May there always be a friend to write a letter — always time for silence between bars of music — always more stories, more music — always a flock of birds over the river — always old maps promising new journeys — always an island at which to moor and shade of trees. May the lonely routine bring wonder to strangers — may every little room open on wide worlds — may all the years be charts drawn in clear ink and none of the clouds to come veil the view from the summit.
With all the rain our great provider wished upon us this long winter, a brick-lined pit dug umpteen years ago (I had no inkling it was there), fell in. More than six foot wide, more than eight foot down. The shock. The fear of falling into piss, shit, bone-eating worms. My need to fill the wretched thing. How to bury a year of crumbling certainties? Last night North Norfolk’s moon went carnival, its light so stark, it would have lit that gap, chasm, abyss, in the dark – a hole that might have gone on swallowing flower beds, deer-molested shrubs and lawn – if the builder hadn’t traipsed to and fro, barrow after barrow, tipped in rubble on a bitter day, to fill it.
I close my eyes and sing her name, shape her ghost on the air. The trees are begging for Spring. One lane haunts another in Wales. This hedge lets in a saline wind though it’s been fifty years inland. The river’s genie snags on a thorn on its way to the sea, vague summers where time behaves differently, finds her curled up in a dune, creaturely in her sleep, her breath shaping a ghost from a ghost. Gifting me a young man’s pain, a brutal tide for a brittle shell, she has vanished again, returned to sand, the softness of dunes. And so these drowned songs surface in my ear, remember her.
I’ll stay young for you if you’ll stay young for me It won’t be easy Some things we’ll have to set aside Jogging along the promenade in shiny shorts I will not do It’s not helpful, you and I turning ridiculous I’m thinking it’s all in the mind. Keep it supple Read decent books, Keep up with current affairs, Above all, stay out of the Obituaries. Try a craft beer Discuss our family less Let them come to us. I’m not that fond of them. You get on with our kids, I never really did. I’m glad they’re not In our faces. They put a halt on us, I know you disagree. We were too young. We had Things to do That we never did and won’t do now.
Beneath you is the swollen city, markets and the plenaries of feral cats, their siestas under siege from cops with eyeshades up and windows down tooling around in old Buicks. There’s a whiff of stock footage about it – sex on the breath of my first lover from the interior. After light rain, elms take a stand in a foreign park. They spread their arms, raise lantern blossom against purple incoming. The years have issued a new print of our one film, which I watch daily, never mind the slow wow you suffer in playback, tailback, fanning out.
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?
Earth’s moon is never new, There’s no replacing her. Either you see all her wintered face Or she sends scraps Through bandages of shade. She doesn’t want your talk Assuaging, failing to assuage, Only your sleepless eyes As she gropes her way Across the cobbled stars, Clutches at sun To heal her secret hurt. She has too much to carry, Sees too far beyond our suburb To be happy exactly. She’s the sort of wreck Who knows what it may cost To unshape this abyss, Its quarterless dark, To get where we must go From where we are.
He’s riding a white horse. I was going to say he was riding into the forest. It’s more like a wood, a large wood with sycamore trees and silver birch and if you look you can see a Weeping Willow. There are deer in the undergrowth watching carefully and there are a lot of small animals. He’s talking to the horse and patting its neck. There’s no one else around and the wood has a beguiling music. The horse breaks into a canter. Rabbits listen and twitch. An oyster catcher flies overhead. And coming into view a long-winged buzzard. The horse slows and steps into the river – He’s a good horse, my brother’s a good horseman.
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.
She appears in the window. She appears to be watering the plant. I need to be in your hair he whispers into her ear. His tongue drains the room of light pitched with the fever of is there someone else is there is there In his voice she can hear a leaf loosening from its stem. Around him begins to lose its colour. His jersey slung across the back of a chair the photograph Blu-tacked to the wall of he and she locked arm in arm and on the table those cheerless chicken wings flailing in their marinade. Let’s get take-away she says. I need to be in your hair.
(after Mallarmé) The smoke rings I cannot blow seem summations of my soul one by one by one they roll scattered with another O their trembling grey bears witness to incendiary art keep your ashen mind apart from the buried fire’s red kiss thus whole choirs of romance fly up to lips unclean with sin just exclude when you begin so-called realism’s lie for with too defined meaning poetry will never sing.
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.
The cab suddenly turning up twenty-seven minutes later after my ten frantic calls from the pavement outside your block, your dressing-gowned silhouette hovering on the balcony, a halo of your wispy hair blonde once more against the dawn. My suitcases thrown in the boot, doors slammed, engine revved, clutch released, I forgot our goodbye wave, checking messages and chanting my flight number like a hex. If only that cab had left me waiting in vain. No way to know I’d never see you again.
Remember those lanes he walked after work, past the weed-wormed car park at the rusting colliery to the two-street village, to catch the bookies or straight into the Oak. His days governed by dim light: in boiler houses or the single bulb rooms of boarded-up terraces – jobs no one wanted never fazed him. The same fanged grin at a rumour his horse had come in, tipping me for putting his bets on; the whiff of piss even turps couldn’t disguise. No family, nor home, some nights sneaking back to the job to doss. He was found on the edge of a field, crushing those tiny blue flowers I still don’t know the name of.
for Ian Sansom Where was it written that I should measure my middle years by the great blank flowering of these pom-poms – uncanny as domes in a village landscape – whose advance has no warning (one day a sprinkling of warts, the next WE’RE HERE!!!), that love water and pacify the night? They’ve no smell; the bees and other pollinators shun them; even the cats, hardly particular, pass by Snowglobia and take their rank business elsewhere. Don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t a plangent lyric about possession of the instant, bright fields and flying clouds. It’s pointless. Something, something, middle years: they’re pointless.
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.
Firm pillows stacked highfor hope to rest on, each calling outagainst nightmare and fear. Courage has determinedthis towering resistance so may it hold firmand remain until dawn for the light to discovera mended nation whose cities awakefrom their troubled sleep.
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.