A restaurant paper placemat is the best place to compose a poem. There’s nothing venerable about the surface, slightly rough, perhaps a stain of sauce or tea. You can try yourself out on a paper placemat, not take things so seriously. Thoughts fill the squares and dimples while a meal fills the stomach. The pen flows like a good wine – with any luck you’ll stagger home tonight, fumble, swear, fail to fit the key.
I’m convinced he would like a quiet wife. One who would sit on her chair and eat granola and sip carrot juice wearing a ring on only her wedding finger. How peaceful to be concerned by nothing more than juice, dried fruits and nuts, and natural yoghurt! The mind like a quiet seed in the dark. How irritating, the small explosion of a green shoot breaking into life. No. He’d have nothing like that. Just a quiet wife on her chair eating granola, sipping juice, her lips turning orange.
We all need to someone to watch our back, says the man on TV. Yours hunches at the wheel as we sail through vineyards dense with straining vines. Our cases bulge and scrape as we lift them from the boot. You’ve drawn the short straw – the orange one with a dodgy wheel, a missing handle. You exhale stiffly. Airborne, you stretch across an empty seat; I stroke you, neck to coccyx. The taxi driver has a back sprain so we haul our cases in, and out: 25 kilos each, according to the airport scales. Your body’s silky as I spoon you in a Travelodge, your spine between my breasts, against my belly, encased between our bodies like a silver chain between two squares of cotton.
Half through his third bottle of red, he took the keys to the gun cabinet, unlocked it, loaded a rifle, stepped out into the garden, wet grass beneath his feet, breath cloud- plumed in cold air, scanned the organic darkness above, sighted a target, fired, then swung his gun around the night sky, aimed again, fired. The stars impervious, gazed down upon him, as shots sang out.
I waited and I saw a bird go winging slow across the sky how slow it flew I couldn’t know how slow because it was so high the sky more pointless than the sea where there are rocks and there is land through which a being flying slow as far as I could understand would neither notice me nor know that I was watching here below the wingbeat steady as a man who still has miles and miles to go >.
under the arch of the Shiraz Palace round to the kitchen tradesman’s entrance young girl walks in her long loose trousers early perhaps for the evening rota does a little shimmy in her long loose body nobody near her nobody watching.
for A.J. and N.C. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar… cheap joke, how it began one ancient evening on the lash in Leeds. Three likely lads, fresh from writing degrees, thinking they knew it all and next to nowt at once, as if the margins of hope and doubt were clear as the angles on the pool table they’d gathered round. Watch them now, unable to imagine, as youth will, what’s up ahead, each smoothly potting the yellows or reds in the backroom of a pub’s smoky haze. You want to tell them these are the best days, aren’t they, but this is only a memory, now the baize is cleared for one final whisky.
Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change... Down there the fathom worker Cleans a universe of sand, Whitening bones, blurring wood With weed and merhair strands Our assiduous, unfailing tide Washing the island away And flooding Prospero’s cove. Now all who were shore-born Will leave in their boats. ‘Good sea’ Will be their greeting, temper Of the moon their government. Into the water they ease the old To look for ancestry bleached In grave-pools, anenome men.
They’ve taken down the trees round Keeper’s Pool. The water’s lifeless, bright and calm, the only creatures left are two white swans, their nest a circled heap of twigs and litter a few yards from a park bench looking at the view – the golf-course, flagged and sweatered. Forever symbols in some poem; what these swans are is what they do. They have no thought or use for us, their watchers, or for the men more distant in the fine spring rain dragging their clubs across the green.
You told me that you’d read, And were struck by That night in bed, A sermon on the naked limbs that lie Inside your soul, And as you told me so, Our youngest son, whose loud voice cried, rushed Usurpingly to climb Inside our sheets and quilt, with soaked pyjamas &n.
Her grief is like the shadow play of bones snapped in an old X-ray unsleeved to show what love had done to her and her bright skeleton. Lit up, half-cut, she starts to flag still clutching her green shopping bag of gin and ashes as she weaves through deep, midge-haunted silences exhausted to this break of trees where, in its pop-up sepulchre, the moon, as if consoling her, unearths a white owl’s requiem for her ripped dress, its unstitched hem come loose, as she herself has come bare-legged and torn to scatter him.
‘To arrive at the place you know not, you must go by the way you know not.’ – St. John of the Cross How many times the bloody GPS led us astray. It pointed us down stairs, over a cliff, into a pathless field barbed-wire barred and pocked with curious cows. Castel Gandolfo, where Pope Benedict lives out retirement from the Papacy, was a particular disaster when Ms. Garmin found a street of the same name in a completely different town. And how we found Pienza, only Jesus knows. Still it’s in Italy, and here we are, photographed sipping Strega in a bar, lamps lighting up the narrow cobbled street where soft rain falls and happy lovers meet.
Neutral as a wheel it is not culpable for what it picks up. Shock jocks, phone-in bigots, ministerial lies and bleating celebs. A cup cannot be blamed for what fills it. No judgment. No fear of offence just submission to whatever is snatched out of the air by chameleon range be it war, corruption, famine, peace, tsunamis, laughter, conferences, anger or simply a brilliant new tune hooking you from the depths.
The gardens are in bloom your mother loved. A jazz trumpet blares – ‘Stormy Weather’ – to a girl spread with her laptop on the grass. Delinquent for a day, you came to catch the last of summer on these paths or the bank grown perilous with out-of-control, knotted weeds, where your father fished at weekends, where, midweek, only tourists stroll and the river-god, Old Father Thames, cuckoo-spit shining in his beard, is unfazed by the pleasure-boat’s farting horn. How they clung here by their fingertips to respectability, slipping each year a little further down a terrible, almost-sheer drop into bottomless debt.
Richard Judge, Whitstable RNLI I was brought up on boats. Trawling, potting, netting. The harbour was very active at the time. We were using claxons and maroons so the whole town knew – there’d be quite a crowd, watching people running down. It’s more discreet now, the crew can click an app. I’ve got a lot of medals – doing things for a long time. Isn’t for anything brave. You put them ashore and think job done. But you’d hear them say – the only reason I held on was because I could see the boat coming. A good clear cut one – a life saved.
I have in mind a snapshot of our son Upheld by you in a prospect of snow, Taken when he was less than half of one On a cold mountain seven years ago. It was the first snow he was ever shown, Was blinded by and touched, and his cheeks glow. His puffer suit is white. His hat is green. Clearly the sky’s unmixed ultramarine. And I recall he slept a long time after, Upright in the car seat I’d pulled from the jeep And stood up underneath the cabin’s rafters, So we could eat a long lunch during his sleep And he’d not hear the clatter of our laughter While we’d in Vin Santo our biscuits steep. He left no footprints in the snow that day But made yours somewhat deeper I would say.
The lone stag’s crossing a field. He’s done with rutting. Outside Snape Maltings he listens to Alexander Gadjiev. He’s got Chopin in his head. He misses the girls. He’s missing an antler. The sky is blood-red. The sonata was perfect. He’s always had a thing about New York. He slips into the water at Bawdsey. His wounds are cauterised. He’s swimming to Old Felixstowe. He curls up in the bowels of the ship like Rimbaud. He’s not sure how things will go. The stowaway stag. He’s going to start again. He’d like some music. He’d like to play the cello. He’d really like a cigar.
Five of them dressed in black from head to foot. We do it in a circle, partly for the children, partly because we’re teaching the English words for arms, legs etc. Wednesday morning in St Stephen’s church hall. The children have already done heads, shoulders, knees and toes knees and toes. The ladies from Afghanistan do their best to join in, shaking a leg, in out, in out and so on though shaking it all about doesn’t come easily and as for the finale – shooting your arms up and shouting Hoi! That’s what it’s all about! – their faces suggest this is nuts.
May there always be a friend to write a letter — always time for silence between bars of music — always more stories, more music — always a flock of birds over the river — always old maps promising new journeys — always an island at which to moor and shade of trees. May the lonely routine bring wonder to strangers — may every little room open on wide worlds — may all the years be charts drawn in clear ink and none of the clouds to come veil the view from the summit.
With all the rain our great provider wished upon us this long winter, a brick-lined pit dug umpteen years ago (I had no inkling it was there), fell in. More than six foot wide, more than eight foot down. The shock. The fear of falling into piss, shit, bone-eating worms. My need to fill the wretched thing. How to bury a year of crumbling certainties? Last night North Norfolk’s moon went carnival, its light so stark, it would have lit that gap, chasm, abyss, in the dark – a hole that might have gone on swallowing flower beds, deer-molested shrubs and lawn – if the builder hadn’t traipsed to and fro, barrow after barrow, tipped in rubble on a bitter day, to fill it.