Poems

The trouble was it overwhelmed the land, The glistening waters gobbled everything, Not drowned, but living, everything: the grand, The not-so-grand, all thriving in the swing   Of tails writhing, eager to be free, Each to its own expression and distinct, But indistinct; so many flapping, we Could only feel the force of them, all linked   Into a swimming mass in one great surge Of different textures, different shades and skins. It left us thinking: what here would emerge With all this foaming madness, widdershins,   Let loose by floodgates. Could we understand The trouble that had overwhelmed the land?

So much steam and shafts of sooty light. The porters look like Laurel and Hardy and I like the train driver’s leathery smell, the glow of hot coals, the crowded platforms. Our mums and dads are on the move, escaping wars, seeking lost weekends, travelling somewhere sad along with the dead. When I blink whole epochs are shunted off. On the holiday special where I once sat there’s a dazed aged man. He’s looking lost as landscapes hurtle past. All those hills and fields and cows on stilts. No wonder his mind is never at rest. Perhaps an old Punch and Judy Show still waits, as promised, at the very next stop?

Or when their arms their legs their hands their clumps of feet entangled   and she asks which of them belong to her and he murmurs Be patient.

He’s got an old truck in the driveway, Hot cup of coffee in his hands, A way of life he’s known since his childhood, First rays of the morning sun Breaking through the clouds He plans his day in the farm He knows he’s gotta give his best   ’Cos all he’s got is in the farm Three kids and a wife A mansion built by his own hands Paradise in the prairies Sings praises to the lord above For the love of family.

Just grant me one summer, powerful fates, and a final autumn of lucid song, so that, sated with music’s sweetness, this soul may wholeheartedly die.   A poet not wielding his sacred might in life shall find no quiet in Orcus, yet once I have said the holy words I came to say, spoken my art,   I’ll welcome then the still realm of the shades… I will be at peace, although I must leave all singing and travel alone; having known the gods, I’ll ask no more.

I send you this bouquet, which my ownhands just culled from the marvellous bed;if spring’s not gathered tonight, I said,tomorrow her beauty will have flown.   Let its light serve as a sermon then,how your charms flourishing their fair Mayshall soon be invested with frost-greyand, bit by bit, become forgotten.   Time paces restlessly on, my sweet,and yet it is not time’s but our feetthat point to a house beneath the hill,   and the joy we are now free to chooseis something of which skulls have no news:O love, love me while you’re lovely still.

Let me be baroque in death as I’ve been practical in life.Let six black-plumed stallions draw the black-gloss carriagewherein my black-gloss casket rests upon a maple plinthfestooned with lilies – outrageously frilled and huge whitelilies exploding from every crevice, their syrupymusk clagging the air for miles around. Let us halt alldeliveries. Let the golden trim of the vast black wheelsflash and wink as we roll by, let the mourners’ wails flyabove the roofs of inappropriately mundane semiswhere only grandpa doesn’t doubt his seeing eyes.

The end of a perfect summer’s day –we ramble down the canal path, past Pirate Castle   and the shopping arcade where confetti sale signscamouflage lives mired in quiet desperation.   Harassed shoppers go about their business,wearing their mask of disappointments discreetly.   Everybody is dreaming of being somebody, preparing to be chosen, immortalized for eternity.   Admiring the moored boats, we move along the track.Suddenly, we are in the presence of five stunning villas –   Ionic, Veneto, Gothic, Corinthian, Tuscan –already celebrated, recorded for posterity.   The water in the canal does not stop to considerthe inequities of our world.

Caught out in the wrong shoes, I choose to join the spiders in a crevice in the old park wall.   To them, all weather is the same; all time is time to do some work.   I watch them working, watch their old webs breathing as I breathe, now tilting brickwards,   now tilting back, laced with shreds of sycamore and pigeon down. I wonder   if I stay here long enough might they take me in – reduce me   to a crescent of fingernail, a snatch of hair – induct me to their way of being there, stoically   sticking to one thing. Then a robin cocks his little head as if to query   why I’m crouched here like a toad when the rain has stopped and all these worms are ours for the taking.

and stare perplexedly into the middle distancewith one crease, one particularly characterfulfurrow knitting my brow, not an old lady furrowoh no something about the way I hold this furrow in this ongoingly perplexed stare will imply a whole panoply of barely suppressed emotions, a gamuteven, simmering away under the surface of thissingular furrow topped off with an immenselyenigmatic rage that also, paradoxically, resemblesserenity and I will do banter in my cop car with my sidekick oh definitely I want a sidekick with whomI will stop. Unwontedly. Here. And also sometimes —there. And I will chew my lip. And he will hold hisbreath. Bamboozled by my odd. Choice. Of hiatus.And no one will move until I speak again.

In summer, when light’s fled, narcotic scentsare poured out from ten thousand blooms; we dozewith shut eyes but ears which only half-close,immured by sleep of a strange transparence.   Soft shadows and the stars subtler, less bright;vague radiance tints that eternal hall,and the sweet pale dawn, awaiting her call,seems wandering low in the sky all night.