Poems

When I dreamt you came back from death with something to say You sat by me, looked down. Sorrow or shame? You needed neither, nor needed to explain. I wanted to share two memoirs, two gifts, Two treasured reminders, one my broken toe Which, when I cut the nail, I lift and wobble. You dropped a bar on the joint when I was six, When iron railings were cut for guns and tanks Leaving their shining stumps to rust and go The colour of our hair. To save the trouble We daren’t show mother. No secret the gold inlay In the front tooth you punched and chipped away A triangle cleverly replaced by P B Ross-Tuppin, Your gift and his because it cost me nothing.

Robert and Guillaume take up their usual seats By the window, which looks out to the square; Old men, they moan about the torrid heat, The patron serves this aged, loyal pair; Past his prime, he gives us a cheery smile, ‘You like breakfast?’ (How does he know we’re Brits?) The cafe’s run down, faded with cracked tiles, He’s alone but his kind, furrowed face fits The decor. More come in from the Third Age, Greet, shake hands, kiss – mechanical habits; The patron eyes the rain, ‘On dit le temps anglais!’ We laugh along, appreciate his friendship. We like this shabby place, the local scene, ‘Ça pisse,’ but we enjoy our burnt tartines.

When Alice had gone down the rabbit hole, We all went to the vigil in the gym. Then in class, we had to say what we were feeling, And made the posters to put up on the wall With all the flowers. I thought how it was to fall  And keep on falling, and stared up at the ceiling And was small. And then I thought of him In his ears and whiskers, and how the soul Of Alice must be somewhere underground, Still missing Dinah dreadfully and crying  Pools of tears. When hometime came, We all went off to Courts to eat jam tarts. Then Queenie’s brother taught us to play Hearts. He looked just like the Knave!  After the game, I saw Alice through the looking-glass. She was trying To get through. I did not make a sound.

Champ de blé, Claude Monet, 1881There’s a brilliance to this day which is almostaudible, as though such days come in the round –sound filtered through sound, light filteredthrough light. Ahead a band of orange-gold,the saturated cousin of last night’s full moon,and in the foreground upflicked silvery alfalfa –two crops and a path positioned agreeablyoff-centre; the sky a brushwork of cirrus.He would have posed Camille on the pathto show the viewer what to feel, how to be.But now that she has been takenhe must make the day’s rarified rondure so bien vrai –the precious metals, the path curving like a bow –that they will know what to feel without her.

After William Wordsworth Some way across the bridge I stop to watcha pigeon on the parapet: the hideous,                    urban beauty of the bird, its thrust-hold strut,the wings flexed, garment-like, about it,wearing the defiant grit and glitter of the city.It lifts off into the smokeless air: the buses, Gherkin,Shard, the Tate, tenement blocks, the domes,and on the bank a Liebherr crane hand on hipconducts the barges gliding on the river, calm,like a Calder mobile I once saw, the gallery wall steepedin its shadows. I get a glimpse through the sharp,discordant light of a metallic heart: the stacking upof time, dear passer-by, is imperviousto the pulse of a single life, hushed in vertigo.

Twas a choice then between Bobby Moore and Nyree Dawn Porter, till Trish shoved the cut hay down my shirt in Ryan’s Acre.

Albanian gangsters with rice flails and Uzis, Ukrainian pimps with high-cheekboned floozies, Jamaicans with handguns, Somalis with knives — just some of the people enriching our lives. Jew-hating Imams from Rabat and Homs, Stockpiling their basements with ricin and bombs, Rich Saudi princes with cowering slaves, Slovakian hooligans, Romanian knaves, A fat lady from Lagos looking quite glum With five kilos of gak stashed away up her bum, Levantine maniacs beating up gays, Young girls from Thailand whose skills quite amaze, Grim Kurdish separatists from the shores of Lake Van, Strange Russian men with a nuclear tan, From Romford to Ruislip a myriad show Of cultural diversity — so mind how you go.

Private, intimate, sensate;  breaching that homeless ache beyond the reach of language,  to make sculptures that seem  to float just above the ground,  narrow columns, six feet high, clothed in succulent colours;  sentinels in communion, sensate spirits always reaching upward, into the light, letting go the personal to know the divine. Age eleven Anne longs to escape from the private gloom of home; is given a red and white bicycle, explores her home town, mapping Easton’s grid pattern, cycling north,  south, east and west, memorising its layout, until she knows every alley, finds in a neglected yard, a strange being, a mirror ball reflecting the town, the trees, her own face turned comical.

Today, fifteen years later and counting, your formal raincoat still belongs to me. It’s the black one you bought for funerals when your own old age was fast approaching. I’d leave it at home, safe from rips or stains, but every time I head for the trade fair and shrug it on in the hotel lobby,  it pauses to give me an awkward hug.

Rather than who were picking upthe big bonuses, it was his signatureI’d look for when signing for my wages.Just another bloke on the gang,no particular accent or hairstyle,but his handwriting – in fountain pen,not the Sellotape-bound birodangling from the clipboard –wouldn’t have been out of placein a shipping company’s ledgeror even a Book of Hours.

You can hear it coming down the road: the stick of old age. No Yeats. No rage. Insistent, pervasive, it permeates the brain like acid. Like an insistent stain. Inside the carapace it works its insidious way into the very heart of existence. There to stay. Silent inside the darkness  hidden from all evidence, it finds its way alone into the very marrow, through the bone. The tap, tap, tap of time beating its threatening percussions on the brain.  Insistent. Like pain. Not a hint of wind. From leaves, not the slightest stir. The sky clear.

Your parents, like mine a decade ago, are hauling themselves around their own home like a team of exhausted footballers who’ve given up on finding a winner but are still chasing an equaliser in the ninety-third minute to make up for the chances they’ve missed throughout the match, knowing full well that the final whistle is set to be blown any moment now.

That brush I happened uponin our dimly lit outhouse, onemother used whilst I was in her bellyand all through my childhood. Its bristles worn shorter than a fingernail,I wrapped it in Saturday’s Finaland tied it with string, put it in for exchangeon a day he was too rushed to check. Clearly not one of the firm’s,they displayed it down the offices,hung it up on the wall, an exampleof how far he’d driven his men.