David Wheatley Poems

How early the autumn seemed to have come that year,
the drizzles like moods, the tightness in the air.
Walking was different: nervous, brisker now
under the streetlights' tangerine conic glow;
needing gloves and scarves. I had both,
And a raincoat pulled up tight around my mouth.
Direction never mattered on those streets.
Once I walked all night and called it quits
somewhere miles from home, then caught the first
bus back. What mattered was being lost.
Anywhere would do: I remember suburbs
plush with hatchbacks parked on tidy kerbs,
Privets, cherry blossoms, nouveaux riches'
houses named for saints, complete with cable dishes;
and then the streets where every window was
an iron grid across its pane of glass,
the garden weeds in cracks, a noise ahead -
a bird, a cat - enough to make me cross the road.
Any light was harsh: all-night Spars
and the lit façades of Georgian squares
I'd hurry past; headlights glared like search-
beams in their hurtling, quizzical approach.
But landmarks were always a magnet. I'd be out
for hours - in sight of open fields - and spot
a pub or spire I knew, then find myself
being led by it, with inarticulate relief,
back in. Home was defeat but consolation too,
reassurance there was nowhere else to go.
The clubs all shut, town was deserted all over:
the only living thing would be the river;
and one night following it, I got a sense
of how, if anything did, it left the dead-ends
of the place behind as, sleek as a dream,
past barracks, churches, courts, the lot, it swam,
the lights that danced on its surface so many jack-
o'-lanterns promising no going back,
for it at least if not for me. I followed it
all the way to the quay-end steps and sat
as long as I thought it would take to reach the last buoy
and from there, dry land forgotten, the open sea.
...

How easy people must be to please
when even brickbats count as applause.

It takes a peace-loving man indeed
to brave such war and not lose his head.

Today's Diogenes must learn
to ride the rapids in his urn

but no Niagara plunge compares
to testing the waters above my ears.

What's a ducking to one fed on
the kind of weather I bang my head on?

I am the dung-heap where the fruit
you plant on me will lodge and sprout,

my rotten-tomatoed two black eyes
the sick-note for my clown's disguise.

The windfalls in this antic zoo
mean not just fruit but the branches too:

I am your tuppenny Christ expected
to salvage his own cross from your deadwood.

If a baying crowd pelts with ardour
an appreciative one just pelts the harder.

Grant me, O Lord, a knockout blow
and over I'll roll and off I'll go.
...

Take me away from this terrible place,
very slowly, by barge, rising through
the frothy lock outside my window
like an old cinema organ.
Ours will have been the most tacit
of courtships, the most offhand
of consummations as I step
aboard from the vegetable patch.
Expressionless townsfolk will process
from the church to the water's edge
and my discarded bouquet float by
to the wheeze of an accordion waltz.
I too have dreamed of a tattooed
first mate and an infestation
of cats in the saucepans and hold.
The candour of my wedding dress
will face down scarecrows
and cornfields from the prow.
Take me away from this terrible place
two or three miles down the water,
no more: nowhere else can I
be happy but where the water voles
splash and the kingfisher combusts.
I hear the lock close behind me
and grant the water its steely
abolition of our having
ever passed through. I will walk
the length of the barge backwards
to you and into our future.
...

There is blood on the snow
and a trickle of rowan berry juice

on his bib where the pine marten
stands for a moment like a man.

What colour should I turn, slipping
after him into the woods, his trail

gone cold and his scent lost
among the dead leaves and tree bark?

Elusive familiar: there is no reason
why we need meet. Will we

have so much as been here at all?
I too have never seen my own face.
...

I crossed the sea. Half my address book
blew away and never came back.

It's one way to weed the cabbage patch.
I never did like them all that much.

I stopped sending Christmas cards and letters.
The other half went. I never felt better.

Which left me and the takeaway man,
except when I got down to one

I wasn't so sure I made the cut
so mine was the page that I ripped out.

I'd decided I liked me less and less
I'd done my throwing out in reverse.

I was the lack that I'd always lacked.
Get rid of me and you're all welcome back.
...

I arrive in the classroom during Geography lesson.
Thirty tongues equally slow to loosen,
till a boy asks to read. I sit on a table and listen

to how a beast in calf on a neighbour's farm
took three hours to deliver but came to no harm.
Now the hands soar up, each child's "I am"

proved aloud from the looping, unjoined script
that fills the flimsy copy-books they grip
and come the end of the year will mostly scrap

with hardly a second thought as they move on.
Who'll read to me then? I sit with them while I can.
They read and read long after the bell has gone.
...