Poems

Cleat hooks glinted on the window wall. We checked again the spotless parquet for paint flecks, even the galvanised conduits and trunking, the suspended lights. A song of an American summer played low. He slipped in ahead of schedule, mild, beige, miles from his reputation. From a chrome tin a telescopic aerial deftly linked to a wing mirror. Straight backed, stepping sideways around the high room, his eyes fixed on the mirror tilted just so, keen to pick us up on any skimping – beneath the cast iron water pipes and radiators. At his shoulder, the chargehand feigned laughter at his own remarks.

I’m not the kind to fidget, fray or fret.I’m truly a soul at peace – ask anyone!The savoir faire for which I’m widely knownhas optimised my odds in life’s roulette.Am I the underdog to back? You bet!With equal yin and yang, in union,I have a personal hotline to the Zone.I relish risk, I rise to every threat.I’ve had my share of darkness: when light fails, the surest step can miss the track. And yetthere dawns within me now a marvellous sunwhose rays enflame a pair of golden scales:a perfect equilibrium of regret –for all I’ve done and all I haven’t done.

He walked each day the same, Picking around Inside his broken, frameless mind For bits of comforting, Pushing his feet With care among free leaves On pavements his for the walking Where no one stopped him with talking : A hatless, witless man. He knew the shabby parts Picking around: The tree-wreck of a rusty car, Nettles and rags and flattened tins, The mouldy mats That leaned box-stiff and damp In ditches, his for the taking. Elsewhere some hand would be making New things to rot for him.

was a down-and-out in awe of a pencil salesmanin a café, midtown Manhattan.Handsome like a movie star, the salesman turns on his sales patter,speaking loudly peachy keens and aw shucks and I am fine here Sandra in The Big Apple, but honeycould you look in my…and the street guy’s envylike a furnace, his eyeslike beads in a forge,and then it happens...just as sales talk goes the wayof big smiles and I gotta go Sandra,the balding bum, in a worn-out windbreaker,soiled loafers, shirt open at the navel, stands up, walks across to the salesman’s table, and says: I am going to be an actor.

Lit up and out of tune she’d bawl to make her ten green bottles fall but near the end, its song and dance, they came down like an avalanche; decades of empties drained and tossed in stairwells, basements, cellars, lost to blackouts or, pulled back once more, a locked ward off a corridor it took a white gowned summer of heat and gauze to wheel her down. Dried out by autumn, washed and dressed, she’d idled into brittleness, stick-thin with rage, with nicotine, the doped rice paper of her skin too yellow now, too old, too wrong to bottlebank a singalong or raise, hoarse from its shattered past, through lacerations of smashed glass, her voice again, uproarious.

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.