Poems

After the disappointment of the confit de canard and the ‘no shows’ of those I’d planned to see a face looms up right at the death, whale-like with shy pinprick eyes  and then all in a rush just as the taxis arrive I’m being told memory is vivid even though his House had been Queen’s mine Marryott and that I’d been good at sport, he hopeless. Fifty years on he still recalls our earnest talk of books. Yet of him my file is a guilty blank, shows nothing of the German boy whose parents thought a year in England would do him good. Oddly, I start to well — that sense  of life as ledger what gained what lost, implacable as the summons of a schooltime bell.

Still clear, their first steps, the fields we camped in, the rained-on holiday lets… less so the white-lined blur of car journeys – their songs, games, laughter, arguments… their silences that gave way to sleep, the engine’s drone. Miles rolled into hours, years.            Between the land and the sea we were never so near to ‘there’, so closely strapped in to love as inside those distances,  a home of sorts, or nearly there.

I am floating on heather again. A fleece unshorn for fifty years slips off me, rolls down the hill. Its tumbleweed won’t stop till the village where Gary and Bill wait for me and Emmy unlocks  the corrugated hall and Stahl repairs his Morris outside Nancy’s shop. It’s early May. The bleating fields and the drone of Glyn’s tractor rise. The sunlight brims with larks. I am not the man I became but inside a song, a dazzling stream, the laughter of friends on the breeze.

Om – OMG! The cosmos sings! A few can hear             its soft wild background murmur, its love song from the wild frontier.             Then wonder shades to worry,             as Earth, distressed, gets warmer. We share forebodings with our friends.             We start to say we’re sorry,             we say we’ll make amends.

What’s day to a miner? Shovels and picks. Ten fathoms deep the mind plays tricks. Like: I’m lying in bed with the sun flooding in. I’m married to a bright young thing in a yellow dress. She sings to me. I pull her close. My hands are clean. My hands aren’t clean. We dream the day then rise at dusk to claim our pay with coated hands. Example two: above the cart, a chink of blue waving like a tiny flame that somehow knows me, calls my name and guides us to a richer seam. Shovel, pick, shovel, pick, the sun’s a ghost, the light’s a trick – yet who’s to say the light’s not true? The mind does what it has to do to save itself from total dark.

Who were they kidding? Themselves for their sins? Or the man with a tripod calling say cheese to these old fashioned guests with their fixed wooden grins in the coffin shaped shadows of pollarded trees? Sometimes they seem no further away than the lift of a veil or the drop of a hat or the time it might take for the bride’s bouquet to hang in the air before being caught while the groom, exposed, not ready yet, is cupping his hand after cadging a smoke from his rakish best man whose waved cigarette is flourished around another blue joke, tasteless, unsavoury, so un-PC that the dead all around laugh uproariously.

Coming back from the doctor, you have little to say. Treading the sorrowful stones of the Galgenstraat, our view across the Ij impeded by a new apartment block on the site of the fearful gibbet where Rembrandt van Rijn observed Elsje Christiaen tied to its arms, she was barely sixteen and you complain of the cold, leaves turning, autumn sun spattering  the narrow street, three young girls playing hockey, long legs, long honey coloured hair, rosy cheeked and out of breath, ‘Dangerous, they could be killed!’ I turn but you’re not listening, looking more like your old self suddenly, quite cheered up.

I rode a bike at speed with letters and cheques, tickets and fines, the dying art of pen. I carried the word of commerce and law, money and verse. A mad dash thick with smog, deadly with car. I rode at metal and juggernaut bus, the copper with a truncheon, prodding. Then a rest on a bench or an alley by a church, as I read about frogs and wounded gods, the bear with a bone dig a hole through a wall. Riding on the Strand, watching for the vans and the hitman cabs, I thought about wind in a stand of pine. How the pike hang gold in a pond at dusk. The city roar gone for a line on a page.

I think writing poems is about tracking downWho you are when completely alone.Not being assessed by anyone, Not answering to anyone. It’s about the part of you that doesn’t belong,The One who has no place in the World,The One with a foothold in Eternity. The One who cannot be foundIn the files of a single Government Department. The One who can’t even be bothered to have an Identity! It’s about the possibility of a myriad completed souls,Instead of all these broken hearts, afflicted minds,And crestfallen, disused selves. It’s like looking for Bigfoot or the Yeti:Something forgotten and left behind,Making its odd whistling sound. Or the Snow Leopard; rare, threatened,Living carefully above the Snow Line. It’s like stepping off the edge of the world.

Half-truths present themselves complete                 as memories write fainter. Keep this in mind: that’s when we meet                 the mind whose grasp is greater,                 retouching like a painter the smudges all the world can see,                 the freedom in our data,                 our mind too data-free. Well-being gleams along its scale.

I emptied my drawers  and cleared the flat.     I sleep on an inch-thick mat.  Want this. Want that.     Not any more.  I dream in black and white.  Colour distracts me.     You only need to own three  T-shirts, exactly.     I dream in light.  Throw your books in the dirt     and light the fire.  Watch the flames climb higher,  higher, higher…      It will not hurt.

We bought it down the car boot sale, not much of a risk for three quid. While I was paying the mother, the teenage daughter ran her thumb over the screen a final time. We’re back today with stuff to sell, David more than two feet taller. It’s been pitched at three quid again. Every time someone picks it up, we glance at each other and wince.