The Golden Mean Read online

  John Glenday

  The Golden Mean

  PICADOR

  For Garry, Daniel, Didi, Jack, Matthias

  and again, and always, for Erika.

  ‘I know that love is life’s best work.’

  William Matthews

  Contents

  The Matchsafe

  Abaton

  A Pint of Light

  Self Portrait in a Dirty Window

  Primroses

  Algonquin

  Allt Dearg

  Ill Will

  Fable

  Two Ravens

  Song for a Swift

  Humpback Embryo

  Mussels in Brine

  How to Pray

  The Flight into Egypt

  Lest We Forget

  Study for the Hands of an Apostle

  The Coalfish

  Blossom Street

  The Skylark

  Amber

  The Ghost Train

  The Steamer ‘Golden City’

  A Testament

  The Lost Boy

  The Big Push

  Rubble

  Our Dad

  The Iraqi Elements

  The Doldrums

  The Golden Mean

  The Grain of Truth

  Northeasterly

  Macapabá

  Only a leaf for a sail

  Fetch

  Fetch II

  The Dockyard

  Fireweed

  Monster

  X Ray

  The White Stone

  British Pearls

  The Constellations

  Lacerta

  The Moon is Shrinking

  Windfall

  The Darkroom

  My Mother’s Favourite Flower

  Elegy

  The Walkers

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  The Golden Mean

  The Matchsafe

  for AN

  If you must carry fire, carry it in

  your heart – somewhere sheltered but hidden,

  polished by hands that once loved it.

  The lining may be scorched and blackened

  but only you must ever know this.

  That easy hush you sometimes hear at night

  as the darkness stirs in you, is not

  the accustomed ache of blood, but a flame

  shivering against the wind –

  a meagre flame seeded long before you were born

  which you have always known must be kept

  burning forever, and offered to no one.

  Abaton

  (from the Greek a, not; baino, I go)

  Let’s head for a place, neighbouring and impossible,

  that city neither of us has ever found;

  it swithers somewhere between elsewhere

  and here, anchored to the leeward dusk

  fettered in cloud.

  Look how it flourishes in decline –

  no buttresses, no walls, no astragals,

  only those luminous avenues of weather

  gathering the cluttered light like window glass,

  all furnished in the traceries of wind and rain.

  A Pint of Light

  When I overheard my father say

  it was his favourite drink, I closed my eyes

  and imagined his body filled with a helpless light.

  Years later, I watched him pour out

  the disappointing truth, but still couldn’t let

  that image go: he’s trailing home from the pub

  singing against the dark, and each step

  he steps, each breath he breathes, each note he sings

  turns somehow into light and light and light.

  Self Portrait in a Dirty Window

  after James Morrison, ‘The Window 1961’

  Don’t grumble if this window grants

  you only what you see in it.

  If you must have light, step out into the world.

  If you need shadow, step out into the light.

  For once, there is no weight in detail. Who cares

  if that’s an oily handprint, a belaboured

  field or far-off hills? The dirt stain of uncertainty

  is all that matters. It fills the room

  with neither light nor dark, but the promise

  of meaning, which, in itself, means nothing

  though it’s what you came here for.

  Primroses

  after Sir William George Gillies

  Picked flowers on a rug are dangerous

  beyond reason. Their mouths hang

  empty of pollen or scent. Such a clamour

  of petals, each cut throat challenges

  the room, renders it uninhabitable.

  A shout, a condemnation, a curse, a denial.

  What use is Spring to us now? What purpose

  a room charged with such desperate light?

  Even as we abandon it, their small voices

  will follow us, their bitter faces gape.

  Algonquin

  for GH and RS

  Each dusk is the final dusk. Late mists

  forget themselves above the lake.

  A crowd of hemlock, shoulder-close and motherly

  whispers as its own reflection drowns.

  Somewhere not here, a loon calls

  out the word for darkness twice,

  then turns into the silence and its song.

  I kneel where the water frays, and from my hands

  build the cracked prayer of a cup.

  Let me drink once more; just a little –

  one mouthful, one sip would be enough.

  Just this time let my hands not leak.

  Let them be brimming when I raise them

  to my lips, like this.

  Allt Dearg

  This burn runs dark and sweet

  as the lining of the soul.

  Drink from me

  and you will always be thirsty.

  Ill Will

  So. First night of the filling moon

  I took me to that spoiled oak, skewed

  on its fold of hill above my father’s farm.

  This left hand hefting his pigman’s maul

  and under my tongue an old King’s penny

  vague with spending.

  Watched while the sparling moon kicked free

  from a trawl of cloud, swam on. Then hammered

  the penny to its rim in the faulted grain

  and wished down the worst on him by three times

  wishing it: ‘Tree, by your own dead hand,’ says I,

  ‘wither that blown onion in him no one calls a heart.’

  All the path home the stink of night

  in the yarrow and dwarf butterbur. Shriek

  of the hen-owl restless in her nothing.

  Days passed; something he couldn’t rage against

  whittled him to a skelf, laid him out hushed

  and bloodless; grew him his stone.

  All this in the month that wears my name. Meanwhile

  I followed ploughshare’s hunger through his fields.

  Whistled in the old mare’s wake. Tasted coin.

  Fable

  Remember that old tale

  of the half-blind angel

  fell in love with herself

  in a frozen pool?

  ‘Tell me;’ she whispers,

  ‘tell me your name,

  more smoke of skin

  or skein of hair than man.

  ‘Love is the self dissolved.

  Lift up to your face

  the mirror of my face

  and you’ll see nothing.’

  Two Ravens

  for DK and SB

  If I were given the choice,

  I w
ould become that bird Noah

  first sent out to gauge the Flood.

  But I would never come back.

  I would never come back because

  I would find another just like me

  and the two of us, casting ourselves

  for shadows, would sweep on like a thought

  and its answer over depths and shallows

  and never rest until the last waves

  had unfurled, beating our wings

  against the absence of the world.

  Song for a Swift

  be owl

  my oldest night

  be wren

  my selfish grief

  be gull

  my restlessness

  be lark

  my disbelief

  be hawk

  my hidden path

  be dove

  my weary fist

  be swift

  my only soul

  my only soul

  be swift

  Humpback Embryo

  Field Collection, South Atlantic Ocean 1949

  Big as a dead man’s foot, but closer

  to tripes or dough than meat.

  Just to be sure, they folded her around herself

  head-down in formalin. Her one brief sea.

  Note that fluke-stump nicked by her mother’s

  flenser’s blade; the flipper’s grace.

  Day after day, she grows the milk bloom of a thing

  that never moved in cold, green, deepening light;

  like most of us. The eye-slit weary, delicate,

  beyond insult and closed against our looking.

  Mussels in Brine

  Their ten-a-penny cunts bob in formalin;

  the lips slackened, fading to olive drab.

  I imagine them weary of being mouthed,

  pickled on tedium, flaccid and tired.

  They reek of estuary dirt; a tang

  of sediment and brackish wine.

  Lord, let their valves be opened to me;

  let all things preserved be consumed

  all but that single grain of sand

  gritting between the teeth; flinty, neglected,

  enduring as regret, reminding me of you.

  How to Pray

  If you ever decide you want to find God

  look for him in a ploughed field, not high

  overhead, in the drift of the distant weather.

  And if you ask me how you should pray

  to a buried God, I would say press

  your lips into the earth, weight your voice

  with the silence of earth and root and seed

  and pray that all your prayers may be stones.

  The Flight into Egypt

  after Policarpo de Oliveira Bernardes

  Like so much of the Bible, it’s predictably domestic:

  just a family on its way somewhere, skirting

  a thread of towns. Everything is rumours of blue,

  because they are in history. No one has courage

  enough to look ahead. Joseph glowers

  at the chafing calf-boots he bartered for in Bethlehem.

  Mary pretends to doze, her fingers locked

  around the swaddle. Even their guardian angel

  has turned to look back – his know-all smile

  encompassing the dusty road, Judaea

  diminishing and the almost-new-born who stares

  complacently over our right shoulders into today.

  Only the old donkey gazes towards Egypt; head down,

  ears back, grudging a burden that is worth so little

  and a pointless journey he knows has barely begun.

  Lest We Forget

  Sari Çizmeli Mehmet Aga – Peder Ås – Tommy Atkins – Chichiko Bendeliani – Joe Bloggs – Jane Doe – Jäger Dosenkohl-Haumichblaue – Fulan al-Fulani – Kari Holm – Hong Gildong – Aamajee Gomaajee Kaapse – Kovacs Janos – Janina Kowlaska – Lisa Medel-Svensson – Madame Michu – Jan Modaal – Erika Mustermann – Numerius Negidius – Nguyen Van A – No Nominado – Seán Ó Rudaí – A N Other – Vardenis Pavardenis – Pera Peric – Petar Petrov – Juan Piguave – Ion Popescu – Vasiliy Pupkin – Imya Rek – Mario Rossi – Joe Shmoe – Maria da Silva – Sicrana de Tal – Tauno Tavallinen – Manku Thimma – Jef Van Pijperzete – Wang Wu – Moishe Zugmir

  Study for the Hands of an Apostle

  after Dürer

  This loophole where the light lets in,

  and my own breath leaks through my hands,

  has damned my words to words or less.

  That shim of air is God, of course,

  who made us all, and all but whole

  then set the wind against the world.

  The Coalfish

  Pollachius virens

  Like a gutting knife lost overboard,

  or a tin flag hoisted against the gloom,

  or a lime-white flame lit in the heart

  of nowhere, the coalfish waits.

  He’s watching for us. How I wish he had

  been named for the perfect

  darkness gathered in his eye –

  that bead of obsidian set in mother-of-pearl

  so perfect it could hold the world.

  A tin flag. A white lamp burning

  in the founds of the sea.

  The gutting knife’s quick flame.

  Blossom Street

  All that awful mess still lies ahead of him of course:

  the silly posturing and bombast, those terrifying

  stylish uniforms, the sticky end. For the time being

  he’s sitting by his mother now her illness has finished

  its work. The sickroom carpet ankle-deep in his mediocre

  sketches of her, endlessly rehearsing every incidence

  of light – all those angles and shadows suffering worked

  into her, as if somehow one loss might be lost in many

  versions of itself. The traffic dims to a respectful hush.

  Echoes skitter in the stairwell, then the impatience of a single

  knock. Yes. The time has come to put the pencil down.

  From this day forward, the only pages will be blank pages.

  The Skylark

  ‘Again and again it would try to hover

  over that miniature meadow . . . ’

  One square of turf to floor

  my cage, one daisy opening,

  one little sun against the sky,

  one cloud, one thread of wind,

  one song to hang

  like nothing over everything.

  Amber

  Some wounds weep precious through the generations.

  They glaze and harden, heal themselves into history.

  What was mere sap matures like blood in air to darken

  and burnish. To change into something useful, almost.

  The Tsar had a whole room built from hurt but it was stolen

  and buried. Sometimes the grim Baltic rolls the scars

  to shape those jewels women love to wear; especially

  treasured where they hold a thing that was living once,

  something with quick, venated wings which happened

  by and thought the wound looked beautiful and sweet

  and that, like other wounds, it should be acknowledged

  somehow and, if only for a moment, touched.

  The Ghost Train

  a twinned sonnet

  Roy, this is how it finishes: we’re riding Dante’s Inferno together –

  that cheapskate ghost train where Fred Hale hides from his killers

  in Brighton Rock. I’m Fred, of course, and you’re my friendly murderer,

  my twin, the one doomed to be sitting alone when the car shudders

  to a halt in the din and glare of a South Coast early summer.

  This is what life is all about – cheap shocks and clapboard horrors

  the whole scene clichéd and overblown – the way the two of us peer

  down into the abys
s beneath the rails: a seethe of black, impatient water

  fretting the stanchions that hold us clear of purgatorial fire.

  When you looked into my face, you looked into a mirror,

  and smiled, and took my shoulder, held me safe, then pushed me over.

  My eyes opened five minutes early, yours closed two decades late.

  Is that the tide I hear behind us, or the ghost train’s plywood thunder,

  or the clutter clutter clutter of loose film clearing the gate?

  John, you died two decades early, I was born five minutes late.

  Two frames of the one short film – that’s really all we were.

  Now that one frame is cut, I’ll carry back twice the weight –

  your life folded in mine – to 1921. We’re boys again – back in the foyer

  of the Regent with Nanny. Valentino breaks her dusty heart four

  times in a single week. We saw it here for the first time – the raw power

  of film: that dance! Death galloping from the clouds, the Great War

  breaking like a sea against their lives, and in the end, The End, a blur

  of shadows between fresh graves, the audience all shiftless whispers.

  A hundred times we sat in that immense, small dark, and breathed air

  rich with smoke and sweat – the reek of a strange, new fire. Remember,

  we filed out glazed and dumb with joy and dark – back to the trashy glare

  of life going dimly on. John, next time we stumble out into the light together,

  guess which of us will blink, and which will disappear?

  The Steamer ‘Golden City’

  after Eadweard Muybridge

  Far from the sea, you still feel part of it –

  all those dull impatient lights,

  that reckless hush. But the way

  the morning breaks against itself

  marks progress of a sort; like a prow

  digging under, ploughing the hours white.

  Even on land, even right here at home,

  you find yourself stalled by the sense

  of something you cannot see dividing

  and falling away behind.

  And you wish it could be real, that wake

  trailing back beyond ocean or purpose;

  something to prove to anyone