River Tame – poems 2 die for

DUCKED EVERY MODULE

“The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, and from without.”
 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)

ducked every module
on Romanticism
during my
English degrees

and yet maybe
that is exactly where
my antipathy
to the movement
must have
originated from

kind of imagining myself
a poet, sort of poet, or
something not
too far from that
as I wandered down
towards the River Tame
(tributary of
the far more
famous Mersey)
stretched out
to the East and West
and South
the Pennine Moors
Bronte territory,
roughest, toughest, most desolate
part of England

still
a ways to walk
to get there

and me for now
meandering riverward

slipping through my neighbour
crazy Gordon Shelley’s
immaculately
mown garden

passing the tiny glade
of wild narcissi
(dangerous lure, that
purity)

and down into the hollow
graveyard for one single
completely
broken piano

its innards spilled, everywhere
rods and hammers
and scattered keys

leit motif
for someone’s life
if not mine entirely

try to duck things
and they still
get to
nail you
one way or’t tother

STALEY BRIDGE STALYBRIDGE

this is Staley bridge
my father’s birthplace

here is a picture
of me in a pram
my sister
in a pram

on a big bridge
crossing the Tame river

this is not
that Staley bridge where
the Saxons crushed the
Vikings
rushing back to

meet my
Norman ancestors at Hastings

and we
know what happened there

****

Yes, here we are
up front Mossley
in that picture, my
Mother

daughter of a war hero
pushing our pram

and there, no doubt,
the great cotton mills
still
doing their job though
not now in
their hey day

postmodernity,
postcoloniality

what landscape altering modes
of production ushered
in in
their wake

and here is Engels incliding
text on this place in his seminal
work on
the working class
in England

and here I am
years later, studying satire living
in his monument house
in Oxford Street Manchester

water
under this bridge, water
connecting
us all
Tipperary, Stalybridge,
Mahikeng South Africa

figures
in a Lowry paintimg
they come
and they go

water
    under this bridge then
so much water we
tend to
   forget about
                        water headed
to the port of slavery

same water in the skiffle
psychedelia of those

Sergeant Pepper people
magicians of the airwaves
conjurors of
                        a whole new
line
    in identity
fruit of the clash of
working class proclivities
with
    transcendental
mind

clash, I say,
but what a melding, beloved
blending

without which
no way this space, or place,
or room
to talk

gone these guys
or finally fading

gone
those mills of my childhood
Spitfire stories
of how
we stood alone

everything reconfigured,
outright repurposed

voices (and their words)
I fail to recognise, alien
strange

elevated above whilst
so out of frame

somehow talking all
necessities of suppression
commandeering everything

stretching

the distance below
to above

to breaking point

viewed from
the Southern tip of Africa, product
victim of
all that this is metonym of
all this place
this life
of which
I speak

ths
shock
could not be more
extreme

(so dark
these river with
their druid name

we cross
all our lives

each
every day

so quietly all
determining)