Brick Wall

for Roy Fisher

‘They’ve no news. 

They infest the brickwork.’

A Furnace

Dear Roy, that day

you came to read, and stayed sitting

by our pond’s low wall,

composed, considering, I seemed to hear

the long haul

weighting each word, the footslog in it,

driven so far

beyond your first, original reserve--

like hearing the quicks

of grass harrowed, deep in the earth.

Dear poet of walls--

man-made, high-baked, from Tigris, Jericho,

Mohenjo-daro,

from Roman to redbrick (pissed-on, spray-canned,

scrawled by kids

with immortal longings), walls blocking

easy views beyond--

how that ‘Dead acoustic. Dead space’

seems an order to listen.

Ordinary, oblivious, walls are soundings too.

Are you there, Roy?

where first I met you, in the walls of a poem

so close-up to nowhere

with its shadowy depressions, mortared holes,

reticulated lines

of squared-up pieces precisely arranged,

and no conclusions

but just to take our improvisatory

tastes by surprise.

Are you there? among all the manifest departings,

sightings inferred

where, for hiding, see? the dead might transfer.

Ghosted to earthworks, 

or pearled like tiny nodes of rain, 

sucked like damp 

into patinas of brick dust, whitish crystals, 

they’re a passing stare 

unremarking, or a thought’s rebound 

from nothing except 

the clay’s absorbent afternoon warm. 

Now you’ve gone 

where the poor of Birmingham, the luckless, the bombed, 

the anonymous-forgotten 

linger in the shady brick-work of your words. 

Those serviceable blocks 

marked by vanishings, arrested absences, 

stored with the form- 

lessness of forms, retain the force-lines 

of lives long lost. 

Some patched with lichen, topped with stonecrop, 

old walls still open 

a way, a near-view blank and prospect 

of shifting souls-- 

those invisible drifters, apparent as day, 

Now you’ve joined them, 

in the bricky exactness of a thing that remains 

immutable, finished, 

fired for cladding, impassably proof. 

Roy, you’re for reading now-- 

poems beyond sounding what we think we know. 

First published One, Two (Carcanet 2021)

Angela Leighton taught for many years at the University of Hull and first met Roy Fisher there. She has written widely on 19th-21st century literature, including On Form (Oxford, 2007) with a chapter on Roy Fisher, and Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Harvard, 2018).  Her own six volumes of poetry include Spills (2016), which contains a prose memoir of her musical and Italian background, One, Two (2021),and most recently, Something, I Forget (2023), all with Carcanet.     

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