Poems

A stone thrown, from this distance, might dispersecrows flocked around the shadow of a manwho waves his arms, appearing to rehearsehis plea beneath the apse’s vanished span;or hit the glassless chancel where sun shonelike holy water poured from its cleft rockas once, perhaps, on Tyre and Babylon,the sand of Thebes, the dust of Antioch:but here is English countryside and thisunseasonable weather with a view,a motorway, exhaust and early mist,chromatic shifts from pigeon grey to blue.

Distillation of a play by Brian Friel, first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 30 June 1993 Silence. Sound – waves tumbling over each other, seagull, singing, laughing, as three couples run onto the beach. They are celebrating the birthday of Terry. Angela and Berna are sisters. Angela and George are having a secret affair. Frank hopes to stay off the booze. Trish never stops dancing. Halfway into the Second Act – Terry declares his medical condition and expectation of demise.  Six monologues. Then they make a promise. A year from now they will return for another celebration, all of them, Terry will be with them, Terry will always be with them. Laughing, singing, they leave human litter on the beach. Silence.

The chief leaf man rises early. A breeze in the banyan tree. The water laps. Skink lizard on the prowl. Perfection. Blue. Perfection. No leaves on the water. Miles Davis –his ghost – becoming the banyan tree. Chief leaf man sees a leaf in the corner of the pool and shouts in Vietnamese. Leaf man number two crouches,  picks it out. The apprentice leaf boy, conical hat, takes a broom from the storeroom. Sweeps. The hotel dog –a Saigon mongrel – watches. Eternal – mythological – war of leaves. The frangipani quickens. I watch its petals drop upon the water. A stiffening breeze from Saigon River. The palm trees writhe and thrash.

Waking, you swivel on bum and hip, then dropyour legs below the knee to the floor, the fightagainst gravity half-won, like a workshopusing prefabricated parts, the bed’s height helping. None of this lessens the jeopardy.When you thrust yourself up onto your feet,you need to balance your whole body adroitly.If there’s a handrail to take some of your weight, use it – not only for push but to steadyyourself. Press your panic button to call,if you panic, whoever is standing by. Whatever their struggles, anyone maydrift off in sleep. But some just die, then fall;and more, like my dear father, fall, then die.

Everything waits. The lime trees in the park never more solitary. A moon parabola’s its passage, its slow arc, its high full toss; by the end of night hits the midwicket centre of the silhouetted trees, wedged in the blackened branches.In life, like the moon, we are all one day bowled back to earth. Lean light days. Enough stillness to sense the future beyond this future; hours that will live (and die) beyond these hours. But for the prancing magpies, solitary crows, the park has shut up shop, people pass through quickly as though unwelcome.The lime trees are obstinate, indifferent, taut as tuning forks. The days lose themselves easily as lost change. The blood slows and the pond stagnates.

All this – of course – was heaven when I smoked.Standing under the trees,my sweet asylum,resourceful and joyful, and dry. Once – when I smoked that is –the people coming up the pavement –people with great lives ahead,cheered as I stood there.A Bohemian, they said. Truly.Notwithstanding the rainwe observe a man with a cigarette.  Like Baudelaire in the suburbs.Reeking of nicotine.Awaiting his horse-pulled limousine.

The rustle of coarse, carded yarn, through fine taut cotton, pulled to a point: tense, hoarse, a wordless whisper, saying something sexual.

i.m. Mick Imlah There is a brief respitewhile our lives are held suspended.We’ll laugh when this is over,wiser for this glimpse of the abyss. For now, we go to work as usual,a zigzag route through the estates,our own private shortcut,till they close the gates at night. We leave behind the Florence, the Alhambra,their dreams of domes in amber light.The way home is due north,King’s Cross by way of Scotland, streets alive with her familiars:the Angus house, the Flora, the Loch Lomond,emblems of proud Caledoniaflaunting their two stars. Argyle Walk, tarmac breaking into cobblesshiny with night and rain,a murky sodium glow, a kind of false dawn,where we come to a halt. ‘They think I may have it’ you tell me,London’s rivers rushing below our feet.

Beeston Castle, English Heritage event, 2023/1265 The castle is perched on a rocky sandstone cragabove a moat of weeds and shadow-fields of flint:a subterranean memory-bank of history and hurt. A banquet of burdock and wild boar is being servedto the fingertip-march of a minstrel’s plucked lute —though I am stationed in the silt-flushed basin below. Today I refuse the role of the slave for the soldierto brandish a sword that cuts deeper than words;a shield that protects more than any page could. Granted a gambeson and a loose-sleeved shirt,I billow between the growing crowds and cracksof moss-flanked flagstones as light as a ghost.

‘Love and war are the same thing...’             —          Miguel de Cervantes Somewhere over the tiled foothills of our council estate A man and a woman are arguing. The focus of the argument is something brutally trivial A TV programme choice, that sort of thing, Yet the air is a hot Isandlewana of big and small wounding And a silence follows, with one avoiding the other While the battleground wounded are hauled away. Unremarkable people go to war like this, see the fracture In the fence and tear at it Making broader access to unremarkable places Left unguarded. (Who slept on duty?