Poems

I paid the fisherman as he passed by, took in my hand this vile monstrosity, a creature murky as its watery haunt, an outsize weevil, or a hydra’s runt; shapeless as shade, and nameless as the Lord. A maw that gaped, and a black stump that bored out through the scales… It snapped at me. God grants a place in his colossal ordinance to these revolting spooks, a world obscured. It snapped at me… We came to blows, we sparred, my fingers fearful of the teeth’s attack: the vendor slipped away behind a rock, vanishing, as it bit me. ‘Go!’ I cried: ‘Bless you, damned creature!

Under the lamp of childhood, the atlas of the world is open to the man: his fingers travel continents, stroke the blue seas, cross their blood red lines to America — to that inevitable page, with circles where his father had set down his whisky glass on the Nebraska plain, with pencilled names of strangers and train times: the whole damn Western in which the hero flees, reduced to its director’s scribbled notes of a young man on a train, hurrying to some future from an unforgiving past.

How much space was it really taking upat the back of the garage? Flipped open,on the lid’s underside, a handsawand a brass-backed tenon saw held fastby swivel pegs; two shallow box drawers with gimlets, awls, that yellow cylindrical tinfor the bricklaying plumb line, slid apartto get at the bigger stuff, any old howat the bottom: chisels, the brace and its bits,that rod like a devil’s tail – the soldering iron.Hand tools for absolute precision.Nothing electrical. Grandad’s kit,that had skipped my father, hardly neededby me in the city, that top floor flat,so I drove them to the auction place.No more lugging around, making space.Never sell your tools, he always said.

Campus trees, grown tall, shadow this forgotten place. In one small room, The Birds of Europe rage, awaiting Judgement’s storm and fire. That day, released from their engraver’s burning cage, red breast, white wing, gold eye will light the dust-grey shelves, as each one flees through broken windows, hinge-sagging doors, to settle, call and sing in the unlettered trees.

for Wendy So time, for one of us, will carry onin chilly rooms where either you or mewill linger for a while after we’ve gonein silences on worn upholstery,in orange paperbacks we’ll never readby crooked lamps, the shadows they still thrownow falling where, for once, we’d both agreedthe lucky one would be the first to goand in their rush, perhaps, leave keys and coat,a just popped out, back soon that comes unstuckto curl up in a yellow Post-it notewith two small kisses clinging on for luckand, trembling on the fridge, collecting fluff,the love for which there’s never time enough.

For three days now it has been possiblereading the letters and looking at photographs,to tell myself there is no differencebetween this and your just being somewhere else. I’ve been philosophising like a foolsupposed resemblances, absence apart:memory, other minds and the rest of it.Nothing resembles the fact that you are not. Rarely knowing what I’d come up with nextor how it would turn out, I never didsee how you always got there first- and lessby dint of progress than by standing still. Tonight we’re having our first conversationsince you died. It proceeds, as usualbut minus the element of surprise – the elementthat was you. Have I caught up at last?

The shepherds are on quad bikes. They wear Adidas and drink Black Sheep.  Still, only they know the tenderness of hills:   fleecy skies, the shiver of gorse; empty lanes  and the prayer of a winter dawn. Their angels  are on Instagram; their psalms are by Dave.  They dream of glad tidings: Lotto numbers  daubed in red, while lifting lambs like trophies.  They’ve lost count of the sleepless nights:  ice on the cattle grids, lost ewes, and a moon  herding clouds into the fold of the horizon.  Few follow the crowd, but wait for a miracle;  like finding, at the back of a cave, a cache of  stolen iPhones bundled like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Her frail breath calls through the quickening hours:‘My body is broken, make up my bed,a deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers, feathers and flickers beyond human powersand cram it with anguish when I am dead.’Her frail breath calls through the quickening hours: ‘Furnish with letters, my Saint Christopher’smedal, an unleavened morsel of bread,a deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers.’ A creature of proud civility cowers.The elegant brain has ruptured and bled.Her frail breath calls through the quickening hours: ‘Is life a race of unmerciful hoursto capture with toil, with furious dread,a deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers?’ A reedling weaves space from whispering towers:a grail for white eggs, for wings of soft red.

Sectioned, I was sent to the Cicada Lunatic Asylum. Doctor Coppola signed the papers. His patients, he explained, were beleaguered by obsessions. Hence the cicadas which colonised the trees in the great courtyard. We were encouraged to adore them. This was Doctor Coppola’s radical way of defying insanity, he was known across Europe. It wasn’t easy at first. Sbagliando si impara. Practice makes perfect. Imagine locked wards of relatively decent people flapping their tongues. Even the cicadas thought we were cicadas. Saturdays Doctor Coppola conducted his monomaniacal troupe from the gazebo. People came from Spoleto: wooden benches, jugs of wine, hand-rolled cigarettes. Bravissimo! Bravissimo!

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.