Shearsman 50 JOHN MUCKLE Three Poems   My Native Home I’d read Coleridge’s lost novel already & found a more careful work than Biographia Literaria, revealing nonetheless of an allegorist’s underlying plot, of sentences braided coloured tendons in an anatomy book                            of chinese pigtails, tendrils of blue smoke across a pocked moon: the craters clearer, closer after reading it & linked by ten thousand runnels to those others on the dark side, where starlight poured in & drove its shuttering engines – a delicate, robust machine the poet had sketched in early youth weeping from a lost fight with his brother, remembering the fairy parlour, skimming flat stones on the Otter: executed to perfection – each twisted braid was wound tight, but on the typescript I examined each sentence had been upset at a single point in another slanted hand, for thus, out of kindness, he had suppressed this work now unfolding in my brain, a slow-worm of a novel, whose meanings opened & sprang shut as the powerful electro-magnet it carried in its long body                      wiped me out.   Parable of the Headless Woman All the bits in the garage are out of reach up in the rafters, waiting to be got down, pulled out, taken somewhere, to another: a trio of Spanish galleons from the auto-jumble & four spare wheels for the Buick bouncing on air-cushions. Not much remaining there – a trolley-jack, a generator abolished & packed up in the rented lock-up where the heavier things rest for later redemption. Files are a rough way of making things smooth. The ducts, if they overflow, will wash out over me. Traps & toolboxes, ambidextrous, professional; a set of worn-out heartbeats, disguised, rolled up in a carpet. No major discoveries. No snapshots of the solitary Judy you met (the Blackpool sideshow’s headless woman) in the bar of the hotel where you were fitting carpets. You laughed to hear about her strange job & she was thinking of giving it up soon as she smoked a cigarette, shook out her curls. You’d even been there to see her show a couple of times:                         she kicked about in a glass jar, bubbling, kept alive by a cluster of plastic tubes at her neck. Decapitated in a train crash, so it was said, but luckily the next carriage was full of French surgeons who patched her up                            & the strong man lifted two chairs at arm’s length, one in each hand. You stepped out of the crowd                                          & tried to lift them both up high, tumbling, too late: lead weights                                           were attached to each of the legs.     In Too Deep Interest mounting always – a crisp morning a line borrowed from a song, to reach within and stare flinch and stammer, riding out of here on the opened book of the fields – a silky stretch of fog, some lost proverb or word from the solitary vigil a night keeps. Asleep tangled in damp line dealing out place mats it will all back up, blistering under your fingers in the subtle rain, subtle weather, each error and way alight on a plain slick as milk, There, going home, it’s the night staff in their prudence – who carry water. Sleep. float. pity. Cruel restive groanings and calls undo the beds & gall-heaped duvets, spillages on the shoreline of their murmurs. Empty laughter’s their blessing, blind fear of time the manifold worry that is care & dull memories of bold crimes. Strike up boldly on a walking frame the last say wept out its piece to slack-jawed barrier faces learning talk to drown in ink — to please nay and nay and nobody: a matchbox, an elastic band, clothes peg triggers in the palms of my hands cover up the land with farthings. The blind were dying to be led, the play ageing as a play ages. Answerphones – a throttle rain, the last of ravaged cornflakes, a spoon. Night trouble and daily fights: a sky black writh screened icons folded underclothes, ironing – lying in wait for a last madrigal. It drops towards you on a glider over the spit-splashed washing, before the fog ends after the next flag – Territory, I believe in you retching, spitting in fright, a shallow grave’s winter solstice rising up from the leaky earth. Slowly they’ll march to reach us who are talking and biting air. Can a pill hide the gibbous state? Will a choice feed us? I slake my thirst, spurning thought for the swift rotation of a florin. I parade lies as the ploughing of furrows. I parade murder as the spring-cleaning of a house. Let it go. No further reasons ruthless or broken. Time’s a trouble-healer with a burning coal, Time’s the friend of might, the cessation of play. Lessons are free to all who flinch – the prudent will carry water or listen to me, who suckled your teats by the fountains of whispering pond by the coliseum of snore thoughtfully arranged for the edification of morons. To look within and stare – a prayer of halfwits, a prayer of disquiet. I wanted to trust my mind a line stolen from a song, some lost word or proverb my pocketed spanner, riding out to the fair.   copyright © John Muckle, 2002   John Muckle’s publications include The Cresta Run (short stories, Galloping Dog Press, 1987) and Cyclomotors (a novella, Festival Books, 1997). He has also published a study of Allen Ginsberg, a number of children’s books, and was founding editor of the late lamented Paladin poetry list.