Poems

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.

Ball-bearings, silver, tilted inhis lidless gold tobacco tintip out and strike the garage floorlike props dropped by a conjurorwho scrabbles for them in the darkblackthreaded by the scent of barkto feel, in earth caked on a spade,the soul his careless ghost mislaidslip through cold hands that disinterthe winter bulbs he left for her,while cobwebs, hung on filthy glass,cling to him when she brushes past,count off in beads of autumn rainfull moons as they roll round againand tremble with her breathing inthe stir of dust shed by his skin.

The room shakes. He holds the hairspring up to the light. In the hour before the jets come he plays old cassettes of Farid El-Atrache and dreams of Beluga where his son, Tariq, once drew a clock in the sand. They bring him pieces of broken time: cracked faces, lost years, and place them into his hands. They pay him in figs and promises. He prises open their secrets then holds each coil with a pair of tweezers. At dusk, he listens to the crickets in the grassand follows the slow sweep of the shadows. He eats his shawarma, then winds his son’s watch, his time cut short. With a father’s touch, he setsit ticking like the beat of a sparrow’s heart.

First you have to give your name.Only when Callum finds it on his listwill he open the door and let you in. They have emptied the waiting roomof all but half-a-dozen chairs.We take it in turns. Each of us is called. We are all of an age, some with sticksmost grey-haired. One by onewe leave by the back door – as we were but touched, changed.

To gambol and to sometimeslollop through the meadow,head, a yo-yo, beech-green eyes. To be a dog — to be a German Shepherd dog sniffing einfach, einfach, in between botanic explorations. Or a Vizsla — chieftain of the hunting arts, Hungarian and fed on chops, oroh to be a spaniel, simply that and snuffle pungent mushrooms and listen in on lachrymose and ancient earthworms, keening at winter’s end. To be wise to it and thump the groundand bark three times for spring!

A 3x5 snap, black-and-white, fading, fallsfrom the pages. Summer ’68, Cuckmere Havensnatched with a child’s Instamatic: blurry, askew –tilted skyward mid-skirmish from a grassed-overtrench carved into the Downs. Resurrected:grinning urchins gangly in shorts – Bell, Lomax, Leeper – hamming it up as prisoner and Jerries,a penknife’s glint at the throat of a boy whose namenow is lost. Rat-runs dug barely twenty yearsearlier, when men barely twenty scanned the Channel,were summoned. To us, not even a memory –just an opportune lair as the drift of barbecued meat,faint shrieks of comrades, hung in the breeze.One more little posse, schooling itself. Down inits foxhole, roused by the instinct of tribal and savage.