From Middlesbrough to Saltburn past Coatham Marshes
as early winter comes sweeping in today from Siberia.
Restless snow flurries start to obscure looming shapes –
the final historical remains of ironworks, steel mills,
stranded black locomotives that pulled the smelt in pigs
from weary morning to never-dark childhood night,
to be converted into steel that still spans the globe.
Abandoned buildings, that still spew out smoke
in my attic-stored adolescent sketch books,
haunt the eye like shells of bombed cathedrals.
This was all marshland once; hidden slag-heaps
lie under grass covered bumps lining the sides
of trickling inlets of the Tees with its metal cranes:
intricate insect totems poke their heads at the North Sea.
Giant deer, elk and other ancient mammal bones
dissolved into this bleak beauty by the estuary:
through whirling flakes you can see them still.
Easy too, to see the Conqueror lost in fog here
only a few feet away from Northern swords
sending Norman soldiers to their long grave
but the thick sea mist that cut him off saved his neck:
no resistance then could stop the North’s razing
and now no entreaty too could save the Salamander
in the lone blast furnace: the fiery heart – last survivor
of the hundreds that lined the river banks an age ago,
making this the land of dragons with satsuma skies
welcoming the Welshmen who came to Eston mines,
recent death by neglect the final chapter of the onslaught
begun back then by the blunt headed warrior king
they cared to name our next Prince of Wales after.
	
I finger my faded neck scar where the tumour was
and meditate upon the random nature of survival
of peoples, of kings, of dreams, of fragments of memory
and this train becomes another one over a decade ago.
Window blur of winter bleak and re-hashed history
takes me back to the vistas from the Siberian train
when, in silent moments I looked into endless forest
passing by in flashes of Autumn gold and silver birch:
felt cold fear that stretched back beyond our time,
conjured up the masses transported past those trees,
and compromised poets punished for incorrect lines
looking over the steppes to the edge of the forest,
looking for the Baba Yaga’s chicken legged house –
oh to be caught in it running away into the pines!
Hungry skinny witches preferred to slow gulags.
You slowly revolve what sent you there: chance chain
ricochet from London heartbreak to the shores of Suomi
to the Far North and windswept steppes and the shaman
of the Khanty who told us the hour of the wolf is at hand.
At Helsinki station at the trip’s outset I knew nothing
of the tribes of the North, just chancing it on instinct
that something there would stitch the wound I‘d been
worrying at for years, some vision would restore me
beyond the state of defiant ursine roaring to calm.

In Turku I ate karhunliha, the flesh of my familiar:
bumbled and stumbled like a half mad circus bruin
sleeping down in the cellar of my old friend’s house,
drank through panic attacks, began to meet the cast
of the northbound trip, that endless locomotive hurtling.
I wildly fancied eating bear in a restaurant would fix
the holes of broken relationships, years of wandering,
constant weeks of separation from my young child,
and it seemed that the soothing salve of friendship too
had brought me back to some innocence, some seeing
that happened at that moment the ice broke on the
Aurajoki that Easter morning and the black icy lump
broke inside me, but the healing was incomplete:
I could not make love my own season though spring
sent me the unearned gift of a welcoming girl, the dark of
the market town, the weight of the past, unquenchable thirst,
kept me stumbling full of appetite and rage, making every
offer of a home like the tormenting doors of a cage.

So when once upon a summertime’s third day’s drinking
in mid-festival floating with minds beautiful and far away,
a lost poet with flowing hair offered to take me to Siberia
for Fenn-Ugrian congress of course I growled an affirmative.
In this little hometown train carriage I ponder my choices
wonder if it was random chance or some norn-woven web
that always said solid blonde Kalle and wild wanderer Esa
were meant to be the poles at the extremes of my journey;
the three of us surrounded by the other travelling writers
a triangular conundrum in a circle at the centre of a puzzle
I’m still seeking to solve, wild men, clown seers, holy fools
the drinkers of fire and milk, salt sucker truth seekers
suspended but still moving in the eye of Blake’s eternity
in the land of strong vodka, white tigers and great bears.
The marsh here, nestled between the busy road to Redcar
And the murdered furnace, contains its own totems:
the swan, the frog, the hunched monkish grey heron,
the blizzard obscures them but they are memory-solid
and are eternal as they are short-lived. The dark tower
in the distance once held that precious fire breather,
the molten core beast that needed constant feeding
as sharp beaks of vicious speculators hovered above:
as deadly as the heron with about as much compassion.
It was the last of its kind and the people here know it.

We are all proud of the Dorman Long signs on tracks,
girders and bridges studied on travels, that confirm for us
that these towns have made their mark though we know
too well that blood and sacrifice paid for our identity tags:
legends of fallen lads pushed down into the furnace smelt
by their own grim fathers to end their molten sufferings,
400 men and boys crushed and broken in our mines,
with their cathedral height shafts and heavy rock falls.
Who are we now without our steel? Nationalist graffiti
sprayed on house walls and the distant flag of St George
planted at the top of the iron drained hills in a game
of put-up-to-be-taken-down, put-up-again-to-be-taken-down,
begs the question of where we came from in these towns.
Long ago there was only a line of small villages here
in swampy grass filled bogland with a coast of giant cliffs,
after bronze age tribes and millennia of small farms
raided and settled by viking invaders who left their
legacy in names of places that Danish visitors recognise,
and some hidden in transformations: from Odin’s Berg
to Roseberry Topping, sacrificial mound to summer idyll,
the ferric seam magnetised them: haphazard pilgrims
Celts and Saxons, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scots and Geordies
Yorkshire folk, Norfolk exiles, Christian, Sikh, Jew and Muslim.

Where are the tribes of Siberia’s far north now I wonder
as the industries that spawned us here have taken away
and destroyed their own sacred lands, brought strangers
desperate for some work to outnumber them by the million,
whilst we dolefully mourn work’s gradual withdrawal here,
count the cost in benefits and workless agony of dead fires?
Can it be what sustained us for so long has destroyed them?
The stock still grey heron’s growing too big in my mind’s eye
I don’t want to think of the sinister totem birds of Den Haag
that haunted me horrendously after the death of my mother,
and flapped towards me again as I waited for the removal
of the ominous neck lump I sensed must be a malignancy,
and spread its wings over our marriage bed as seas raged
down the winter sea front outside our Amber Street window.
It’s much better to think of what was survived once long ago;
more than ten years gone since we rioted north before the snow,
a comic book version of Kalevala with an extra clown in tow.

That night you threw dice that came up Khanty Mansisk
You’d been drinking away the days with Esa Hirvonen,
pondering the significance of his name: why would
Jesus of the Elk have been sent to you as a compadre
if you weren’t meant to see something in the wilds?
Why had you met Kalle the storyteller outside the Alko
that time if you weren’t meant to need his rocky strength
and his absurd wit to temper your wild flights of fancy?
You didn’t know one day you’d be godfather to his child –
but predestination is not a belief I can easily sign up to.
There is only the present, I chanted as the waves rolled
that day when I got the diagnosis of three death spots,
dark multiple headed dragon I foresaw and faced down
with a grizzly roar during a meditation spirit vision,
all that matters is how we handle this coming wave:
that one now – breaking loud on the Cleveland coast –
the one you throat-sing as it breaks into surf for the shore.
Joe Strummer was right I hoped, the future is unwritten,
physics tells us there is no future in the now, just futures,
moved to by accident or design: I could have disembarked
after all in Petersburg or Moscow and stayed there for good
could have opted not to go to see my doctor in time,
ignored my wife’s concerns and let the lump further ripen,
found out the true meaning of that beautiful word metastasis,
could have backed out of Ville’s offer made down the phone
I could have been Billy Liar and stayed unsafe at home;
(That film made as many choices as On the Road for me
I’d never be the one to turn down the trip with Julie Christie.)
My heads packed full of this stuff: on a red brick estate
it’s all you can build your eventual escape routes from;
the lucky detritus of art and culture fallen from the table,
just enough inspiration to keep going, to see it through –
the loneliness of the long distance poet, Sisu in Finnish
tempered by poetry, comedy, punk, flashy shards of rock’n’roll.