Poems

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.

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.