A Selection of Poetry
In my experience, one's poetry gets overshadowed by one's novels. Natural, this, I think, seeing as novels are so much easier to sell. Nevertheless... Here's a sequence about Charlie Chaplin from the book above.
Charlie
1
His mother
acted out the crucifixion:
Christ’s face
with the pallor
of an East End waif.
He was in need of bloaters;
ham and eggs.
Legs pressed together,
arms outstretched,
she vexed herself to bursting;
sang without using her voice.
Cloistered behind curtains,
she’d act out the street.
She could be anything –
sunlight; a copper’s nark –
and afterwards,
playing in the park,
Charlie looked at her hands,
the way they fluttered
as she fed the pigeons
then refused to settle down.
He saw how she became herself
when she was least herself.
No words:
simply the briefest rainbow
arched above
the pitiful patter of the birds.
*****
2
Once, in the park,
his brother made a ball
of newspaper and string.
One thing become another,
just as though,
glazed by the sun,
it advertised another life.
Banks; restaurants;
an affluent woman’s face
forced you to feel invisible.
Nothing was what it was:
it grew or shrank
in the uneven light
of your regard.
If you were poor,
your longing burnished every crumb.
You lost yourself
trying to bridge the gap.
Later, he danced with everything,
his talent –
an assiduous burnishing –
no different from love.
*****
3
His mother faltered.
Now the audience was as unstable
as the sea.
He couldn’t wait:
paraded; thumbed his waistcoat;
sang “’e don’t know ‘oo ‘e is”.
His frame aspired upwards
while his hands polished his coat.
He waded in a flood of money;
sang and sang again,
each song a prayer
for what continued to be thrown,
as tangible as grace,
from the insouciant gods.
*****
4
At eight
he danced in clogs,
one cog in a machine,
bright only insofar
as one flame in a fire is.
Soon he would learn to mould the air
around him into an orchestra;
to carve a loaf of bread
into a concertina’s folds.
He was as tense
and as responsive
as a tuning fork.
He only had to walk
to hear the pits roar.
Reams of white paper,
ragged light,
confettied him,
each of his gestures
as inflated and precise
as when a groom
accepts a wedding ring;
smooths it
for one slow inch
along a finger’s seam.
*****
5
America!
Department stores so full
it was like being smothered
in a dream.
The thickness of the shirts;
the light tread
of the shopwalkers,
like doctors
yielding to their patients’ call.
Outside, the buildings
all burlesqued him;
pushed against the sky
as though urging to be let in.
The cars; the cops;
the night ablaze
with being,
every light-bulb flooded
with its need to shine -
he lived there
like a bird
lives on a branch.
He didn’t trust it;
loved it, partly,
because he didn’t;
because he knew
it would be snatched away.
Each door,
each brightly burnished gate,
as tempting as a coin
and just as likely to depreciate.
*****
6
Stanley Jefferson
lies in his bed
and counts his toes.
He’s watching Charlie
gloss his face
with cork. He knows
how every gesture is a fluent phrase,
speaking the truth
of someone else’s face.
But there is something else:
a fire. A brazen dare. A need.
Charlie’s features come to life
in the same way that movie light
ignites a strip of celluloid.
He turns his head
and there are glimmers of this;
glimmers of that.
Even his hat’s alive.
He is starlight to Stanley’s donkey.
Now they’re due on stage.
Hurriedly, Stan dons his apparel.
It will be years
before he is Stan Laurel.
*****
7
In Hollywood,
each set
is open to the elements.
The wind plays
with an actor’s hair;
it lifts the tablecloth
and fusses with the rug.
Sometimes the unit
jumps into a truck
and drives to where
stark scrubland frames a space
as blank as any stage.
Charlie can front the wind
and bump against it like a kite.
The light –
that broad unyielding loud
American light –
seems given to him
to juggle or display.
He forces himself on film,
slows it to suit the pace
his shoes dictate.
Those splayed and outsize shoes,
like balancing on fish.
Watch how the racetrack crowd
begin to understand
that everything revolves
around the little guy:
the horses and the endless sky,
the camera, all in thrall
to Charlie,
who, they will soon realise,
is all of life
and all its hardships
rolled
into one bouncing ball.
*****
8
Old film is like a grave
in which the dead still move.
Difficult to believe in love
when boy and girl
are only wraiths,
and, anyway, styles change.
You have to trust
that Edna isn’t meant
to be this matronly.
It is, that beauty now,
more in the way Charlie reacts
than in her face.
He swoons while standing up.
She flares then sways and yields
as though she is precisely
what he feels;
smiles like she is expressing
his own heat.
Later, she drank.
Her beauty, so much filigree,
became illegible.
Look, though, and you can read
the hope still in her eyes;
her mouth’s dismay.
She hasn’t died.
She rises, frail as smoke,
from the dull ashes
of forgotten days.
*****
9
Marriage a lightness,
like a coat worn carelessly,
and then one note –
Charlie; Charlie; Charlie –
sounding in the poor girl’s ear.
Each girl lost
in the fierceness of his need
to be himself;
to be so free
he was exemplary
while being treated like a king.
Each bed a trap.
Each wedding ring
a snake
that he was scared
would take him by the throat.
Each new life
like a bit of business
he would briefly own
and then discard.
Mildred, Lita, Paulette:
so many orts and scraps.
*****
10
A paradox: the silliness of rolls
made into dainty feet
but rendered with such purity
that all you hear’s the music
that the hands create.
It’s a new kind of elegance,
born out of poverty;
out of the things
that you can only see
with the mind’s flickering light.
He walks
just like he’s striking music
from the world’s behind,
his hands prosaic miracles:
proof that we are the only miracle
we need;
that we can make new worlds,
bright skeins of smoke,
out of the fragile promise of the air.
*****
11
Outside,
the orange groves mark time.
Inside, Charlie proceeds to count it;
is so proud of his own studio
he films it going up,
the opposite
of something flowering;
its walls definitively closed.
It’s home, transposed,
time ticking to his will:
everything in motion
and then stilled,
kept static,
til he sets it going
like a clock.
Each whim is set in stone.
Nevertheless, the fluent groves
outlasted him.
*****
12
Cocteau
met Chaplin. Said:
“I don’t speak English.
He doesn’t speak French.
We talked
without the slightest difficulty.
Words caught the light.
He would transport them
from one language to another.
Sometimes, a gesture
would precede a word;
it would escort it.
There was no slowness,
only the apparent slowness
of the balls
when a juggler
disciplines them,
one slow ball after another,
in the air.”
*****
13
Limelight.
Both men so singular
you’d hardly call it
a duet.
More and more difficult at Charlie’s age
to place yourself, foursquare,
upon a stage
and mimic flight.
Keaton looks blind;
it is the world we laugh at,
how it conspires
to trap him, like a bird.
Charlie’s hands
barely belong to him;
he eyes them with as much distrust
as if his fingers
are a pair of snapping jaws.
Pause, and you see
how everything is loss.
His cheeks proclaim it,
and his eyes.
He falls into the pit
and we are anxious that he is alright,
this old man
conjuring his youth
with such ferocity
we see how age
drags on him like a stone.
*****
14
If Charlie’s pathos
seems unearned, consider this:
in every building,
tall and grandiose,
he saw its opposite:
the dust
that floated in its wake.
Some places push their chests out;
seem to speak.
Others are dumb.
Charlie gave voice to those,
and so America abandoned him.
In Switzerland, in his last week,
he lay and dozed
and listened to how voices
can conceal a room;
felt, for one last time,
how all the things you know
only reveal themselves
on the vast loom of silence.
Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his first novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. Rough Music, his second novel to be published, is now here.
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