They’re trying to hold the shapeof their smiles while wrestling with their darlings who, it seems,would rather be anywhere than planted on their knees: mum and thunderous son,dad clutching daughter, as she flails towards something in flight.The photographer clicks anyway. They’ve made an effort: the knitsare new and ties are properly knotted. Poor parents. These are the cuckoosthey let into their cherished nest.
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.
I painted beaches, seasides, shores or waves dashed on a harbour wall, a mackerel sky, a signature, to peddle to the gullible, until the seasons ran aground with darkly varnished fishing smacks or chalk-white gulls soared to astound the cliffs that threw their shadows back. My friend Proudhon said property was theft and so each rock and shell, each stone turned over by the sea, was never mine to lift or sell; as if I’d stumbled on by chance, light-fingered, dawn’s exuberance, pickpocketing, as morning came, sienna, cobalt, cadmium.
On the yard behind Hanley Fire Station, Jean-Claude from the French manufacturer is servicing the ladder. Bob, the chief mechanic, hands slipped inside navy boiler suit warm on his belly, purses his lips, puffs his cheeks at Jean-Claude spinning in the operator’s seat like a funfair ride, testing the turntable: sending the ladder higher than the drill tower, maxed out; then all sections sliding down, gathered into one again, compact. In the first floor canteen they face one another in silence – Bob knows a spanner and a spindle but can’t do French, Jean-Claude flummoxed by the local cuisine – both relieved they’re almost done, back on their feet, cheers, au revoir.
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.
Had I south Devon’s embattled cliffs, Ablaze with gorse-bloom and salted light, The sand and the schist and the chalk cliffs Of rust and slate and softest white, I would spread the cliffs under your feet: But I, being here, have only ploughed fields; I have spread ploughed fields under your feet; Head south, love; beware the tug of ploughed fields.
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.
The point of the hike was to forget the waveof restructures. Cuts were in favour all season,each team member prepared for transformationagainst a profile, a personal specification. Beyond the M40 underpass, we trod the gaps,those places the towns had not made their own,so we could talk through what matterslike wanting to be outside of ourselves for the day. We thought we knew what the landscape allowed for,assured by the discretion of its valley ear,in the untrammelled grass of a mid-winter.The thickets were not given over, we assumed. Only when we had achieved our aimand our legs ached from switchbacksdid we see a shape. It came over a field, a dotand then, there, only fifty yards away, its red eyesuddenly honed to us, its fervent electric buzz rising.
I paid the fisherman as he passed by, took in my hand this vile monstrosity, a creature murky as its watery haunt, an outsize weevil, or a hydra’s runt; shapeless as shade, and nameless as the Lord. A maw that gaped, and a black stump that bored out through the scales… It snapped at me. God grants a place in his colossal ordinance to these revolting spooks, a world obscured. It snapped at me… We came to blows, we sparred, my fingers fearful of the teeth’s attack: the vendor slipped away behind a rock, vanishing, as it bit me. ‘Go!’ I cried: ‘Bless you, damned creature!
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.
Every day another word slips away I never know it’s gone until I’m lost for it But some days I get one back to roll around my tongue and wonder what exactly it is going to say.
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.
Don’t dare shred me one Tuesday afternoon In a corner of your dismal office, Or spend two minutes of the life you’ve settled for Pondering if I can be recycled in the blue Rather than composted down in the brown. Don’t even think about turning me Into recollected-in-tranquillity, Re-imagined and therefore rubbish poems. If you give her a new name and write A Sequence I swear, I swear I will scream like she did. She loved you, she hated you, For the love of God man up: Burn me in a gaping Victorian grate, Hurl me from the cliff in a hessian bag And make it good enough for Alan Bates or Rickman on Saturday night TV.
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.
The Sacred Heart sister at Sophia Posts me an airmail letter With two sought-after stamps For her twelve year-old collector. Much later, on cassette, She talks of doing a doctorate On etiquette in Edo, Plus a traveller’s guide for the Gaijin. The millennium hosts its moment; A tsunami coasts toward Christmas. She tells me on the telephone Of an essay on Shusako Endo, The convert Catholic novelist, His link an east-west ligature And a job for her jubilee year. Call and response continue From the ’64 Olympics To the karaoke bar She runs with an Irish Jesuit For mystical male alcoholics.
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.