Sir Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia or Urne Buriall, 1658

This seems a good time to be thinking about elegies. My mother died in 2011. I was in Romania. Strangely, that day I'd gone to a graveyard I'd visited several years before. I wanted to check a quotation I thought I remembered from one of the tombstones in the German cementary in Sighisoara, birthplace of Count Dracula. When I arrived back in Borsec, the dilapidated Transylvanian village where I was staying on a writing residency, I heard about my mother's death.

Since then I've been working on and off on Elemental, a collection of poems that starts with my mother's death, and moves on to consider loss more generally. In Borsec, I'd been working on the Hotel Transylvania sequence which plays variations on the sonnet in tighter or looser ways, and which became part of the Pilgrim Tongues book featured elsewhere on the website.

Here the opening poem of Elemental echoes the sonnet form to build a longer sequence.

Remains

In Transylvania when I got that call
– had been that day to Sighisoara, drawn
to that famous undead batman’s place of birth.

Think: the Saxon cemetery high up the hill.
Carved gothically upon one stone, I’d seen
Ruhen in fremder Erde! Written it down.

Lie still in foreign soil – but you never can:
(stone blunts, moss overwrites your name)
the earth remains cold and strange.

As do you. Whoever you were, laid low
in the lie of the land, you are now (whatever now might mean)
your own remains – Just let the world, its weather,

drain right through your tongue, your ribs,
whatever stubbornly persists of you.

*

The happy event: floral hats like cake-stands;
the glint of trombone, trumpet, the tubby tuba
– you can almost hear the brass band’s oompah-pah –

the frothy ’taches, the marquee’s foaming pints.
The heads thrown back to aim a laugh at the cloudless sky,
so happy and huge you almost hear it being snapped.

Meanwhile the ragamuffins scarper from the bobby.
Can you hear the hobnails clacking cobbles,
taunts hanging in the echoing alley? Smudge-faced girls

squealing in grubby smocks, their curls in cables?
Far harder to hear these umbrellaed gatherings of crow
-black coats which fall to skirt their booted ankles.

Can’t read their widowed faces. Tight-lipped or veiled:
darknesses balanced on isosceles triangles.

5.ROTARY

Bishops, Vice-Chancellors, Lord Mayors, Privy Councillors,
snug with the certainty of fobs and gold watches,
oil-painted into morocco-bound gilt-edged corners,
warming their robes and chains of high office.

Or barrel-chested by awaiting carriages;
posed on the lawn, sealing the good marriage,
the beribboned children are already pale and fading,
beside the solid house that is no more.

The servants fled and the mansions humbled.
The gables gone and the chimneys tumbled.

The pediments and architraves,
cornices and swaggering stone, cut down to size;
the steeples, and all that rose high razed;
towers sinking into the ground like grave.

6. STREET FURNITURE

The proliferating signage of eight-till-late:
forget the bank’s brass-plated earnest door.
It’s all Wetherspoon’s, Oxfam, pound-shop pop-up, nail-bar,
Barnardo’s, Polsky Sklep, convenience store.

The Workhouse has been put to idleness;
Business has parked itself just out of town,
the library’s in the low-rise leisure centre
where work’s the sweaty penance paid for pleasure.

Those who settled long ago are gone,
they’ve left some standing, mainly fallen, stones,
but mostly it’s just the barely decipherable mound:

earth’s belly, oddly swollen with gods and bones.
With nothing more to live up to, they’ve finally found
their level. It suits them down to the ground.

His champagne cork comes with old photographs:
here, the town is up for a christening-party
where the shipyard echoes arch and nave, and churchy
buttresses fly from blueprint to rivetted ribs
to the last few spars and stays that corset the ship.

All Sunday best: beneath the slipway slats,
frocks and feathers. “Back then, we all wore hats.”
Daughters, mothers whose babies skippered the bridges
of prams on bobbing high chassis seas, cheeks tweaked
by whiskery uncles flushed with hip-flask whisky.

Snug in its little wooden box, this cork
(he presented its twin to the owner’s wife)
recalls the sleek green bomb cradled in straw.
First job: to mitre these joints; then tasked to score
the glass, ensure the bottle smashed on cue.

The photographer ducked inside black cloth. Flash!
– to catch it all as chocks were sledged out clear
and light rhymed back from the bottle’s brilliant smash.
You can almost see that crowd’s huge cheer
still hanging in the magnesium-bright air.

A greased creak as tons begin to edge.
All that hammered noise and work now eases:
foam-born, slides sideways over wood and tallow.
Lolls, lurches. Booms. Heaves a wave to throw
blunt weight around. Wades in, bullying shallows.

The river recoils, shivers back over shore.
Sky whitens. The crowd’s a stumbling blur.
That side is screams and shouts. This side’s a roar.
Girls clutch at skirts, raise hems to run or squeal:
eels slither through the grass, squirm at their heels.

Back-wash. The hull is rocked as displaced
volumes shoulder back, the weighty chug
slows to a lap; waltzing into a sort of grace,
she settles to a broad-beamed dignity
– “Long gone... They shut up shop in ’63.”

Outside, the day itself now sheds some dark
on those lively long-dead celebrants, their work.
Traffic at the lights for the single-track bridge;
before the Saturday big-shop Tesco trip,
just here, the dump, the bottle bank, the skips.

Below, the river: a duck or two, a swan;
styrofoam crumbs, a freshly-painted narrowboat;
a rusty hull, skewed into a bed of reeds;
a plastic medusa ghosting the algal green,
bagged rainbows smudged around an oily skein.