Poems

Each night at ten the fossoyeur powdered white with limereads the tally by the excavation.The trussed lie there hooded, tagged, after the weather the viewers sleep. The mice fear death, the unselected,for they have a pulse of finite beatsand even the rats along the foundationswhen exposed by the digger’s jawspin around each other like eels.Death’s saw leaves a nick in the bark,who is up there in the forksearching for sails on the horizon?Even in a book cave three stacks deepthe seller found no sanctuary.In the village of Damme a widow lay his marionettes carefully on strawhoping they would survive the night.Leaves that drop onto the canalare moved by the passage of swans,thus they turn awhile, the brown, the lime here along the Potterierei in Bruges.

I wish I’d gone to Icelandwith Auden and MacNeiceto feed my brain on silenceor talk of war and peace.I wish I’d seen Craiglockhart under a Scottish moonand talked about the slaughterwith Owen and Sassoon.But I was a Belfast studentwith Heaney and his clan.I never got to talk at all –one had to be a man.

We recognise each other at the same time –Mr Fleet, my old geography teacher. He says Time flies and our names come to each other like a mnemonic, decades since we last met. He’s dressed for the weather, with binoculars,but he’ll not see a rarer bird on his walk than me.He fires off big questions like I’m in an exam,keen to map the battlefield of my adult life. He wants to talk more but I’m not sureI’ve passed the test and his waiting wifeis used to this sort of thing, the once brightmeeting him dulled, and she’s keen to get on.

Long after there is no point feeling lossI cross this now familiar dry plateauand stop, hearing my footsteps also stop.Silence, a fresh sheet falling on a bed, settles. Not quite a silence after all:a quiet breathing in the winter hedgeand sheep, cropping. Birds – a flock of something,plovers, peewit, I don’t know, but breathing,alive, quiet. There is nothing to fear,only the din that echoes in my head.Wet fading footprints vanish on the laneas if I walked already here todayand my own self is not too far ahead.I think, walk slow. Don’t catch her up again.

If I’ve shown up at your room, drunk, at 3am, then let’s at least agree that lesser men have sunklower, and that my being here at least shows you and me have a unique connection, that drew us two together against all odds: something mostly complex, though grave, something ultimately true,or that at least when falling home I thought of you You! with whom I’m aligned on all three planes:material, reflexive, transverse— and yes my suit is stainedbut that’s less my fault than the gravitational force that drew the wine into my shirt, the same that put my knees into this dirt or forced the pebble through your windowpane:all of which for which you will agree I’m not to blame.

They sense the clocks have changed but can’t tell if an hour’s been lost or gained. It’s a struggle to name the day of the week Monday or Friday it’s all the same. There isn’t a deadline they have to meet no future appointments they need to keep. Like insects trapped between panes of glass the ghosts feel held between night and day. They appear in a novel no one will read and they can’t be bothered to turn the page. The ghosts long to kick through falling leaves but the seasons forget to change.

Absorbed by the TV in the corner, the pair of us on the sofa – but what of the space in between? The introduction of a rug or low table, nothing to obscure the picture. An emptiness remains: colourless, formless in either light or dark. Neither any use for it nor to it, we stare ahead, not seeing what’s here or not here.

The fall of a girl’s hair, the flare of a skirt –the merciless daily things that break your heartare there for you to learn your skills from. The hurtof living is what stings us into art.Cool your desires to ice, then start to play.Compose it all like music: use what you need:secrets; strange worlds; failed love; friends gone away.Each poem’s a rock-hard crystal, grown from a seed.Dig down and find the past: dead kings; old war;wonder-filled days; riding your first steam train;mysteries; why men don’t whistle any more.Honour the things that won’t come back again.Remember politics, but don’t digest them whole.(That shimmering emblem trailed across the skywill ravel out your mind, destroy your souland fill the world with lies while millions die.

after BaudelaireNow comes the hour when a flower feelsPerfume evaporate as from a bowlOf incense, when sounds make the evening’s soulSad languorous waltzes so that the head reels.Perfumes evaporate as from a bowl,A mandolin’s strings pluck a heart that keels,Sad languorous waltzes so that the head reels;The sky sad, beautiful, will take its toll.A mandolin’s strings pluck a heart that keels,A tender heart that hates the gaping hole,The sky sad, beautiful, will take its toll,The sun drowns in its own blood and congealsA tender heart that hates the gaping holeThe past can be unless the memory seals,The sun drowns in its own blood and congeals,Your memory burns inside me like a coal.

Keep your distance – here be dragons Agues of all kinds blown in from the East Time to fear door-knobs, be wary of cheek-to-cheek Kiss nothing, stay Within the boundaries, do what they say   Soon we won’t know ourselves, bolted Behind untouchable doors, masked Like smash-and-grab merchants or terrorists Or like surgeons Bent over an open wound, tellers of fortunes   The shelves in every shop are empty No buses run, traffic lights blink at nothing No letters come, no bills, no bitchy world intrudes We hold all government in our hands This is what no one quite understands.

After a note by Jules Laforgue The melancholy of Van Goyen’s pale autumn marines.Sad, eternal wind – life in monotone – boats loaded to tipping point, drowned banks where melancholic cattle, submerged to the knee, nose for grass – windmill struts emaciated against the hills –the little village of thatched cottages on stilts where we sleep outside to the eternal lapping of dirty flotsam and a thread of chimney smoke. Fish stew boils muddily, rascals whine. Wide skies where heavy rainclouds pass eternally overhead – white storks flapping to other countries. But how to grasp the heartbreaking melancholyof Van Goyen’s stained, sad marines?

Life has changed into a matterof keeping an eye on yourself.What stage are we at?Should you be holding onat all costs, to your sincerity?When you close your eyes and catch upwith a sort of accelerated film,moving you in the direction of a bad end,is that what’s heading your wayor something remembered,or the memory of somethingyou only thought?Maybe you’d prefer to be someone else,someone who doesn’t exist,such as Colonel Rolleston,collecting his Irish Times at the pier.Preparing for another trip to the refuse centre, it’s as if you are standing behindyour own shoulder,witnessing the levers of your armswork to fill black plastic bagswith books and clothes.

                    the volcano        I’d christened Mont D’Espoir or Mount Despair                    ‘Crusoe in England’, Elizabeth Bishop The twin peaks of Mont D’Espoir and Mount Despairkeep changing places and are hard to tellapart, with their simple binaries of sol y sombra. Relentless weather treats them both the same – clouds gather at their summits and disperse.Sometimes the clouds speak dragonish, and sometimes human. The twin peaks are made of the selfsame stuff – a composite of jet and alabaster,ground down at the same rate by the same blasts.