Poems

This elfin child was taken into care, And maintenance devolved upon the State. His whimpering mother was inadequate, His father vanished into empty air. Life came unfurnished – nobody was there To dress his wounds and make the pain abate. It was too much to ask and far too late To find another mother anywhere. His scars healed up, his head was cleared of lice, His shorts stayed clean, his nose stopped dripping snot, But life to him was what he had not got, And certain of his habits were not nice. He was a ticking clock about to strike. Nobody liked him. What was there to like?

The figure in the shadows stared at Eve And shook the beans inside the bag. ‘Believe Me, crops of serpentini beans achieve A growth of two feet, even more, no lie.’ Eve, flattered by him, looked and gave a sigh. He rattled them and said, ‘Give them a try…’ ‘Perhaps I could be tempted…’ Blushing red, Eve muttered, playing with the seeds, her head A blaze of possibilities, the bed So promising where they could start the plot. She turned. ‘Now Adam, should we take the lot? A multi-buy…’She fanned herself.‘It’s hot Out here. There’s no escaping all this heat!

A place to see the little things between the monuments and tombs. As in the chapel of St Gabriel, a pencil. Here they are, behind the obvious. Next to the chapter house, a cupboard with a bowl, four toilet rolls. How small things quietly wait, make us forgivable. Inside the vestry, just inside the door, an iron.

It hangs, a mobile in the stairwell, always in motion however slight. Each silver scale as it sparkles there a neighbourly lodestar guiding us home to where we shall meet for ever in friendship beyond the darkness of your loss. Nothing you made that did not shine, nothing you dreamed can leave us now. And so we give thanks for this precious gift as it swims through the air to the sound of your laughter.

for Lucy Dallas Because they wanted to go home and some bit part, a rat in deep cover, raised the alarm (he had done harm himself, but legally, and hid his shame) or, falling in slow motion, the cashier, shot through the heart for moving a finger, reached with his last breath for the dead guard’s Peacemaker and returned fire – because of this taped riot I’m here watching the sun dance to our own live show, few words between us and the telling air, the sum of what was not but is now clear, how Redford in his larcenous prime loved Katharine Ross the schoolteacher and there was time to come for them beyond the frozen fusillades of blame as secretly we bless bad breaks, like “Bolivia?

I’d tell you I came back here, that I’m writing in this room, if you had not found another and are happy, I presume. I’d tell you I returned and I have walked to you know where, if it were not to disturb you for so little, seems unfair. I’d tell you I have chosen the exact same spot to lie, and perhaps I’ll never say so or I may do, by and by.

In the summer fields your life left you. She ran out from under the hood of your heart and tottered across tarmac on clippy-cloppy hoofs like a teenage girl in heels. No time to notice the strange evening light, the sun low down on the green high crops, only time to brake and watch her go first one way then the other, undecided at the sight of your wide, loud car; alien, yes, off-white and wild; you glimpsed her on a patch of burned waste ground a farmer must have scorched for a reason, and passed.

I sold the sleek black bike you said I should buy. My special treat, in the shop, on my own, I couldn’t fulfil. It took your love, your woman’s will to tutor me in the art of self-giving and not to fear the gifts that feed. My self-denial father’s handed down creed. Cycling was the emblem of our in-love-fun. We headed out evenings after work, met near the deer park, rode out that summer to an unending, un-setting sun. What now our love is done?

The moon comes knocking on our door; a slavish stalker who hangs around all night. The slowest of walkers, he matched at an equal distance each of our homeward steps. We close our door on him, push him out only to find he’s already skirted the house, taken the side alley, slipped the padlocked gate, jumped the flowerpots and several four foot pines and is staring fixedly through our unlit bedroom windows. He’ll watch all night, like this, through his scarf of cloud, the broken drape; while we count faceless sheep he waits. He holds the hours we conflate. The night marked down to his pin-point satisfaction he lets us go though we’ll never know at what thin hour he left. It’s been this way all month.

Together, they wrote a book. Its title was Solitude, or Every Man his own Hermit. They wrote alternate chapters in a small room with one chair and a desk hardly bigger than A4. Bip wrote on Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays, Bop on the other days. On Sundays, neither wrote. On Sundays, they went together to search for the stuff of fiction. They travelled, gambled, dug gardens, dated deep women, whose talk they would agonise over on weekdays at that desk, working out meanings.

You fling yourself out the door into the wind and start to row yourself down the steep hill with your standard issue steel stick, working it along the dark path, clickety-click, clickety-click. It’s a path you would know with your eyes closed, the old Richmond Hill you cycled up and down as a boy, in all weathers, coming and going from the house perched on top. You shuttle along at first, Taking full advantage of your exit velocity, clickety- click, clickety-flop against the rail, breathe heavily, rattle on. At the bottom, you tilt into Patrick Street and fluorescent lighting, poke at the white rounds winking on the ground, checking for coins, finding gum. You have forgotten your glasses, and so your vision is that of a small subterranean animal, tunnelling with its forepaws.

The imagined day includes sunshine and shopping And people saying Yes and being on my side. There’ll also be traffic and occasional drizzle So I know I haven’t died.

Out on the crumbling landscape’s farthest edge, Their winter journey starts, and while I know Some names, I can’t recall from stripe of wing Or sobbish cry which honours which. And so This panic by a fading coastal ledge Is all that’s left — an urgent need to bring Old screams back round in one last salt-sprayed plea, Reminiscence crashing up the sand: The wave-break when you pushed away my hand Eroding me down to an enemy, Beginning our migration with your words.

Calendar pages: one scrumpled day dies in a garden spun to fools’ gold, where wind mews over twigs and bones at an outhouse door, black sky sustains the buoyancy of loss, dried sap knots branch to branch, caging a star whose variable glance is light’s tumult cut to the quick yet cold to the retina as once upon a time, remembered pain.

That August, in La France Profonde, the frelons were out in force, honey-gold cruisers of late summer air, their poigniards sheathed. The heat lapped at a sticky terrace table, our observation post for village fictions — Jean, his bench-saw snoring to the hornets, a girl scraping her pans out to the hens, that old man in his garden chair — le petit vieux. We smiled, as if our smiles could throw a tremulous lifeline to one who seemed to have no need of saving, a kindly ghost, a dream of summer silence, the gentle answer to our drift of questions. That last day, when Jean came for the keys — Nos amitiés à votre père, monsieur — he tapped his forehead, murmured ‘Verdun’, carried our cases to our little Peugeot.

The soul is like a little mouse. He hides inside the body’s house With anxious eyes and twitchy nose As in and out he comes and goes, A friendly, inoffensive ghost Who lives on tea and buttered toast. He is so delicate and small Perhaps he is not there at all; Long-headed chaps who ought to know Assure us it cannot be so. But sometimes, as I lie in bed, I think I hear inside my head His soft ethereal song whose words Are in some language of the birds, An air-borne poetry and prose Whose liquid grammar no one knows. So we go on, my soul and I, Until, the day I have to die, He packs his bags, puts on his hat And leaves for ever. Just like that.

I can’t think of anyone else still alive who knew him, and could reminisce with me about his special kindness, his panache — (ice-white shirts, cufflinks which, looking back, were just a trace too gleaming) his well-known love of the stage and his dramatic tours round the domain he cherished — the Department of Dental Products. I think of him with affection, even love. He gave years of his life to sales graphs and managerial meetings. He settled me soothingly at my first typewriter and when we sat next to each other at the firm’s Christmas party, he said: Don’t call me Sir, we’re off duty now, and I think you need another mince pie.