Poems

No Englishman would be seen dead under one, preferring to run for cover, soaked to the skin, peruke bedraggled, than carry this effeminate device, the ‘Frenchies’ unfurled without a blush. Only Mr Jonas Hanway, by no means wet, having seen off Persian pirates on his travels and an outspoken critic of tea drinking and employment of climbing boys, had the backbone to own one. An arresting accessory with an ebony handle carved with flowers and fruit, its opened canopy offering a pale, green silk display, while a lining of yellow satin blazed above him like a portable sun, as he strolled through torrents of ridicule, resolute in letting no one rain on his parade.

Hong Kong A fan on the ceiling.  The parlour full of drapes and towels.  A pianist plays behind the curtain. They call him Liverpool.  The cat mooches. The woman puts her hands together in salutation.   A man on the chair, legs stretched out. The woman kneads his feet. The boss takes the money.  Sometimes yawning,  sometimes burping, sometimes farting. Her chakras perfectly aligned.  The man on the chair floats above Tung Street. His feet are factories of pleasure.

Good morning. Perhaps before I am old, wandering on the face of the world, lost, you could suggest an open place of grass and curious trees where I walk barefoot as the day cools under a massive sky, with a herd of something I can’t quite see moving slowly over there on my right, the earth beaming up the fragrance of life and the loud ticking of benign insects. Or I may consider a warm ship’s rail at the same time of day after the glare, all the other passengers somewhere else and my lone cabin prepared behind me. Yes, I’ll go for the first option. Thank you.

Holding the glorious heap of her black hair away from her head for the heat, the tall, young, I’m guessing Italian woman swivels her slender torso with such a sweet nonchalance that the no less glorious clump at her armpit is rendered unignorable. Degas might have done a sketch then and there, and Hardy was a man who used to notice such things; but that was the nineteenth century, and to do so now would be deplorable.

The decision, now my mother’s off her feet, off her food but not, thank god, her rocker, is for a rota of nephews and nieces to drop in  and keep an eye on her so she’s not alone.   Unshod gypsy horses cropping the grass   of a traffic island in autumn’s last-blown leaves (from my Uber window) ushers me home as evening brightens Whitley Hill and Bearley. ‘I left Afghanistan when I was a boy,’ the driver tells me, catching my reflection.  ‘I just walked out. I was lucky! A social worker  found me foster parents in Coventry.  They kept alsatians, lovely dogs, and we drank  orangeade on Fridays.’ The house is full. My sister, her oldest son. A brother or two.

Just to say there was one small deer standing alone in a dry field. We’ve passed it now.

I used to think some people were beyond your sphere Of influence and lived in a partitioned world. Silly of me. No one is beyond the sun’s light – How could they be? And we all drink water And breathe the same air and use the same tired words. I used to think some people were beyond your sphere And would be right to feel outraged at featuring, With their intelligence, in unsought prayer. Silly of me. No one is beyond the sun’s light; Most livers love the sun, confess to it And train their lives to track its wanderings. I used to think some people were beyond your sphere Of influence, as if they’d been assembled Separately, set up to feed upon themselves. Silly of me.

(22 November 1915) Four bombardiers were on their wayTo a small village in the rearLayers of dust had turned them greyThey’d joined up earlier that year They quietly spoke of other yearsAnd gazed at the vast plain aheadA shell coughed near the bombardiersNot one so much as turned his head Their talk was all of yesterdayTomorrow seemed a waste of breathThey held to their ascetic wayThis constant discipline of death Guillaume Apollinaire & Velimir Khlebnikov: Birds, Beasts and a World Made New was published by Pushkin Press on 15 August.

My brother in the evenings, long after his death, would take a corner seat and sigh under his breath. Yes, sigh, and mutter things that I could almost hear. Then, like a painted house, he faded over years until his image and his whisper both were one. There was a final dream, when this small talk was done. I walked along a hall where all the recent dead were triaged on a stony floor, and cupped his head as gently as my dreaming arms would harbor him. But couldn’t stop the fear that trembled on his skin. An endless row of people tended those they loved: there was no canopy, or sky, or stars above, or walls enclosing us – the dead just simply lay, until the dream had said the thing it came to say.

(after Saint-Amant) Mastered by laziness and melancholy,I dream in bed like a boneless hare en croûtestewing in its own juice, a delicate brute,or like old Don Quixote in his holy rage. I don’t care a hoot for the latest cause,the count palatine and his royal descent,but consecrate a hymn to the indolentmood in which my soul’s interred, these rare languors. Such is seclusion’s blissful sweetness, it seemsthe action I spurn will be repaid in dreams –already they’re distending this paunch of mine – yet I loathe work so much that, with one blue eyestill closed and one hand beneath the sheets, friend, Iwas barely able to reach my final line.

A man walks the black soil of a reaped field. He pauses to kneel and parse the earth for old coins or unearthed aluminium. He is twenty-two. He is fifty-eight. He’s not a man but a child with a dog. He’s my boss. He’s a gamekeeper, he’s a bailiff at my door. Three buzzards form an ellipsis in the sky, then the scene changes. There’s snow on the ground. Stars in the damp night. I can see his breath. The man is my father, and he walks the perimeter of hedgerow like a sentry, halting occasionally to scrape a hole in the hoarfrost with the heel of his steel capped boot. I never see what he buries. I’ve never seen his face. He’s outlived his failures or he hasn’t. He casts no shadow in the moonlight.