"Poetry by Peter Daniels"

PETER
DANIELS

The Pump

After piped water, the pump becomes redundant,
the handle chained down at the side: at rest, if you like.
The pump turns into “what we used to have”,
but no one’s minded to get rid of it.
With war declared they strip it down and oil it
in case Hitler bombs the reservoirs, but
water stays on tap. It’s part of the yard,
with the paving in dark blue brick sluiced out
with a broom down to the drain.
A piece of ironwork painted green,
rusting into the wall, all of a piece.

It’s what they call “the vernacular”.
Flowers in tubs do brighten it up, the pump
redone in white, the name of the foundry and the date
picked out in black. It punctuates the composition,
sets off the door to the kitchen, the stone basin
where they used to put the bucket
planted up with nasturtiums that trail.
The place all spruce for the visitors,
now the redundant pump can stand for
all the strength it took the kitchen girl to crank it
and crank it till the steely water came up at last, and at last
she could find time to become somebody’s grandmother.
Somebody look at the pump and think of her.

TOP↑

Annual Leave

Picture yourself somewhere else, one Thursday afternoon.
Can you calculate the benefits,
prior to the leap that might land you
outside eating blubber and berries,
a salad of weeds in a forest of storms?

You haven't used all your allowed holiday, I notice.
The little beat under your eyelid - time to take it
out for a walk, enjoy the company of rooks, relax
on the assault course.

That lady, up at the castle window calming her nerves
with a tossed lettuce - soon she'll parachute off
with the raggle taggle, for good.

© Peter Daniels
Published in the pamphlet Work & Food (Mulfran Press, 2010).
First published in The North.
Illustrated by Moira Coupe.

TOP↑

Shoreditch Orchid

They’re grubbing up the old modern
rusty concrete lampposts,
with a special orange grab
on a fixture removal unit.
The planters come up behind
with new old lampposts in lamppost green,
and bury each root in a freshly-dug hole.
The bus can’t get past, brooding in vibrations.
We’re stuck at the half-refurbished
late-Georgian crescent of handbag wholesalers.
The window won’t open. The man behind me
whistles “What a Wonderful World”,
and I think to myself:

Any day soon
the rubble will be sifted; the streets all swept,
and we’ll be aboard a millennium tram ride,
the smooth one we’ve been promised, with a while yet to go
until the rising sea and the exterminating meteor,
but close before the war
starting with the robocar disaster.
And when the millennium crumbles,
I’ll be squinting through the corrugated fence
at the wreck of the mayor’s armoured vehicle, upside down
where they dumped the files of the Inner City Partnership;
and as I kick an old kerbstone
I’ll find you, Shoreditch orchid, true and shy,
rooting in the meadow streets
through old cable, broken porcelain, rivets and springs;
living off the bones of the railway.
You’ll make your entry unannounced,
in the distraction of buddleia throwing its slender legs
out in the air from nothing,
from off the highest parapets, cheap
attention-seeking shrub from somewhere
like nowhere. But here
you’ll identify your own private genes,
a quiet specimen-bloom seeded in junk,
and no use to any of us; only an intricate bee-trap
composed in simple waxy petals, waiting
for the bees to reinvent their appetite.

We’ll be waiting for the maps to kindle
as we get settled, where we find ourselves
undiscovering the city,
its lost works, disestablished
under the bridges. There’s no more bargaining
for melons and good brass buttons.
We share your niche
and crouch as the falling sun
shines through smoke, and the lampposts
fail to light the night to the place all buses go.

© Peter Daniels
First prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition 2008, with the Ted Hughes Environmental Poetry Prize.

TOP↑

“Not My Mother…”
Vladislav Khodasevich

Not my mother, but a Tula peasant,
Eléna Kúzina, fed me her breast.
She warmed my swaddling-clothes above the stove,
and with her cross at night my dreams were blessed.

She knew no fairy tales and never sang:
but always kept as treats for me instead
inside her treasured white enamel tin
a peppermint horse or fruity gingerbread.

She never taught me how to say my prayers,
but gave up everything she had for me:
even her own bitter motherhood,
all that was dear to her, unconditionally.

Only the time I tumbled from the window, but
stood up alive (that day for ever mine!),
with half a kopek for the miracle
her candle graced Iberian Mary’s shrine.

And you, Russia, “great resounding power”:
taking her nipples for my lips to pull,
I suckled the excruciating right
to love you, and to curse at you as well.

My honest, joyful task of making psalms,
in which I serve each moment all day long,
your wonder-making genius teaches me,
and my profession is your magic tongue.

And I may stand before your feeble sons
priding myself at times that I can guard
this language, handed down from age to age,
with a more jealous love for every word…

The years fly by. The future has no use,
the past has burnt itself into my soul.
And yet the secret joy is still alive,
for me there is one refuge from it all:

where with the still imperishable love
even a maggot-eaten heart can keep,
beside the trampled coronation crowd
my nurse, Elena Kuzina, asleep.

TOP↑

Kings

The king of touch is good to fling with, waltzing
from ballroom to bedroom. Feel under his skin,
the veins his blood is roaring through.

You can’t leave them there,
dancing on the edge of a cliff.

The king of tact knows a trick you don’t,
but he holds his powers in reserve, his
is the unexpected gift.

Sometimes heroism makes good sense
though you can’t insist on it.

The king of trust is aware what the night can be,
and he waits there, sparking and vulnerable, till
he can prick a hole in the dark.

“Take off that ridiculous gown,” he says.

The kings of truth have told you: “People go, they die,
they won’t be perfect. Don’t wait up for your climbing joy.”

Sweat is water, salt and grease.

© Peter Daniels
Won a tenner in the South West Competition 1993, and was published in the pamphlet Be Prepared (Smith/Doorstop, 1994), but revised since. TOP↑

Breakfast, Palermo

One golden glazed bun, sliced open.
One scoop of custardy ice cream, speckled
with chips of fruit and chocolate. Sandwich them lavishly.

To be eaten in uniform by a young soldier,
with one careless hand, espresso in the other.
At the chrome bar, more coffee is hissing.
Sunshine slants in early, yellow.
Not a speck on his trousers.

© Peter Daniels
Published in Of Eros and of Dust, ed. Steve Anthony (Oscars Press, 1992) and the pamphlet Be Prepared (Smith/Doorstop, 1994)

TOP↑

Family

I'm getting used to the household here,
"informal", I think you said.
But who is the woman that brings rice puddings
and tucks you up in bed?

"I thought you might ask, and it's hard to explain,
but let me think this out:
she's my ex-lover's ex-lover's ex-lover's mother,
she likes to get out and about."

On Tuesday I met with a man on the stairs,
he was holding up a length of pipe.
He ruffled his moustache as he gave me a smile
— do you think I'd be his type?

"That's my ex-lover's ex-lover's therapist's plumber,
he came to fix the U-bend and stayed.
He's always handy with his monkey wrench
but he's not to be had, I'm afraid."

Who was the man that called last night?
When I told you, you grabbed at the phone.
He was obviously someone special to you
so I thought I'd leave you alone.

"He's my three-times-ex-lover's next lover's lover,
we go back quite a long way.
We may not ever have been that close
but we're family, I think you'd say.

"We've often bumped into each other in crowds
— once we met at a bus stop in Spain —
but he's dying now, at his parents' house.
I'll never see him again."

TOP↑

Dull Funeral Home
Wisconsin

Opposite a car wash, on your right
a statue of a Holstein cow; on your left – "Hey,
can we stop the car a minute?" – it's that sign.

And whenever you need it, they have time.
Visit for a drink with the embalmer,
take as long as you like. Their expertise
is at your disposal.

Death needn't be a time to do anything.
If you want fuss, that's down to you.
This is America's Dairyland,
they put trust in cows, here. They know
your dead meat turns out as lively as your recipe.

Follow the standard procedures
for your denomination, hire the Fort Snelling
Memorial Chapel – "Staff available for weddings
and other pastoral acts." New Age
ritual consultancies advertise
"Planned observance for solemn
or festive occasions, parenting,
competitive events, establishing traditions,
anniversaries, pet loss."
Whatever: but
if anything happens, ask for the Dull
Funeral Home. They don't need ideas.

TOP↑

The Fireyard

At the back, the last room, lucky to get it.
The whole hotel smells of damp curry,
facilities not special.

I settle down with the old t.v. showing Winter Olympics,
two rival skaters perform their separate circles
but I shift across to the local Chinese stations.
Men in suits all the same shade of grey,
seems to be the Taiwanese Parliament.

The spyhole lens in the door
is fitted the wrong way round
– hm? There’s a label in my new
underpants – “Inspected by Carol” –
I stick it over.

Through the venetian blinds, outside
I spy the Fire Station yard, the men
idly shooting hoops, playing a hose on a car.
How many visitors must bless this
pent-up exercise. San Francisco
in its own bored heat, ready for flames.

TOP↑

Wall Street

We walk further downtown, beyond the Village graffiti
that says AIDS IS THRUSH
AND IT'S CURABLE!
Life is money and the buildings are bigger here.
It's Ash Wednesday,
this is a day to commemorate
some crisis: all the last-born, maybe,
picked from among the perfect suits, the ones
wearing on their groomed brows a smudge
like a smear of sex. Look how ready they are,
it makes them hunger for six weeks without sin.

Being with my sacrilegious Manhattan friend,
it's time to look at a few spiky old churches,
because we don't visit here often.
Remarkable needlework: the white altarcloth, with
crossed pairs of three-tail scourges in red.
More smudges: gladly humble
to wear this dirt mark in public.
And Jesus, with his robes hanging off him,
stands at a bank of candles, warming his hands.

© Peter Daniels
Published in the pamphlets Be Prepared (Smith/Doorstop, 1994) and revised version in Blue Mice (Vennel Press, 1999).

TOP↑

Natural History Museum

I wish Lord let me be nervous again, as confidence makes them wary,
and please make me meek — as if it could make them love me —
but for now I want to shout Fuck and my tone may be unsympathetic,
though I don’t have the accent for street ranting.

I don’t live like that either, I do enjoy a steady job and comforts.

I wish to propitiate the Ilford Mammoth.
I’d pray to refashion the instruments of peace,
be famous for it: I’ll be dead soon enough
and they say you can’t take it with you.
You’ll be dead, too, and then you’ll be sorry:
we shouldn’t throw away our advantages.

Today, I wish to be as unknown as yesterday,
yet never unhappy with my broken trumpet,
even now I know that it’s mine:
I grew up thinking it’s others that are chosen,
I’m not the one that must break the instrument, then
twist it back into tone.

I wish to kneel at the rail of the exhibit.

The Mammoth is depicted walking up the High Road
in front of a double decker bus its own size. I ask
do they do this as a postcard, they suggest I suggest it.

They do a postcard of fleas in Mexican costume.

I am moved to set out East, to undertake the sacred journey.
At Seven Sisters I’ll buy a ticket for Seven Kings,
to visit the spot where it fell, twisting and trumpeting.
The Borough will have a file on it, there may be a plaque.

I shall keep my feet off the seats, and leave no belongings on the train.

I wish to make the fulfilled pilgrim’s return, purged and serene.

© Peter Daniels
Won Ł50 and was published 1998 in Tabla, the 29th time it was sent out. Judge was Ruth Padel, so she has got something right now and then.

TOP↑

Mice

In the yellow water pail
two blue mice are floating.
They splashed through my sleep
last night, and I ignored them.

On the porch, three more mice
lie in the bottom of a dry pail,
withered, with a few old leaves,
and a scattering of droppings.

One mouse looks nibbled,
keeping the others alive
to chase the walls a while
inside the plastic drum.

How long before they died?
We could lie in wait and
count how many fall in:
but simpler to set some traps.

I throw the crisp mice out,
and this morning's two
wet and bloated ones,
with the water they drowned in,

scrape out the bucket of dried
mouseturds under the pump:
remember tonight
to keep the lid down on the water.

TOP↑

Heads

From the first there was no help but the sky
where the height above our heads went on and up
and where the signs came. The ground where the dew
soaked our feet, that was our own
because we lived there, though it might turn hard
or crumble, lose us in rising to mountains
or sink to the marshes and waters.
If we could ever find ourselves in clouds
our hearts would overbalance with that mastery.
Here we live, content under our hats, and a hat
protecting for the sake of heaven
won't help us fly, won't let us disappear.

TOP↑

The Representatives

It’s these people, they all come back to be recognised
for what they are: unspeaking, unforgiving, charmless,
jealous, persistent. I don’t like to be offputting
but I’d rather not know them, or not all the time.

I call them up one by one and attempt to take it slowly.
I could let them all come in at once, and wait
with my head in my hands for the jabbering to stop
but it won’t. Go for one by one, but deal with them quickly

without regret. They must have their feelings too,
it would be unwise to encourage their attachment.
Don’t become any one of them. Their own healthy state
is roaming free, unsheltered, naked, screaming.

It’s not for me to crown them with jewels and ointment,
treat them to shopping in Chelsea, or a romp in the park
— they’d stretch out along the edge, cling to the wiggly railings.
I can commission songs for them to sing of their secret pain.

I can persuade them the best people are vegetables,
and that the tree of heaven is a weed. I can pretend
they are shells arranged on my table, representatives
of disappearance, their own loss, hard empty receptacles.

TOP↑

The Lemon Trees
Eugenio Montale

Listen, the laureate poets
move only among
the less-frequented plant-names:
topiary boxtrees and acanthus.
Me, I love the roads that run themselves
down to grassy ditches
where in the half-dried-up puddles
boys are catching a few
straggly eels:
lanes that follow the banks
dipping between tufts of reeds,
and lead through orchards, under the lemon trees.

Better if the chatterings of birds
are lost and swallowed up in blue sky:
you can listen more clearly to the friendly
branches, whispering in the air that barely moves,
and feel the smell
you can’t unstick from the earth,
that drizzles in your heart an unsettling sweetness.
Here the distracted passions
call a miraculous truce in their war,
here even we, the poor, get a touch of riches
and it’s the smell of the lemon trees.

You see, in these silences where things
give themselves up and seem close to
betraying their ultimate secret,
sometimes you think you might
have caught Nature out, discovered
the world’s blind spot, the link that won’t hold,
the thread that unravels until at last it leads us
into the middle of a truth.
You look around in puzzlement,
your mind investigates, accommodates, disintegrates
into the perfume that floods out
the more the daylight fades.
These are silences where you can see
in every disappearing human shadow
a kind of troubled Divinity.

But the vision has gone, and time brings us back
to the rumbling city where the sky appears
only in pieces above the eaves.
Rain tires the earth, and winter’s tedium
thickens on the houses,
the light gets mean, and the soul bitter.
Then one day, from a badly-closed doorway,
through the trees of a courtyard
you can make out the yellow of lemons;
and your iced-up heart is freed,
and they roar out deep inside you
their own songs,
the golden trumpets of their sunshine.

TOP↑

Mr Luczinski Takes a Tram

He has paid a small coin to a glass box
like a fairground machine:

a dull purple ticket
permits him to sway with the tram,

which pushes on through a city of breezeblocks
and neo-baroque stucco.

The people might be
his second cousins twice removed:

a woman in fishmonger’s gloves
coming home from the market,

a man balancing two dusty old bikes
between fellow-passengers.

In this incarnation, his tweed suit
is not quite threadbare enough.

He maintains a sense of direction but
there’s nowhere it can take him.

Somewhere at the end of this line
is a field of dandelions and a bluebell wood.

TOP↑

Crossroads

Through the night, forms of the untoward
come forward in their best clothes, and stink.

They’re ordering trains across your life, got you
in mind, singled out when they send in the tanks.

We can hope to face them down, one by one,
each of us earn a road to hell on our own donkey.

A standing stone marks the crossroads where
Cerberus pees three times with his special tincture.

Think of how each of us will join them, given
a part to play, a part of the cold unthinkable.

Years of counting the small curses and blessings,
offerings of resentment, every grunt of thanks.

Through the night, watch and listen as they all move
slowly through you, they rumble a little, they twinkle.

TOP↑

Policeman, Stoke Newington

Standing close up to a policeman,
I can get a free look at his
uniform, its unrevealing midnight matt cloth
and silvery buttons, its clever gussets,
and places for his walkie-talkie,
yes, his walkie-talkie tucked under his tunic.
Serious tailoring.

He glances at me sideways,
the expressionless professional
caught in this personal necessity
here at the cash dispenser in the street,
as if performing a secret habit: Don’t be ashamed,
I could tell him, It’s a normal function, we all do it.

Satisfied, taking a single circumspect motion
to finish his transaction and reinsert
his wallet in its place, he walks on,
a bobby in a helmet, upright in a naughty world:
he’s a policeman with money, stowed
in the safest pocket in the street.

TOP↑

Routemasters

Up at the Common where the buses hang around
the buses are hanging around, red vine tomatoes
in a bunch. Still hanging around, the immortals.

Boys in generations have spotted them. They rattle
through Church Street; or they progress past Selfridges
at the speed of a houseboat, showing off an aptitude for London.

Diamond graffiti windows, mouldy upholstery,
rested each Sunday for a garage sabbath with the engineers.
It can’t be long before their definitive retirement.

Through weekdays and Saturdays, wind, rain, sun
and the dull particulate smog of this atmosphere,
drive the blood along our veins, carry us home.

TOP↑

PETER
DANIELS

Poetry

About

Events

Buy

Links

Contact

HOME

PETER DANIELS

Poetry

About

Events

Buy

Links

Contact

HOME

PETER
DANIELS