LITTLE POEMS IN FROME

ON SALE ONLY THROUGH THE FROME LETS SCHEME

Michael Peverett

1996

6 am

Late again running down Weymouth Road

Beneath a cold blue skyburst,

& blackbirds somewhere up there too,

High in the high stone buildings.

Two shopgirls clatter up Catherine Hill

With lumpy work bags swinging.

Nothing happens without our will,

It's only our wills make action.

The day is still at the structural stage;

The slowness of bare foundations

That need to carry all the coming activity,

The noise, the ham-ham-hammering,

The radio alarms pre-set to burst forth,

The breakfasts, bathing, front doors banging,

All that will soon emerge at a rush

To furnish the day, complete it.

Sports People

I want to spend my time with sports people,

To enjoy their towelled simplicity,

Their fierce philosophy,

Their sweet, untroubled conscience.

They think only of their best times,

The diary of events, the exercise programs,

Working on technique in the gloomy court,

Buying a CD to relax to.

They are entirely bemused.

For them, the field is never a political fact;

They think that science fiction is true;

They are always great at parties

And they live like puzzled dogs with codes and charities.

I long to drink Lucozade with sports people,

To savour (by proxy) the glow of their endurances,

The desperate training that has toned them

To calm acceptance, to focussing purely on

Coming good at the right time.

(As you and I should do, but)

They are the happiest.

In the Hexagon

I like to watch those awkward men,

Whose features could perhaps come to life,

Forcefeeding themselves with pulls at a pint

& shifting their feet in the buzz of chatter.

Who may you be waiting for?

It's eleven o'clock & the band's on.

Your faces that nobody longs to draw

Are transparent, as if already gone.

& the dancers have already taken the floor,

Black heavy shadows speckled with lights;

Back in the bar, groups form round tables

Smiling and talking for all they're worth.

On Cley Hill with my daughters

On the brow of the hill white cattle appear,

And the girls make awed cries. It's sunset,

Almost the time when we pack up, chilled,

Return to warm homes and artificial lighting.

Their hooves are steady on the crumbling bank.

They are slow. There is much sweet green

Low-growing herbs on the chalk. The sky west,

Where the eye looks, or avoids,

Is the colour of crystallized pineapple.

It's hard to tell sloes from leaves,

Or blackberries from thicket,

For everything's silhouette here,

Everything except the looming white of cattle

And the girls' teeshirts. And the sky,

Which has no edge, no silhouette ever.

National Lottery

- Has been an enormous success.

- Draws everyone down to the nearest outlet on Saturday afternoons, in summer, in teeshirts, the children sucking on small dyed drinks,

- While the adults muse expansively, they don't have to justify anything. The puritans are buying potatoes and biscuits in the other queue.

- Well if you don't buy in, you can't win. It couldn't be you.

- Thank God we can spend our money on what we like in this country.

- New tales circulate constantly, myths of ordinary people who happened to be chosen, sometimes for good sometimes for ill. Tragedy too is a privilege that is not for the many, and one that is described with a certain envy. At least the git had the winning numbers!

- And there are many, many conversations, with friends and at work, about how we would spend the money. The subject has released a flood of smalltalk, we are licensed to outline our aspirations, the unconstrained expression of our personalities (at any rate in smalltalk) and everyone listens for a bit. It gets quite serious.

- Responsible. See everyone right.

- I wouldn't give none of it to charity. I'd dosh a bit round the family. Shut them up.

- Start doing a bit of the initial paperwork - as a precaution. Get it out of the way because there won't be much time to think of it after you've won.

- In the event of my death while holding the winning ticket, I wish the money to be split between...

- If you're in a club or something, do the job properly. All in writing. Sounds funny but people are funny when there's thousands in it.

- And Kelly the dog will go to a luxury home for old animals, because the new lifestyle will be too much for her.

- With tickets carefully salted away, as if already worth millions, step out onto the pavement on a hot afternoon. The traffic wants to stream but is checked by people who want to cross the road, want to get home with their tickets.

- When the winning numbers appear, while watching another channel, after tea, the kids get excited. That one was only one out, they say. Then the tickets get scrumpled up in an ashtray.

- It's all a big game, isn't it? That's all it is.

- Everyone relaxes, swigs at cans, breaks open new packs of cigarettes. It's still pretty warm.

- People have moved on, too. It's that scratchcard thing now.

Near Bath

Clustered pipes in the shadows of a roadside

Elder-, ash-shadowed, here hemlock purple-sprouts to 2.5m

Bent saw-diagonalled where hoppers leap

& gold-pearl-tooth beetles creep to a dry tip.

The sun crowds, clover-scented shine dapples ivy, crisp-bags;

The warm yellow mulch of bluebell leaves, big caper-fruit.

Work stuff

We arrange a meeting, post-pub,

In the canteen. It's getting hard

To find somewhere to smoke these days.

How can we put together a network strategy

Without ciggies?

Mark can be reached on the moby,

Back by 15:00, it said on the whiteboard.

For resilience, we need a pair of bridges

Sited at the bureau,

Before the system is rolled out to the users,

But the bridges won't filter multicasts.

Bandwidth is a concern,

How much do you know about switches?

The business case is complicated,

Local politics need to be negotiated

And that's my area.

A buffet of wet wind strikes the glass,

Sixteen floors up. The light has greyed.

Outside is imaginably dank.

Three weeks to Christmas, and I forgot

To visit the bank.

Streetlamp in the rain

In November, one midnight comes

When I have to post a letter.

The rain is heavy and cold, and everything's dark

Except for the phone-box under the cypresses.

At the door, the wind punishes me

For wanting to walk out.

"The darkness and I have seen everyone off."

It punishes, but it attracts me.

I walk out fast and post my letter,

Start to walk back -

And I'm under a streetlamp

Looking up into its halo.

There in the halo, the rain seems to float,

Yes now I can see the rain itself

Hurtling down, each separate spit

Becomes visible for a moment.

And behind, the black white black white twigs

Of a silver birch bend round, round in a gleaming circle.

They make a high basket in

The heaven of the streetlamp.

I stand in the rain, the wind, the darkness.

A very small thing happens.

It's too quiet to hear, but I can feel it

Becoming, breaking the surface of being.

With a sense of terrible, tender surprise

I grasp for a moment what it is.

"I live here. This is my home.

That's my house. My family. Where I live."

Cashpoint

In the marketplace not far from the jumbo dogs

& racks of Chinos "made for a high street name"

Is a very unimportant installation,

A blind window set in a stretch of wall.

If you watch you will sometimes see

A single person sidle furtively

& face the wall with fidgety fingers.

Sometimes, too, there is a queue.

(A queue is when the space around people shrinks,

You get close up, smell each other, overhear remarks;)

But not at the moment when they face the wall:

No, that is private...

You mustn't know the numbers that they press.

You mustn't know the numbers that they read.

You mustn't know how large the gift

(For it usually offers a valuable gift)

Or what sort of emotion that gift arouses

In fast-disappearing poker-faces.

High Fields

In Frome we're thirty miles from the sea

& that's only the Bristol channel anyway,

So I feel closed in and must stand in high fields

Where the ground crumbles in air, losing holds.

Sun and wind checker the hill-fort

From whose trough a warm uprush crests the bank;

It is like walking on a map. Saxifrage empires;

Gentian empires; to walk and descend is glorious.

The Pine Boys

Sometimes it seems like

Half the forests in Scandinavia

Have come to Frome to be

Sawn into inexpensive furniture

The sander makes a dust so fine

That where it forms a heap beneath the workbench,

It almost looks like jelly.

The men who handle the tools

Can't go to the pub at lunchtime.

It's almost a rural pursuit,

The same continence, the same discomfort,

The same cheerful singing, though now it's the radio,

& the National Health means life continues

After the last time you sweep out the shop.

Poem in a Christmas card

Christmas is a festival of yellow in the window

that draws the low sun in the brief afternoon.

Christmas is a special kind of rubbish on the floor,

a clean shrubbery inscribed with love-notes.

Christmas is when the kitchen table holds up trays

of fragrant sculpture, and says: Don't keep your distance!

Christmas is when the harlequin colours of the beeches

migrate indoors to create a midwinter space

where spluttering fires make faces glow for a second

with shy eternity amid the fantastic uproar.

Christmas is the familiar faces of those you have lived with all year.

At last you stop to admire them, to form new hopes.

Children coming home from school

It's a dreamy, stumbling, chattering return,

42p in pocket and passing a shop

Enough for a can of drink

Descending towards the river but

The river is not what they see

They see the video shop and know a new video's in

They see Laura Bagley and Helen Burnett

(For they are in the same year)

Further ahead, wearing their famous school bags

Which always split, first one strap then the other,

And they shriek with laughter passing a sole adult

Whom they do not know, they call him "a sad person".

There is quarrelling and playing about

In impromptu gangs, for who walks with whom

Is by no means random,

But finally their routes diverge,

They break apart, one heads for Portway,

One for the Butts and one for Critchill

And finally there is only one child left

Who takes the final steps to the house

Reflective as the silence and the lack of company dictates

- And that's every child.

Old people's home

My nan should have died that night

But my dad broke into the house and held her in mid-flight,

Arcing to the big slab, the stone wall.

She should have injected into that well.

But as it is, a new life came,

A jokey life since she's not the same;

It's out of phase with time.

She looks with gaunt surprise at the lime

That is finally striking leaves from its black boughs.

She's tired. Our visiting minutes take hours.

Mum's buff raincoat and scarf on the chair

And the bright net bag of clementines

Are like kryptonite here - such alien colour

And fragrance that spins

In the hot still room where it won't inhere.

Between the glad ritual of hello

(Me finding seats on which to sit and smile)

And the reluctant relieved goodbye

(Me putting out the chairs into the hall)

Great effort keeps alight a litany

Of small events and things achieved,

Something done at school,

My sister's picture in the Standard.

Your voice, wearied by times and names

Grows brief. Mum and Dad natter on

And this hardfaced, painfully loving adolescent

Listens to sighing in the limes.

Swifts

Canister with six metal marbles:

That is the cry of a swift,

Neat, harsh, as it hurtles over the eaves

Firing a bullet

Into someone's late lie-in.

The loop of a swift

Down here, is a cramped replica

(Like a rubberband in a matchbox)

Of its high swinging curves

Above the park in the afternoon,

Its huge gleaning circles

Mouth open to the shimmering crops of gnats

Up there in the open element.

Air! The boundless flightpath

Of the swifts who transect Somerset

Or Africa - those insignificant names!

So much to a swift means nothing,

The span of its wings is the gift of opulent freedom.

Credit card statement

...is beyond belief. It is a miracle that my words themselves are not in debt. As my pen is lifted into the air after each small and complex circuit, the new word appears, not ghosted like an unavailable option on a pull-down menu, but sharp and black as if well able to make its way in the world. Fictional, it does not indeed undertake to pay the bearer on demand etc etc - hopeless impossibility - but it manages a liberal swagger of its own. I am potent, I am replete with significance, it seems to proclaim.

Home Baking

Though everything that moves must lose its way

Venturing out in stormy corridors

From the cold kitchen of that later day

When hungry Time has eaten up the stores

I must believe this will not end your life

Which will stay here where warm and fragrant loaves

Stand on a wire tray, and this belief

Must diet on the drift of autumn leaves.

Friends in the evening

Everyone's easy,

& that's the whole point of friends

In the evening, intent on pouring tea,

Or rolling up and watching TV.

We all talk,

Because bringing up children, & having no money

& things that are hard to deal with, have to be faced

But not now, with tea and company;

& no-one can help,

But that's the whole point of friends,

With our backs to the shadows, the lost day

Put to bed, & we're not really talking

Or even listening,

This is formation flying in the warm colours

Of the winter sunset, round and round

In the dreamy heaven that we've found to share.

White Horse and Cley Hill

Over the town there broods a horse.

Over the town there broods a hill.

Blue Circle cement have tidied the horse,

& the National Trust looks after the hill.

They have outlived

All the weavers, tenants and nannies;

& they will outlive Year 9 at the college;

Those peaceful, forgotten gods,

Shored up by cement and the National Trust.

Modern Nature

The first day of July, we're driving into rain,

A sopping downpour that splatters,

Waiting at traffic lights, splatters the bonnet

With shiny explosions of water, quieting now,

We move into fifth on the bypass, get underneath

That cloud again, down it sheets windlessly,

Except for our own flying Vauxhall, which frills

The seismograph water up, up, wavering up

Into the niches of the corner glass, and down,

Down as we slow into town, the radio signal

Stuttering into fuzz as we cross the river.

On top of the microwave, a yesterday bowl of salad

Has wimped out, and Wimbledon disrupted by rain

Is half way through sets. A potted tomato plant

Knocked flat by rain. The French doors creak.

My daughter slices courgettes and a carrot

To add to the sauce. I'm thinking uneasily

If I dare ring Providenza. My hair hasn't been cut

Since February, and last time she told me if you

Let it grow that long next time you can't come back.