Come To Where I'm From
a poem
A stranger messaged me on LinkedIn describing the poem I’m posting here - ‘Come To Where I’m From’ - as one of the finest poems he knows.
Any poet knows that when such a thing happens one’s solitary lifelong walk through the forest is for a blessed moment lit by company. It means more than I can say. So…
It’s good timing too. I’m teaching an online course on my friend and mentor Walcott, and we’re just coming to ‘The Schooner, Flight’ - a great central poem in Derek’s work. Maybe this poem was the echoing sound of his apprentice, autobiographical, impressionistic… Being me it’s about time and my hometown, and how we circled through our lives together. It was originally written because the theatre group Paines Plough were asking for poems on the theme of Come To Where I’m From. In the book it’s in - Pluto (2012) - I called it ‘Birthplace’ but I think of it as ‘Come To Where I’m From’. We sold our house in Welwyn - the third one I lived in, all walking distance from each other - after my mother passed in 2023.
I am working hard in the early mornings towards my book Making Better, on poetry, neuroscience and wtf is happening, and - you know how it is - I can’t start spilling it here.
Here’s this in the meantime. I don’t know when I will write another poem, or how I would, or what it could be, so perhaps it helps to remind myself I used to.
***
Birthplace (2010?)
Hard to remember, now there is nothing here,
that there was once nothing here. Hard to remember
they paused in a field with a plot for a field and a feel
of a place in mind and a little knot of horses
faraway in a corner stood there
pretty much where that little knot of horses
stands. The railway ran through the white template,
the life and death of it, made east and west
of nowhere. North and south it left itself
whichever way one looked.
Hard to remember now that it's all begun
that it all began and, now that it's all over,
hard to recall it's gone. Those who are gone
arrive in a crest of steam and the late-lamented
help them with their boxes.
Those to the east have a shed and those to the west
a greenhouse, it was a field and not a field
hereafter, it was a path through new houses
and a sweetshop. There was a lane and another lane
which, crossing it, was obliged
to name it what it was named and the five things
needed they built buildings for. A meadow
reared its set of gardens like farm-children
edging behind houses to belong there,
to cluster and imagine
a gate that is always shut will be always open.
But for now the horizon was sky and a blackberry hedge
and the north was the nettle-bed, and the south the roses
and the east an archway to those sad allotments,
and the west a banded twilight
as out they build, in the time a bedtime story
takes to ferry me shipshape to tomorrow;
out they build till I wake and the horizon’s
gone. It won’t be found until it’s wept to
on a holiday. The town
is mine, this side of town is mine, the homes go strolling by, then, bowing out of sight they scurry round the world to be back in time for when I pass, as if they never budged, and a chuckle of wood-chimes is all I’ll ever know. Now they grow names with care, they name what dreams of being garden Garden, what will never be a city City, and they name it for some hovels in the Domesday Book. Go where they say it is. Come to where I’m from. The north is lost in thought: the glance away from fairytales is a look through time, the south is sitting me down and standing me up, the east unnerves me with its look: I never heard of west, what's west? and the west goes west in search of answers. Hard to remember an hour’s walk was a world away across country, breakfast an age ago. The streets lit up like anything being thought of glittered with shame and joy. So I was thought of, for the north was a copse of houses to be called at, found wanting at, found wanting you, while the south got London like one gets a belief and beamed to find it all leads somewhere.
The east I met in dreams was the east I knew but enormous, so the west escorted me where those like me liked me, on a singing bus-ride I prayed would never end till I begged it to. Things come true, looking back, things come true I was wishing for, they are gone and still come true, when north south east and west flop on a lawn in summer and so do you, and the time I stare at you and the time you do are the same time, are equal, the same time, same span, like an equals sign is suddenly loop-the-looping home so it forms infinity by a hedge in summer – You, I caught your eye in my life. What else did I do? and the longer ago it gets the longer it lasts and closer it seems to come. Come to where I'll never again be from, you, there are miracles showing up again instead of us. The shadows comb the lawn, diligent and discreet as a search team until I call it off for want of a clue. South go the memories, north goes love as I wake, while the east and west welcome the bright apprentice and dispatch him daily on his amiable fruitless errand. My eyes grow books and suffer books, my ears grow songs and suffer songs, my hands break news, my feet fetch drinks, my stomach stomachs it all like something bet it it couldn't, and out they build, they build,
from the slim incessant fountain they began with,
to the homes we knew and will never, side by side
they build them, like the ones we won’t remember
play tag in the park with the ones we can’t forget
and the kids they brought together
had kids together and soon the north was the poems
I wrote about you, woods of poems I pass through
guided by a voice in headphones, soon
the south is the realm of Alfie Rose, the east
an airport serving nowhere
and the west the news I brush off like a boy-king
as I stir the foam and find I’m in Manhattan.
And maybe they built out far enough, I wonder,
sipping the wine in a brasserie I always
loved, or I text my exes
in the terminal or I listen to the songs
I listen to. At the rendezvous of evening
I always miss for mulling over headlines,
what travelled outward travels at standstill,
then starts to travel in,
when the woodland path arrives in the blue clearing: the second son of three is getting ready to set some last adventure with his soldiers. But his pals who don’t take no for an answer shriek from the road until he rises, childhood done forever. The clearing reached, the path is weeds and litter. Hard to remember, now I see it all, that it was all I saw, and I drive through a north I cried in, where the council’s nailed up signs and arrows that These are trees and So are these, and the south is so far south it’s south of understanding, and the east is the internet and the west my time here googled with a whisky. Come to where I said it was, it’s there I’m gone. The plastic infantryman dropped in the wood outlasts the wood. I meet you for the last time but one on a wet Thursday, and the street rolls up behind me like a script unless I turn to stop it.
The fine idea remains just that. The blueprint flutters down unused, and the children’s children tweet on the ragged swings. There’s not a tree, a yard of light, a lamp-post that won’t tap from me my only soliloquy I remember when we, when she, declining, like an old-school verb, to when you. Then you, derailed at a dream-junction, are someone else again, the old first names step out in their parish beauty, Rosemary, Clare, Diane... What I want from one is what I got from one, as if the maths made sense in the negative: now writing looks like black on white but feels like flint on nothing. North they are shutting up the picture book forever, south the theatre's pricey card for children, east the warehouse eats the one beside it, west I set out seats for relatives and replay scenes that happened in the west, right there I mutter, peering into sunset, pulling a cork among abandoned deck-chairs. Come to where I’m from, like the bloke I once got talking to in The Sun, on the only night he spent in my birthplace, a desolate Sunday evening wiping tables and he said I hate this town and he was gone, said he’d never come again, come again like him, when you never will, come to where I’m from like the glossy editor at Condé Nast who murmured to me Glyn, it does you no favours, saying where you’re from: say you’re ‘from Hertfordshire’, come again like him, where you wouldn’t be seen dead. Come again like one who’s lost, come again like one for seconds on First Capital Connect, who meant to lift his eyelids from his iPhone as the little place shot by but when he looks we’re on the Digswell Viaduct, gone, bygone, high over the green fields and lanes of where I’m from. The north is a new flowerbed a stranger tends, the south four 4x4s on a driveway, from the east a fellow stops to stare at where we lived as if he remembered us when he lived, I remember him well enough, and the west is me at work on this by the garden gate. Preposterous, what was. I watch that gate for you and all the gone. The odds against are stars to sail between.
Come to where I’m from. Now there’s nothing here,
hard to remember once there was nothing here.
Hard to remember we paused in a field in sunshine
with a plot for a field and a feel of a place in mind
and a little knot of horses
faraway in a corner stood right there
near where those horses stand, by the quiet trees,
beyond which all the yellow rising hills
you think are there are the yellow rising hills
you thought were there.