Poems

I found a gift-tag tailed with silver stringdropped by our bed, ironically heart-shaped,gold cardboard, unattached to anything,attracting bits of fluff and Sellotapeand, placed between your hairbrush and your pillswith ribbon from the final gift you wrapped,reflected in a mirror that revealedWith all my loveblue-biro’d on the back.   Your present, a belated jeu d’esprit,this black and orange clip-on kipper tie,its flourish of your old tomfooleryintended to, with love, mock-horrify,turned up too late to carry off the jokebut left me grateful, knowing how you’d tried,still hearing laughter, stifled as I woke,and truly, by the morning, horrified.

Next he told us how he’d creepto the edge of the tip with a broken chunk of cistern or sink raised above his head and before letting it go, them black rats, super quick, big as rabbits, tails fat as rope, gone. Other places where they usually get and that tea time was a good time – hardly anyone about, not many cars, when you could hear cutlery from opened kitchen windows. The waitress handed us the menus.

shuffling across the carpark from the pool in my dry robe like a damp, disconsolate Cistercian, I heard them, two peacocks: their proclamations launched wide into the whites of the Cumbrian sky, their maladroit plainsongcutting up the backdrop of chaffinch after chaffinch and as iffrom nowhere, two peacocks: (stately home dropouts? heritage park rejects?

A loaded presence in a biscuit tin,       The rounds of sandwiches they found             Were cut and dried as hard as tesserae;Forgotten in the airless wardrobe, play       Was innocent. Would they rebel Against the bounds of home? But looking inOne day back early, neither made a sound,And caught the two red-handed by the standard lamp,      Surprised with strawberry jamSpread on the prairie carpet with the large sliced white,             Preparing in the makeshift campProvisions for the wilderness.And where would they be going? ‘Well?

As the Taliban surged back into Kabul and the international correspondents looked more exhausted with every broadcast but not as exhausted as the refugees   I thought of my young second cousin Matthew, one of the four hundred and fifty-sevenflown back from Afghanistan in sealed coffinsto Wootten Bassett and then, in Matthew’s case,   to York for his military funeral in the Minster, after which the gun-carriageparaded him on a tour of the packed streets before beginning its sedate procession   to the cemetery while we, the mourners,plus vanloads of soldiery sped off ahead at a pace Matthew would surely have preferred,with sirens and flashing lights, to get there first;   all of which might have been designed to persuade his parents that being blown up by a bombat.

Across the great divide…   They kept them hidden till I stepped inside       One for a birthday card,Puzzled at first by what was there       And what was not. And what was there to hide?   Huge glossy frozen packs of pig’s feet, tripe,       Hog maws and chitterlingsAnd no promotions down the aisles       I recognised.

Years of working weekends, cashing in his holidays, dossing in loveless digs beside arterial roads or in vans to pocket his expenses.   He’d earned it, kept on how soon he’d be in Lido di Jesolo, a linen suit for evenings;us lot wouldn’t exist.   Back three days later, rubbing down skirting boards before we arrived. Couldn’t stand it:the kids, the heat, the wife.

We trudged the grounds of a country house       under a featureless skyas stark trees bled out with morning rain       and what light there was started to die,   and every time you grabbed for my hand       I felt a little thrill,unmentioned, ineffable.       I’m glad to feel it still –   I spent half a life being bad at that.       And here we were, noses to wind,simply happy, which nobody is,       but as close as I’ll ever find.   And in came her message. And later that night       I looked at it, then at her profile:smiley-faced. Husband gone. Three gorgeous kids.       Was thinking of you!

After breakfast, our bonuses in the bag, time sheets collected, the weekend begins. Down by the battered garages near the burnt-out Escort, our apprentices go for it: first to find one gets chips for his dinner. Stanway says to take it behind that steel-shuttered house, top of the estate, and for all of us to be there, midday. In the unkempt garden, we watch Stanway – 56, kids at uni, wife a pharmacist – chucking bricks. The wider the screen, he says, the bigger the bang. One of the lads promises an old black and white from his nana’s spare room, at last taking a real interest, can’t wait for next week.

My soul, my shadow, the dreams I stare into the night are wounded. I kiss my mirror-self. The lips with which I bite are wounded.   I am a year filled with venom, every season is autumn: leaf-filled evenings, the snaking twilight are wounded.   The signs of the stars – my Scorpio, my Libra, Sagittarius pierced by his own arrow’s flight – are wounded.   The snorting bull, on whose proud horns the Earth is caught, is heartsick. His heart, my heart, breaking at our plight, are wounded.   I have no country, no land, not even a room the size of a grave. No sky. Centuries of starlight are wounded.   My father gives me food/ gave me water: childhood’s homework. Beneath dust and blood, the pages are white, are wounded.

Hearing ‘Caravan’ by Duke Ellington and I’m at the Blue Parrot in Casablanca: the house bird perched outside unfazed by whirring ceiling fans, and the belly dancer’s creeping shadow. The band playing jazz to a fluent clientele leave the exotic bird unperturbed. A street market unfolds under her gaze. How simple the menu at Ferrari’s place: pleasure, talk, a handshake, the deal. No choice to be made about right or wrong, ideals or love, one song over another. Buying and selling is Ferrari’s trade, attending to his business of the day, the rake-off on sex, liquor, hookahs.

In the beginning a slap gets it going and a child once told me breath’s here ‘to blow bubbles’. In heaven I was once informed breathing is no longer needed. I should have guessed. Breath’s always been a downmarket option, wholly belonging to earthly struggles, to life and death and other mundane matters.