The Three-Day Melt

After waiting the week

for a damaged gutter’s steady drip,

it starts to beat an old tattoo.

And we are amongst the few,

digging out our neighbourly slush,

metal offered to the melting ridge,

and thinking ourselves heroic.

Glossed by sun-tormented snow,

the street achieves a sheen,

like a hotel foyer magazine,

before it hardens, greys,

maculate as newsprint.

Here are the furrows we made,

footfalls disappearing.

Already we are forgetting

the claustrophobic days,

beating around the bush

to clear negotiable ways

back to the ordinary rush.

Out of suspension now,

the accelerating hours

push on; clouds clear;

and we can no longer mark time –

grateful, at least, for not

having to watch every step.

Tom Phillips

'The Three-Day Melt' appears in Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012): http://tworiverspress.com/wp/recreation-ground/

Across the backyards

(draft)

Is there something you don't understand?
I expect there is.
There's nothing here for me, either
(least of all in these thudding heres and theres).

Unread books look good -
secondhand bargains, online deals.
I've been sorely tempted.

And then, outside the window,
angry magpies,
or, at risk of labouring the point,
a family, a story,
her nearly opaque features
at another address.

Rain falls,
determinedly indifferent.

Or determinedly different,
if that's the way you fancy it.

Tom Phillips 2012

You make things sound good

You make things sound good.
I don't trust that.
Even though you must do it,
I can't imagine you
lolling on the sofa,
eating takeaway meals,
putting out the recycling bin.

There is a limit
to how much I believe
of what you're telling me.

You'll say it's only suggestion
but there you are, in print,
suggesting what you say
is true, is permanent.

Copyright Tom Phillips 2012

Two dreams

1
At the intersection of concrete platforms
where pedestrian flyovers converged
and plate-glass windows drew blanks
on the sun’s insistence, you emerged
from the campus-loving crowd
and said ‘This door’.

We made it through to somewhere
almost recognised: book stacks
flashed like so many blank spaces
in a Zoetrope. You insisted
that I hadn’t seen it all.

Around what looked like a lift shaft,
tentative borrowers pulled out
hard spines, hopeful cases.
Below us, contending zealots stood,
uttering the codices
of their various religions.
We heard their whispers
in the silences left behind
by the books whose titles we withdrew.

2
A grey wood. Predictable.
The First World War.
I might be either of my grandfathers.
At this point, I am about to tell
my comrades that I’m going
for a stroll. The elms
define the horizon
like lost opportunities.
I walk. When I return,
my bed’s been made:
not a sign of trouble.
The sergeant lumbers up

blocks out what's left of the light:
‘And where the fuck have you been?’

September 2011

Seven Years Later

There are words we would rather skirt around,
when the sky becomes an excuse,
or this arrangement of ducks across sloping cobbles
distracts from what we talked of last night.
We were only hypothesising, weren’t we,
about a society of amputation,
the whole bloody foreign situation?

At the turn of the road, rage between drivers
who, moments ago, were merely strangers.
From here, from this angle, the headlines
behave like a cliché, precisely,
read: ‘Everything is wrong.’
They have worn us down – or out –
and we have no more choice than
to reach for another bottle or shout.

Tom Phillips

Through the outskirts

Almost precisely as you’d expect,
it's the wires’ thickening cross-hatch
across pocked tarmac, stained render,
comes closest to local authority boundaries.
Or, approached another way, the pale
concrete sweep of southerly ring-road
with its phalanx of 50s council housing,
TV dishes and double-glazing sun-glints:
the cusp of a city that will draw you in
through misnamed, treeless avenues
(Boer War victories, bird species, poets)
or up and over railway bridges,
past gravelled yards, construction sites,
the terraces’ gradual narrowing
to these fin-de-siècle cul-de-sacs.
With buddleia and footpaths
gathering to allotments, mesh gates,
there are marram grass patches,
sunk culverts’ mossy blockages,
and a security guard, arms akimbo,
pacing limits of occupied land.

From here then, best move on
through burnt ochre cars relapsing
to spare parts, domestic whims expressed
as pebbledash frontage, garden gnomes
and koi carp winking dirty orange
in the glaucous eye of a pond.
These, too, are part of the city:
indented chalk vale, schoolyard,
billboard, improvised belonging –
left around for decades in one place,
we’re hardly more at home than Russian vine
or this branch of Lidl opening late
beneath defaced factory buildings
and scaffolders joking, on overtime.
At a guess, it will only be months
before we no longer recognise
reconfigured thoroughfares,
arrangements of girders and plate-glass.

Tom Phillips, 2011

Phillips: The Performance Years

Breakfast at Southville Deli

You don’t know this but last night
I lay awake and watched you sleeping,
Heard the soft scrape and wheeze of your breathing,
Felt the warmth of your body and thought:

‘What on earth are you doing here?
I’m not married to you, Audrey Hepburn,
And I’ve never eaten breakfast
Outside a downtown jewellery shop.’

Politely, Miss Golightly tossed and turned
Till the milkman’s electric go-cart squeaked.
It was never meant to be. She spurned
My offer of staying the rest of the week.

Which, all things considered, is just as well.
Manhattan fantasies are nothing but rot
For drunken fools who are over the hill
And believe there’s more than they’ve got.

There isn’t. Love simply changes its hue.
Sometimes, it pulses a deep, vibrant red,
Sometimes it’s insufferably blue.
Whatever. The amorous film stars are dead.

Which means, my love, there’s more to life
Than what passes for it on the telly.
Audrey Hepburn would never be my wife
Or do breakfast at Southville Deli.

Before the second summer of love

Looking into the face of the wrinkled hippy
Is like staring at a leathery elephant’s arse.
In fact the elephant’s arse
Would smell much nicer and talk more sense.
But hey, man, we’re at Glastonbury and all
The blessed children of the sun/moon/earth/stars
Have abandoned their two-tone semis for Pilton’s New Jerusalem.

The scrotum-cheeked one gabs on and on
While the Cure grind out some dodgy gothic blues.
“The 60s,” he says, “were mind expansion.
Festivals. Peace. Free love.” And I’m thinking,
Back in the 60s, mate, the only free love
In this field was bovine rape: the bull
Entertaining half the diary herd.
Hippies are just ramblers in disguise,
Dumbly sentimental for the countryside.

This one claims Jerry Garcia is Jesus and nobody
Will ever be as good as Hawkwind or Pink Floyd.
Next thing you know he’s recreating Hendrix riffs
With a strand of pubic hair and an empty flagon of cider.
Something about his I-ching-rebirthed-tantric being
Makes me want to puke. Maybe it’s his rainbow flares.
His nasal whine. Or the aura of patchouli
Like the stench of old socks left overnight
In a bucket of dead carnations.

He believes I’m a cynic but my heart is good.
He’s more naïve than I thought.
“Vietnam,” he says, “now that gave us a cause.”
As if he was glad that war broke out
So he could blather into the small hours.
He thinks he’s revolutionary:
He makes Norman Tebbit sound like Karl Marx.

There was no great flowering of love in the 60s,
Just the contraceptive pill and a lot
Of teenagers up in their rooms
With photos of Twiggy and a large box of Kleenex:
Tofu-guzzling guru-hunters shafting sheep
At bongo communes in deepest Wales.

My Glastonbury relic had a mystic experience
Somewhere outside Carmarthen. Gandalf
And Bilbo took him on a trip – but the randy hobbit
Started feeling up the elves and the wizard went off in a huff.

The relic claims he knows the secrets of the cosmos
Before asking me the bus times back to Bristol.
He didn’t want to leave his car all weekend in a field.
“It’s new. It’s the firm’s. You know how it is.”

Oh, yes, I know how it is. Nostalgia for someone he never was
Oozes from him like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ oozed
From every hi-fi back in 1971. And whatever ideals
He didn’t have are deader than Elvis Presley.
I wish I could think of something witty
But instead resort to “Fucking hypocrite hippy!”
And the crystal-wearing peace-loving crowd
Oblige by beating me to a pulp.

Life is shit

When your fag gets caught on your underlip
And burns the tips of two fingers;
When the cat’s had a crap in your favourite shoes;
When the last place left to drink is full of suits
And kebabs just look like alien beings;
When the taxi queue’s so long you won’t get a cab
Until this time tomorrow – and there’d be a bloodbath
On the streets of Yate, if only the population of Yate
Wasn’t kicking the shit out of each other in Bristol;
When you’ve finally made it home on foot
And woken the street by puking in your surprisingly resonant bin;
When you’ve tried to regain equilibrium
With one last tin of Stella and David Bowie’s ‘Low’
But found the lager’s flat and the CD’s scratched;
When you’ve tumbled into bed and wished
You’d never eaten those digestives;
When you’re flat out but the room’s still spinning;
When you’re alone and facing the prospect of a dawn
So dissonant it makes Swedish death metal sound tuneful
And you’d pop your head beneath the pillow and scream
If your brain wasn’t rattling round your skull like a pinball;
When the hangover has finally struck and the only thing
On telly are the Tweenies and the bodybags
Coming home from Baghdad; it is tempting to admit
That life is shit and go out in search of what compensates for it:
The almost-missed daisies like fireflies in the park,
The perfect lover glimpsed in the corner of your eye,
That conversation you had, that anecdote,
A poem, a photo, a painting, a blinding shag,
The insufferable persistence of beauty
In waterfalls, trees, clifftops and beaches,
The insufferable simplicity of breathing.

Only, this isn’t the eighteenth century and Wordsworth is dead.
This isn’t the Industrial Revolution.
It’s the Post-Industrial Revolution.
It’s the post-post-post-modern revolution:
Bill Gates, Big Mac, Bush and Brown,
‘I’m a Celebrity – get me out of here’,
‘Shaun Of The Dead’, ‘Dawn Of The Dead’,
and, in the dead of the dawn,
there’s only one conclusion to draw:
life is fabulously, beautifully, gloriously shit
and you’ve got one choice:
neck that Bloody Mary,
deep breath, face it.

Allotment poem

In the interests of making amends,
I will trudge up this hill with rough implements
and dig into the sod. Spring creaks
with grey-greenery, stumped cabbage stalks,
and the horizon loosens into a smile
which almost hurts with its precision.

Somehow connections ache so much
amongst groundsel patches lines beg
to differentiate themselves. How else
to regard these rhubarb tips sprouting
from compost? Or the spindrift may
cresting an upsweeping breeze?

Still such care must be taken (to find
and not project). I’m staring at my shoes.
While over and above this valley’s
unambitious public transport routes
hen harriers jockey on the thermals,
poets, their words, ghost cemetery yews,
and mushrooms push between my flat feet.

Tom Phillips
Feb-Mar 2011
Or what became of parts of the earlier posting 'How to be a Poet'

Tell him not to look so intense

Tell him not to look so intense.
The house shakes and that word
is meaningless, anyhow.

I was like that once, only
looking at a map of river deltas,
sunken green land between tawny ridges,
it seemed as if the inevitable rising tides
might stretch as far north as Minnesota.

Or that I would have to kill my father.

It never came to either.

At the sea’s edge,
where Freud caught eels,
and sharpened his scalpel,
a thousand pebbles dried.

We think we know the world too well,
inventing convenient melodramas,
exit strategies, complications
to be met with knitted brows.

Svalbard: perhaps I’ll go there.

Tom Phillips

After Asculum

"And I, Pyrrhus," he said
(grandiloquently)
"might well stand
above such blazing campfires
coding victory."

These losses, in each individual case,
mean no more or less,
viewed from this angle,
than the dead and the redundant.

Arithmetic exists at the sword’s edge.
Years pass in their thousands.
Here’s one – a mosaic
on the museum floor:
the writer on his knees
before the emperor.

How to be a poet

Aside from having great friends,
I will trudge up this hill with unknown implements
and dig into the sod using hand-held verbs
and words I’ve never heard or recognised.
The horizon will loosen into a simile
which almost hurts with its precision.
Long-dead authors congregate outside the church.

Somehow the link aches so much
there will be books handed round like liturgies.
Amongst the rain-swept gravestones
mourners reach for metaphors
like gangsters going for their guns
in an unfilmed episode of The Godfather.

At the kissing gate, there’s a pause.
Hen harriers jockey on the thermals.
Over and above the valley’s lack of ambition,
writers disperse along public transport routes.
I look down at my shoes.
Mushrooms grow between my flat feet.


Tom Phillips 2011

Saving faith

The lump of it, concrete, in the corner,
between Italianate gestures and the low shops
slung along streets which dropped away
into burlesque cellars on every side,
was as much as we could do to avoid
saying something out of turn.

Builders invested all manner of curious angles
with scaffolding and ad hoc cardboard signs.

Only here, with charred sweetcorn husks
being twisted on open charcoal burners,
there were dutiful faces pressed against glass.
Further on, by the corner, you were dealing cards,
as, inside the crowded Lovely Shop,
elbowing customers would like to think
they’d not wasted their fare on the bus.

On the terrace of the International Hotel,
we might be dreaming otherwise
as the cranes and mixers lay down
the building blocks of another religion.

Tom Phillips, 2011

Rock-pooling in winter

Smoke misting branches of a cypress
behind the vacant house signals
fluctuating wind directions
as we might be finding opinions
between rocks furred with lichen,
twisted strata, or two boys
who’ve tracked looped worm casts
and are digging, digging
for all their worth as bait.

Failing to predict erratic geometry
a hermit crab sketches across
flat stones, our son’s disappointed.
His empty bucket’s scooped up,
taps dull syncopations, flips
from ledge to ledge, blown down
to stall in drenched sand.
Flotsam, lost things dam streams,
create wreckage for the moment.

To have this beach to ourselves –
as if we had some prior claim,
being amongst those who, pinked
by on-shore breezes, have stood here
and recalled this or that winter
when the landlady took to the water
every day, or sea-spume
flecked the windows of her pub.
Or, perhaps, the year it didn’t.

Incontrovertibly out of season,
the market’s depressed. Cottages
won’t budge. Blacks scraps rise
against grey, too solid cloud
like all the punctuation shaken free
from yesterday’s paper. Gulls
go through their routines
while crows possess frail aerials.

In amongst these local territories,
we might well be out of place,
places we could call our own.
At odds now, we move back up the beach,
collect that wind-blown bucket,
read headlines, climb hills,
stare at the bay’s predictable waves,
retreat into somewhere that we’d call home.

Tom Phillips 2011

Seven years after the Gulf

There are words we would rather skirt around.
Every day the sky becomes an excuse,
or appears to consist of an arrangement
of ducks on sloping cobbles,
that thing you talked of last night.

There was nothing to be said, for example,
which might not offend at this table.
We were only hypothesising, weren’t we,
about a society of amputation,
the whole bloody foreign situation?

At the turn of the road – rage
between drivers who, moments ago,
had never encountered each other.
From here, from this angle,
the phrase ‘Everything is wrong’
behaves like a cliché, precisely.
It contains a would-be full stop
and an effortless change of gear:
the bottle reached for from the mat
and fingerprints on the neck
just above the label.

So say it, go on: beyond those willows,
how easy it might have been
to dissolve whatever was happening elsewhere
in the drawn-out fade of a sunset.

Tom Phillips 2010

In the Citadel

Above so much traditional stone housing
squatting into the mountainside,
the football stadium and a hexagonal blank
like a heliport (the emptied plinth
of a statue which surveyed far more
than it would ever command),
we are stepping over shed fuel tanks
to photograph the captured plane.

Downed in the Cold War,
by whatever means, it sits now
on a lawn on the edge of a rampart,
its turbine an empty mouth,
its stripped-out cockpit open.
We take turns to stand
with kids on the wing
while tourists from elsewhere
count medieval cannon.

Not far west of Gjirokaster
lies Hamara, Saranda, the Adriatic,
beyond that the Mediterranean,
and, beyond that, the Atlantic.
Sometime in the 1950s,
a Lockheed strayed off course.

Driving down white marbled streets
where celebratory excuses are enough
for men who shouldered state relics
all the way up to the citadel,
we’re turning out onto the plain,
disputed territory not that long ago,
where old simplicities ended.

In the City Museum

In the City Museum

The great lunge
of paint across canvas
draws requisite attention
from students, tourists,
connoisseurs etc.

Cage's 4' 33 reiterates
traffic harmonies.
We are impeccable:
expansion of the object
not representing,
necessarily,
development of subject.

Poem: Boundary Crossing

Boundary crossing

You know and I know that here, at this candlelit table,
what’s being said can have no consequence:
to get so far we’ve passed through many hands.
I’m in yours now, and taken back to moments
I’d otherwise be wary of: potential, spilled
beans and glimpses of a parallel life.

Are you for real? Of course you’re not.
This talk is all there ever is between us.
We laugh. You say the right things.
Another elsewhere disappears from view.
For a second, I almost catch your eye.
At the door you seem hesitant when saying goodbye.

Stone Platoon (new version)

The Stone Platoon

How else to look at this fountain
with adjacent memorial statues?
Drizzle’s left droplets finding paths
through embossed verdigris,
such-and-such a name who fell.
I’m not close enough to make
more of others’ particular loss
in whichever battle or campaign.
The stone platoon endures
inclement weather, helmeted,
bayonets fixed at thickening air.

Remembrance Sunday every year
we'd stand with such indifference:
dragooned Boy Scouts in the breeze
which furled around a cenotaph.
We’d put up with it, out of respect –
although, eventually, out of respect,
we’d be prone to goose bumps,
laughter and knocked knees.

Here, though, are three historians
come to read blurred epitaphs
for losses in some foreign field.
What could it be to them,
in any event, who died
and who came home again?
Their silence affects some care
as, beneath a sun-split sky,
they line up for a photograph
before those who, in memoriam there,
did the best they could have done.

April 2010, originally circulated by Various Artists, May 2010

The Stone Platoon

How else to look at this fountain
with adjacent memorial statues?
Drizzle’s left droplets finding paths
through embossed verdigris,
such-and-such a name who fell.
I’m not close enough to make more
of others’ particular loss
in whichever battle or campaign.
The stone platoon endures
inclement weather, helmeted,
bayonets fixed at the clear air.

Remembrance Sunday every year
we'd stand with such indifference.
Dragooned Boy Scouts in the breeze
which furled around a cenotaph.
We’d put up with it, out of respect –
although, eventually, out of respect,
we’d be prone to goose bumps,
unkind laughter and knocked knees.

Here now though are historians:
three men at the foot of a lion.
What it might have meant at one time
flashes out into the sun-split sky.
Corporate call-centre managers
clinch photographs of those
who, in memoriam there, did
the best they could have done.

Poem: War and Concrete

War and concrete

Stories, cupolas bulge in these fields
we're passing through: these infamous
bunkers ranked across strategic slopes
refuse to let history disperse.
Stubborn, they endure at roadsides,
in vineyards, gardens, the city’s asphalt brink.
Goats graze along their silted mouths
and, garishly painted, one would draw
in clients for a rash and hasty tattoo.

Just when you think you’ve forgotten
the landscape’s overlaid again
with a grid of war and concrete
giants might use for stepping stones.
Too solid ruins outdo grey crags
where beech woods sheltered partisans.
Sunk shafts and gun-slits mark
a whole world gone. Count fifty
and you’ve barely even started.

It took an old Chinese tank to drag
one clear of sodden sand at Vlora,
and 800 Euros to dismantle it.
Elsewhere, too, you might have read
of how, to turn a dictator’s scheme
into this geometric, defensive terrain,
the architect became the first test case,
emerging from the shelled prototype,
deafened, unspeakably loyal, triumphant.