisements for Me

  When I was young there was nothing exactly stupid

  about the world. In fact, in the good old days

  there was the thump and the tug of it, the way it heaved itself

  like a stone, yanked so to speak in glory,

  the way i
t fell up, crushed up, and then crushed up again,

  getting newer and newer, louder and sweeter,

  the way it watched its own face fall between its fingers

  as though its face were a handful of gold coins.

  I think I might have known the whole drag of everything

  going upwards, a tide that pulled me with it.

  Actually, I know I did. (You were part of all this by the way.)

  And the sky, well, where to begin?

  The sky was so adult, not imbecilic or thin or so-so or girlish.

  Did I outgrow it?

  Did I drink it, shoot it, find a way round it?

  Did I get inside it and drive off in it?

  Forgive me, but on my way to work this morning,

  even though the sun was on fire and the trees were up,

  I was in the apocalypse. Death is not what you think it is.

  It’s actually what I think it is.

  Meanwhile, Trees

  He was thinking, as he rocketed across the Tuileries,

  top-hat steadied with one hand, cane gripped in the other,

  and with that coddled little smile still (despite the haste

  of the body that carried it!) goofing-off all nonchalant in

  the otherwise deserted high-school corridor of his face, that

  perhaps he might remake himself from something already

  half-mutated such as a hotel pool-soaked novel or something

  whose extra weight, as he would explain to Gaston later,

  would be promissory, such as the lavish body of a maggot.

  La scène: Paris, mil neuf cent dix. The city streets are wet

  with an old-fangled rain that feels, rubbed between

  contempo fingers, entirely démodé. It’s winter and the trees

  have done avec their leaves, have choked them at the wrist,

  strangled every one until they each gave up their flat green

  ghosts, turned a purplish black, and dropped just as the

  rubber-banded barren nuts of rams drop and do germinate

  not at all in no hot earth. Oh, how he hurries crispy under

  branches, possessing, as he does, all the lightness of the lost!

  So I was at home doing the washing up

  and I thought, perhaps I’m using

  too much washing up liquid. I actually

  like to use a lot of washing up liquid

  because I think it makes the work easier,

  well that’s the impression I get anyway,

  but I have had the feeling that some

  people think I use too much. I definitely

  had the impression that my parents thought

  I was using too much washing up liquid

  when I was over at their house last week

  and helping out after lunch. And then

  today I thought, you know what, I can use

  as much damn washing up liquid as I like

  in my own damn house and no one can

  stop me. I could squirt the whole of this

  bottle straight down the drain if I felt like it,

  and if my wife said what the heck are you

  doing, I could just smile at her and carry on.

  In fact no one could stop me if I sold

  the damn house and everything in it

  and spent all the money I got from

  the sale on washing up liquid. I could

  have it delivered in tankers if I could get

  the parking permits. I’m appalled that

  I could actually do that and no one could

  have me arrested because after all it’s my

  damn money. How the hell is that kind

  of thing allowed to happen? Someone really

  needs to have the authority to intervene

  and protect me from myself.

  The Sea

  The man and his small dog performed their shuffling dance.

  The crinkly suit the man wore was designed to mimic the sea,

  his made-up face too was greyish blue and his mouth, a wet

  cave that uttered the crunchy sounds of the sea as well as fish

  and crab and anemone. His hair was white and coiffed in

  the style of foam. The man and his dog moved purposefully

  towards the audience then paused and reversed back again

  in the fashion of waves. He comprehended his role but his

  little white poodle in its blue coat only followed, as waves

  blindly follow their predecessors towards a jaded shore.

  On holiday last month I was entertained by the action

  of the actual sea. Each wave that broke upon the rocks

  at Morte Point was its own show. Each wave struck its pose

  and then withdrew, grand and throwaway, tossed off

  with the nonchalance of a well-rehearsed performance,

  yet always fresh and daring (or so it seemed to me) in its

  improvised quality. The variation was infinite and ridiculous

  and there was a distinct new-agey flavour to the whole splash,

  as well as a consistent sense of something magically bogus,

  a contrived simulacrum of revelatory meaning.

  The Madding Wind

  I stood on a path in the little park alone that afternoon

  and I watched in my dismay the wind

  as it threw all connotation out of the battered trees.

  I saw it rake it from the grass, thresh it from the plants,

  the stones, the little fence and the very sky itself,

  so that the covenant each had

  with its ancient reputation was beaten from it easily as seed

  is hit from straw. That wind it blew allusion

  right off of all creation, stripped it of its candied coat,

  left nothing but a brittle chaff that danced depraved

  and godless jigs with it. And when I turned myself

  towards the blow I knew at once my face it emptied

  like an upturned sugar bowl to make a hollowed

  thrown-down countenance, and I found myself conjoined

  with that divested little park in its perverted dance.

  When You Come in, Poppet

  Your cold clothes. Your cheek against mine,

  stiffened with a thrilling foreign chill

  you’ve picked up outside.

  Well I move back in ahead of you.

  I arrange my papers like this

  on the kitchen table and I sip my tea once or twice.

  Of course I must take you

  back into the melting warm. I must take you

  all the way in again and shove

  and shove out

  what I can of the whole day,

  that spruced-up bull that’s left its cleanly

  trace in you, that smart day

  with its fearless strut and its white clothes

  like the white clothes of a saint.

  A train, pale white in colour,

  stopped beside a bleary field at dusk, leaks

  its waspish steam in wisps that eke from pistons,

  slits and pipes. On board the train there sits

  a little man within whose leather bag there is,

  well wrapped in rags, a disembodied folded leg

  that’s formed of tiny epidermis-fronted drawers

  every one of which is so precisely made no

  evidence of it is seen upon the surface of the skin.

  Each drawer he has constructed out of flesh,

  and each contains a tidy portion of it that fills it

  to its brim. Just as a wily counsel might press

  his point and thus unbolt a box in which a voice

  is locked, so might this passenger press artfully

  enough upon a section of the limb that it will click

  somewhere deep within its meat, somewhere near

  its marrow, with a knock like a muffled penny’s

  d
rop, and with a subtle jolt will spring against

  his finger’s nudge before it saunters smoothly out

  lubricated solely by the goodness of its fit.

  It will follow his retreating digit to present

  its content, hidden within the folds of which

  is the modest smell of it. And then at once,

  with but a fraction of a pause, the drawer will

  pop coquettish back inside its slot unprompted

  by a push as though suddenly ashamed it had

  displayed itself and all the neatness of its butchery.

  Look at Our Faces – How Dead

  We’re Going to Be!

  It’s the abundance of specificity that leaves me

  so dying.

  I go hotfoot through miserable woods that are haunted

  by me, and here are the trees

  each of whose leaves suggests its particular green.

  I walk across a field

  that’s been spattered with fragments of cow shit

  every bit of which is specific.

  Here are bones, buttons. Here are wild dogs, biscuits,

  French horns, imps, borlotti beans.

  Here is a submarine, a brick, a rose hip.

  Here are the piping bodies of girls and boys once popped

  like perfect peas from puberty’s cramped pupa;

  basted, they gleam head to toe with poem juice.