Roy Fisher

Where's Birmingham river? Sunk.
Which river was it? Two. More or less.
...

Dear Mr Fisher I am writing
a thesis on your work.
But am unable to obtain
texts. I have articles by Davie, D.,
...

The pianist Joe Sullivan,
jamming sound against idea

hard as it can go
florid and dangerous

slams at the beat, or hovers,
drumming, along its spikes;

in his time almost the only
one of them to ignore

the chance of easing down,
walking it leisurely,

he'll strut, with gambling shapes,
underpinning by James P.,

amble, and stride over
gulfs of his own leaving, perilously

toppling octaves down to where
the chords grow fat again

and ride hard-edged, most lucidly
voiced, and in good inversions even when

the piano seems at risk of being
hammered the next second into scrap.

For all that, he won't swing
like all the others;

disregards mere continuity,
the snakecharming business,

the ‘masturbator's rhythm'
under the long variations:

Sullivan can gut a sequence
in one chorus—

—approach, development, climax, discard—
and sound magnanimous.

The mannerism of intensity
often with him seems true,

too much to be said, the mood
pressing in right at the start, then

running among stock forms
that could play themselves

and moving there with such
quickness of intellect

that shapes flaw and fuse,
altering without much sign,

concentration
so wrapped up in thoroughness

it can sound bluff, bustling,
just big-handed stuff—

belied by what drives him in
to make rigid, display,

shout and abscond, rather
than just let it come, let it go—

And that thing is his mood:
a feeling violent and ordinary

that runs in among standard forms so
wrapped up in clarity

that fingers following his
through figures that sound obvious

find corners everywhere,
marks of invention, wakefulness;

the rapid and perverse
tracks that ordinary feelings

make when they get driven
hard enough against time.
...

I've lived within half a mile of it
for twenty years. West
by the black iron weather-hen
half-strangled with clematis
on the garage roof
I can locate it. Past a low ridge
in the cliff face of a limestone dale
there's a cave in the bushes.

When the old tigers
were long since gone, leaving their
teeth, the valley people
would climb there with the dead
they thought most useful;

push them well in,

take them out again,
walk them around:
‘They're coming! They're coming'

We Malagasies love
our second burials.
We hire a band that comes
in a van. Again
with liquefaction almost done
we hold our cherished ones
in our arms. From the grave-clothes
they fall in gobbets as dog-food
falls from the can. We wrap them
in fresh dry linen. They
bless our lives with their happiness.

Walk them around the valley. Drop
here a finger
for the god that is a rat or a raven,
here a metatarsal
to set under the hearth for luck.

And what was luck?

The afterlife back then
was fairly long:
nothing demented like for ever,

nothing military. The afterlife
would come to the party.
...

At night on the station platform, near a pile of baskets, a couple em-
braced, pressed close together and swaying a little. It was hard to
see where the girl's feet and legs were. The suspicion this aroused
soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover's back,
to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout en-
gine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his
cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish
the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgy-
nous fantasy, the self-sufficient core of his stupor. Such a romantic
thing, so tender, for him to contain. He looked more comic and
complaisant than the couple had done, and more likely to fall heav-
ily to the floor.

A café with a frosted glass door through which much light is dif-
fused. A tall young girl comes out and stands in front of it, her face
and figure quite obscured by this milky radiance.

She treads out onto a lopsided ochre panel of lit pavement before
the doorway and becomes visible as a coloured shape, moving
sharply. A wrap of honey and ginger, a flared saffron skirt, grey-
white shoes. She goes off past the Masonic Temple with a young
man: he is pale, with dark hair and a shrunken, earnest face. You
could imagine him a size larger. Just for a moment, as it happens,
there is no one else in the street at all. Their significance escapes rap-
idly like a scent, before the footsteps vanish among the car engines.


A man in the police court. He looked dapper and poker-faced, his
arms straight, the long fingers just touching the hem of his checked
jacket. Four days after being released from the prison where he had
served two years for theft he had been discovered at midnight cling-
ing like a tree-shrew to the bars of a glass factory-roof. He made no
attempt to explain his presence there; the luminous nerves that
made him fly up to it were not visible in daylight, and the police
seemed hardly able to believe this was the creature they had brought
down in the darkness.


In this city the governing authority is limited and mean: so limited
that it can do no more than preserve a superficial order. It supplies
fuel, water and power. It removes a fair proportion of the refuse,
cleans the streets after a fashion, and discourages fighting. With
these things, and a few more of the same sort, it is content. This
could never be a capital city for all its size. There is no mind in it, no
regard. The sensitive, the tasteful, the fashionable, the intolerant
and powerful, have not moved through it as they have moved
through London, evaluating it, altering it deliberately, setting in
motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen.


In an afternoon of dazzling sunlight in the thronged streets, I saw
at first no individuals but a composite monster, its unfeeling sur-
faces matted with dust: a mass of necks, limbs without extremities,
trunks without heads; unformed stirrings and shovings spilling
across the streets it had managed to get itself provided with.

Later, as the air cooled, flowing loosely about the buildings that
stood starkly among the declining rays, the creature began to divide
and multiply. At crossings I could see people made of straws, rags,
cartons, the stuffing of burst cushions, kitchen refuse. Outside the
Grand Hotel, a long-boned carrot-haired girl with glasses, loping
along, and with strips of bright colour, rich, silky green and blue,
in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps she was beau-
tiful.

Faint blue light dropping down through the sparse leaves of the
plane trees in the churchyard opposite after sundown, cooling and
shaping heads, awakening eyes.
...

I saw the garden where my aunt had died
And her two children and a woman from next door;
It was like a burst pod filled with clay.

A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs
Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses
With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors;

The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground,
Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle's corpse
Over the housetop and into the street beyond.

Now the garden lay stripped and stale; the iron shelter
Spread out its separate petals around a smooth clay saucer.
Small, and so tidy it seemed nobody had ever been there.

When I saw it, the house was blown clean by blast and care.
Relations had already torn out the new fireplaces;
My cousin's pencils lasted me several years.

And in his office notepad that was given me
I found solemn drawings in crayon of blondes without dresses.
In his lifetime I had not known him well.

These were the things I noticed at ten years of age:
Those, and the four hearses outside our house,
The chocolate cakes, and my classmates' half-shocked envy.

But my grandfather went home from the mortuary
And for five years tried to share the noises in his skull,
Then he walked out and lay under a furze-bush to die.

When my father came back from identifying the daughter
He asked us to remind him of her mouth.
We tried. He said ‘I think it was the one'.

These were marginal people I had met only rarely
And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen;
Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths.

This bloody episode of four whom I could understand better dead
Gave me something I needed to keep a long story moving;
I had no pain of it; can find no scar even now.

But had my belief in the fiction not been thus buoyed up
I might, in the sigh and strike of the next night's bombs
Have realized a little what they meant, and for the first time been afraid.
...

The irritations of comfort—
I visit as they rebuild the house
from within: whitening, straightening,
bracing the chimney-breast edges
and forcing warmth, dryness
and windows with views into
the cottage below canal-level.

For yes, there's a canal, bringing
cold reflections almost to the door,
and beyond it the main line to Manchester,
its grid of gantries pale
against the upland and the sky;
there's a towpath pub, where the red-
haired old landlady
brings up the beer from the cellar slowly
in a jug: there's a chapel
next door to the cottage, set up
with a false front and a real
boiler-house, and—
rest, my mind—nearby there's
a small haulage contractor's yard.

Everything's turned up here, except
a certain complete cast-iron
housefront, preserved and pinned
to a blank wall in Ottawa.

This comfort
beckons. It won't do. It beckons.
Driving steadily through rain in
a watertight car with the wipers going.
It won't do. It beckons.
...

Where's Birmingham river? Sunk.
Which river was it? Two. More or less.

History: we're on tribal ground. When they
moved in from the Trent, the first English

entered the holdings and the bodies of the people
who called the waters that kept them alive

Tame, the Dark River, these English spread their works
southward then westward, then all ways

for thirty-odd miles, up to the damp tips of the thirty-odd
weak headwaters of the Tame. By all of the Tame

they settled, and sat, named themselves after it:
Tomsaetan. And back down at Tamworth, where the river

almost began to amount to something,
the Mercian kings kept their state. Dark

because there's hardly a still expanse of it
wide enough to catch the sky, the Dark River

mothered the Black Country and all but
vanished underneath it, seeping out from the low hills

by Dudley, by Upper Gornal, by Sedgley, by
Wolverhamption, by Bloxwich, dropping morosely

without a shelf or a race or a dip,
no more than a few feet every mile, fattened

a little from mean streams that join at,
Tipton, Bilston, Willenhall, Darlaston,

Oldbury, Wednesbury. From Bescot
She oozes a border round Handsworth

where I was born, snakes through the flat
meadows that turned into Perry Barr,

passes through Witton, heading for the city
but never getting there. A couple of miles out

she catches the timeless, suspended
scent of Nechells and Saltley - coal gas,

sewage, smoke - turns and makes off
for Tamworth, caught on the right shoulder

by the wash that's run under Birmingham,
a slow, petty river with no memory of an ancient

name; a river called Rea, meaning river,
and misspelt at that. Before they merge

they're both steered straight, in channels
that force them clear of the gasworks. And the Tame

gets marched out of town in the police calm
that hangs under the long legs of the M6.

These living rivers
turgidly watered the fields, gave

drink; drove low powered mills, shoved
the Soho Works into motion, collected waste

and foul waters. Gave way to steam,
collected sewage, factory poisons. Gave way

to clean Welsh water, kept on collecting
typhoid. Sank out of sight

under streets, highways, the black walls of workshops;
collected metals, chemicals, aquicides. Ceased

to draw lines that weren't cancelled or unwanted; became
drains, with no part in anybody's plan.
...