Free Selected Poems by Tony Harrison Page A

DYE!

Still
    Tugging my forelock fathoming Xenophon
    grimed Greek exams with grease and lost me marks,
    so I whisper when the barber asks
Owt on
?
    No, thank you!
YES! Dad’s voice behind me barks.
    They made me wear dad’s hair-oil to look ‘smart’.
    A parting scored the grease like some slash scar.
    Such aspirations hair might have for ART
    were lopped, and licked by dollops from his jar.
    And if the page I’m writing on has smears
    they’re not the sort to lose me marks for mess
    being self-examination’s grudging tears
    soaked into the blotter, Nothingness,
    on seeing the first still I’d ever seen
    of Rudolph Valentino, father, O
    now,
now
I know why you used
Brilliantine
    to slick back your black hair so long ago.

A Good Read
    That summer it was Ibsen, Marx and Gide.
    I got one of his you-stuck-up-bugger looks:
    ah sometimes think you read too many books.
    ah nivver ’ad much time for a good read.
    Good read! I bet! Your programme at United!
    The labels on your whisky or your beer!
    You’d never get unbearably excited
    poring over Kafka or
King Lear.
    The only score you’d bother with ’s your darts,
    or fucking football …
       (All this in my mind.)
    I’ve come round to your position on ‘the Arts’
    but put it down in poems, that’s the bind.
    These poems about you, dad, should make good reads
    for the bus you took from Beeston into town
    for people with no time like you in Leeds –
    once I’m writing I can’t put you down!

Isolation
    I cried once as a boy when I’d to leave her
    at Christmas in the fourth year of the War,
    taken to Killingbeck with scarlet fever,
    but don’t cry now, although I see once more
    from the window of the York–Leeds diesel back
    for her funeral, my place of quarantine,
    and don’t, though I notice by the same railtrack
    hawthorns laden with red berries as they’d been
    when we’d seen them the day that we returned
    from the hospital on this same train together
    and she taught me a country saying that she’d learned
    as a child:
Berries bode bad winter weather!
    and don’t, though the fresh grave’s flecked with sleet,
    and dad, with every fire back home switched on, ’s
    frozen,
              and don’t,
                              until I hear him bleat
    round the ransacked house for his long johns.

Continuous
    James Cagney was the one up both our streets.
    His was the only art we ever shared.
    A gangster film and choc ice were the treats
    that showed about as much love as he dared.
    He’d be my own age now in ’49!
    The hand that glinted with the ring he wore,
    his
father’s, tipped the cold bar into mine
    just as the organist dropped through the floor.
    He’s on the platform lowered out of sight
    to organ music, this time on looped tape,
    into a furnace with a blinding light
    where only his father’s ring will keep its shape.
    I wear it now to Cagneys on my own
    and sense my father’s hands cupped round my treat –
    they feel as though they’ve been chilled to the bone
    from holding my ice cream all through
White Heat
.

Clearing
    I
    The ambulance, the hearse, the auctioneers
    clear all the life of that loved house away.
    The hard-earned treasures of some 50 years
    sized up as junk, and shifted in a day.
    A stammerer died here and I believe
    this front room with such ghosts taught me my trade.
    Now strangers chip the paintwork as they heave
    the spotless piano that was never played.
    The fingerprints they leave mam won’t wipe clean
    nor politely ask them first to wipe their boots,
    nor coax her trampled soil patch back to green
    after they’ve trodden down the pale spring shoots.
    I’d hope my mother’s spirit wouldn’t chase
    her scattered household, even if it could.
    How could she bear it when she saw no face
    stare back at her from that long polished wood?
    II
    The landlord’s glad to sell. The neighbourhood,
    he fears, being mostly black, ’s now on the skids.
    The gate my father made from