The Shires

Bedfordshire

A blue bird showing off its undercarriage

En route between our oldest universities

Was observed slightly off-course above Woburn

In the leafy heart of our sleepiest county:

Two cyclists in tandem looked up at the same moment,

Like a busy footnote to its asterisk.

Berkshire

Once on the causeway outside Steventon

I had a vision of living in willing exile,

Of living the knowingly imperfect life

But with a boundless and joyous energy

Like Borodin played by the North Berkshire

Youth Orchestra in its early days.

Buckinghamshire

A goose in the garden of the second-best pub

In Marsh Gibbon was busy doing its dirty toothpaste

And noisy, too, when a woman staggered out

Of the lounge bar into the deserted car-park

Saying: ‘I could never think of the child at my breast

As anything other than a penis with a mouth.’

Cambridgeshire

The bird arrived. Nothing so stately-exciting

As Handel’s dusky queen that was unspooling

Perhaps too loudly from a scribbling student cell,

But looped between the trees, a flash of green:

And only the having chanced to look just there

Could tell you it had ever been away.

Cheshire

There was a young woman of Cheadle, who wore her heart

Upon her sleeve, bright chevron! Oh, the keen-eyed

Men of Cheadle, as in the jealous month

When the registration numbers of new estate cars

Change all over wealthy suburban Cheshire,

And they picked out her heart with a needle.

Cornwall

The very last cat to speak Cornish had a glass eye

And kept a corner shop, selling shoe-laces and bullseyes,

Brasso and Reckitt’s Blue. My great-aunt remembers

Buying postcards from him as a girl,

When George’s profile sped them for a penny.

Aching to talk, he died of pure loneliness.

Cumberland

They play bezique in Threlkeld and they play

For keeps in Shap. And all the shapely clouds

Roll through the streets like weeping chemistry

Or cows escaped. And tea is served in the lounge

Over a jig-saw puzzle of the Princess Elizabeth

Beneath wet panes, wet mountains and wet sky.

Derbyshire

Once upon a time, in Derbyshire’s leaking basement

Where you lie back in boats and quant by walking the ceiling,

A strange girl in the dripping darkness attached

Her damp lips to mine fast, like a snail’s adherence

To cold stone in dusty nettles, and all unseeen

The bluejohn slid by me: yellows, greys and purples.

Devon

You will never forget the fish market at Barnstaple:

Wet gills, double bellies, gleaming scales,

Shells like spilt treasure. And the cream there thicker

Than a virgin’s dream, and Devon’s greatest poet

Born Gay, on Joy Street, taught by Robert Luck:

It is the paradise of all fat poets.

Dorset

When the old woman entered the sea at Charmouth

And the great waves hung over her head like theatre curtains,

I thought of the sibyl who charmed the rocks to yield

Their grainy secrets till history bore down

Upon her and the liquid world was fixed

For ever in the era of the fossils.

Durham

At the end of your battered philosophical quest,

The purity of Durham rises like an exhalation,

Like the stench of sulphur in a barrel. Birds

Build in the walls of the cloisters, disappearing into holes

Like black-robed devotees. Inside it is quiet,

The oatmeal crimping distant in grey air.

Essex

I had a vision in the dead of night

Of all the kitchens of commuters’ Essex

Alight like the heads of snakes; and down them slid

The bored wives and daughters of the managers

Who were at the identical time arriving

On the ladders of their power and fatigue.

Gloucestershire

Armorial memorials reduced

To leper stone, forests to hedges, hedges

To sickled stumps where perch the songless birds

Of Gloucestershire, and vans require the roads

Before them in their headlights. No one speaks

In the time it takes to cross the greenest county.

Hampshire

Driving at evening down the A 34

Like a ski-run, the sun a deiphany,

The car-radio a percussive Russian insistence:

Pure pleasure, pure escape! Past Winchester,

Unseen its stalking scholars, past everything,

Driving through Hampshire, driving for the boats!

Herefordshire

Alone between the Arrow and the Wye,

Wales to the west, keeping its rain and secrets,

I wandered in cider country, where the shade

Beneath the trees is golden red and noisy

With the jealous spite of wasps: Ariconium,

The poet Philips, his long hair combed out!

Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire is full of schoolmasters,

And archaeologists who are part-time poets.

Together they apportion past, present

And future among their imaginary admirers

In the form of examination papers, foul

Drafts, and labels of dubious information.

Huntingdonshire

Herds of deer are moving through the trees

Of Huntingdonshire noisily and rather

Slowly. An idle hand sweeping the lyre

Brings tears to the eyes of the moderately rich.

They will dip their hands in their pockets, gently dip

But not too deep. You’ve got to keep money moving.

Kent

Old men coming up to bowl remember

Other old men who in their turn remembered

Things that were hardly worth remembering

Through long still nights in Ashford, Faversham,

Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells and Westerham

Where even now the fields still smell of beer.

Lancashire

All the oven doors of Lancashire

Swing open on the hour, revealing vast

Puddings. After tea, the lovers stroll,

Their hands in each other’s back trouser pockets,

Feeling the strange swell of the flexing buttock.

The sun sinks, and the Ribble runs to the sea.

Leicestershire

Cheeks of angels, lips compressed, donate

To brass invisible impulsions of

Purely material breath: a county’s children

Gather to create an overture,

While brothers and fathers leaping over hedges

Wind horns to their alternative conclusion.

Lincolnshire

M1, M18, M180: the roads

With their bright and bowline intersections sweep

North to Scunthorpe. Go further if you will

To where the Trent meets the Humber and Lincolnshire ends.

There, at Alkborough, you may draw breath

And if Nicky’s at home she will give you a cup of something.

Middlesex

Middlesex is mostly roundabouts, the bright

Voice of five p.m., insistent infotainment:

Fingers gallop irritably on the steering-wheel;

The nails make little clicks. Down the line

Of fuming stationary Volvos boys bully with headlines

That tell the drivers all about the place they have come from.

Norfolk

Norfolk is somehow inverted: it’s all sky

With clouds as bulky as castrati or lines of Dryden

Sailing out above you, tinged with sunset.

Get as far as you can, but not too far,

Say to the Tuesday Market Place at King’s Lynn

Where all the conveyancing is done in verse.

Northamptonshire

Once half-lost here, when only a map of sounds

Or smells could lead us from a wood, we came

At evening to horse-brass and low-timbered beams

Where the world had evolved to its great public state

And the men and women of Northampton, being counted

And with amber drinks, found themselves to be happy.

Northumberland

Traitors’ county: from one end to the other

You can walk bright-eyed with never a second glance

From a stocky frowning people who move slowly

And mind their own business. For they have seen it all:

When the mist clears over Northumberland

It leaves squat towers, valleys scarred with lead.

Nottinghamshire

There is one red door in one slightly curved

Street in one nameless market town

That contains behind it for a moment an image

Of the planet’s destiny: a girl stooping

To a hallway mirror, making her lips move

Into a theatrical kiss, a self kiss.

Oxfordshire

The kingfisher has long flown. Along the Cherwell

The biscuit of bridge and college wall is blank

Of its image, but with a passing presence

Like a photograph taken with an open shutter.

This, we reflect, is just the sense of our life,

Aware of something the very moment that we miss it.

Rutland

Rutland is large enough for you and me

To stumble into as into a wood without being seen,

To tread its moss-starred carpet, enchanted

By the chipped china of the russulas,

Pink, grey, grey and green-grey, and red,

Peeping beneath the oaks, not far from Oakham.

Shropshire

Shropshire Blue, still made, the Lord be praised,

Tart veins that kept the Romans here and Housman

From the rope. The iron bridges lead you to it,

Farms knee-deep in cow. And if you stop off

In red-earthed Bridgnorth, that vigilant town,

Be sure your pint is not ungraced with cheese.

Somerset

A thousand airy harps! We hardly dare

To let out breath, for our imagination

Responds to these full-throated sounds as though

To the ranks of the ever-delighting dead, our wise

Visionaries, and this is the county of dreams

And of the moon’s occult praesidium.

Staffordshire

Staffordshire is where you almost came from,

Darkened beneath burnt clay, perpetual dusk.

It is the housewife’s dream, twinkling hearths

Bright with Zebo, scrubbed pumice steps

And, in the bathroom, a finger on the nozzle

And little lavender farts to begin the day.

Suffolk

I’ve had Leigh and buried St Edmunds,

Stowed Felix and Market and Upland,

I’ve been shut up in Boxton, found it painful in Akenham

And felt totally stupid in Assingham:

Carrying around one’s valuable despair like a fleece,

To live in Suffolk is to suffocate.

Surrey

Flying in perfect formation above the sleeping

Cul-de-sacs of Surrey, you observe

The blocked pairing of houses, each with a garage,

Like epaulettes. What whisperings behind

The party walls! What eavesdropping, and what

Bad timing! Well done! Sorry, partner! Boom!

Sussex

Chalk pie, a quality of sun like laughter,

Distance predicted in hoof-beats: everywhere here

Is vigilance as well as cruel amusement,

That tempered island quality called sardonic.

From Rye to Selsey Bill, something is on offer,

A glittering spread, the bottom drawer pulled out.

Warwickshire

Driving to Wales I crossed a corner of Warwickshire

That seemed to be hardly space at all, the home

Of Dr Hall and his famous father-in-law

Or of magic woods where lovers were lost and found,

But simply the minutes that it took to tell

An unimportant story, now forgotten.

Westmorland

Once again the skies are open over the whole county:

From Clifton to Burton, from Grasmere to Brough,

The pubtalk steaming with anoraks and orange parkas.

But I can remember one solitary eye

Raging in silence in the dripping marsh,

Its dewy lashes spooning aphids from the air.

Wiltshire

In Wiltshire they are sending extra-terrestrial

Signals: what will the Venusians think of us?

Four-footed creatures who like to move in circles?

Let’s hope they never noisily discover

That we are only half the men they thought us,

Stumbling at tangents from our glimpsed perfection.

Worcestershire

Oh darling, come to Broadway: there we’ll take

Tea and scones and jam made from the plums

Of Pershore, perfect, pitless, palate-pleasing.

A stroll in the model street, a browse at Gavina’s.

Then it’s right foot down in the Volvo, plenty of Scotch

And the largest bed we can find at the Bull in Worcester.

Yorkshire

The brown teapot is always warming here

For there will be a time when you must come home

Though you be unknown except to the flowered dead.

On the moors the diagonal smoke rises

Like a bitter smile, tight but welcoming:

Cousin country, extra places for tea.

Copyright Credit: John Fuller, “The Shires” from Collected Poems, published by Chatto & Windus. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited, http://www.randomhouse.co.uk.

Source: Collected Poems (1996)