Matthew Francis, who recently moved from England to Wales, teaches creative
writing at the University of Glamorgan. His first collection, BLIZZARD
(Faber & Faber, 1997), won the Southern Arts Literature Prize and was
shortlisted for the Forward Prize. DRAGONS, his second collection, was
published by Faber earlier this year, and he is also the author of a novel,
WHOM.
Reviewers of BLIZZARD called it "an ambitious and likeable book" (SUNDAY
TIMES), "nicely understated" (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY), and "genuinely
chilling" (THE GUARDIAN). In a forthcoming review of DRAGONS for POETRY
INTERNATIONAL, Joseph Duemer asks: "Is there such a thing as a mainstream
experimental poet? If so, Matthew Francis would qualify for the title on the
basis of his new book.... Here is a poet who delights in playing with
traditional meters, turning them deftly to his own uses."
This selection of poems will be followed by an interview with Matthew
Francis, who has a thing or two to explain: What DO "the cuttlefish do"?
Who's "underneath," "on the edge," "off the ground"? And what's with the
forest décor?
Poems from BLIZZARD
Outside My Window
In the shaped darkness where I used to be,
something is shouting. I'm awake. The voice
is a girl swearing in the not-quite place
you have to cross to get back home to day.
It is a place that wants to be elsewhere.
You never think about it till one night
you leave the pub or party, and the street
is stretched out waiting for you. It is here,
empty and cold, your sleeping theatre,
rinsed with a lamplit silence which you share
with everyone who's stood out here before.
Some bastard starts to play a bass guitar.
Sounds like he's playing over the telephone,
a hollow, basement music that you feel
rather than hear. Ponderous. Comical.
You'll be all right in a minute. You'll just lean
on somebody's gatepost till you get your breath
back, while the houses stand not holding theirs.
You clench your jacket, ready. This is yours,
this stretch of midnight, to do something with.
It is a long receptacle of shouts.
Now you feel better, don't you? Now they know,
the upstairs dreamers, that you live here too.
Your words run naked through their curtained nights.
And then you go home and you go to sleep.
The whole town sleeps together, except them,
those hoarse, white memories you can't unscream.
They stand outside your house and wake you up,
you being me. Now it's years later. The face
is someone else's but the same words still
wrench it apart. What are they after? Well,
they've done with me now and I want some peace.
I'm heading for the other side of what
I take to be a sort of game reserve
full of bird-noises and the whining of
that bug the milk-float settling on the street.
_from_ Occupied City
2. _The Cathedral_
Next morning a herd of stone
reared up at me in the sun.
There are white oxen
on the medieval towers,
and a hippopotamus
(nineteenth-century)
thrusts out unexpectedly
above the west door.
I climbed a tower and rested
my hand on the head of a wolf
mangy with yellow lichen.
An eagle, a bat, a lynx,
some devils and a drunken monk
gazed with me over the plain.
Whoever made these figures
knew what a fiend looks like,
his tongue between his teeth,
fearer and feared at once.
The armies were moving again.
A long slate-grey column
shuffled along the main road.
The tanks were glinting beetles.
The aeroplanes from here
were no fiercer than the swifts
that tore at nothing below.
I thought of my muttering guards
patrolling the nave inside,
blotched by the rose windows,
talking no doubt of women,
one they had left behind
or one they hoped to find
in the supine republic.
The sacred is just a light
that sometimes stains the skin
of the old profane faces.
I put my hand on these faces
crusted with dried-up green
and warmed to them, as the sun
must so often have done.
I remembered Rimbaud's line
about Europe's parapets
as I stood on one that might
have been carved out of the air,
overseeing the fields
by some seigneurial right--
that of just being here--
and I wished that the great towers
were suddenly very small
so I could hold them
as one holds someone else's child,
with a sort of courteous love.
_from_ Blizzard
1
How it began. I don't remember.
They all said it was too cold to snow
but to me it seemed that the weather
was on the move. There was a chill glow
in the air; sunset was delicate
and distant. Then it began. I know
it must have, a first flake in the night.
There are no witnesses. In the dark
when everyone was asleep, too high
and small to notice, the forming flake
locked up a hint of water while I
may have stirred in my bed. There was no
whisper, no streak in the curtained sky,
and things do not begin. But they do.
8
Snow on snow on snow on snow on snow
Coming down again. Coming down a
I didn't go out. I didn't go
Lovely weather for geese. Lovely wea
It snowed on and on. It snowed on and
The falling grey. The falling grey. The
Endless. Endless. Endless. Endless. End
We're talking serious weather now.
It's been on the news. No more of those
smiling girls. Not just the odd snowplough
out in force either. Could be the freeze
of the century if it keeps up.
Maybe a new Ice Age. No one knows.
Doesn't stop them talking. Doesn't stop
9
Now where was I? Standing at the door.
It was dark again. This evening's snow
had half-filled our footprints. I could hear
soft voices, an opening window.
Cut off, we watched the lights on the west
side of town with envy. There were no
stars here, and the road was overcast.
In the republic of candles each
light is created equal and there
is provision for darkness and such
spiders et cetera as heretofore
resident. See the margin. You'd be
surprised what has survived. Let them here,
each according to its lights, run free.
11
Outside Marks and Spencers they gathered
with their lanterns for the Festival
of Northern Lights. Their snowmen glittered,
and their snow women, and a snow whale.
Where had they come from? I hadn't seen
any of them, these gleamed-on people
in rich fake fur. When did they blow in?
Tattered bonfire flames. An Innuit
torch song. Then dancing. A fire-eater.
Pagan hymns. Jugglers. The jingling hat.
The joint passed from glove to glove. Later
we sat in the wet ash dawn and talked
bears. We slept in the shopping centre
in the slush among the jetsam, wrecked.
Poems from DRAGONS
Dragons
It was not the ideal day to go looking for dragons--
drizzly. You want it crisp, what you call dragons'
weather. They stay inside when it's wet. Dragons
are great ones for forty winks. There must be dragons
snoring underneath us this minute in the old dragons'
tunnels. All right, Craig, let's go. We got in the Dragons
Unlimited Land Cruiser, just four of us, shivering, and the
two Dragons
Agency registered guides Craig and Dylan, who said he saw
dragons'
spoors in the mud and knelt down muttering, dragons
were here all right, two females and some halfgrown dragons.
See, the bracken's charred where the yearling dragons
were playburning. You don't get that with the bull dragons--
when they flame they mean it. I've seen dragons--
Dylan, it's gone ten and these people are after dragons.
Those cinder droppings are stone cold. The dragons
will be miles away by now. We looked at each other. Dragons
seemed unlikely in the grey drip but Dylan smelled dragons
so we slithered up the road and found a field where dragons
had rutted. It looked like scramblers but Dylan said dragons.
In any case the ruts were still there but not the dragons
so we ate our sandwiches while the guides talked dragons
and sheepburnings and farmsteads torched by dragons
and places you couldn't grow dahlias for the dragons--
the colours seem to enrage them--and how male dragons
display at night on the summits. I've been here when dragons
lit up the sky for miles--it was just like the dragons
talking to each other in firework morse, dash dot dash. Dragons
don't burn so hot as they used to and some dragons
have gone out completely, from the conditions. Imagine, dragons
extinct. It was all too easy. The afternoon was white now, dragons
out of the question, so we climbed back into Dragons
Unlimited and Craig drove us back down saying, I saw dragons
only last week, a small one anyway. As for us we saw dragons
all the way, a nostril sculpted in shiny rock, a twist of dragon's
breath in the fog, the stunted vestigial dragons'
wings in a crest of dry-stone wall. Dylan said dragons
are like that. Sometimes you see them everywhere, dragons.
By the Forge
_John Keats in Winchester_
Say you had been for a walk by the river
among fields of dry yellow and brown whose smell
was baking, as if the earth were their oven,
but the afternoon was warm and cold at once
and you had noticed a numbness in the sky,
a shiver in the water, that made you yearn
for things with sun in them, apples, corn, honey.
And say the air had been fidgety today
so the gnats couldn't keep still, and overhead
it was crowded with excitable swallows.
This was your season, the time of departure.
You could feel that edge in your lungs, like the tang
of unlit bonfires or a foretaste of snow
in the last of the sunshine, as you turned back.
And you had nowhere to go now but a room
that stared at the blank side of a house, a street
you could listen to all night and hear only
the punctuation of footsteps and a cane,
so you walked through the city, where the people
had the look of those you see on holiday
as if only pretending to be themselves.
And London was waiting for you, a poem
you were almost ready to try again with.
There was another room, a woman, a book,
and a cold blur like rain you couldn't make out
from this far away. You had to be inside
writing the words before you could find their shape.
Say you were thinking of all this and standing
all of a sudden, in front of an open shop
where a basket of coals was seething orange
and a man came and stabbed it into yellow,
a cornfield of sparks. Say you watched him hammer
and thought he was beating light into a bar,
making the street dark. That's when you'd hug yourself
and say, I should like a bit of fire tonight.
Interior Designers in the Forest
A complete environment of raw furniture!
Fairly unupfront colours, brown and green,
but with strong verticals, and gaps between
to allow for the circulation of the air.
The aim is never to know quite where you are,
so it rearranges itself. This moving screen
in front of us is made of natural fern.
What do you think? Perhaps I'll just sit here
on this organic bench in the sunlight
effect. Dry rot is in, apparently.
I've seen some illusions in my time, but hey,
this place is somewhere else. And this is great,
a pond you can use for washing in, or treat
as a wild mirror. Look, a _trompe l'oeil_ me!
Museum of the Forest
We drove to the forest. It was in a museum.
At the door they handed us a mudspattered map already
separated by too much folding into its nine panels.
Chanterelles grew in the carpet. We weren't sure if they
were exhibits.
We were asked to wear wellington boots to protect the mud.
We put our noses to a little hole. There was an autumn day
in it, dry and mushroomy.
The next room was perfumed with resin, warmed by the
greenblueyellow of an infrapine lamp.
We rolled up the sleeves of our anoraks and the prickle of
rain was applied by tiny hypodermic syringes.
In the next room we had to leave all our sounds at the door.
It contained the noise deer don't really make at all when
they run off.
Then we were in a disorientation room with multiple paintings
of the same tree and the sun always in the wrong position.
They locked the turnstiles half an hour ago. The cry of the last
child has faded and the sun is setting in the north.
No one has told us if the carpet is for sleeping on.
Sleepers
_The Retrochoir, Winchester Cathedral_
There is a tomb here that attracts butterflies--
some property of the stone
that holds the sun.
Black stone with the shape of a bishop in it.
Space beneath, where the man was,
Peter Des Roches,
as hard as his name now, a stone among stones,
and mourned by no one except
the butterflies
that seem only a nuance of the sunlight
or the air remembering
the way he went.
*
Places have their own tombs. Asphalt and houses
have hardened over the downs
where he hunted
and rode out of the wood in his purple cloak
with his men nowhere in sight
and the stag gone
to find the country had got away from him
leaving a foreign hillside
with a palace.
Welcomed among the trumpets and tapestries
and peaches out of season,
he somehow knew
that this was the country underneath our own
and that his host was Arthur
stirring in sleep,
who gave him a small gift as a memento--
to open his hand and make
wings flutter out.
*
Sometimes on a winter day light disturbs them
and they fly between the white
growths of marble,
among cut chrysanthemums and the encased
remains of sounder sleepers
the sun can't reach.
Late June
As soon as the heat starts,
neighbour murmurs, sprinklers,
barbecue aromas,
permeability.
And the deaf man leaves his
window open, TV
rebounding everywhere--
Wimbledonmania.
Nor is the air left to
itself. Tripper balloons
sunsetcrawl fireblurting
indefatigably.
How it must seem up there,
downland, cornfield contours,
boundaries overlooked,
simultaneity.
It is what June makes one
believe, roomy twilight
welcoming flowerscents,
interchangeableness.
School sports day, and time for
outdoor vocal pursuits,
afternoon loudspeaker
echolaliating
the one two three of the
unseen, shrieked-at races,
hectoring vowelsurges,
incomprehensible.
