Peter Didsbury

In Britain


The music, on fat bellied instruments.
The fingers, swarming down ladders
into the bubbling cauldrons of sound.
The mouths, greasy, encouraging the prying fingers
with songs of fecund stomachs.
The hands, transferring to the singing mouths
whatever is lifted through the scum.
The choicest morsels, the collops of dog and the
gobbets of pig. The orchestras and bands,
the minstrelsy arranged in tiers,
dripping on each other. The larded steps.
The treacherous floors in the wooden galleries.
The garlands of offal, plopping on heads
from a height of some feet.
The offal sliding off down the front of the face,
or over the neck and ears. The offal reposing like hats.
The curly grey-white tubes, dangling jauntily
above the left eye of the bagpipe player.
The guests, similarly festooned.
The guests at their conversation,
abundance of dogs and pigs in these islands.
The guests at their serious business, lying in pools.
The stories, farting and belching across the puddled boards.
The gross imaginations, bulging with viscera.
The heads full of stories, the stories thwacked like bladders.
The stories steaming in time to the music.
The stories, chewed like lumps of gristle.
The stories describing extravagant herds.
The stories, reasons for killing each other.


*


The Drainage


When he got out of bed the world had changed.
It was very cold. His breath whitened the room.
Chill December clanked at the panes.
There was freezing fog.
He stepped outside.
Not into his street but a flat wet landscape.
Sluices. Ditches. Drains. Frozen mud and leafcake. Dykes.
He found he knew the names of them all.
Barber’s Cut. Cold Track. Lament. Meridian Stream.
He found himself walking.
It was broad cold day but the sky was black.
Instead of the sun it was Orion there.
Seeming to pulse his meaning down.
He was naked. He had to clothe himself.
The heifers stood like statues in the fields.
They didn’t moan when he sliced the hides from them.
He looked at the penknife in his hand.
The needle, the thread, the clammy strips.
Now his face mooned out through a white hole.
The cape dripped. He knew he had
the bounds of a large parish to go.
His feet refused to falter.
Birds sat still in the trees.
Fast with cold glue. Passing their clumps
he watched them rise in their species.
The individuals. Sparrow. Starling. Wren.
He brought them down with his finger.
Knife needle and thread again.
It happened with the streams.
Pike barbel roach minnow gudgeon.
Perch dace eel. Grayling lamprey bream.
His feet cracked puddles and were cut on mud, They bled.
There was movement. He pointed. He stitched.
His coat hung reeking on him.
He made cut after cut in the cold.
Coldness and the colours of blood.
Red blue and green. He glistened.
He stitched through white fat.
Weight of pelts and heads. Nodding at the hem.
Feathers. Scales. Beaks and strips of skin.
He had the bounds of a large parish to go.
Oh Christ, he moaned. Sweet Christ.


*


A Priest in the Sabbath Dawn Addresses His Somnolent Mistress


 
Wake up, my heart, get out of bed
and put your scarlet shirt back on and leave,
for Sunday is coming down the chimney
with its feet in little socks,
and I need a space in which to write my sermon.
Although the hour’s already late
it can still be done, if only you’ll depart!
Down the pipe and out across the lawn
would take you to the station yard
in which you left your bicycle last week
and give me time to clothe in flesh the text
I have in mind for the instruction of my flock.
Please hurry, dear. The earliest note of the matin bell
has left its tower like an urgent dove
and is beating its way to woods outside the town.
The sun is up, the parish breakfasted,
the ghosts are all returned into the flint
yet still you lie here, shaming me with sleep.
Wake up, I say, for Sabbath legs
are landing in the grate. Go naked if you must
but grant me these few minutes with my pen
to write of how I cut myself while shaving.
Be useful, at least, and fetch my very razor,
for the faithful have set their feet upon the road
and are hurrying here with claims on the kind of story
which I cannot fittingly make from your sudden grin.


*


A Bee


Become at last a bee
I took myself naked to town,
with plastic sacks of yellow turmeric
taped to my wizened thighs.
 
I’d been buying it for weeks,
along with foods I no longer had a need for,
in small amounts from every corner grocer,
so as not to arouse their suspicion.
 
It was hard, running and buzzing,
doing the bee-dance. I ached
at the roots of my wings, and hardly yet discerned
that I flew towards reparation,
that in my beehood my healing had been commenced.
 
Words they use in this hive. To me it seems still
that clumps of tall blue flowers,
which smiled as they encroached,
had been born of my apian will,
in which to my shame I struggled for a moment,
and stained the air with clouds of my dearly bought gold.

Post Hoc (2026)
17 Blue plaque
18 A letter never sent, in 1983, to one who had moved away
18 Fractured haiku
19 A Christmas poem for 1971
20 In for a penny
20 Give you joy
21 In the eighties
22 Autumn crocuses
23 Allowable language
24 A short account of the Russian Empire
 
A Fire Shared (2020)
29 The Fog
30 A Fire Shared
31 Stepping Outside
32 Braxy-Hams
33 Lines of Enquiry
34 A Closing Prospect
35 A Pasture for Gazelles
36 How Wrong Can You Get?
37 Eleven a.m.
38 Language and Land
39 Words at Skipsea Brough
40 The Conclave
40 The Evening Star
42 Travellers
43 Angelophany
44 Seasonal References
44 In This Street
45 In a Distant Market
46 Ghost Work
49 Words at Wharram Percy
50 Bestial Gleanings
51 Handshakes
52 A Charmed Circle
53 Yellow Shoes
53 Tweedles
54 Moon-Leaper
56 In Poulton Street
59 Giant Forms
60 Smoke
61 A Chaplet or Minor Rosary
63 Sufficient Unto the Day
63 Care in the Park
64 Matelot
65 River Traffic
66 From the Fire Tower
67 An Exhortation to Himself
68 Bevis of Hampton
69 Homeward Bound
 
A Natural History (2003)
73 Owl and Miner
74 Revisited
75 Praying with Kit Smart while Walking to Work
76 Antique Lands
76 At the Gates
77 As if in Arden
77 A Natural History
78 Given in Sleep
79 Coasts of Africa 1850
80 Far from the Habitations of Men
80 Heartland
81 Pastoral
82 The Green Boy
82 Kurdistan
83 The Romance of Steam
84 The Village, or, Festive Schadenfreude
86 Pedestrianism
87 Hell on the Ringroad
88 Medieval, Somehow
88 On the Grand Tour
90 Cemetery Clearance
90 Victorian Angels
91 Now and Then
92 To Warm a House
93 At a Pinch
94 For Notes
95 Chai
96 Eight Magpies
96 Their Names
97 The Country Bus
97 The House Sitter’s Letter
99 Not the Noise of the World
100 The New Badge
101 Nowhere Near
102 Tailor in a Landscape
103 Thus
104 In Silence
104 Queen Victoria’s Chaffinch
106 Giant Forms
107 From the Top Floor of the Library
108 Solarised
109 The Valley Floor
109 Therefore Choose Life
 
That Old-Time Religion (1994)
113 The Shore
114 Passing the Park
114 The Old Masters
116 A Troubadour
116 Winter Quarters
117 Part of the Bridge
118 At North Villa
120 An Egregious Talent
121 A Moment’s Reflection
122 The Gun
122 The Shorter ‘Life’
123 That Old-Time Religion
125 In a Gothic Yard
126 At Her Grinding-Stone
126 Words for a Sundial
127 Topographical Note
127 In My Kitchen
128 A Letter to an Editor
131 The Cartoon Version
132 The Coffin Factory
133 The Bear (The Sofas)
134 The Devil on Holiday
139 On Crete or Somewhere
140 Sitting Propped Up in the Side-Galleries
140 Individual Culture
141 Common Property
142 The Seventeenth of June
143 Line with Atoll and Idol
145 Cosmological
145 Staff Only
146 Pokerwork
147 An Office Memo
148 The Tar on the Roads
150 He Loves to Go A-Wandering
151 A Malediction
152 A Bee
153 Next
154 Jottings from Northern Minsters
155 An Expedition
156 Spade
156 Sunday
157 Elegiac Alternatives
158 Chandlery
158 One Mile Wide
 
The Classical Farm (1987)
161 A Priest in the Sabbath Dawn Addresses His Somnolent Mistress
162 By the Fire
163 Truants
164 The Bell
165 Anatolian Sequence
166 A Winter’s Fancy
168 Traffic
169 Night Moves
170 The Smart Chair
172 In the Glass
172 The Surgery
173 The Smoke
174 Death of Pan
175 Red Nights
176 Home Town
177 Mappa Mundi
178 Talking to David
179 Country Alembic
180 Scenes from a Long Sleep
182 The Guitar
184 The Jar
185 Part of the Rubric
186 Eikon Basilike
188 The Classical Farm
189 The Pierhead
190 The News
191 The Rain
194 Old Farms
195 Glimpsed Among Trees
198 Cider Story
199 A Shop
200 On the Green Phone
202 White
203 A Flyte of Fancy
204 A Man of Letters Recalls an Incident in His Youth
205 Long Distance
206 Events at the Poles
207 The Hailstone
208 Eirenicon
209 The British Museum
210 The Globe
211 What Care We Shew
212 The Barn
213 The Fly
214 Vesperal
215 The Mountain Hare
216 The Northlands
218 The Sleepers
218 Hare’s Run
220 Gillan Spring
222 The Best Translations
223 A Monastery in Georgia
224 The Restoration
 
The Butchers of Hull (1982)
227 That Way Inclined
227 Hermetics
228 The Pub Yard at Skidby
228 The Experts
230 Celebrations
231 During a Storm
232 Running
233 Building the Titanic
233 Geography
234 Back of the House
235 Three Lakes by Humber
236 Strange Ubiquitous History
237 The Butchers of Hull
237 Upstairs
238 The Specialist Heart
239 The Summer Courts
241 A White Wine for Max Ernst
242 The X
243 The Autumn
244 Bard
244 The Nail
245 April
246 Donegal
247 The Sigh
248 A Vernacular Tale
249 Aloft
250 Cemetery
250 The Seventh of April
251 The Drainage
252 The Flowers of Finland
254 Cat Nights
255 A Daft Place
256 In the Dakotas
258 In Britain
259 In Belgium
260 The Web
261 A Civil Garden
262 Two Urns
263 The Library Steps
264 A Book
265 Venery
266 The Residents, 1840
268 A Riddle
269 Roses
260 Clues
270 Saying Goodbye
273 Notes

275 Index of titles and first lines