Poems

In the park today,All that I found had a name.The black ball of a robin’s eye,The dizzy dart and dawdle of the sky blue butterflyWere almost just the same,   But I had their songIn my hands and lips,Like the grass I picked when it had beenRolled and rolled until the colour of its darker green Was now my fingertips,   So I travelled fartherInto the depth of the park,With the gumboot slickness of a slugAnd the tictoc waterboatmen out wrinkling the rug On the pond’s unblinking dark.   There were daisies’ yellow circlesInside daisies’ yellow circlesPiled on their slim white spoons,And I ran around and round and round and sang the tunes That all went round in circles.

Regent’s Park, November   I pick a tree, from all those rows,ruggedly gesturing, voiceless,braced for the fall of shaming snows,a captive in its stark undress.   At my feet the thousand-piecespuzzle in countless shades of brownattests to a handful of specieswhose leaves the recent winds brought down:   English oak, sycamore and plane,dropped from nearby if not above,plus singletons a whispering campaignseems to have carried from some grove-   cum-library of rumours from afar –silver maple, pin oak, liquidambar.

Often it disappears – from hotels, harbours, airport carousels… but always it comes back to him.   Trusting in the umbilical dance of instrument and player he stays calm in its absence.   Amongst the cosmic flotsam orbiting Earth this minute There! Tauseef’s harmonium.   On the sea bed, flexing its gills for ghazal-hungry shoals Listen! Tauseef’s harmonium…   sometimes for years until, missing his voice on the air, it plunges through the atmosphere   or, surfacing back to the light, steals in on the tide’s concertina to appear at Tauseef’s paddling feet –   a child’s shadow through frosted glass after all hope has been lost.

The year after my brother died,I was out on my threadbare Vespain countryside south of Bradford.The day was warm and blue;I let myself get lost, turn by turn,until I rode solo along the lanes.Low, overhead of me, a plane flewwith a single propeller,its undercarriage painted cloud-like:its span the shape of a Spitfire,or other kin from boyhood books.I stopped in the road,cut the engine, and took off my helmet;and heard it made no sound.I was untethered in those yearsby grief that made my life unreal.I stood and beckoned to this ghost.

She said she dreamedthat young once moreshe walked a roadthat led from nowhere   into nowhere,and, stopping, placedher name-tagged suitcase down.The question asked   inside her headwas this: ‘Shall I go on,walk on. Or turnand stay a while?’   She turned, and leftthe suitcase standing thereto be reclaimedsome other day   when she would need no proofof who she wasor where she was to go,the handle forming to her hand.

Whit Sunday, blustery heat, and you in three-piece suit to read the Second Lesson.   The day before, I’d excavated Arctic Rolls from ice-shelves in the local store’s deep freeze.   We ate them reverently, like miracles we didn’t quite believe in.   I threw up first and stayed in bed. You soldiered on through hymns of praise   till hot air swayed the church and God stopped leading you in upright ways,   an almighty adjustment that left you face down in the Benedictus, eating dust.

One summer I’d a plague of them –they looked so pretty in their red and black I didn’t mind them fluttering round but then I’d find one on my pillowor leaving smears across the panes.The boldest liked to totter on my fingerthen take me under her wing –it was lined with finest satinwhich she unfolded like a sheet.For months she hung around the windowtill a gust or rumour took her off. I remember the smooth curve of her backand how she’d tumble from the bed to fetch up madly wriggling on the floorhelpless as an overturned coracle.

I thought about going to a support group. I looked into it in the yellow pages and other outmoded data sets. I came upon a strange group of surly Sues and churlish Chads. We sat around and made high-pitched whines for about an hour. It was a pre-verbal kind of vibe. Some of us barked. We were all royally pissed off by something or other but no one was allowed to say what. That was the beauty of it. In Week Two, we harmonised and made a lovely Whingey Symphony. A person from an Adult Ed course down the hall put their head round, looking for their dog, Brian Eno, who had strayed. We went full-scale Allegro con Moans.