Poems

Her frail breath calls through the quickening hours:‘My body is broken, make up my bed,a deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers, feathers and flickers beyond human powersand cram it with anguish when I am dead.’Her frail breath calls through the quickening hours: ‘Furnish with letters, my Saint Christopher’smedal, an unleavened morsel of bread,a deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers.’ A creature of proud civility cowers.The elegant brain has ruptured and bled.Her frail breath calls through the quickening hours: ‘Is life a race of unmerciful hoursto capture with toil, with furious dread,a deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers?’ A reedling weaves space from whispering towers:a grail for white eggs, for wings of soft red.

Sectioned, I was sent to the Cicada Lunatic Asylum. Doctor Coppola signed the papers. His patients, he explained, were beleaguered by obsessions. Hence the cicadas which colonised the trees in the great courtyard. We were encouraged to adore them. This was Doctor Coppola’s radical way of defying insanity, he was known across Europe. It wasn’t easy at first. Sbagliando si impara. Practice makes perfect. Imagine locked wards of relatively decent people flapping their tongues. Even the cicadas thought we were cicadas. Saturdays Doctor Coppola conducted his monomaniacal troupe from the gazebo. People came from Spoleto: wooden benches, jugs of wine, hand-rolled cigarettes. Bravissimo! Bravissimo!

This is not you because you don’t work anymore. Hands that once caused crowds to roar in derby matches – flicking balls like flies over the bar – now struggle with a fork. That chest which swelled to face the cavalry stampede of strikers groans at all the air still left in the world. Legs which booted the ball miles behind enemy lines now buckle like wiry twigs. We sit in the car listening to the sea and the football results. Bolton wanted you once. You could have played in the Matthews final but you stayed behind because of the girl. Old enough to kick you taught me the goalie’s trade – dragging lines in the grass with your boot to show where the posts were. Making your body big. Yours has shrunk.

(after Heine) I saw the elves in the wood last night, riding in the light of the moon; I heard their little horns ring out, their bony bells’ portentous tune. They spurred past me as swift as thought on mice whose antlers shone like gold; those steeds flew silently as swans, wild swans that range the southern cold. Their queen nodded as she went by, nodded and smiled (I held my breath). Did that strange smile mean my new love, or did that smile betoken death?

Split apart with a thumbnailits two leaves open: brushed mild steel,cool in your palm, symmetrical. Allow a finger to settlein any of the countersunk screw holes –the natural comfort of cupping. The definite edges of each leafwill be bedded one day flushin the door’s back edge and the jamb. This is where the work is done,effortlessly transportingthe weight of the door.

Craned onto the site from a truck  the ten-by-ten corrugated steel cube,  our paint shop. Nothing for sale  but a magnet for kids: bricked,  scorched, clambered upon, adorned  Stoke, Vale, obscenities from spray cans.  Inside the door, an Alsatian’s head   in sagging red gloss welcomes you to a throat-seizing reek of turps,  linseed and propane. Bowed shelving  to the left and right and straight ahead  an old door on two empty tea chests – our prep bench – strewn with rock-hard rags, clogged wire brushes, clotted stir sticks. Underneath two five-gallon drums of gunk,  and the piss can.

At the front of second-hand books,reminders of ones I’ve writtenor received myself. Dead-end cluesto lives that might have changed or stopped,birthdays or anniversaries,dates that exhausted all meaningsand slipped back into calendars. In a dingy, ramshackle shop,I stand in the aisle and read them,imagine their faces and plots.It’s time to take them home with meand give their books new life, and hopethis copy of my collectionis as lucky when its turn comes.

The first, essential task: repudiate your parents. Reject their values and advice. Make clear they have no right to legislate.   There will be rows, of course, but that’s the price.  The later task: reject the youthful you. Remove the smirk from that conceited face. It may take tens of years to see this through.  Slow and painful, like shedding a carapace. The final, urgent task: repudiate the first repudiation. Try to mend the damage that you wrought. If not too late. Assuming they’re still there to re-befriend.

and where yesterday I lay broiling in the vat of my bedroom  today a sneaky little breeze tickles my soles — Coo-ee! Only me!  shifty at first but soon breeze picks up speed with What — did you think I was gone for good? That me and my three ‘e’s had  danced our final conga around your curtains and hightailed it  out of the element once and for all? Finita la commedia?  Leaving you with only the hot, hot heat to tan your hide?  My God, you’re a tragedian. I bet you spent the whole 48 hour heatwave being Blanche Dubois around the place, fainting  and drawing cold baths. Don’t tell me. I bet you were writing poetry.  Oh God, you were. Oh you have to have your psychodrama, don’t you?

I skate because the streets are made of ice, because I have to learn, I skate because the river’s hard and green, because the birds are crows or magpies but could be vultures overhead and in the trees, I skate because the men are home from hunting with just one fox across a shoulder, because their sticks are raised and keen, their dogs are slouched at heel, I skate because I’m not aware they’re there, because the trees are leafless, naked, their darknesses exposed, I skate because the men around the fire outside the pub have nowhere else to go, I skate because I am a girl and have no running shoes, because the women are knee-deep in freezing water, because the white peaks are so very far away, I skate because a man has.

Our liege Of jewelled gravity Set free Has roped the breeze And saddled him To ride through winter’s mind, Inconstant spring, All summer’s Fabergé, To find a season Greenest green, Demesne Past altering.