The Shout

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2005 by Simon Armitage

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Boston, in 2005.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The poems in this work were previously published in the following collections: The Dead Sea (London: Faber & Faber, 1995); Moon Country by Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell (London: Faber & Faber, 1996); CloudCuckooLand (London: Faber & Faber, 1997); Book of Matches (London: Faber & Faber, 2001); The Universal Home Doctor (London: Faber & Faber, 2002); Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (London: Faber & Faber, 2006, and New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armitage, Simon, 1963–
The shout : selected poems / Simon Armitage.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
“Originally published by Harcourt in 2005.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-95874-7
I. Title.
PR6051.R564A6 2012
821′.914—dc22 2012003210

Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Shout

Gooseberry Season

At Sea

Poem

Kid

Lines Thought to Have Been Written on the Eve of the Execution of a Warrant for His Arrest

Not the Furniture Game

Robinson in Two Cities

The Lost Letter of the Late Jud Fry

To Poverty

Parable of the Dead Donkey

Hitcher

To His Lost Lover

Mr. Robinson’s Holiday

The Dead Sea Poems

Man with a Golf Ball Heart

I Say I Say I Say

White Christmas

Before You Cut Loose,

Goalkeeper with a Cigarette

A Week and a Fortnight

Dream Holiday

Chapter and Verse

The Two of Us

Five Eleven Ninety Nine

Robinson’s Life Sentence

Song of the West Men

Tachograph

A Glory

The Tyre

The Winner

For the Record

Homecoming

8 P.M. and Raining When Robinson

You’re Beautiful

All for One

Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass

The Strid

The Twang

The Strand

Salvador

The Golden Toddy

Birthday

The Night-Watchman

The Jay

The Summerhouse

The English

Working from Home

The Back Man

Robinson’s Resignation

Incredible

A Note About the Author

Other Books by This Author

THE SHOUT

We went out

into the school yard together, me and the boy

whose name and face

I don’t remember. We were testing the range

of the human voice:

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm

from across the divide to signal back

that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park—I lifted an arm.

Out of bounds,

he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,

from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell’s Farm—

I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead

with a gunshot hole

in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,

you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

GOOSEBERRY SEASON

Which reminds me. He appeared

at noon, asking for water. He’d walked from town

after losing his job, leaving a note for his wife and his brother

and locking his dog in the coal bunker.

We made him a bed

and he slept till Monday.

A week went by and he hung up his coat.

Then a month, and not a stroke of work, a word of thanks,

a farthing of rent or a sign of him leaving.

One evening he mentioned a recipe

for smooth, seedless gooseberry sorbet

but by then I was tired of him: taking pocket money

from my boy at cards, sucking up to my wife and on his last night

sizing up my daughter. He was smoking my pipe

as we stirred his supper.

Where does the hand become the wrist?

Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed

and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that razor’s edge

between something and nothing, between

one and the other.

I could have told him this

but didn’t bother. We ran him a bath

and held him under, dried him off and dressed him

and loaded him into the back of the pick-up.

Then we drove without headlights

to the county boundary,

dropped the tailgate, and after my boy

had been through his pockets we dragged him like a mattress

across the meadow and on the count of four

threw him over the border.

This is not general knowledge, except

in gooseberry season, which reminds me, and at the table

I have been known to raise an eyebrow, or scoop the sorbet

into five equal portions, for the hell of it.

I mention this for a good reason.

AT SEA

It is not through weeping,

but all evening the pale blue eye

on your most photogenic side has kept

its own unfathomable tide. Like the boy

at the dyke I have been there:

held out a huge finger,

lifted atoms of dust with the point

of a tissue and imagined slivers of hair

in the oil on the cornea. We are both

in the dark, but I go on

drawing the eyelid up by its lashes,

folding it almost inside-out, then finding

and hiding every mirror in the house

as the iris, besieged with the ink

of blood rolls back

into its own orbit. Nothing

will help it. Through until dawn

you dream the true story of the boy

who hooked out his eye and ate it,

so by six in the morning

I am steadying the ointment

that will bite like an onion, piping

a line of cream while avoiding the pupil

and in no time it is glued shut

like a bad mussel.

Friends call round

and mean well. They wait

and whisper in the air-lock of the lobby

with patches, eyewash, the truth

about mascara.

Even the cats are onto it;

they bring in starlings, and because their feathers

are the colours of oil on water in sunlight

they are a sign of something.

In the long hours

beyond us, irritations heal

into arguments. For the eighteenth time

it comes to this: the length of your leg sliding out

from the covers, the ball of your foot

like a fist on the carpet

while downstairs

I cannot bring myself to hear it.

Words have been spoken; things that were bottled

have burst open and to walk in now

would be to walk in

on the ocean.

POEM

And if it snowed and snow covered the drive

he took a spade and tossed it to one side.

And always tucked his daughter up at night.

And slippered her the one time that she lied.

And every week he tipped up half his wage.

And what he didn’t spend each week he saved.

And praised his wife for every meal she made.

And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.

And for his mum he hired a private nurse.

And every Sunday taxied her to church.

And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.

And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.

Here’s how they rated him when they looked back:

sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.

KID

Batman, big shot, when you gave the order

to grow up, then let me loose to wander

leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder

as you liked to say, or ditched me, rather,

in the gutter … well, I turned the corner.

Now I’ve scotched that “he was like a father

to me” rumour, sacked it, blown the cover

on that “he was like an elder brother”

story, let the cat out on that caper

with the married woman, how you took her

downtown on expenses in the motor.

Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker!

Holy roll-me-over-in-the-clover,

I’m not playing ball boy any longer

Batman, now I’ve doffed that off-the-shoulder

Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number

for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper;

now I’m taller, harder, stronger, older.

Batman, it makes a marvellous picture:

you without a shadow, stewing over

chicken giblets in the pressure cooker,

next to nothing in the walk-in larder,

punching the palm of your hand all winter,

you baby, now I’m the real boy wonder.

LINES THOUGHT TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN ON THE EVE OF THE EXECUTION OF A WARRANT FOR HIS ARREST

Boys, I have a feeling in my water,

in my bones, that should we lose our houses

and our homes, our jobs, or just in general

come unstuck, she will not lend one button

from her blouse, and from her kitchen garden

not one bean. But through farmyards and dust bowls

we will lay down our topcoats, or steel ourselves

and bare our backs over streams and manholes.

Down Birdcage Walk in riots or wartime

we will not hear of her hitching her skirt

or see for ourselves that frantic footwork,

busy like a swan’s beneath the surface.

But quickly our tank will stop in its tracks;

they’ll turn the turret lid back like a stone;

inside, our faces set like flint, her name

cross-threaded in the barrels of our throats.

I have this from reliable sources:

boys, with our letters, our first class honours

and diplomas we are tenfold brighter

than her sons and daughters put together.

But someone hangs on every word they speak,

and let me mention here the hummingbird

that seems suspended at the orchid’s lips,

or else the bird that picks the hippo’s teeth.

Boys, if we burn, she will not pass one drop

of water over us, and if we drown

she will not let a belt or bootlace down,

or lend a hand. She’ll turn instead and show

a leg, a stocking, sheer and ladderless.

And even then we will not lose our heads

by mouthing an air bubble out of turn

or spouting a smoke ring against her name.

But worse than this, in handouts and speeches

she will care for us, and cannot mean it.

Picture the stroke of the hour that takes her:

our faces will freeze as if the wind had changed,

we shall hear in our hearts a note, a murmur,

and talk in terms of where we stood, how struck,

how still we were the moment this happened,

in good faith, as if it really mattered.

NOT THE FURNITURE GAME

His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney

and his eyes were boiled eggs with the tops hammered in

and his blink was a cat flap

and his teeth were bluestones or Easter Island statues

and his bite was a perfect horseshoe.

His nostrils were both barrels of a shotgun, loaded.

And his mouth was an oil exploration project gone bankrupt

and his last smile was a caesarean section

and his tongue was an iguanodon

and his whistle was a laser beam

and his laugh was a bad case of kennel cough.

He coughed, and it was malt whisky.

And his headaches were Arson in Her Majesty’s Dockyards

and his arguments were outboard motors strangled with fishing-line

and his neck was a bandstand

and his Adam’s apple was a ball cock

and his arms were milk running off from a broken bottle.

His elbows were boomerangs or pinking shears.

And his wrists were ankles

and his handshakes were puff adders in the bran tub

and his fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits

and the palms of his hands were action paintings

and both thumbs were blue touchpaper.

And his shadow was an opencast mine.

And his dog was a sentry-box with no one in it

and his heart was a first world war grenade discovered by children

and his nipples were timers for incendiary devices

and his shoulder blades were two butchers at the meat-cleaving competition

and his belly-button was the Falkland Islands

and his private parts were the Bermuda Triangle

and his backside was a priest hole

and his stretchmarks were the tide going out.

The whole system of his blood was Dutch elm disease.

And his legs were depth charges

and his knees were fossils waiting to be tapped open

and his ligaments were rifles wrapped in oilcloth under the floorboards

and his calves were the undercarriages of Shackletons.

The balls of his feet were where meteorites had landed

and his toes were a nest of mice under the lawn-mower.

And his footprints were Vietnam

and his promises were hot-air balloons floating off over the trees

and his one-liners were footballs through other people’s windows

and his grin was the Great Wall of China as seen from the moon

and the last time they talked, it was apartheid.

She was a chair, tipped over backwards

with his donkey jacket on her shoulders.

They told him,

and his face was a hole

where the ice had not been thick enough to hold her.

ROBINSON IN TWO CITIES

Cities of architecture and scaffolding, tower blocks

taking the temperature, external elevator-cars outpacing

window-cleaning cages, projects and broken deadlines, Robinson

near the station. All routes end here. Cities of junctions

and ring roads, inside lanes peeling off to the left

shunting traffic into neighbourhoods, districts, Robinson

on the loop bus, his third lap. Cranes making the skyline.

Cities of offences against the person, taxis and sirens

and crossing the street from nowhere to nowhere, Robinson

on foot. Cities at dusk, each outpointing the other

with starlings. A choice of evening papers, the bridge,

and later with his tightrope act along the ledge, Robinson

in two minds.

THE LOST LETTER OF THE LATE JUD FRY

Wake.

And in my head

walk barefoot, naked from the bed

towards the day, then

wait.

Hold.

The dawn will crack

its egg into the morning’s bowl

and him on horseback,

gold.

Me,

I’m in the shed, I’m

working on it: a plus b plus c, it’s

you, him, me. It’s

three.

Hell,

this hole, this shack.

The sun makes light of me

behind my back.

Well,

good.

I give you the applause

of ringdoves lifting from the wood

and, for an encore,

blood.

Look,

see, no man

should be me, the very opposite

of snowman:

soot.

I

work that black dust

where I slice your name into my forearm

with a jackknife: l.a.u.r.e.

y.

You

at the window now,

undressed. I underestimated him,

never saw you as a pair, a

two.

Yours—

that’s him for sure.

The sun will have its day,

its weeks, months,

years.

Fine.

But just for once, for me,

dig deep, think twice, be otherwise, be

someone else this time.

Mine.

TO POVERTY

(after Laycock)

You are near again, and have been there

or thereabouts for years. Pull up a chair.

I’d know that shadow anywhere, that silhouette

without a face, that shape. Well, be my guest.

We’ll live like sidekicks—hip to hip,

like Siamese twins, joined at the pocket.

I’ve tried too long to see the back of you.

Last winter when you came down with the flu

I should have split, cut loose, but

let you pass the buck, the bug. Bad blood.