Poems

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 >.

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.

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.

Neutral as a wheel it is not culpable for what it picks up.   Shock jocks, phone-in bigots, ministerial lies and bleating celebs. A cup cannot be blamed for what fills it.   No judgment. No fear of offence just submission to whatever is snatched out of the air by chameleon range be it war, corruption, famine, peace, tsunamis, laughter, conferences, anger or simply a brilliant new tune   hooking you from the depths.

The gardens are in bloom your mother loved. A jazz trumpet blares – ‘Stormy Weather’ – to a girl spread with her laptop on the grass. Delinquent for a day, you came to catch the last of summer on these paths or the bank grown perilous with out-of-control, knotted weeds, where your father fished at weekends, where, midweek, only tourists stroll and the river-god, Old Father Thames, cuckoo-spit shining in his beard, is unfazed by the pleasure-boat’s farting horn.   How they clung here by their fingertips to respectability, slipping each year a little further down a terrible, almost-sheer drop into bottomless debt.

I have in mind a snapshot of our son Upheld by you in a prospect of snow, Taken when he was less than half of one On a cold mountain seven years ago. It was the first snow he was ever shown, Was blinded by and touched, and his cheeks glow. His puffer suit is white. His hat is green. Clearly the sky’s unmixed ultramarine.   And I recall he slept a long time after, Upright in the car seat I’d pulled from the jeep And stood up underneath the cabin’s rafters, So we could eat a long lunch during his sleep And he’d not hear the clatter of our laughter While we’d in Vin Santo our biscuits steep. He left no footprints in the snow that day But made yours somewhat deeper I would say.