Red Check Shacket
I’d heard the stories: the time
on Cromer beach, some oozing
hallucinated morning, where
amongst the bladder wrack
and shreds of net, he found
a jetsam blister pack of pills
and snorted every one. People
told me to take anything he said
with a pinch of salt: his father,
broken from his wife’s affair
bailing out of a stricken plane
at ten thousand feet without
pulling on his parachute cord
or an encounter in Tangiers
which sounded (as it proved)
like something from Burroughs.
Years later, haunting Seven Dials
the way I often do, I saw him,
inside the office for a school
for English as a foreign language,
and it made a sort of sense
that he’d spent his life drifting
through the world. In truth,
I always felt left behind by the pack
he tagged along with in the old days:
the decadent goth, the acid jazz
aficionado, Little Rick, Guinevere
her drippy beauty. The last time
I’d seen him, we’d invaded
a cemetery together, released
from education and probably
we felt we’d reached adulthood
but god we were young. I don’t
remember it as a cold night
but he loaned me a shacket
of red check, nineties grunge,
and even then I felt I’d been given
the opportunity to try on
a version of a life. It was the last
time I saw him and the shacket
stayed in the wardrobe at
my parents’ house for years,
musty totem of times not spent
and the men we might have been.
Rivers
‘Can I bear to leave these blue hills?’
– Wang Wei
My father sends me photos of the floods
at the same time each year: the glut
of water swamping the Welsh bridge
around which I would kill time
in a junk-shop warren gone the way
of its trade, the toffee water thick
with silt, lolling like a passenger
dozing against one’s arm, photos
of the streets turned to canals
swamping sandbags and doorsteps
running off the mountains fed
by great cords of water, photos
pinging onto technology, slim
incisions into what had been home,
and I think of all those years
my father has driven these routes
along the roads which are erased
into a supple flux, what it means
to know a place in a way I will never
know anywhere, with my inconstant
flitting, how he can trace the Severn
through hills of slate and heather
down through valleys and plains,
where trees are printed like language
against the skyline, from a high
hill where his parents surrendered
into their graces, how he is always
driving, the way a shark must move
ever forward in order to survive,
how this, too, is a kind of journey
complex and obsessive, a stereo
playing the blues of Robert Johnson,
the Mississippi throbbing
in my father’s veins, a voice calling
to elsewhere, and perhaps
these photos are his way of saying:
move onwards, remain restless,
your past has already drowned.
Harry Dean Stanton
Luckless, laconic, destined
to be killed in the second act,
a kind of hang-dog presence
lurking in the background
of celluloid dreams (when
you could call it celluloid),
speaking of weary resilience
of the type. We all get there
eventually. Support characters
to the bigger story. Forgotten,
eschewed and chewed up,
outsiders unimportant even
to ourselves. Baffled about
the circumstances which led
to this gun or that alien
being pointed at us. Avatar
of the Western mythopoetic,
road movie pilgrim, probably
born at age forty-five, that guy,
his presence became more
an extension of the landscape:
a tree root which gnarled up
wandered into town to jack
your car. Why be the theatre
when you can be the scenery?
Why say anything when you
have walked through a desert?
Why preoccupy yourself
with the centre? The audience
will find you muddling along
in a state of heroic fuck-uppery,
so ready to hide at the edges
you drive through the night
to play a part in this poem.