Three Poems by Andrew Smith Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Smith and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Three Poems Andrew Smith Glasgow necropolis 1. I woke to find Thursday still dark, the trainlights scattered in a passing graveyard, thrown back from polished stones as if the dead in their banked city were turning on and off their bedroom lamps. We drew into Central by Kennishead and Pollock and through the mist the flat lights wrote a script in orange binary. Stories morsed in storeys and an unbroken code. 2. The rich dead have their bones and urns ensconced above St. Mungo in the comfortable ranks one would expect for merchant corpses, although stone angels weather as they grieve and all the testament of eulogies and family trees on copper have lost out to graffiti and encroaching verdigris. These green suburban graves will be anonymous as tenements. Behind John Knox's back two miles away the Sighthill flats are turning on their lights against the evening. Smith 2 Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Smith and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 3. The final anxious houses of the propertied and the high towers of the displaced poor fill spaces on the same earth. Are not unconnected. There is a word for their relationship, heavy perhaps, and unpoetic but the word is dialectic. Harter Fell The tip of Harter Fell had snagged a muscle of cloud which flexed, but held, dragging itself further down the rock until, by late afternoon, the valley-floor had all but hauled it in. It was the pared time of year, November had scauled everything, leaving the trees exposed against the sky and scree, abandoned nests and old rookeries hanging in the ribs, recalling the gulp of tacks my brother took when we were kids, and which I still imagine an x-ray might find clustered in his gullet. We climbed up out of the sun tacking a way from bluff to bluff, with each new outcrop darkening out of the distance like an oncoming ship until we seemed to be walking under the prows of a stone flotilla, harboured in the mist. Earlier, on the shoulder of the pass, we had wandered round Hardknott fort, Mediobogdum to the fourth cohort posted from the Dalmatian coast, guarding for themselves perhaps, memories of the Adriatic, but for Hadrian, the road Smith 3 Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Smith and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 that tracks the Esk, west to Ravenglass and east over Wrynose, up to Ambleside. That angular fingerprint on the hillside has power's old concentric whorl: principia, granaries, barracks, outside wall. Nub and cusp, a shape so familiar to us we mistake it for something natural. The same learnt dyslexia with which we misread hills for all that's most callous and implacable, as if they were a range of splintered letters spelling out a word for permanence. But just the opposite, these set crumples are nota benes to the liquid earth, three thousand foot memories of how easily the order of things can change, how little of what we take as given is, or needs to be. Therefore, also, a question: how much of what we swallow leaves us torn? Lunar Estate To belong. Words that sound revenant already, a song of a footless ghost, up to its shins in the world's accumulation, soles resting on the line of some redundant underearth. Half bodied, things glimmering like an advert through its chest, always drawing the eye. Belong to. The shadow becoming bone, words like a scrap of shell or chitin we hang our fists around, gripping as if it were stigmata. Property's nail. The way belonging's changed, the choice entailed, the choice we forget we make, between home and own. In our local Safeway they are selling off the moon one white, impacted acre at a time. Crater lip, rock shelf, dust: 12.99. And the logic at least is honest as a knife, while having fucks up dwelling in our lives Smith 4 Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Smith and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 the least deceptive home promises no oxygen, no water, leaves us only thirst. True to these lies, they are changing this bought earth to moon, the moon to earth.