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Peter Riley
from Best at Night Alone
Night long over fields and hills the dome stirs.
Lit window, figure bent over table, forest
edge star traces contracted on a point of harm,
biting the bone. Asking questions.
Where are my people? Cowering under
desert shadows. Children laugh.
***
The window figure blocks the light
dark form in a light frame, pain
courses through the body at a bequest of the total.
The wooded hills, the night birds
sitting silent on the stones, dark auditors
of random violence. Families
torn apart. Love’s revenge
falls on the children.
***
Pain in the limbs ache in the memory
in the window a distant street lamp
suddenly goes out. My vanishing point.
Dark wind and the thrashing of branches,
rain on the glass. My home’s validation.
***
I have my alcohol and fat. I remember better days,
why are we living out here in this shadow land
driven from my pasturage and choral fate, my tale
a dark form thrust into the night
across fields of lavender, ecstatic proteins
burning into lives. My sweet poison.
My working timetable.
***
All our resources gone to
waste in the desert, these people are
wrecking the earth.
And nowhere but here in these
patient groves
will an eyelid be opened to the earth’s curve
at dawn or fall of night.
No, I don’t want a sandwich.
I don’t want a valet case.
***
Street, street, banal street
paved with promises the mind
walks you in the middle of the night,
and a hand is held out, cupped, I am
busy with my insects truth and
hope, hand reaching for hand.
A knock at the door. Two
children run away down the street
laughing, hand in hand.
***
A white poplar
spread against the grey sky.
A white populism buried under a stone.
A vast military vocabulary,
evangelical empire,
the silence of.
Great webbing of white letters
falling to earth
where they lie hurt and dying.
***
Upland slopes full of spiked plants October
skeletons rattling themselves in the night.
A message forms at the lips’ limit. What is left
of our liberty but a scatter of aggressive bones?
And very disgruntled populations liable to
paranoid acts.
Moths at the window.
The home that survived resentment.
The home that survived alcohol and fat.
The home that survived encryptment.
Needing help to climb the stairs.
***
The great mountain forms erased at night,
no more lights, no more houses. How could there
not be paranoia in such places as these,
threatened by the world brokers at every act.
Freedom and Democracy
shatter people’s bones.
Beacon darkness through the fields, where
the children are hiding.
***
‘We have thrown away everything worth having
and erased everything worth knowing
and now we are bombing Eden.’
Lord God, you who made me,
turn me into a pillar of black salt
for the soldiers to practice shooting at.
Moths on the windows, serious and symmetrical,
moths with purpose. Then when I open the windows
the moths fill the room in fear and delight the whole
pillar of alienation suddenly opens like a winter rose
and all the company of song.
***
(after Deguy)
Singing old songs together in the evening
like nomads round the camp fire. The rare
moment when we agree to die
It is Orpheus, it is the soft thing stronger
than stone, stronger than tree or
scattered creatures, the song in its clearing
as one by one we stand and leave
in good order by the law of random numbers.
They have all gone to bed and left me here.
Singing old songs together in the evening.
‘Best at Night Alone’ is available from Oystercatcher Press, 4 Coastguard Cottages, Lighthouse Close, Old Hunstanton, Norfolk PE36 6EL for £4.00, postage free.
Copyright © Peter Riley, 2008
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