Free Selected Poems by Tony Harrison

gone shopping; just the same,
    in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
    and the disconnected number I still call.

Flood
    His home address was inked inside his cap
    and on every piece of paper that he carried
    even across the church porch of the snap
    that showed him with mi mam just minutes married.
    But if ah’m found at ’ome
(he meant found dead)
    turn t’water off
. Through his last years he nursed,
    more than a fear of dying, a deep dread
    of his last bath running over, or a burst.
    Each night towards the end he’d pull the flush
    then wash, then in pyjamas, rain or snow,
    go outside, kneel down in the yard, and push
    the stopcock as far off as it would go.
    For though hoping that he’d drop off in his sleep
    he was most afraid, I think, of not being ‘found’
    there in their house, his ark, on firm Leeds ground
    but somewhere that kept moving, cold, dark, deep.

The Queen’s English
    Last meal together, Leeds, the Queen’s Hotel,
    that grandish pile of swank in City Square.
    Too posh for me!
he said (though he dressed well)
    If you weren’t wi’ me now ah’d nivver dare!
    I knew that he’d decided that he’d die
    not by the way he lingered in the bar,
    nor by that look he’d give with one good eye,
    nor the firmer handshake and the gruff
ta-ra
,
    but when we browsed the station bookstall sales
    he picked up
Poems from the Yorkshire Dales
–
    ’ere tek this un wi’ yer to New York
    to remind yer ’ow us gaffers used to talk.
    It’s up your street in’t it? ah’ll buy yer that!
    The broken lines go through me speeding South –
    As t’Doctor stopped to oppen woodland yat …
    and
           
wi’ skill they putten wuds reet i’ his mouth.

Aqua Mortis
    Death’s elixirs have their own golden gleam.
    I see you clearly: one good, failing eye’s
    on morning piss caught clumsily ‘midstream’
    it’s your first task of the day to analyse.
    Each day dawns closer to the last
eureka
,
    the urine phial held up to clouding rays
    meaning all solutions in life’s beaker
    precipitate one night from all our days.
    Alchemists keep skulls, and you have one
    that stretches your skin taut and moulds your face,
    and instead of a star sphere for sense of space
    there’s the transatlantic number of your son,
    a 14-digit spell propped by the phone
    whose girdling’s giddy speed knocks spots off Puck’s
    but can’t re-eye dry sockets or flesh bone.
    My study is your skull.
I’ll burn my books
.

Grey Matter
    The ogling bottle cork with tasselled fez
    bowing and scraping, rolling goo-goo eyes is
    gippo King Farouk, whose lewd leer says:
    I’ve had the lot, my lad, all shapes and sizes!
    One night we kept him prancing and he poured,
    filtered through his brains, his bulk of booze.
    The whisky pantaloons sans sash or cord
    swashed dad to the brink of twin taboos.
    As King Farouk’s eyes rolled, dad rolled his own:
    That King Farouk!
he said, and almost came
    (though in the end it proved too near the bone)
    to mentioning both sex and death by name.
    I wake dad with what’s left. King Leer’s stare
    stuck, though I shake him, and his fixed Sphinx smile
    take in the ultimate a man can bear
    and that dry Nothingness beyond the Nile.

An Old Score
    Capless, conscious of the cold patch on my head
    where my father’s genes have made me almost bald
    I walk along the street where he dropped dead,
    my hair cut his length now, although I’m called
    poet
, in my passport.
         When it touched my ears
    he dubbed me
Paganinny
and it hurt.
    I did then, and do now, choke back my tears –
    Wi’ ’air like that you ought to wear a skirt!
    If I’d got a violin for every day
    he’d said
weer’s thi fiddle
? at my flowing hair
    I’d have a whole string orchestra to play
    romantic background as once more I’m there
    where we went for my forced fortnightly clip
    now under new, less shearing, ownership,
    and in the end it’s that that makes me cry –
    JOE’S SALOON’s become KURL UP &