Internal Combustion in Buckinghamshire
The Cowper and Newton Museum is closed
so I walk out (passing the Soul
Garage) towards a country park
where the flooded Ouse glares back
and a tape tells me I’m forbidden.
In the churchyard there is no reply
from the slave-trader who is frowned on
by a grim stone mask. Around him
are many Souls, all of them local,
but what about that old newcomer?
Imagine him flying above the spire
and past the sign for OLNEY: HOME
OF AMAZING GRACE and the place that sells
Persian rugs to cross the endless
roaring lines from Milton Keynes,
a kind of hell undreamt of when he
was at Orchard Side preoccupied
with his own soul, though there was Homer,
his pet hares, that epic sofa…
If only he could have booked a service
at the local garage instead of at the church
of St Peter and Paul with its shipwrecked curate
who failed to cure the problem but left
the poet in his garden with his travel books
to find for himself the vital spark.
Colombia
for Katie
Having started at a place where the key wouldn’t fit
because it wasn’t your door but identical
I kept coming back to the flower market.
Though the city farm offered its rat nav and the old
glassworks flashed up looking-glass directions
I kept coming back to where the Bird Cage
hung on its usual corner singing community songs,
the rowans a little riper, the bins fuller, and children
walking on their own now. And there I saw nothing.
*
But something you’d told us once: in Colombia, swept
away in your bikinis by young boys on mopeds
who dropped you with your rings in the jungle and left you
to find the river yourselves, to take a rubber tube
back to the city, to your phones, a river you couldn’t
locate and kept on going in circles, to the same place.
*
This was long before you came to Columbia Road
where Sunday mornings are always ablaze with sunflowers,
though none will guide me to the underground today.
Prospect Close in December
But such a day tomorrow as today
And to be boy eternal
The Winter’s Tale
A place you’ll never leave: the skull
that swipes your ceiling when a car
turns in the cul-de-sac; the howl
of something not extinct out there
beyond the hawthorn hedge, a last
survivor, legendary beast.
This ‘boy eternal’ knows the game:
that wolf was Heathrow engineers,
that death’s head just his window frame
in silhouette. I’ll outgrow fears,
he tells himself, repeats it now,
and hears his parents saying how
the boy has such ‘imagination’,
and wishes he did not see years
in formal long drawn-out procession
(for them, a line of smiling stars)
unceasingly bear down on him
their claws lowered towards his room,
especially when engines stall
and smoke trails, wings tilt,
and from the Great West Road the wail
of fire crews. Fasten your belt
and go downstairs, ignore the dread
of people passing overhead.
Then wait for Christmas: you can play
some carols, poke at presents, watch
whatever’s on your screen till day
returns and even hear of church
above the planes, but still no truce
for those who live in Prospect Close.
JOHN GREENING IS A BRIDPORT, ARVON AND CHOLMONDELEY WINNER WITH OVER TWENTY COLLECTIONS, INCLUDING TWO FROM CARCANET AND THE RECENT FROM THE EAST (RENARD). THE INTERPRETATION OF OWLS: SELECTED POEMS 1977–2022 (BAYLOR UP ED. GARDNER) CAME OUT IN 2023. HE HAS EDITED MATTHEW ARNOLD, GEOFFREY GRIGSON, EDMUND BLUNDEN, IAIN CRICHTON SMITH AND A NEW U.A. FANTHORPE, PLUS SEVERAL CRITICAL STUDIES AND ANTHOLOGIES, MOST RECENTLY (WITH KEVIN GARDNER) CONTRAFLOW: LINES OF ENGLISHNESS. HIS GOETHE TRANSLATIONS APPEARED IN 2022 FROM ARC. THERE IS A RILKE NEW POEMS THIS SEPTEMBER.
Photo – John Greening, by Adrian Bullers