Poems

When Alfredo lets the film fly on its beam of light, I Pompieri di Viggiù comes to roost on a tenement block, rippling the hard lines of masonry. Isn’t love sleight of hand after all? You and I, in rainy Islington, among discrete coughs and rustles, spoon Sicily’s raw energy into our souls. Giant faces undulate over shutters in the hot body of night. A couple on the cliff edge of passion, lips parted, noses positioned, close in for the . . . Twenty years, and they’ve never let us see a kiss! wails an old Sicilian; the withheld moment like a slap across the wrists. How we laugh, as the priest rings his hand bell and Alfredo snips each corrupting frame. Kisses drop to the floor, shiny as snakes; alive in our minds as only the unsaid can be.

This morning I took the Coasthopper from Burnham Overy Staithe to Sheringham, boarded breathless, had to run. The driver said next time put out your hand. The ‘George Vancouver’ stops for everyone! Our buses start from Lynn. They’ve all got names, one’s called ‘Black Shuck’ after the dog who spooks the coast. ‘Fanny Billingham’ was hung in Norwich. ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner’ rented Randall’s folly on Salthouse beach. I moved closer, told her I’d met STW, but fixed on roads, she didn’t care to stretch Coasthopper lore. As usual Cley was bottlenecked. Take it easy, she meant the car blocking our path. Just reverse dear. Now we’re there!

Drip, squelch, ooze, a subdued pitter-patter, a background hum that is scarcely there. Mostly silence. Faint creaking. Drip, drip: a twig bows to release a flop of snow. The clothes-line is hung with shapeless rags of ice, on the verge of transforming into aerial sheets of water. What do they taste like? Like nothing at all. The wood pigeon complains, complains, complains. Smaller birds venture to the branches around their feeders, releasing now and then a puff of white from over-laden twigs as they tweak out half-unfrozen seeds. The wood pigeon returns to its moan.

It’s all right, the rain is falling. It’s all right, no need to worry. When was there ever a need? But you do, you do. It eats away at you – fear about infestation, damp, job, taxes, the household chores, and don’t even get onto personal relations, the vultures of failure bouncing with glee – because right now the rain is falling, dripping from the line, fences, gutter, leaves, and under its lens the trees have turned up the dial on green and yes, it’s all right, the rain is falling and it doesn’t look like stopping any time soon.

After the painting by Theodore Robinson Two priests, on the narrow path to heaven, pass a balcony brimming with clementine. Like crows, they glance up, and see a woman with red hair, sipping a glass of Gragnano. She smiles and tells them there is more than one way to the top of the mountain. Ahead, they can see bleached plaster walls, the brilliant white light of the houses, and the Bar Alfredo, that stands, teetering on the brink like a drunk fisherman back from the catch of a lifetime. Beyond is the place where brick gives way to rock, and where shadows give way to light; the crags on the grassy slopes that we must all, one day, climb.

Because we talk we talk about the weather, its predictable mood-swings, good days, off days, days that come at any time of year as if from nowhere – stormy, or so sweet we have to go outside to feel, together, their July-in-April, March-in-May, nostalgic for a world whose atmosphere adapted us as we adapted wheat, leaving hill-top forts to thorn and heather while we cut the forest and made hay. Remembering our parents’ parents’ fear of not enough, then nothing left, to eat, we grow too much, only preparing for what we expect the weather has in store.

how Peleus won Thetis of the grey mistby clasping her to the couch, and holding onthrough her every changing shape, even the tigress.You gods on Olympus, grant me that peaceonce her shape-shifting is over, and promise meby the Styx, it be over once and for all.

Hard to believe the mirror:those sags you thought were cheekbones.Your size is no longer your size and the next one up buries you. Flimsy panels and the clothes hook swivels on a single screw. The curtain that won’t draw to: who might burst in, who’ll step out.

His habit is watching sceneryChanging at the bend,The view lying back encirclingIts dishevelment with an arm. Or watching a waterfallSilently on film, jumped shotsLeaving him unsplashed.It is visiting a Sussex castle Where he pictures the skirmishingOf frightened soldiery.It is any crowd he seesIn profile, fathers and sons anonymous As collectors’ coins. He observesThe cheerful blindness of flowersThat seem to know him but go onNodding when he has passed. His habit Is standing outside and seeingHis cupped gaze in the glass,A seafarer photographedAgainst the adventure of the sky. Out over the noisy seaSignals intermittently winkGreen or red, suggestingSomeone prepared to wait,But in the darkness eventually go out.

It’s been a while. Let me get used to it.I knew about the widows, of course, but hadn’t quite expected the crutches, the walking-frames, or that poor agitated soul endlessly pacing at the front. On the other hand, the baby chirruping during the one minute’s silence could hardly have given any offence. It’s been a late, cold spring; last year’s was also cold and late, but it happened.Normal operations are being resumed.Someone has died, at nearly a hundred, of natural causes. Weep, but not too much.That white shower was not snow, but petals.

You are not churchy, I feel certain of it.You do not demand a particular hat or coatOr a room filled with a particular scent.You do not only like hymnsAnd if someone laughs you don’t mind.There is no special kind of poem for youOr single word to wrap your meanings inNor can any category contain you fully.There is not a box you will not slip out of Or knot you cannot easily untie,And that, in a way, is the whole trouble –There is nothing, hard or soft,That can restrain youAlthough, my goodness, I’ve tried.

Goddard prints his footsteps in the gloom and, from the transepts, Breathes an air swaying with a pleasant doom, not quite his own. He marks the candles, too, stacked and swelling for another age, And, for the thousandth time, repeats their sigh, repeats their sigh. Still the organ keys lie waiting for him, like the ships that sailed for Troy. At his command, the prows descend, the sails fill, the sea gives way; And burly chords claim marble caverns for their own, Where baffled statues tremble under sticky coats of dust. Implausible glory fills Goddard’s lungs and clouds his eyes.