The Frome LETS scheme

 

These poems appeared in a recent post that ended up being mostly about other things, so I'm giving them their own home. And that's kind of appropriate, because they come from when I and my-then partner and the two girls were for the first time in a house that we owned, in Frome in 1993. We didn't own the house outright, of course. There was a big mortgage and money was always a problem. We got involved in the local LETS scheme -- a bartering scheme where tokens (then known locally as LETS -- a few years later they were renamed "Shuttles") could be exchanged for goods and services. It was a small-scale scheme, though I sold a car on LETS once. The main problem with the scheme was that it didn't pay the bills; you could only use LETS tokens to buy the things that people offered. The main useful thing I remember us buying was home cooked meals. Too many of the services were things that were nice-to-haves rather than essentials: foot massage, hair-wraps, guitar tuition. And I suppose this tendency is typified by my own contribution to my partner's stall at a LETS market, a slim booklet titled Little Poems in Frome. Here are some of the little poems:

6 am

Late again running down Weymouth Road

Beneath a cold blue skyburst,

& blackbirds somewhere up there too,

High in the high stone buildings.

Two shopgirls clatter up Catherine Hill

With lumpy work bags swinging.

Nothing happens without our will,

It's only our wills make action.

The day is still at the structural stage;

The slowness of bare foundations

That need to carry all the coming activity,

The noise, the ham-ham-hammering,

The radio alarms pre-set to burst forth,

The breakfasts, bathing, front doors banging,

All that will soon emerge at a rush

To furnish the day, complete it.

On Cley Hill with my daughters

On the brow of  the hill white cattle appear,

And the girls make awed cries. It's sunset,

Almost the time when we pack up, chilled,

Return to warm homes and artificial lighting.

Their hooves are steady on the crumbling bank.

They are slow. There is much sweet green

Low-growing herbs on the chalk. The sky west,

Where the eye looks, or avoids,

Is the colour of crystallized pineapple.

It's hard to tell sloes from leaves,

Or blackberries from thicket,

For everything's silhouette here,

Everything except the looming white of cattle

And the girls' teeshirts. And the sky,

Which has no edge, no silhouette ever.

Near Bath

Clustered pipes in the shadows of a roadside

Elder-, ash-shadowed, here hemlock purple-sprouts to 2.5m

Bent saw-diagonalled where hoppers leap

& gold-pearl-tooth beetles creep to a dry tip.

The sun crowds, clover-scented shine dapples ivy, crisp-bags;

The warm yellow mulch of bluebell leaves, big caper-fruit.

Streetlamp in the rain

In November, one midnight comes

When I have to post a letter.

The rain is heavy and cold, and everything's dark

Except for the phone-box under the cypresses.

At the door, the wind punishes me

For wanting to walk out.

"The darkness and I have seen everyone off."

It punishes, but it attracts me.

I walk out fast and post my letter,

Start to walk back -

And I'm under a streetlamp

Looking up into its halo.

There in the halo, the rain seems to float,

Yes now I can see the rain itself

Hurtling down, each separate spit

Becomes visible for a moment.

And behind, the black white black white twigs

Of a silver birch bend round, round in a gleaming circle.

They make a high basket in

The heaven of the streetlamp.

I stand in the rain, the wind, the darkness.

A very small thing happens.

It's too quiet to hear, but I can feel it

Becoming, breaking the surface of being.

With a sense of terrible, tender surprise

I grasp for a moment what it is.

"I live here. This is my home.

That's my house. My family. Where I live."

High Fields

In Frome we're thirty miles from the sea

& that's only the Bristol channel anyway,

So I feel closed in and must stand in high fields

Where the ground crumbles in air, losing holds.

Sun and wind checker the hill-fort

From whose trough a warm uprush crests the bank;

It is like walking on a map. Saxifrage empires;

Gentian empires; to walk and descend is glorious.

Poem in a Christmas card

Christmas is a festival of yellow in the window

that draws the low sun in the brief afternoon.

Christmas is a special kind of rubbish on the floor,

a clean shrubbery inscribed with love-notes.

Christmas is when the kitchen table holds up trays

of fragrant sculpture, and says: Don't keep your distance!

Christmas is when the harlequin colours of the beeches

migrate indoors to create a midwinter space

where spluttering fires make faces glow for a second

with shy eternity amid the fantastic uproar.

Christmas is the familiar faces of those you have lived with all year.

At last you stop to admire them, to form new hopes.

Home Baking

Though everything that moves must lose its way

Venturing out in stormy corridors

From the cold kitchen of that later day

When hungry Time has eaten up the stores

I must believe this will not end your life

Which will stay here where warm and fragrant loaves

Stand on a wire tray, and this belief

Must diet on the drift of autumn leaves.

Friends in the evening

Everyone's easy,

& that's the whole point of friends

In the evening, intent on pouring tea,

Or rolling up and watching TV.

We all talk,

Because bringing up children, & having no money

& things that are hard to deal with, have to be faced

But not now, with tea and company;

& no-one can help,

But that's the whole point of friends,

With our backs to the shadows, the lost day

Put to bed, & we're not really talking

Or even listening,

This is formation flying in the warm colours

Of the winter sunset, round and round

In the dreamy heaven that we've found to share.

White Horse and Cley Hill

Over the town there broods a horse.

Over the town there broods a hill.

Blue Circle cement have tidied the horse,

& the National Trust looks after the hill.

They have outlived

All the weavers, tenants and nannies;

& they will outlive Year 9 at the college;

Those peaceful, forgotten gods,

Shored up by cement and the National Trust.

Modern Nature

The first day of July, we're driving into rain,

A sopping downpour that splatters,

Waiting at traffic lights, splatters the bonnet

With shiny explosions of water, quieting now,

We move into fifth on the bypass,  get underneath

That cloud again, down it sheets windlessly,

Except for our own flying Vauxhall, which frills

The seismograph water up, up, wavering up

Into the niches of the corner glass, and down,

Down as we slow into town, the radio signal

Stuttering into fuzz as we cross the river.

On top of the microwave, a yesterday bowl of salad

Has wimped out, and Wimbledon disrupted by rain

Is half way through sets. A potted tomato plant

Knocked flat by rain. The French doors creak.

My daughter slices courgettes and a carrot

To add to the sauce. I'm thinking uneasily

If I dare ring Providenza. My hair hasn't been cut

Since February, and last time she told me if you

Let it grow that long next time you can't come back.