I can detect a new feelingfrom shoulders to fingertips.My handwriting returns. Or is it an old feeling?Ironing, folding, combing hair —habits flaunt themselves in the face of recent history.What can I do with myself?Skiing, karaoke, roller blading… I’m ready for anything.I want to rush out and tell everyone,I’m back and mean business. I want to put my arm around her,to ask her where she has beenand what she has seen.
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.
Sometimes in bed you turn your back on me and I on you, and a lazy game of footsie is the product of those two negatives, a slow dancing cheek to cheek. I like the tangle and the tightness of a hug, the snug asymmetry of spooning. But when our heads diverge, reflecting each on its own pillow, our solitary dreams replenish the heart- shaped space we make between us.
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?
in his Clouseau-era. I want to get home knowing at any minute I might karate chop Burt Kwouk as he comes flying round the corner or trap his trouser-tie in the fridge door or flip up the fold-down bed on his head — basically I want to triumph frequently by freakish misadventure. And I want a beige mac and to take liberties with my vowels and I want a range of disguises for every occasion (including one involving lederhosen) and a lava lamp and always at least one eccentric, vastly rich admirer who finds me fascinating. And I want terrible timing that’s also somehow — sublime and I want to be the badass buffoon who might snap the evil villain’s snooker cue but doesn’t break a sweat.
Drake, the clot, missed it by a mile. That hook of rock failed to snag his sails into the only gap for a thousand miles and the Ohlone breathed easy in their skins unaware of the Great Inevitable whilst the dew on the antelope’s nose lay undisturbed. Salmon knew the river would not deepen. The eagle’s shadow rippled like a whisper over desert ridges. Grassland rolled a parody of Atlantic waves. Crow and Lakota were still safe behind the Appalachians which dipped to the farms of the Puritans and the graves of the Seminole. One curious soul raised his head, wondered what lay beyond the forest and the valleys. To the west.
In her, oily tongued Hughie found his perfect foil: a cockney sparrow, whose pixie cut and skinny frame won the hearts of millions in the age of monochrome. Her money more than doubling as she made the ratings soar, bringing with it a rags-to-riches change. The sky seemed the limit, yet something in her ached for her lost world of nine-to-five, round the corner local, down-to-earth mates. Until finding herself broken on the wheel of flashbulb fame, she threw in the towel, hoping to return to her old, ordinary ways. Instead, uprooted for too long, she withered, took to God and pills, deadheading herself with an overdose on one light-starved, February day.
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.
Half through his third bottle of red, he took the keys to the gun cabinet, unlocked it, loaded a rifle, stepped out into the garden, wet grass beneath his feet, breath cloud- plumed in cold air, scanned the organic darkness above, sighted a target, fired, then swung his gun around the night sky, aimed again, fired. The stars impervious, gazed down upon him, as shots sang out.
I waited and I saw a bird go winging slow across the sky how slow it flew I couldn’t know how slow because it was so high the sky more pointless than the sea where there are rocks and there is land through which a being flying slow as far as I could understand would neither notice me nor know that I was watching here below the wingbeat steady as a man who still has miles and miles to go >.
under the arch of the Shiraz Palace round to the kitchen tradesman’s entrance young girl walks in her long loose trousers early perhaps for the evening rota does a little shimmy in her long loose body nobody near her nobody watching.
for A.J. and N.C. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar… cheap joke, how it began one ancient evening on the lash in Leeds. Three likely lads, fresh from writing degrees, thinking they knew it all and next to nowt at once, as if the margins of hope and doubt were clear as the angles on the pool table they’d gathered round. Watch them now, unable to imagine, as youth will, what’s up ahead, each smoothly potting the yellows or reds in the backroom of a pub’s smoky haze. You want to tell them these are the best days, aren’t they, but this is only a memory, now the baize is cleared for one final whisky.
Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change... Down there the fathom worker Cleans a universe of sand, Whitening bones, blurring wood With weed and merhair strands Our assiduous, unfailing tide Washing the island away And flooding Prospero’s cove. Now all who were shore-born Will leave in their boats. ‘Good sea’ Will be their greeting, temper Of the moon their government. Into the water they ease the old To look for ancestry bleached In grave-pools, anenome men.
They’ve taken down the trees round Keeper’s Pool. The water’s lifeless, bright and calm, the only creatures left are two white swans, their nest a circled heap of twigs and litter a few yards from a park bench looking at the view – the golf-course, flagged and sweatered. Forever symbols in some poem; what these swans are is what they do. They have no thought or use for us, their watchers, or for the men more distant in the fine spring rain dragging their clubs across the green.