Poems

Each twig of the willow tree was gluedto a clear twig shadow of frozen dew. By midday, a one degree rise in heatloosened ridges of ice to the ground in showers. They lay amongst the grassstrangely, like transparent razor blades and glistled as they fell. Under thisgentle fire: two blackbirds and a robin fought over diced apple, stollen,mince pie and Christmas cake crumbs. I stood under the tree like a figurein a cracked-open snow globe: a part of this unbound arrangementthat could never happen again.

This is not you because you don’t work anymore. Hands that once caused crowds to roar in derby matches – flicking balls like flies over the bar – now struggle with a fork. That chest which swelled to face the cavalry stampede of strikers groans at all the air still left in the world. Legs which booted the ball miles behind enemy lines now buckle like wiry twigs. We sit in the car listening to the sea and the football results. Bolton wanted you once. You could have played in the Matthews final but you stayed behind because of the girl. Old enough to kick you taught me the goalie’s trade – dragging lines in the grass with your boot to show where the posts were. Making your body big. Yours has shrunk.

(after Heine) I saw the elves in the wood last night, riding in the light of the moon; I heard their little horns ring out, their bony bells’ portentous tune. They spurred past me as swift as thought on mice whose antlers shone like gold; those steeds flew silently as swans, wild swans that range the southern cold. Their queen nodded as she went by, nodded and smiled (I held my breath). Did that strange smile mean my new love, or did that smile betoken death?

Split apart with a thumbnailits two leaves open: brushed mild steel,cool in your palm, symmetrical. Allow a finger to settlein any of the countersunk screw holes –the natural comfort of cupping. The definite edges of each leafwill be bedded one day flushin the door’s back edge and the jamb. This is where the work is done,effortlessly transportingthe weight of the door.

Craned onto the site from a truck  the ten-by-ten corrugated steel cube,  our paint shop. Nothing for sale  but a magnet for kids: bricked,  scorched, clambered upon, adorned  Stoke, Vale, obscenities from spray cans.  Inside the door, an Alsatian’s head   in sagging red gloss welcomes you to a throat-seizing reek of turps,  linseed and propane. Bowed shelving  to the left and right and straight ahead  an old door on two empty tea chests – our prep bench – strewn with rock-hard rags, clogged wire brushes, clotted stir sticks. Underneath two five-gallon drums of gunk,  and the piss can.

At the front of second-hand books,reminders of ones I’ve writtenor received myself. Dead-end cluesto lives that might have changed or stopped,birthdays or anniversaries,dates that exhausted all meaningsand slipped back into calendars. In a dingy, ramshackle shop,I stand in the aisle and read them,imagine their faces and plots.It’s time to take them home with meand give their books new life, and hopethis copy of my collectionis as lucky when its turn comes.

The first, essential task: repudiate your parents. Reject their values and advice. Make clear they have no right to legislate.   There will be rows, of course, but that’s the price.  The later task: reject the youthful you. Remove the smirk from that conceited face. It may take tens of years to see this through.  Slow and painful, like shedding a carapace. The final, urgent task: repudiate the first repudiation. Try to mend the damage that you wrought. If not too late. Assuming they’re still there to re-befriend.

and where yesterday I lay broiling in the vat of my bedroom  today a sneaky little breeze tickles my soles — Coo-ee! Only me!  shifty at first but soon breeze picks up speed with What — did you think I was gone for good? That me and my three ‘e’s had  danced our final conga around your curtains and hightailed it  out of the element once and for all? Finita la commedia?  Leaving you with only the hot, hot heat to tan your hide?  My God, you’re a tragedian. I bet you spent the whole 48 hour heatwave being Blanche Dubois around the place, fainting  and drawing cold baths. Don’t tell me. I bet you were writing poetry.  Oh God, you were. Oh you have to have your psychodrama, don’t you?

I skate because the streets are made of ice, because I have to learn, I skate because the river’s hard and green, because the birds are crows or magpies but could be vultures overhead and in the trees, I skate because the men are home from hunting with just one fox across a shoulder, because their sticks are raised and keen, their dogs are slouched at heel, I skate because I’m not aware they’re there, because the trees are leafless, naked, their darknesses exposed, I skate because the men around the fire outside the pub have nowhere else to go, I skate because I am a girl and have no running shoes, because the women are knee-deep in freezing water, because the white peaks are so very far away, I skate because a man has.

Our liege Of jewelled gravity Set free Has roped the breeze And saddled him To ride through winter’s mind, Inconstant spring, All summer’s Fabergé, To find a season Greenest green, Demesne Past altering.

A restaurant paper placemat is the best place to compose a poem. There’s nothing venerable about the surface, slightly rough, perhaps a stain of sauce or tea. You can try yourself out on a paper placemat, not take things so seriously. Thoughts fill the squares and dimples while a meal fills the stomach. The pen flows like a good wine – with any luck you’ll stagger home tonight, fumble, swear, fail to fit the key.

I’m convinced he would like a quiet wife. One who would sit on her chair and eat granola and sip carrot juice wearing a ring on only her wedding finger.   How peaceful to be concerned by nothing more than juice, dried fruits and nuts, and natural yoghurt! The mind like a quiet seed in the dark.   How irritating, the small explosion of a green shoot breaking into life. No. He’d have nothing like that. Just a quiet wife on her chair eating granola, sipping juice, her lips turning orange.

We all need to someone to watch our back, says the man on TV. Yours hunches at the wheel as we sail through vineyards dense   with straining vines. Our cases bulge and scrape as we lift them from the boot. You’ve drawn the short straw – the orange one with a dodgy wheel, a missing handle.   You exhale stiffly. Airborne, you stretch across an empty seat; I stroke you, neck to coccyx. The taxi driver has a back sprain   so we haul our cases in, and out: 25 kilos each, according to the airport scales. Your body’s silky as I spoon you in a Travelodge, your spine   between my breasts, against my belly, encased between our bodies like a silver chain between two squares of cotton.