Library Access

Journey into Space

It is the reading room, locality is everything.
The shelves stack up with Northumbrian essentials –
no quoin or corner unincluded, no coal-faced,
coped-with tragedy. Deeds, decisions, votes
and attitudes; careful cuttings; local plants,
vanished yards and ships, and bound editions
of the Tyne Tees TV Times. Minutes
thinned from hours, or letters into words,
events that gripped then fell away like wasted
grain. Lost dreadnoughts, councils, mothers, every
mother’s son – the yesterdays that go unnoticed
here all gather space and wait. For what?
These past times, people and their papers,
might vanish into air – scanned in, compressed,
become alive in an electric dark that everyone
can share – or continue to degrade to dust,
an irritation in the throat, the reddened eye:
the stuff, the dreams, all cleared or wiped away.

The Secret Agents

A thin silence comes from all parts of the planet,
The agents in the reading room have settled to their tasks.
Laptops reflect their lenses, anonymously.
They sit, digesting consequential lines of code,
the only voice, the library lift, whose empty words
soliloquise the way below. Although surrounded,
their needs are not an open book – it’s their
screens that net the things they seem to seek
– an article with thrilling patterns of blood gasses,
some dead-end jobs; a script; a boxing
film with subtitles in Greek: but secretly, beneath
the hiss of circulating air, the chirp of mice,
the bossy chat of nagging keys on boards,
a dozen essays, letters, poems, maybe
get composed. A parka-ed man, grey beard,
awaits the lift’s return, and looks around
at faces that recompose their blank unyielding
stares. The aircon clears away the dust –
the faint decay of paper, and the death of cells.

Newcastle City Library
January 2013

Those Cats

The cats lie, eyes-closed, on the sofa where he died.
The rise and fall of fur. Three sets of ears pitched
cautiously in my direction. Where I sit, he sat, worn out,
eyes fixed on three bright bars of straight, unmoving heat.

They’ve taken him. Still here, the life he left from,
the things he never seemed to see – the empty
hearth, its burned-through grate remaining
unreplaced; the cotton dishcloths drying.

Above, on the enamelled mantel, his little joke –
the china collie dog my mother bought him,
head down, facing out the clipped-out snap
of sheep, wrapped round an old and empty tin;

some matches and a scrap of card with pencilled stock on.
All this beneath the noiseless clock, the simple
calendar from Scot’s Gap, the royal samplers Jane,
his elder sister, made and which she hardly dared

put on the wall for fear of what he’d say.
Now, both are gone. The tongue that troubled her
fills the farmhouse kitchen with its silence.
Monday Mart day. Nothing left to sell.

The cats take their untroubled ease, as if sleep
was their sole pleasure. From his he’d wake and stare
the fire out, stroking them with fingers strong as roots
and thickened with the honour of his work.

The electric bars give out their heat, heat he
sat in front of as he died, boots on, and cap,
waiting for what we’ll never know – a rest?
more warmth? a stockman’s knock upon the door?

Alone he died, alone my mother found him,
eyes closed and sitting up; called him,
felt his cooling brow, and knew its time.
The doctor laid him flat beneath a blanket,

lifted him like a child, a body age had lightened,
and, as they talked, his cats claimed last possession,
lying in their accustomed comfort on his feet.
Look at those cats, she’d said, and shook her head.

Ogle Hill Head

OS Sheet 78 [1961]

Envisage every layer that a map contains –
the naked earth, its contours combed with pleasure
round each hill; the rivers, runs of coastline,
and each cliff; the early settlements like puckered skin;
the castles, mansions crumbling in their gothic script;
towns, conglomerates that grow their random streets
in filaments of grey; the railways, roads and motorways
that try to give the whole some sense of running
to a plan – each element a mark of god, or sign
that need or greed has kept the landscape in its grasp,
or touch of someone’s hand upon a page.

An up-to-date O.S. holds everything
we have or were. Discovers what’s around us
and each hedge – no seeming secret place
that can’t be found or guessed at, or privacy
for distant monarchs in their glens. In time,
an older map will tell you what you’ve lost.
That mine that once sprawled heaps and railheads
by those brick-walled yards has gone, and in its place
a landscaped park, a quick estate, a superstore.

On my map flows a past with all its routes
intact, keeps now alive with guesses at each turn.
Turn right, along a road that isn’t there,
but is, to a future that has happened and is not.

Ellingham
August 1993

Yorkist

Beneath a canopy of roofs two rivers
saunter, lanes wind and vanish in
themselves. At either side, opposed,
2 halls, one stone, one iron and glass,
stand for the centuries they span.

Time was slower when they blocked
the Minster up. 10 generations trapped
the silences within. Son handed stone
to son, anonymous, and on until
the air was stopped and held voices
echoed to the Lord. The building does
the maths – a trinity of forces gathers
weight in emptiness above our heads,
while older anarchies persist in corbelled
heads that grin and gesture to a past
still dancing wicked in the woods.

The perfect arch across the rails
took only months to take its spaces in.
Its gods could hurry profits to perform
their work – and oversaw advantages in speed
to bring the word. An age of individuals
and proudly known. In spite, the station
leaves no sign or fingerprint behind
of those whose skill and brain hand-made
this thrilling double curve. Itinerant hand,
or iron engineer – through them, oblivious
with gratitude, the ticketed have passed,
with hurried cases to be north or south.

York 1st and last. A place of purpose
and of pilgrimage. A kingdom and a throne.
Keep coming here in thrall to gods
Who grip and hold quicksilver in their glass.

Red Square

from Prospects of Leningrad

In the square that half the world associates
with blood, we’ve come beyond the confines
of our Cold War fears to stand upon its
rain damped, gloss grey cobblestones.

The red flag streams above a Kremlin tower,
a purpose and a history behind no word
need comment on. The wind that blows us here
has forgotten all those winters that were hard.

Try to see the lines of missiles, bombs,
the bannered crowds, or feel the fall of soldiers’
boots. You can’t. Light pours off cathedral domes.
A limousine with darkened glass makes off, its tyres

hiss it past. People smile for snaps.
Adjust their hats, their furry wraps.
A casual place, run with the minimum of fuss.
The policemen stand as purposeless as us.