Mark Ford - Selected Poems

SELECTED POEMS ALSO BY MARK FORD POETRY Landlocked Soft Sift Six Children BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays TRANSLATION New Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel COPYRIGHT 2014 by Mark Ford COVER AND BOOK DESIGN by Linda Koutsky COVER ART Joe Brainard AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH Mary Hinkley, UCL COFFEE HOUSE PRESS books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, . Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book. To you and our many readers around the world, we send our thanks for your continuing support. Visit us at coffeehousepress.org.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION Ford, Mark, 1962 June 24 [Poems. Selections] Selected Poems / by Mark Ford. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-56689-350-3 I. Title. PR6106.074A6 2014 821'.92DC23 2013035160 FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING Poems from Soft Sift (2001) and Six Children (2011) are reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber, Ltd.

Copyright 2001, 2011 by Mark Ford. Poems from Landlocked (1992) were originally published by Chatto & Windus. SELECTED POEMS CONTENTS When Im in power I will pursue landlords across the country. Right now, life has me boxed in, and my cries for help drift inscrutably around willows, oak trees, and grief-stricken elms. I left home young, and since then Ive roamed and roamed, following my nose, through deserts and cities, always alone, in forests, living in trees What a life! They say every character is complex, but I am tangled up like spaghetti; I lie here, observing the stars, a stiffening breeze tickling my feet, my pillow a petrified log. The birds chirruping in the early dawn ignore me, while I dream I am a lunatic, striding the land, scattering seed and crushing the asphodel beneath my pitiless heel; but finally the day arrives, bursting softly over the horizon.

For the West has been ruined. You left under a cloud but I love you. If you could only see me now! I stand here, incompetent, tracing figures on a map, fully dressed as if it were already evening, enraged and impenitent, clenching my teeth. I very much enjoyed your latest book I lied having NOT read it. Hurrah! Were all of us bright as chickens As if Jack liked Chrissie and Chrissie liked Jack. Ah, we had a good season, then, we drew all five fixtures! For Christmas, I asked my mother to knit me a tie To go with my tunic.

No! she snapped, Go out and buy one. So off I samba When it was Sunday and all the shops were shut The streets are full enough though and there are Some fine ankles showing throughmy fertile imagination! I see miniskirts where others see only galoshes, I can count all my exes at the bus stop All over with tinsel, polluting the atmosphere with Their dirty breaths. It is lunchtime So I hail a friend munching a pastrami sandwich He spotted me and then he lay flat in the snow. Stop playing hookey, I yelled, youre grown up now! Then I thoughtbut what if something is really wrong? I screeched to a halt beside his head The snow spooning up into my sandals, and I shouted Get up, Jake, and I toed him. Any moment I expect him to grab me playfully by the ankle, I quite liked the idea of a tussle in the Christmas snow On Main Street. He didnt budge though.

Only the yellow stains of the mustard from his sandwich drooled Scenting the crisp air. Ah, come on Jake, You think this a rodeo? I whisper to him, Why not get up? And I threaten him with The police, arrest, his sister in tears on the phone. And I poured hot coffee down his throat, murmuring But its the season of goodwill, no one plays for keeps Over Christmas. What kept him down there, Face in the slush, people mustve seen him eating Pastrami sandwiches before? Apparently not. I waited All afternoon by him, chain-smoking his Camels, And then I watched his feet disappear into the ambulance That arrived after dark. I stamped his damp sandwich Back into the snow.

People, I thought, Will find this when the thaw sets in And wonder about it, shopping or on their way to work, Birds like sparrows will nibble the sesame seeds And wish it were pumpernickel, It will liven up their Easter. See, no hands! she cried Sailing down the turnpike, And flapped her arms like a pigeon, And from the backseat Solomon, her spaniel, answered her By woofing ever more madly at each passing car! What a trek it was out west And back again! Weeks on end she spent Stranded in the worst motels, poor thing, Could never quite make up her mind to go on To go back, to stay absolutely where she was. Such awful doubts assailed her in the prairie states For days she chewed her favorite gum on the hard shoulder And whispered her difficult secrets to the wheat Where game Solomon yelped, and, true to form, The unmiraculous wheat only rustled through its rosary once more. She sent me a postcard from somewhere In Missouri, and then again from Amarillo, Texas. She said she thought shed make it All the way to sunshine California, but she said She couldnt promise shed like it when she did Or even that shed get all the way over to the ocean there, Which didnt surprise me or disappoint me one little bit, And I sent one back to an address in Vegas saying, Well why should you, unless of course you want to? I asked for nothing better than a five-spot. I thought that modest.

Whisking around On her single stiletto, though, her lips twitching, She stared me in the eye so forcefully I saw only the familiar words Nothing Doing. I determined there and then To take each disappointment as best I could. There you have it, once we were so close Nothing short of a machete Could have separated us. Now... I watched her hail a shiny yellow taxi. It was such a wonderful afternoon! I moved off down the block, my block, Its bright red bricks seemed to watch me, There was a sudden breeze fresh in my face And the sun was so strong it made my eyes water.

Too bad, I thought, for her sake, That she didnt remember me like she should have. Atlanta emerged from the ribbed, red soil Of Georgia; it now has One of the busiest airports in America. From there we flew to the cradling arms Of New Orleans; here, where the Mississippi Ends, perspiring jazz musicians like bulls lock horns. Its said that every forty minutes the world is girdled By a satellite; with a nail I trace the thin blue Veins of the delta winding dubiously toward the sea. No one lives in the imagination, or if they do they probably stink of garlic. What a thought! Five oclock.

Everyones pushing off to the country for the weekend. What a jamboree the streets enjoy, sticky traffic jams, spouting hydrants, and roofs that catch the red and dying sun. While Tom Cat plays with baby, theres Mother waving us farewell. Drive carefully, she cries as we pull out, its Friday night, remember. We slide so easily though through strings of amber traffic lights on our smooth journey to the shops, our windows rolled down all the way. The light lies down beautifully over the new arcade.

What a lovely evening! My trolley is overflowing with supplies. In the low, flat sweep of store window my friends and I see ourselves reflected. The lot behind us is beginning to fill up, could be theyll introduce valet parking at some point. Pleased, we fill up the trunk and go back for more (You again the cash girl joked us), enough to feed us and our families for a part, at least, of the long, hot summer now approaching. After he threw her through a plate glass window, nature seemed that much closer. Even the dastardly divisions in society might be healed by a first-rate glazier.