Poems

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.

In the days when I loaded goods trains for a living Out of love for you, and no small concern I felt cold and tired and clean My throat pulsed slowly with the cold air’s burn Down on the silvering frost-lit rail Balanced with risk on the oiled sleeper Pushing upwards against the weight Of an electric four-ring cooker or a fridge The tracks going on till they fell off the world’s edge.

I suppose you’re right and breaking upwould be quite a good thing,but staying togetherwould be an equally good thing,so whatever we decide to doit will be all right. On balance,I lean towards doing nothing,but whatever happens we’ll go onseeing each other, won’t we?   I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad,seeing other people for a change,we might even find someonewe could bear to be withfor more than half an hour,although I doubt it somehow.Experience suggests we go onfeeling the same about everythingno matter what happens. I do anyway.

Agnes B. Marshall, née Smith, of Walthamstow, practised at Parisunder Viennese chefs, had visions of snow-capped mountains,stiffly beaten peaks, set in glassy dishes. Not for her the Penny Lick.She knew life wasn’t a rehearsal and set about chipping away at Gatti’s glaciers: Norwegian ice kept frozen under London clay. (Liquid nitrogen later emerged from the mists of her imagination.)A finger in so many pies! She licked off the cream and ate the cone. At her height, she fell, the Queen of Ices thrown by a horse,never to recover. Without her, the business tripped, too: bought up by Mrs Beeton’s publisher (if you can’t, then join ’em). But why be sorry?

when an unexpected whirl of wind tosses grey veils of rainacross the Common; gobbets of roof-tile moss and mudplop on my doorstep. The parakeets, no doubt bewildered, flung among new-leafed trees, are blown to destinations never planned for. Flowers I planted yesterday fight fortheir lives in sodden borders. The sky turns dark. I switchon every light, write this... Abruptly it is over. Blue sky,calm cirrus clouds, warm spring sun and I, sitting foolishin the spotlight by my tall wide windows on a shining day, war still roaring from the TV screen.

and I’m dead set on a fire:the year’s first.   Barely cold, but I wantto ball paper, lay kindling,   strike a match, smell autumn.The same as a boy:   the sleepovers, bike rides, fishing trips –always the next thing, always   tomorrow.I’ve got good at this – wielding an axe.   Wood splits:a hollow ring.   Soon now, I’ll sitand watch today go up in smoke.

won’t be deterred, though her coughclinks and rattles like a bottle delivery.   The porch covers her; rain and shine shesits cross-legged on the doorstep, not   watching while the street happens,coughing to punctuate life’s sentence.   Somebody should tell her the fifties areover, that no one’s going to photograph her for   Picture Post, that she should quitsmoking. This morning she sits behind a scaffold   as though it wasn’t there.Two men crab-walk the roof above.

When I get there, my friend is fast asleepwith nail clippings scattered on his kneein the dayroom’s baffled light. I wake him gently.‘I don’t know where I am.’ ‘You’ve been asleep.’   Homes Under the Hammer is on the BBC.We manage, once we find his stick, a turnaround the block. He mithers about his hat,all shifting sand, in peril on the sea.   I take his arm, point out cherry blossom(petals on a black taxi) as if springcould blow his mind. But how can he withstand   the rising sea: the broken home, his darlingpottery collection auctioned off to no onehe could know, lovers lost with all hands?