Mark divvn't knaa

Here are the ten poems I've chosen for translation. They include a number from a sequence called The Dunno Elegies, which has within its title a pun on Rilke's Duino Elegies (from which some of the images stem) and the shoulder-shrugging way of saying 'Don't Know'. I'll be interested to see what our translators make of that! It is all work from an as yet unpublished book, though some of the other poems have been anthologised. One is Bulgaria-related.


The Dunno Elegies: One

Angel of the North, Gateshead
for Mick Henry

What use are angels when the wind blows back
our sighs with the sand? What use this song, nosing
through undergrowth like a dog roots out smells,
tired of its own hot-blooded clichés, bored
with knowing how lost and forgetful we are
here in this reciphered, recycled world.
If we knew how terrible it would feel
to be reminded that beauty exists
just a fleet moment from the walkers’ path,
in mould on a leaf or mud in a footprint,
what would we do, would breath catch or guilt grip?

No, if I were to shout, now, on this hill
above the Team Valley Business Park,
how many angels would hear it? How many
would care that my grief had blown their cover?
The change in my pocket occupies me
for a cold minute or two. The sobbing dark
chokes on my whistling, a tune that visits
and then forgets to leave. Forgive me.
I only mean to console myself.
This is a song for my mother, the past,
an echo I hear of a better world,
a trail worn out of knotted grass, folly
that pushes you on into the woods,
a place torn down that started again,
dark native mud still on its boots,
unilluminated wings stretched out.
Magpies croon and croak and try to catch it,
trees sway bare and brown, wind-blown hedges mime
the river rushing seawards holding its breath
while it takes in this hopeful new song.

The angel rusts a welcome to its brothers,
its wings embrace prayers, its sore heart escapes
the buried pithead in a gasp of song,
over the seasoned museum of the land
where the worm is king, turning like a screw
in a rawlplug, a braddle into wet bark.
The keening rises on the valley’s thermals,
rolling and tumbling into low hinterland.

But there are shadows left even by angels,
where the coal sleeps soundly, silent miles down.
The wild coast between here, there, now and then
is not so solid as it used to be.
This song was only meant to warm the air.
If it could do more it would be unbearable.
There are things only angels can forgive



The Dunno Elegies: Three

On Hadrian’s Wall
for Linda Tuttiett

The rain is running late, eighteen words for it
loose on a hillside, different tongues
boiling down what it means to be English
by clambering over some ancient stones.
The morning has blown in through a dank blur,
as if covered in moss, a hangover
worming its sorry way home to sleep.

This is bleak, a line scratched into the earth
to show the angels just who’s in charge,
a long wall walked in early morning mist,
catching shadows as they take human form
and try to be like us. The fields suck light
out of the sky and turn it into mud.
Shoulder to shoulder the hills form circles,
block out the countries we’d otherwise see.
All the angels here have swords and curses
they teach each other in the early hours.
They left few descendants to freeze here
in the grim far North, but never went home.
They dream of desert sun and of water.
All they have is rain, the endless sound of it.

What letters do they write home in their heads?
What bitter visions do they describe
from their short foreign days in the wind?
They didn’t know that they were building
a heritage for a fortress empire.
They were doing what they were told, but now
they are angelic, whatever their tribe,
and they walk amongst foolhardy tourists
in their fleece-lined jackets and woolly hats,
whisper in the ears of bright young women
those eighteen words for rain, and more for love,
love that would warm the bones, the aching bones.

Is that what survives the never-ending wind,
what divides us into those on the list
and those waiting outside for a friend with clout?
Nothing else is happening here: just sheep
counting themselves to sleep, demonstrating
the random nature of migration,
as a chain-smoking Italian teenager
brings down a bird with a flick of the wrist
and an unbecoming stone’s swift flight.


The Dunno Elegies: Nine

Teesport, Redcar

Rolling picture of the utterly here,
land still in turmoil as markets crash,
morphing and merging in hostile arrangements
when old certainties just evaporate
like red steam leaking from pressured globes
at the heart of networks of private roads.
All the power that once was here changed.
Iron made a place appear overnight,
now it is rusting the water ochre.
Ore in these dark hills, a dance in the pipe-work.
An endless mess of goods trains shuffles
through imitations of illuminations,
past stone-tongued fire-eaters and fireworks
burning messages into the heavens.
Our children wheeze, and tiny angels
keep them company in their fragile games.
This is a blank land of grey-faced fences,
barbed wire barriers and strengthened steel.
It scrubs its face raw because it is proud,
and it wants the world to be orderly.
Though the angels on the backs of trains
think it looks so shiningly chaotic
something good must come from its blissful rush,
the wind tastes bitter, chemical, beaten.
You can see its shape from Redcar beach,
nourish a warm dream of Holy Island,
so far to the North the light is different.
There is quiet there, and cleaner daylight,
permanent beside the gulls’ plainsong.

But here, gates are locked, one by one
companies become simple history.
Too many to list, those that are gone.
Molten, the angels that record their names.



The Dunno Elegies: Ten

Fitness First, Eaglescliffe

I am no good at thinking. I am only good
at noting things down and putting one foot
in front of another for a long time.
That’s what this gym is for, energy
passing from my legs into the treadmill
into the cold earth, the brownfield site
that lies beneath the car park and our feet.
Staring down the mirrored middle-distance
pains put to one side, and death just a myth,
this joyous suffering seeks a resting place.
I put grief aside, can think of the lost
without tears so long as I keep moving.
I think I am somehow making the earth turn.
If I do it quickly enough better words will come,
these sudden gusts of grief and remembrance
will be as welcome as wind on a beach.

Except our feet do not touch the ground,
our feet float somewhere just above the dirt.
I can hear voices, I can hear voices
in my head as I count the steps I make,
as I check off left then right then left again
then again then again then again until,
I look up at the wall of mirrors ahead
and see the angels walking the aisles
between the machines, shaking their heads.

These factory boys cannot believe us.
A room full of heat, lines of effort and hope,
calm self-deception, wild reassessment –
panting none can hear through our headphones,
or over machines’ arrhythmic heartbeat
filling the eaves like a kind of song.
Glances cross in the mirror, sizing up
an undertow of exposure, openness
to anything but a conversation.
Brows dip under the weight of sweat,
heads nod, shoulders rock, into a body
of lone people not communicating.
The crescendo we do not hear gets worse.

The women angels me-mo across the rows,
lips and eyes exaggerate the clarity
of their conclusions, their bemused anger,
no more than a whisper in the room
but a metallic scream in the glass.
Endurance wasn’t built in a day, it says
on the wall. They are killing themselves laughing.
They run their hands over the rails and the seats
looking for the joins, for how things are made.

My legs are moving only out of habit,
my brain frozen. A voice in my headphones speaks.

It’s not the absence of what we’ve lost
that redefines us, but the echo,
not a betrayal, but a warm embrace,
wings and chest calming the song to silence.
What is here overwhelms. So stop running.



My Name is Mark and
after Charles Bernstein

I am a northern poet, a northwestern poet,
a northeastern poet, a Stockton poet,
a Preston poet, a Teesside poet,
a domestic poet, a political poet,
an evasive poet, a formal poet, an ex-
perimental poet, a reflective poet, a strategic poet,
a part-time poet, an evenings and weekends poet,
a 24 hour party poet, a performance poet,
a preschool poet, a streetwise poet,
a smart arse poet, a wry poet,
a real poet, a male poet, people’s poet,
a blue poet, a red poet, a green poet,
a black-white-and-read-all-over poet,
a ready made poet, a donkey of a poet,
I am a love poet in the morning,
a darkly comic poet over lunch,
a post-prandial second language poet,
a crispy edge of the lasagne poet at teatime,
a pop poet watching the telly,
and an interrogative poet in the sack,
I am a creative poet, a restricted poet,
a poet making the most of slender means,
a listed poet, a candidate poet,
a could-have-been-a-contender poet,
a difficult decision making poet,
a young poet, a poet with a maturing voice,
a gritty poet, a can-I-take-it-to the-bridge-
yeah-go-on-take-it-to-the-bridge poet,
an anti-poet, a poet who hates beauty
for its own sake and its own good,
a poet after Auschwitz and the poet who
put the ram in the ramalamadingdong,
I am a vernacular poet, a poet
of exquisite juxtapositions,
a poet inhabited by inhibition,
I am a poet with a mission,
a missionary poet with a million positions,
a beat poet, jazz poet, spoken word poet,
I am an ironic poet, a post-punk poet,
a just-add-boiling-water poet,
a poet with attitude, a fraudulent poet,
a situationist poet, a dead poet,
a situation-communist poet,
I am an accessible poet, I am a poet
banging a tambourine, I am a poet with a headache.
backache and an indefinable langour,
a terminal case of ennui,
I am a discursive poet, a generative poet,
an imagist who scorns the sketch,
a poet driven by the need for results,
a leaving poems poet, a birth of your child poet
a research poet, a poet ever puzzled,
a product poet, a process poet,
an executive Top Management Poet,
I am a terraced house poet, a pacifist
terrorist poet with a pillowful of feathers,
an erotic poet, a dream poet, a dream-song-sung-blue poet,
a poet without a home, a poet in his place,
a poet crying for mother and apple pie,
a stir-fried tofu poet, a white bread black pudding poet,
I am a poet in the field, a poet at large,
a systems poet, a computer generated poet,
a small press poet, a hard pressed poet,
a depressed poet, a suppressed poet,
a poet reeling with surprise and delight,
a husband poet, son poet, brother poet,
dad poet, a dadaist poet, a sudden movement poet,
a martian poet, a poet behaving badly,
a talkin-‘bout-my-generation poet,
a post-post-post-post-post poet,
a modernist poet in the market place,
a gnomic poet on the street corner,
a never-going-to-be-on-the-South-Bank-Show poet,
a tea-time local news poet, a tense poet,
a speak my weight poet, an eat my words poet,
an educated poet, a philistine poet,
an aesthetic principles don’t butter the bread poet,
a poetry boom revival poet, a dusty corner poet,
a shabbier the better poet, an alphabetical order poet,
a dictionary poet, a tip of the tongue poet,
a poet in a mess, a you-hum-it-I’ll-play-it poet,
a stop-this-poem-I-want-to-get-off poet.



How I learned to sing

The day spins like a plate on a pole,
sunlight streaming down and around us,
carving shadows out of the beach.
A snag of mishaps has shaped mum’s face
into a taut parody of itself.
We are sent to find crabs, in pools
where we have not seen a crab for years.
The sea is a vein in the estuary,
the tide coming in a race memory,
and stranded pools dot the sand
with water still so cold it cramps
our calves before we can fight.
Then my sister is suddenly dancing,
splashing towards me with her discovery,
a small pink starfish she waves
in my dumbstruck face.
Though she is smaller, I can’t reach it,
she ducks and swerves away
like the memory of it now.
I can’t reach her, mum and dad
are too far back to help, but
I want that starfish, want to run
my fingers over its serrations,
pop it in my pocket to frighten
my mum with as we wipe sand
from between our toes later.
I start to scream at my sister,
first words and then just noises,
and the gulls turn from pencil flicks
to real birds with real blood
rushing beneath sharp feathers,
claws asking my shirt whether
it will rip or be carried off,
and now my voice has gone soft
and crying for what I can’t get
I feel my wings rise and set,
the gulls craws and my own throat
harmonise as I pale and float
up and over the docile waves,
not worrying, or wanting to be saved,
looking down on the strip of beach
at the family I could not reach,
and singing back back back.



Where Thinking Got Me

It was ideas cut my chest tight.
The dusk sang me ragged,
wrang me dry as salt.

Hollow backed with hunger
I held the face in the mirror
steady, simple as a toy box,

while I sweat myself some air.
Three deep sweet breaths
made my young neck flush

when some sudden consolation
wrapped me in papier maché,
delivered me into stereo,

then made me run everything
I’d ever done again, backwards,
all the way home.



Poem (On Realising I am English)

‘The important thing is to adapt your dish of spaghetti
to circumstances and your state of mind.’
Guiseppe Marotta

In the parallel universe where wizened Corsicans
rave over suet dumplings and rapturously murmur
improvised sonnets in praise of stotty,
barm cake, bloomer, cob, scone (to rhyme with gone)

no one would criticise me for never mentioning
the real grievance at the heart of this poem.
I’d be lauded for the tightness of my lip,
for the way you feel my teeth grit and grind,

for how I shrug off questions with a joke
about the endless spouting of emotion
I waded through to get here.

I think this as the glaze of a first pressing
spreads its lucent green over the frying pan,
ready to spit at the very suggestion of an onion.


Going

I recall it now as it will be then:
stillness suddenly present overhead
and the earth twitching madly beneath my feet,
a Thursday beaten with sticks and sickly sweet.

I will leave behind a half hummable tune,
and messages etched in the soles of my shoes.
Brickwork kicked into chunks by the gate
suggest what happened happened too late.

A Thursday when dark fades in before three,
still years from a breath of the weekend,
I will go, eyes open, not awash with pain,
but wanting them to wish I crop up again.

It will rain as they wake to how I'm not there,
as train-rattle piles through the evening air
that holds my silence and stills my tongue
as our garden fills and swells with its song.



Return

'It is better to be in love with your wife
than to be in love with your poetry'
- Toma Markov

1.
air like a lump in the throat
in this dark haired city
if a horse could lay pumpkins
they'd be like those piled high
on market stalls at Sitnyakovo
and I'd be full of ginger carrying
my swollen heart home to bake

2.
This is a long fever, secret like a wish,
pale as you and flowers in its miracle heat.
It is close to mute, and lies snug in our palms in the dark.

So quietly new is it even now a breath might break
to talk of heart, hope, and then hold still
while our blood runs hot again,

guessing how every dry afternoon would feel
if this flush didn't warm the air,
didn't catch us falling into balance.

3.
Of many parallel worlds
I choose this one.