SMATTER

 

Sometimes he looks in the mirror and this is what he sees:

 

a smattering on the windscreen, like a slash of hail

on the cusp between sharpness and slush

                                                                            or the drift

of small long-legged things, the spread wings, the critical moment,

 

or flyaway seeds that lift

                                              off the hedgerow in the dry gust

that’s his own speed.  He blinks and it’s gone

 

for now at least. What remains is his momentum

going forward

                           but in free fall. Travelling.

 

*

 

Road movies… This isn’t a landscape where you see the distances

unfurl, the straight aim across prairie, into dust, red desert, sunset 

 

or any illusion of the gold land just beyond the ever-after (its glow

now and then silhouetting one tree, one cactus, or deserted shack).

 

We are bound for the ferry port. There’ll be queues. And questions.

We are bound for the border (hardening) defined as where a story

stops.  A pane where things in flight get spattered, flat.

 

*

 

Partitas and fugues

by many hands in many keys

played simultaneously. . .

 

which is how we might hear

the ant swarm, the gnat dance,

our own dissolution, were

 

we not such slaves to the small

but driven god Direction.

 

*

 

Overwrite me, he once whispered to the world

– some kind of adolescent rapture, he forgets –

 

as if he was the world’s blank jotter.

And like the wryly vengefully responsive fates

 

in a Greek myth, it proceeded. What

you ask for, be prepared to have

for ever,

                much more than enough.

 

*

 

After the places with names, the ones

he or his smartphone will remember,

now:

           in the hiatus between here and when,

between holiday and history, the children in the back

or maybe just the memory of them,

                                                                 it begins, he

/she begins, as if this was a bardo, a between-life:

now, next, after this, who will I be?

 

*

                              So the journey goes on,

the sense perceptions pelter on the retina

too fast to erase,

                               their traces cross-hatched denser,

the pressure of their tiny impacts rammed

to a brillo-pad mass, abrasion,

                                                        and on

until no optic nerve remains unsated,

no space remains to move through,

                                                                 time

itself too full to move, no gaps between.

 

*

 

Lamp post. Lamp post, lamp post,

with their melancholy down-regard.

 

Fin de siècle aesthetes, elegantly pained

by us – how banal, look, a car,

and a car – quite unaware

 

how their own pose is identical,

in hundreds, and equally spaced,

 

all the way to a horizon

they will never raise their heads to see.

 

*

 

That, then, was the career plan, and modest enough: to be

the curator of the chaff of things, all

the blown-away moments that nobody saw:

 

the inclination of that grass blade in the wind, the lift

and nearly flare of that was it a bird, no,

a polythene bag whipped up by the slipstream.

 

A curator… just one of the lesser order of recording angels.

Why not? The grand ones have a lot on their minds, or

what used to be minds before the white-out of omniscience.

 

*

 

Imagine every glance, however

sidelong, through however wincing-thin

the crack –

              a fractious child’s

                              between the megaliths

of his own boredom

                                    or his mum’s / his dad’s

abutting silences;

                                 what slips into a breath

between two lover’s sudden bickering

they can’t explain;

                                 or the miles streaming back

east through the grille in the container

with its undeclared cargo of hope,

with scarcely air enough for one,

let alone the twenty, huddled, let alone

the world…

                       Imagine each glance

scored scratches, laid and overlaid

to textures like mute polished marble,

time cross-sectioned, all the tiny

lives, the tiny

                        deaths, displayed.

 

*

 

The plainchant of speed. The monks, the truckers,

in their high cabs, or their satnavs, telling the names

 

of Europe over, till the words mean nothing; there is only

flow and eddy, mattins, evensong, the rise and fall.

 

*

 

My god, how many fields does it take

to make a distance? And (we need this

sorted out before a real eternity sets in)

which is more terrible: the countlessness

of trite half-acres (drive-time radio,

its short attention span)?

                                              Or the one

without horizons, ever-after, featureless

except for the arrow on the map: You Are Here?

 

*

 

Cloud shadows over the fields. How many ways

to spell weather, or the shapes of shadows

melting over, into our roads, our walls, our

arbitrary lines of demarcation.

                                                     Stopped

at the border, what can shadows say? Melt

shadows into shadows. In the lorry park,

to sleep or cling between the axles, 

             in the cargo hold,

                                how many languages

in which to lose your face and name. . .

 

*

 

When a straggle of cranes came over,

on a slipstream of migration,

                           necks and legs stretched out

as if to stretch the sky itself, to make it wide enough

for everyone who needs it,

 

he was driving in the opposite direction.

Something they were fleeing from was where I had to go.

 

*

 

A prayer, if you will,

for Alexandru, in his 40-tonner

out of Bucharest,

pushed to the edge

of his legal drive time

then a little further

to the lethal single kilometre more beyond.

 

*

 

Big buzzard on a fence post

like a canny hunch. He is counting us by,

        or in, or out. Whatever,

there’s a rendezvous he has in mind.

 

Not us, now. Now, he gives up waiting.

Rises, gathering armfuls, wingfuls

        of his patience, heavy

as it is. Becomes a single shrug in feathers.

 

Off, first up the air’s steep stairs until

the thermal takes him, and we fall

        away beneath, a detail

in his high perspective, dwindling.

*

 

Wind in the wheat field: it knows all

about big data: how we feature in it, me and you

as diminishing points, our voices hushed in awe

 

as vast patterns emerge, the big beasts

crunching though the undergrowth

in which we scuttle, or are crushed.

 

*

 

Service station: where the spirits of the un-place

        you will never come to

                                                  except passing

              sit down for a break, for a breather

        if these things had breath, for a quick

eternal cappuccino, with the spirits of the other

       places left or longed for,

                                              smoke shapes

strung out, fading, in the spaces in between.

 

*

 

The road has dispensed with all directions

other than its own. It gives the lie

to the lie of the land,

 

time likewise. Only, now and then

catch a glimpse of a small stream

cut into a culvert’s dark

 

on one side, vanished under. Its will

to go somewhere, some compulsion

white lines can’t rule, road signs can’t translate.

 

*

 

A prayer for the small ones

on their flightpaths – song thrush,

lapwing, as the earth’s tilt tips them,

skylark, woodcock, plover,

                                               curlew

cut from the sky, its long cry

flying on without it.

 

A prayer for the mute

weight of the wild boar piglet

rolled to the hard shoulder.

For the badger.

                           For the roadside

strips, stray clumps the wild

wood has come to, from which they

the homeless ones broke cover, centuries ago.

 

*

 

A meditation on the moment: visualise

this space in the air, a moment after

your own passing through it, the moment before

the car behind you fills that space precisely,

somebody else’s eyes blink, thinking

this same thought, that moment: here

I am        am I       am here.

 

*

 

Mist, out of nowhere.

                                        It’s as if the ink

with which to draw the world, to give it edges,

ran out, and the pigment to colour it in.

We hit it, with no impact

                                              but a falling

feeling. Sideways, all around us, white-grey

swirling flow, with almost shapes, with

shadows in it

                         that our headlights throw

from shapes that we seem not to see,

much less can we explain.

 

*

 

Peering into the press and pebbledashing of sensations,

each one a scratch on the lens, crack

in the windscreen which will catch the light,

 

there are landscapes emerging, like an older

painting leaching through the plastered wall,

 

another country with its folds, bourns, darkwoods,

songlines. Your long walking there.

 

Wild geese out of the north, in season, still

with the ice sheet at their backs, come calling

their reminders, almost too high for us to hear.

 

*

 

A page of this, unwritten / written in the waking

of the night. When he looks in the morning,

         nothing… Or there may be

a ghost of itself, like archaeology, the page

microscopically trodden, like a footpath in the dew

         left two millennia ago. Accept it, this

may be the point. I mean, what if the road

took it upon itself to remember

        everything, us and

our passings, one by one by one.

 

*

 

If the road has a voice, it’s the rip-sigh of tyres on tarmac,

voice as real as a river’s, also flickering with small facets

of reflection in the light,

                                             with every word, in every car,

on every mobile, preserved: a white, white-water sound.

Silence itself could not be calmer or more grand.

 

*

 

The paradox, which is the grandchild

        of a paradox: the road

is going nowhere / the road

       is nothing but a going.

Ask the river, it could tell you. Now

ask it again. Ask the same river twice.

 

*

 

I am here am here am I. And now, and now. In ink,

in insect-flicker and smear

we have an illustration of how far

 

it is beyond us, what we conceive to be

the eye of God, that sees all this (and

now, and now again)

 

as one, as shape, a space-and-time-piece,

which those hands, if it had hands, could turn

to catch the light at every angle. We

 

approximate, speed smearing bush, bush,

road sign, faster while that further tree,

that wind-vane, slide by slower –

 

to the skyline where one silhouette

stands motionless. Most probably,

but who knows, it’s not God.

 

*

 

A prayer for Alice, alone

 

with her quarrelsome three

in the back, strapped in

      to the wrangle and shove

of themselves with each other,

an hour to Calais at least and no

we can’t stop we’ll miss

        the ferry and why

can’t they won’t they won’t

they just

                                   until

she turns her head a moment

 

that’s the end of it.

 

*

 

This smatter on the windscreen,

it’s the price we pay for speed,

for getting somewhere. Wipers

whimpering – their slush and wheeze

as they push back at the pelting

rain-splats, each shivering out

into distortion – in season (can

it be that time already?) the seductive

lacework, crumpling itself by degrees, of first snow.

 

*

 

Face comes to face, eyes in the rear-view mirror.

Face greets each other         more like colleagues

(from a different department)    than old friends.

As if met in the crowd             with a slip-stumble

of not-quite-recognition.      Face…   meet face…

         That awkward introduction at the party,

the crush around too loud for you to hear: ‘Face…

face.’          Now add the word ‘I’.  Does that help?

 

*

 

This be the book. The one

page. Not the holy text, the highest, but

the one we wrote together,

                                                  from the first

dumb scratch to great machineries

of syntax, glassy chimes of concepts,

                                                                 the shoal

switching sometimes right-left, sometimes

left-right, sometimes breaking into flicker-bits

till they arrived

                            at everywhere, the page

we call the Present. This

                                             is not it

but a crude facsimile I made an age ago.

 

*

 

From the sky’s point of view

or from a boulder’s, the road

is a muscle, always flexing.

The road is a verb, as electricity

is all verb, not the individual

atoms, nouns, you/me, our

indecisions, alternating currents

switching to and fro.

 

*

 

Could this in passing also

be a love song? Road is all

              relationship, the traffic

              between things, between

1. Breath, touch, word

and matter, the quiver and hum

               even at night, the glow

               behind the skyline. Road

is what connects us. Road

is appetite, and need. What some

               will give their lives for. (A prayer

              for Zaid and his sons, trusting

their savings to a man in Thessaloniki

for the idea of Europe.   For all

               the others who had nothing

               left to give, not even names.)

Road is a prayer in tarmac

                                                to escape

from what comes after them, to live

in some direction, to recover what’s been lost.

 

*

 

Sometimes it comes to us, with eyes shut, white

lines still unreeling at and into us and through:

that this

                 is how it’s always been. How always

1. An always

travelling.

Travelling.      Still.            Still

                                                       travelling.