The Passage of Time

by Robert Nisbet

His shop in the arcade Ron called
The Passage of Time. As you went in
you saw a hundred timepieces, alarm clocks,
carriage clocks and digitals,
watches in cabinets, time banked high.
Seeing that cog-wheeling certainty
I wondered at the way that Ron,
through every second of each eight-hour day,
would know, click-ticked, brain-deep,
the time, the time, the time.

For a while one summer, I helped him out.
And he’d say, each day, leaving Pearl in charge,
Mid-morning coffee, John? Time for our break?
I started to log the times.
11.25        11.38        11.33
Around eleven-thirty. Mid-morning-ish.
And later in the day, he’d say, Time
to start packing up. I logged these too.
5.18        5.22        5.15
Quarter to twenty past. Roughly.

O Ron, I saw your full achievement then,
such joy in the approximate,
your days’ emancipation,
proof now against the clocks’ harsh trek,
proof too against the scurrying of time.

Friday Night

by Robert Nisbet

Evening kick-off, pub afterwards,
Kev gave them hell.
Home by twelve, fair walk, he’s not too pissed.
(He’s thirty-two now, remember).

First feeds the dog, a short-arsed Sealyham.
(Never slavered a jaw in earnest, this dog.
No pit-bull legend, he).
Kevin heats up some Ovaltine,
remembers to set the alarm.
(His uncle’s by nine tomorrow, fixing that motor).

Time now for Butch’s walk.
Round the block, dog rooting, fervent
only about smells and snorts and urines.
Kevin’s aware of a three-quarter moon,
the light spreading an opulence,
over the jumbled roofs and chimneypots,
grained walls, gardens, the Indian grocer’s
(shuttered now), the chapel, Midway Motors,
still the drenching moonlight,
the place, the peace.

A Geography of Song

by Robert Nisbet

The first singers were cowboys,
Frankie and Tennessee Ernie and Slim,
moustached like velvet, yodel’s colour
backed against prairie and range.
My Hebridean father, human bagpipe,
would drone through the parlour
with the boat songs of Mingulay and Skye.
Bernie, riding the hill into Broad Haven,
would give us Lonnie Donegan
and a song of stacked pig-iron
shifted by rail on the Rock Island Line.
On the last bus home on Saturdays,
we’d larrup the rhythms of an old mill
by the stream, Nellie Dean,
the sentiment lapping with the beer
against the back teeth of the evening.

Valleys Town

by Robert Nisbet

It made him want to leave the little town
in the first place: gateway
to the mining valley: the village-ness,
the local thing.

Jolting to art school on the Underground
he knew moments of total anonymity.
At other times, in a fresh set,
he was glad of the new dispensation,
remembered the village in contrasting pictures.
Boutiques in the King’s Road,
his father’s grocery.
Espresso bars, the chip shop.
It was good to be racing on.

The meritocracy, the middle class,
glittered for years, but guttered a little,
like a stubbed candle, when his father died.
He’d remember now the long Cardiff Road,
where he’d watched the daily patterns,
the shopkeepers, the miners’ wives,
buses running in village time, village tempo,
from valley to town to port.
He sensed harmonies in the town’s truth,
shining like a newly-mined and new-washed coal.

The League of Gentlemen

by Robert Nisbet

Kids do gangs, often enough. We did,
that’s me, Pete and Texas. Junior school,
we were the Red Hand Gang, later the Wolf Pack,
and last of all the League of Gentlemen.
We were smooth movers, snooker sharps,
we had silky skills. We played between us
one clarinet, one set of bongos, word games,
cards, the field (female).
                                       Only twice, I think,
did one of us swing a punch at anyone.
First one was Petey, down at Morgan’s Cove
one summer. Usual thing. Pete was going out
with Gaynor. And some smartarse from Tenby
said, You still getting it from that slag?
Pete thumped him. Broke one of the boy’s teeth.
Chipped his own knuckle.

For ‘A’ level history, we had Hayes, the staff’s
number one shit. Sarcasm was the thing
with Hayes, pick on people’s size, looks, anything.
And Texas was a butt of his. It was nothing
you could repeat really, just … incessant.
And one day Texas cried. Big lad, Tex,
and at seventeen you didn’t cry. But he did.
And then the bell, Hayes wrapped himself
in his academic gown, paraded out.
And that stupid Wattsy said, He was very witty, Tex,
you have to admit.
                              The punch seemed to come
from deep, he swung from below his waist,
and deep too from somewhere like …
…. despair.

I don’t want, ever, to see a punch like that again.

Seascape Newgale, Wales, Winter 2014

by Robert Nisbet

The village: a pub, a forecourt, a camping site,
a few houses on the hill, two shops, a café
where we, so many of us, have watched
the steam rise from coffee cups, the butter
trickling through toasted teacakes,
looked out to see spring warm the cliff tops,
mused on the natural world.

And then (as now) the moving water and a foul wind
will rise, shattering, hurtling through the village.

Resurgence then, repair, the fresh paint licked
on window frames and gables.

And again and again,
when the village is spruced and sweet again,
the wind and the water will rise again and shatter.

And again and again,
when the water has crashed,
the village will return to lick with paint,
renew,  
toast teacakes.

Old Maps, Wise Things

Robert Nisbet

In the nursing home, he’s jollied along by saucy Katies
but he’s dreaming half his time, his smile turning
half-aside,  half-inward,
to maps and days and tropics of his own.

The Council School, before the war,
meant strictures and the stick. Yet he, sometimes,
at eight years old, would wander off. We never quite
knew where, but somebody said they’d seen him
at the station, watching the upline trains go out.
In the end even the harridans let him be.
No caning any more, just, The wanderer’s returned.

Wartime, we were teenage and the bombs were falling
not too far away, that red glow at Pembroke Dock
at night. So he’d be in, but in that family, nine of them,
his sister said he’d sit aside, in all the noise and radio,
and write in a big notebook, drafts and charts and sketches,
a book he called Old Maps and Wise Things.

He got to Cardiff University, got a fair degree, I think.
But the girl Jane from Johnston, in his history class,
said he’d sometimes dream through a lecture, sketching
tropical birds and plants, and maps of reefs and islands.

He was in business nearly forty years, a stationer, a bookbinder.
He was a good craftsman (those books were beautifully bound)
but now and again he’d go. For the day.  Just disappear.
He had a hand-written sign, same one for years,
Re-opening tomorrow.

Archipelagos. Distant worlds.

Troubles

by Robert Nisbet

The bomb went off in the barracks
just after noon. She was desperate, hunting news,
ringing, ringing, holding on. Set off for home
(it was nearer the barracks anyway)
and at Cardiff Gate the evening papers
told of the bomb, people at the tables talked of it,
but the bomb was lost between a bent politician
and a singer’s pretty boobs, and she rang
and rang again, to the last coin, drove on,
fifty miles again, to a nearly-empty Pont Abraham
where the waitress was suddenly kind
and she poured it all out, just as suddenly,
My son is there, and the girl cried with her
(what sort of emotional girl was that?) and said
You can ring from here, out the back, they won’t know,

and her son was safe and she could only sob,
helplessly, in a caretaker’s room,
with the brushes and the buckets and the bleach,
because her son was safe and there was somebody too
who had helped her, with her arm round her,
to pull out of a racing current,
fetch up on a safe, dry bank.

Farm Sale

by Robert Nisbet

The notice just gave details of acreage,
of arable and pasture. In The Journal’s later piece,
the interview, Owen’s phrases seemed to have halted
within him before they were written down. He simply said,
It wasn’t just a livelihood. He made some reference
to the obvious things, the shearing, branding,
calving, milking, the haymaking when cousins
and neighbours came, swigged brown ale from flagons
in the top of the barn as the heat built up.
But Owen did not mention, could not explain,
the one green image haunting him, those last few days:
the centuries’ clump of foliate oaks,
up by the main road, overhanging the milk stand,
the churns, the milk leaving for the creamery.

Artefacts

by Robert Nisbet

Two quid, a full day’s earnings. Now,
the auction at the Market Hall.
He’s never been to one before,
just seen the sale ads in the Star.

He loves the café just outside:
these dealers, drivers, men in caps
and cords and aprons, women with
their tresses streaming, scarves and rings.

The hall. He browses. Loves Lot 12,
a copper kettle, tiny thing,
maybe eight inches high, odd bash,
but burnished to a sparkle. Then,
Lot 23, a miniature,
a girl with golden hair (she looked
just like his memories of his Mum).

The auctioneer stands second just
to God, he thinks, but suddenly,
descending like a royal flush,
the thought: Yes, I can bid. Lot 12.
Abruptly, 12, he gabbles, bids,
gets it for fifteen bob. And soon,
the miniature, for just a quid.

The hour following is chocked
and full with gazing on, with lots
and artefacts, before, his goods
brown-paper-wrapped, he stomps his way
to bus and home and bed and board.

Cottage, Seagull, West Wales Coast

by Robert Nisbet

In a coastal cottage suddenly
by tossed spring hawthorn
the seagull with the savage eye
scratches down the windowsill.

Blues in a Green Country

by Robert Nisbet

He was her first love, a forester.
He planted spruce along the high Preseli hills.
She’d sometimes dream with him
of majesties of green on mountain ridges.

After their parting, she did well enough.
She married, raised young, played bridge,
consorted even, more latterly,
with ladies who lunch.
                                     They’d not have thought
that once, teaching English to teenagers,
she would flinch from William Blake:
Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night.

Sometimes now, driving over the Preselis,
she’ll wince with wonderment,
seeing those forests, their green
and their grandeur, matured now
and confident upon the sky-line.

In the Portage Bay Café

by Robert Nisbet

At breakfast time, the snow spins
its carousel through Seattle's winter streets.
Our meal out is an encampment
in America's gregarious heart, as waiters
teem, proffer their service's glad hand.
There are Rancher's Breakfasts, syrup,
pepper bacon, wafting coffee. In the midst,
in the steam of bonhomie, my grandson,
who is four months old, looks through
and at it all, the ketchup bottles
and the cream-topped rolls, with utter
wonderment. Behind him, down town,
sky-scraping blocks raise their challenge
to the ferries and the islands and the inlets
out in the sound. On again, and there are
mountains, out in the countryside's
long reach, their peaks capped
by the brilliance of snow.

Collector’s Items

by Robert Nisbet

They’re ranged out on his sideboard,
where he can see them through the day.
The whisky glass. He hasn’t had a drink
for years now, but it was inscribed minutely
by the regulars in the Nag’s back bar
before he left for retirement. Then
the photograph of the one racehorse
he once part-owned, Autumn’s Reign,
be-decked after his one win, at Haydock Park.
There was as well the brown tobacco pouch,
but they’ve thrown that out. He doesn’t smoke now,
for God’s sake, but they’d sniffed and sulked
and said it smelled. So he just has the whisky
glass and Autumn’s Reign. He tells the girls,
the carers, about them. But he knows damn well
(he’s not daft yet) that in the world of talk
Spin ‘em a yarn sometimes gets knocked back
by Boring old fart. But he chats the girls gently
and they listen, he tells them of Jack McGuire,
Jack the Lad, the jockey (they’d have liked young Jack),
and characters in the Nag’s.
                                             His nieces are the trouble
(his nieces, for God’s sake, that one who’s
a therapist is worst), now they’re snuffling about
the whisky glass and the photograph.
Sometimes he’s badgered till he’s querulous,
but then his eyes will glitter and he’ll shout at them.
And then they’ll scurry off, conceding him
his thoughts of the Nag’s back bar, good cheer,
and Autumn’s Reign thundering wonderfully
down that long home straight.

Landlocked

by Robert Nisbet

Tall, sandy-haired, mild-mannered Bokes,
just leaving school, sixteen, the Merchant Navy
the Monday next. And nobody made a speech.
I walked with Bokes to his house.
Behind us, boyhood’s scuffling certainties,
mitching, matches, youth’s music.
Ahead of Bokes, I could not, could not see.
But he was peering then, that day,
out to the distances of diesel’s range.
In Mother Clark’s, the sweet shop, I bought
old Bokes a lollipop. Iced. Raspberry.
Hey boy, you can’t do that.
I can. You’re leaving.

I next saw Bokes at a reunion, some  
fifty-two years on. And he … ?
Half-million miles of ocean (my estimate),
much of it in the far Pacific, and often too
the Arctic Circle. Later, two oil rigs.
Still the mild and sandy Bokes. And I … ?
Stayed local, classrooms, seminars,
studied the iambic pentameter,
Petrarchan sonnet, irony.

I’ll get you a pint, said Bokes,
as a summer evening sank on the harbour
outside the Starboard Inn. A pint.
You bought me a lollipop, the day I left.

The Territory

by Robert Nisbet

Things start with the cathedral, the
natural meeting place for wary lovers
from holy homes, aged twenty-nine the
two of them. From nave to chancel
to lady-chapel they threaded steps
and conversation, only to return then
to the city-village, to the ice cream
parlour’s rum’n’raisin, and some easing
of the mood. Their coast path walk
took them through floods of yellow
gorse, bathed them in sun. Is it too
fanciful to use the phrase “white light”?
Maybe it was the warmth, the sweating
of that squeezed untidy kiss. It would be good
to report that they hurried to the beach
and skinny-dipped. Et cetera. Well, no.
But as cathedral bells tolled evensong,
and heights of rooks exclaimed their
fright, our two were twenty miles away,
sequestered in a little bistro, sharing a
bottle of Chilean Merlot, making plans,
making such plans.

Light Comes to the High Street

by Robert Nisbet

Half past eight. Last night we felt the
lingering of an Irish gale, the rasping of
late leaf, by steps and alleyways.
There’s pub detritus certainly, but
Chloe, office junior, and Wayne, the
bookie’s clerk, drift, grinning, with the
leaves, to work. Both clubbed last night,
both separately, in cars elsewhere,
removed clothing, tasted a joyful
newness. The staffs of Furnishings and
The Outdoor Shop banter, scrap out
allegiances. Harriet sets up her mainline
bookseller’s, listens to the rustle, the chat.
The boys have been round, the road sweeper,
the paper deliveries, and, as the shuffling feet
scratch out their measures on the day to come,
something in Harriet’s imagination
bottles the alchemy
of people and purpose and day.

Still Life

by Robert Nisbet

Foreground, the pop lorry reached our street
on Tuesdays around tea time.
There were dandelion & burdock
and that hoosh of air and excitement
as the little cradle of wires
snapped back off the top of the bottle.

Deeper, a sunshine soaked the street
and we were safe in the centuries around us.


Author’s Note: I’ve just realized what a “British” poem this is. So to explain: in the 1950s and 60s, lemonade (usually called “pop”) was sold in Britain from lorries (trucks?) which drove around the houses. The bottles were sealed by quite neat little cradles of wires at their necks.

A Solva Sunset Two history graduates have come to a Pembrokeshire smallholding

by Robert Nisbet

 

It really felt as if we were a Western-wagon couple,

bundling into some new dimension of land and meaning.

Now, like a clumsy nineteenth century cart wheel,

we’ve lurched into the territory’s ditch.

You’ll leave for a while, to teach history again,

in the English Midlands, wait on resurgent times.

I’ll keep this place going, for sure,

feed the chickens, chop sticks, bundle them …

Keep the home fires burning,

that song must be seventy years ago now …

tend the crops, the shop, the children.

 

Tonight’s curious iridescent sunset,

out on the cliffs beyond Solva,

is not so much a failing of the light

as a washing down, a making spruce.

In the Beach Café, 1962

by Robert Nisbet
 

Exactly fifty years ago, this showery

August, we sat in a Broad Haven beach café

as rain rolled solemnly down the windows.

Those two boys, sickle-keen, their futures

carved in hope, into influence and mighty

good. The girl, long raven-haired,

our archetype, she played guitar for us,

smiling down vistas of love and socialism.

I’ve seen none of them again, in half a

century. I’ve seen no revolutions, carousels

of love and brotherhood. I simply hope

those boys never sold trash for easy greed,

polluted neither minds nor beaches,

that they’ll have taught, administered,

constructed decencies. And she, maybe

she worked on good and generous things,

maybe wrote songs. Maybe her children too

reached eighteen years of age
with hope and earnestness unhurt.