Poems

He wakes. Alive. No cash. No phone. Down from their ash trees squirrels nose through drink and dope enough to stone a wood’s astonishment of crows. He stirs and gives the crows a scare. Pinned up with lamps, tar paper sky flaps open at a corner where, tipped out of dusk, moths flicker by, skim rings around him, put to flight such stars as steel-capped boots might spark, shake out the red from each tail light before their wings fold into bark; its scabbed and corrugated face that mocks him as, still pissed, he tries to wave down cars or, flailing, chase light vanishing inside cats’ eyes, gone searching for an end, a trick with ampoule, vial or blister pack or, waiting for its twist and click, the white top of a childproof cap.

If I still remember the termsprotasis and apodosisfrom Latin grammar days at school, why can’t I exchange this knowledgewith its minimal relevanceto my subsequent life, in which sentences trot along quite wellunparsed and without their clausesneeding precise designations, for instant access to the namesof acquaintances approaching,all smiles, at social gatherings?

Not regret at what could have been said              but regret, half way down, at what was said  (… this will be called the fifth tread of ten). Not only regret at what was said but that it was said before it knew it was said (… this will be called the sixth tread of ten). Not only regret at what had been said but that it will cause other things to be said by way of reprisal for what was said and by way of knowing will be said again and so much regret is a foot mid-stride on what will be called the tenth tread of ten.

Enough to walk –  enough to walk, untied enough to move together side- by-side, to let the words occur to let the world occur around. Scrap  the table in between, the stare and all  it means, enough to brush a shoulder, let a misstep cause two hips to touch.  Enough a glance, a glancing off at what a plane can teach, what  might be learnt from an edge.

When he was a young reporter, writing  for the Straits Times on the Korean War,  my brother-in-law was based in Japan. His girlfriend, Itsuko by name, taught him  certain refinements concerning hygiene  that had not been part of his upbringing: for example, to dry between his toes. Sometimes I embarrass friends by asking  if they include this in their own routine – although that implies a further question:  do they, in the first place, wash between them?  Apparently not everybody does.

Under the lamp of childhood, the atlas of the world is open to the man: his fingers travel continents, stroke the blue seas, cross their blood red lines to America — to that inevitable page, with circles where his father had set down his whisky glass on the Nebraska plain, with pencilled names of strangers and train times: the whole damn Western in which the hero flees, reduced to its director’s scribbled notes of a young man on a train, hurrying to some future from an unforgiving past.

How much space was it really taking upat the back of the garage? Flipped open,on the lid’s underside, a handsawand a brass-backed tenon saw held fastby swivel pegs; two shallow box drawers with gimlets, awls, that yellow cylindrical tinfor the bricklaying plumb line, slid apartto get at the bigger stuff, any old howat the bottom: chisels, the brace and its bits,that rod like a devil’s tail – the soldering iron.Hand tools for absolute precision.Nothing electrical. Grandad’s kit,that had skipped my father, hardly neededby me in the city, that top floor flat,so I drove them to the auction place.No more lugging around, making space.Never sell your tools, he always said.

Campus trees, grown tall, shadow this forgotten place. In one small room, The Birds of Europe rage, awaiting Judgement’s storm and fire. That day, released from their engraver’s burning cage, red breast, white wing, gold eye will light the dust-grey shelves, as each one flees through broken windows, hinge-sagging doors, to settle, call and sing in the unlettered trees.

for Wendy So time, for one of us, will carry onin chilly rooms where either you or mewill linger for a while after we’ve gonein silences on worn upholstery,in orange paperbacks we’ll never readby crooked lamps, the shadows they still thrownow falling where, for once, we’d both agreedthe lucky one would be the first to goand in their rush, perhaps, leave keys and coat,a just popped out, back soon that comes unstuckto curl up in a yellow Post-it notewith two small kisses clinging on for luckand, trembling on the fridge, collecting fluff,the love for which there’s never time enough.

For three days now it has been possiblereading the letters and looking at photographs,to tell myself there is no differencebetween this and your just being somewhere else. I’ve been philosophising like a foolsupposed resemblances, absence apart:memory, other minds and the rest of it.Nothing resembles the fact that you are not. Rarely knowing what I’d come up with nextor how it would turn out, I never didsee how you always got there first- and lessby dint of progress than by standing still. Tonight we’re having our first conversationsince you died. It proceeds, as usualbut minus the element of surprise – the elementthat was you. Have I caught up at last?

The shepherds are on quad bikes. They wear Adidas and drink Black Sheep.  Still, only they know the tenderness of hills:   fleecy skies, the shiver of gorse; empty lanes  and the prayer of a winter dawn. Their angels  are on Instagram; their psalms are by Dave.  They dream of glad tidings: Lotto numbers  daubed in red, while lifting lambs like trophies.  They’ve lost count of the sleepless nights:  ice on the cattle grids, lost ewes, and a moon  herding clouds into the fold of the horizon.  Few follow the crowd, but wait for a miracle;  like finding, at the back of a cave, a cache of  stolen iPhones bundled like the Dead Sea Scrolls.