The Dark Passages
Katrina Porteous
These fragments began as part of Book
of the North, a collaboration between a number of North
east writers and artists. In particular, they were inspired by
the North Pennine lead-mining landscape of Alan Smith's canvases,
and were intended to link in some subterranean way with Sean
O'Brien's Drowned Book. They were subsequently taken up by
composer Keith Morris, to form the first
section of a sequence for the Bigwords concert in the Live
Theatre, Newcastle.
I had originally wanted to write something that was not simply a
poem to be presented on the computer, but one which was written
for the computer, as a composer might write for a particular
instrument. I wanted to explore what this particular technology
would allow me to do, that other media would not.
One of the technology's interesting features seems to me its many
layers, which allow a text to be non-linear, or for the reader to
choose his or her own route through it. I see an analogy in this
to the movement of a poem, which is also often non-linear, like a
dance or a maze. The challenge for the author is to maintain
structure, form and meaning while allowing the reader freedom to
begin and end, to enter and leave the maze, where he wishes.
Here, however, the fragments are presented as straightforward
text.
The over-riding metaphor linking this sequence is geological. The
collection of fragments is structured in blocks and layers like
the sedimentary rock that dominates the landscapes of the North
East. A multiplicity of routes runs through it like tunnels --
the man-made and natural limestone passages of Northumberland and
Durham's coal and lead mines, potholes and sea caves.
The fragments are intended to guide the reader through various
layers of time: from the massive scale of geological time,
through historical and cultural time, to personal memory: and
underground odyssey through things remembered and forgotten.
The Dark Passages
Out of the space at Nothing's heart
North and South were wrenched apart.
Out in the dark, the farthest stars
Stamp their braille that no one reads:
A message sent and not received.
I said to the stars:
What is written
Down in the dark,
In the dark passages?
In the ear the waves of sound
Roll like breakers up the sand
From the time when time began.
The singing grass and the aching sky
Are waves that break upon the eye.
There are rocks and there are rivers
But at last
All rocks are rivers.
In the book of sperm and blood
Are written the recipes of the dead.
The equivocation of the north
Records the story of the earth.
Sedimentary
This is a layered landscape,
Scarred
And heaved wide open to reveal
Its inmost part,
The cumulative quick of its
Recording heart.
Tumultuous and barren,
It lies hacked
Or hollowed; age on age
Its history stacked
In horizontal bands of grey and ochre,
Cracked
By deep descending fissures
Reaching down
Into the crunch of dense
Compacted stone,
The graveyard of lost continents
Remade as one.
Here, ferns and forests, and inhabitants of oceans,
Dumb and blind,
Have found themselves unstrung, and slowly
Redefined
As grit beneath the fingertips.
Through time,
The dust of distant planets
Knits in scars
With all the creeping, quivering things
That seed and spark
And tremble on the edge of life like the
Remotest stars.
I said to the stars:
What is written
Down in the dark,
In the dark passages?
Song of the Dead Men
We are the Deed Men, drillin' the foreheed,
Brekkin' the deed grund, drivin' the levels.
Brae the mell an' torn a quatter.
Brae mell. Brae.
Winnin' the hard grund, we are the Deed Men
Blastin' black poother, breathin' the stour in.
Brae the mell an' torn a quatter.
Brae mell. Brae.
We are the Deed Men, drivin' the levels,
Spar t' the dump an' bowse t' the kibbles.
Brae the mell an' torn a quatter.
Brae mell. Brae.
Deed grund won, lads, breathin' black stour in.
Hard life, hard deeth. We are the Deed Men.
Brae the mell an' torn a quatter.
Brae, brae, brae.
Song of the Bowse
Forst t' the knockstone t' brae us b' hand,
Then t' rollers t' crush us t' sand.
Next Aah'll be seived on the trammel for fines,
Then t' the hotchin' tub -- jig oot the slimes.
The sludge i' the buddle is weshed b' the born
An' as smiddam Aah'll bleeze i' the mill fires the morn'.
There are rocks and there are rivers
But at last
All rocks are rivers.
The Smiddy Widow
Let the rock sweat its drops of lead,
Let them sink through the cinders;
Let a blast from the bellows fire his face blood-red;
Let the heat skin his eyes, sting his cheeks; let him choke
On the brimstone stink as he rakes through the slag.
What pools in the sumpter stiffens in the pigs.
What is scraped from the chimney settles in the blood.
It's a sky-high price, this almost-irredeemable
Mineral purity, this slippery, equivocal
Melt of rock and flux of lead.
It's a hex. It's a curse. It's some other hand's work,
What fires wrought, gasping through cracks in the thin earth.
The Living
Believe me, it is not the dead who haunt us.
It is the living, with their otherwise, elsewhere lives
That go on without us;
Who every morning decide what shirt to put on,
And every evening, whether it should be carrots or peas;
Whose days stretch out at the end of a wire that every hour
defies us to touch it;
Who mourn and are afraid in unknown arms, and celebrate
With unknown symphonies, and whisper
Love in unknown ears; whose lives
Keep ramifying like the cow parsley in the hedgerows,
Like the brambles in the black earth, pushing shoots where you
least expect them,
Making the histories different from what you remember;
For what is remembered and what is imagined within your own
borders
Becomes the unreclaimable country neither will enter
Ever again.
And yet
Why in their absence are they more present than ever?
It is their laughter that wakes us from sleep.
It is their trembling that chills us like knives.
Sometimes the smell of them enters the room.
Chance, it says. Accident. A stray thought. A whim.
And you banish them. Then
Their indifference becomes a glittering sea,
As if, by their going on living without us,
They had turned us into the dead, who watch over them, helpless,
Out of reach, out of call, on the shore, while their small boats
surrender
To the thunderous roll of an ocean that takes them,
For good or for ill, but forever, beyond us,
All the time snatching them further and further away
Towards a horizon also unknown to us.
Katrina Porteous is an award-winning poet based in Northumberland. Much of the work in her first collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe 1996), deals with the fishing community of this area. She has recently enjoyed poetry residencies in Cornwall and the Shetland Islands, and earlier this year was a guest at the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada USA. Her work has been featured on BBC Radio's Finelines, Stanza and Woman's Hour.
Her work is also featured in The Poet's Calendar.
