Report on Arrival by Robin Skelton

Report on Arrival

I

They ask me where I was born.

I have no history

but the length of my bones,

and my religion

is the tablet of stone in climbing grass.

They ask me how much I am worth.

In pounds or dollars?

Dollars.

I scrawl dollars upon the sky.

And will I settle here?

Will I ever go back?

The rubber stamp

rolls like a whale on the pad,

and silence waits like a heron.

I can’t go back.

That is why I am here,

why I am breathing.

II

At thirty-seven I make a new start with the sea

and the peeling arbutus by middens of clamshells humped

up near the Reservation. Officers hope

I’m in work,

                 have a place to live,

                                               won’t let Faith down

by raging through roads that are underseas to green

rag-hanging chestnuts and oaks with a bottle or woman

or setting a mountain ablaze.

                                           I will fire a mountain

someday up-country where bears have the masks of people

and whales tunnel down through the seas, and I will call

back,

         (They said “Call us back”),

                                                spinning black charred fingers

round the numbering disk

                                     “Yes, I have settled

nicely,

          pretty well fixed,

                                   yeah, doing fine,

protecting the fire from the green,

the blaze from the cold”.

III

Would you say I was

                               dangerous?

Tell me

soberly under these trees that drag flat fingers

down on the English roses,

                                        Would you answer

I was a dangerous man?

                                    I don’t lie down,

ever,

        without recalling

                                 a woman’s mouth,

a woman’s hands, a woman’s breasts, a woman

mocking the folded roses,

                                       Would you say

now in your letter that I should be given papers,

rights, and freedoms?

                                 Could you ever say

anything safe of this

                               here

                                       where

                                                 grey quail

in wool skirts

                    walk in line

                                     down the sidewalk,

                                     on God Street?

IV

You would rather see photographs?

                    I have photographs

         (taken against the light)

                    of my wife and children

And of a big brown house upon McLaren

        where you think

                    (quite reasonably),

                              that I live,

Having written me there, and

                    getting this answer

        on the right paper,

                                   headed with the right name.

The evidence all points that way.

   There is even a mortgage

      And an insurance policy

                                         which is signed

                    (yes, I admit it)

                             with my name.

                                                   And you

Want photographs of the trees?

                           of the porch?

                           of a sitting

Family smiling?

                        Would rather have that than this

attempt at a genuine map

                                      of an entirely

                different country

                                        where

                           we are all alone?

Robin Skelton, The Hunting Dark (London: André Deutsch, 1971), 9-11.