Come Here To This Gate E-Book

Rory Waterman

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 50

Beschreibung

Come Here To This Gate, Rory Waterman's fourth collection, is his most candid and unexpected, personal, brash, hilarious, and wide-ranging. The book is in three parts, the first a sequence about the last year of the life of his father, the poet Andrew Waterman, against a backdrop of recrimination, love and alcoholic dementia: 'your silences were trains departing'. The second consists of poems that open various gates, or are forcibly restrained behind them, from the literal North and South Korean border to the borders between friends, and those imposed by photographs, memories, and paths taken and not taken. The third opens on the poet's rural home county of Lincolnshire. He rewrites several folk tales into galloping, sometimes rambunctious ballads for the 2020s: what happens when imps, ghosts, and a boggart who looks like a 'doll left behind at Chernobyl' must reckon with the modern world and the people who lumber through it.

Leseprobe

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Contents

Title PageAinns World of Miniature Marvels                   IALL BUT FORGOTTENPreludei. The Shortest Day, Intwood Wardii. Alcoholic Dementiaiii. Twin Oaks Nursing HomeInterlude: First Night, Lincolniv. A Near-Circle of Cadaes on Not Getting Live-In Carev. Air That Killsvi. ReverdieInterlude: First Night, Norwichvii. Being Presentviii. Homeix. Deprivation of Liberty SafeguardInterlude: First Night, Colerainex. All I’ve Done for Want of Wit to Memory Now I Can’t Recallxi. On Mutexii. Private CeremonyCoda                   IICOME HERE TO THIS GATECome Here to This GateThe BurrLockdown ManStudent CutsMorality PlayReturn‘Do You Want to Share These Memories You Posted…’AnniversaryGooseberriesPerennialsThis Realm, This EnglandRoutinesDelayed Postscript to Teenage HeartbreakFirst-time BuyersAt a Friend’s Second WeddingThe StepfathersDoubles at the Tennis ClubMy Friends the CommunistsICN to LHR                   IIILINCOLNSHIRE FOLK TALESYallery BrownThe Metheringham LassThe Lincoln ImpNanny RuttYour Solitary BeechEnvoiAcknowledgementsNotesAbout the AuthorCopyright

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Come Here To This Gate

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Ainns World of Miniature Marvels

I wanted to make the short trek up Wonmisan

and rake my eyes across a miniature Seoul

to the east, its millions hidden in concrete cubes

pressed between islands of scrub – and, deep in its bowl

of ridges, Bucheon, a circuit board live in low sun.

But the forecast threatened an 90% chance of sleet

so I’m being a Titan of tired and tiny landmarks:

mildewed Twin Towers, a ten-foot-long Downing Street,

under a dry sky of greys, sad patches of blue.

That leaf could be Larry the Cat, the whine of the kid

beside me could be… Never mind. Could I rebuild home,

check in on the woman I love, nine hours back, in bed;

or see what’s become of my father, still waiting for love,

dreaming his way to the life he never made

then waking to hours of pining to go back to bed

then dreaming his way to the life he never made?

If we could still talk, Dad, I’d call, ask: do you remember

that day we took a taxi at 8 a.m.

to the foot of Mount Brandon, rose through waves of rain

a few hundred yards, gave up, came down again,

and waited like trolls beneath a metal bridge

while sheep went off around us? What else to do

all day until our driver would trundle back

with his microclimate? Then everything changed hue 10

so, slowly, we made it, past false peaks and mist filigree,

though I was eleven and you were, by then, nearly blind.

And gulping at gale on the summit, I showed you our bay,

sweeping a finger along the shrunken shore

to our pro tem home, too small for you to find.

2020

11

I.

ALL BUT FORGOTTEN

December 2020—January 2022

Loved. You can’t use it in the past tense.

Ken Kesey

The past, like a severed limb, tried to fix itself onto the body of the present.

Hisham Matar 12

13

Prelude

I see him rounding the hairpin to Spring Hill,

whiskey legs slow down the tightest coil of pavement,

pipe clamped in smiled-thin lips, my hand in his –

the hand that prodded his a month ago,

that couldn’t uncoil the fingers now pared to ash

and boxed in my boot, with nowhere else to go.

But still we dawdle down Spring Hill, don’t we?

Me tethering him those final yards, knowing

none of what a toddler can’t know, and happy.

1985 / 2022

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i. The Shortest Day, Intwood Ward

She walks me briskly past a row of ‘bays’:

alcoves in which a body lies contorted

in each peaceable corner. Out here is chaos.

We stop at bay 5 – ‘You’ll know which one he is’ –

then she gestures, smiles, pads off somewhere else.

And do I? Then I do. ‘Hi Dad’, I say,

so he judders, heaves his chin up from his chest,

beams. ‘Hello, son!’ His face is not quite his.

‘They’ve still not bloody told me why I’m here…’

(They have.) I find a chair, pull up to him,

and we settle. His nappy fills beneath the blanket

as he talks about school, the ‘miracle’ of my birth –

the flowers on the wasteland of his life

bursting into a meadow of his making,

which we both lie in together, finally –

and this is dignity. Opposite, Brian

talks himself to sleep, snores, wakes, and talks

himself to sleep, snores, wakes, and talks, and sleeps,

his life a tight loop, easy enough to ignore,

unlike the doctor’s call, now a fugue in my head:

‘Sorry, but yes.’ […] ‘Months.’ […] It’s hard to say

when he’ll develop symptoms.’ I’ve looked them up,

seen clots in clotted colons, morphine drips,

taut mouths in final circles. ‘What’s the date?’

‘The twenty-first, Dad.’ ‘Just another day here.’

Then he chuckles, tells me something else I recall

differently. ‘Dad?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘I’m proud of you.’

He grins. It fades. Does he know that can’t be true?

15

ii. Alcoholic Dementia

The sheep-tracks of your mind were worn to trenches.

You said what I’d said simply didn’t make sense

then blathered again about little Dietrich Pegler,

the Nazi boy at school. One of your legs

protruded, limp, from the standard-issue blanket

as you laughed a tabescent laugh, then went blank

and slept. Something beeped. Someone coughed.

The rising, falling, rising of your breath

seemed eternal labour. Your gut gurgled –

the newer you might’ve laughed. And soon you heard