Poems

You go here and go there, but also stand still, return to the same spots: the bench on the hill in Victoria Park, above the plane trees that veil through winter branches the city’s spill, platform seven, same-time Tuesdays, Temple Meads gloomy and Cardiff central gleeful in sun,  a table in the café waits, routinely where you sit, before work, as you’ve always done. You are running too, when you can, through early dark,  sun lifting lazily over Ashton Court’s tree-lined hill, cross-country reps. Wednesdays, in Manor Woods Park,  this New Year’s world breathes cautious, centred, still,  those night walks home; Orion, seems the spindle,  that turns time through January’s long chill.

I give you permission to be grumpy on your birthday. Quibbles, Tussles… escalating to full-scale plate-smashing Rows are allowed. Hypochondria, Melancholia, Cattiness, Swipes, Barbs, Pollution Anxiety — all shall be smiled upon. Not literally. There will be a window at noon for a forty-five minute Tirade on Money Worries. Longer, if necessary. Don’t hold back. Anything at all till midnight is permitted, after which, with a swoosh, naturellement, you’ll be Sweetness and Light.

we’re outside The Apple Pie, sheltering. A jackdaw hops on a table nearby, twitching its hooded head, chit-chattering urgent news. Fixing us with beaded eyes, its charcoal plumage paints the rain-rod day. You message Steve, his house still full of Kath. Step-dad or Lydia? Who’s come to stay? Someone’s there, we hope, to ease the aftermath. Warmed by soup and pot of tea, we talk of Steve, watch umbrellas wheel down the lacquered street. read the Sunday papers, don’t want to leave. In together fug, rooted to our seats, just you and me with jackdaw recitative, we are the blessed. We are the unbereaved.

Take a walk with me down to the stream. It’s a cold, clear day. Frost underfoot. Tonight there will be stars: approaching home, we’ll crane our necks to count them, while billions of years whoosh past and next-door’s cat creeps over the shed. For now, it’s the stream we’re seeing through: billions of drops absolved of their differences, woven into one, a rippling pathway between two fields. Kneel down with me, and take these cares we’ve nurtured all the year in hand: our meek and jumbled offerings, our unsaid sorries, our pains. Let the cold, clear water stun you into wonder as it carries them away. There is time to do this at the closing of the year on a cold, clear day.

I was considerably perplexed for a long timeas to how they ensured each can contained a uniform amount. And what was the measurement?Gigglebytes? Guffaws? Microsnorts? I assumed there was a warehouse or depotin HaHa-on-the-Hill or Chucklington or some peripheral spot: HowlMart! orLarfs-R-Us! in dayglo on the side, but worried about the clowns who manned itbeing drenched by their backfiring buttonholes. How could they possibly handle bulk ordersin those absolutely massive shoes?

They Oz you up, your Mandyias. They may not mean to, but they do. They give you vast and trunkless legs A sunken shattered visage too. But they were Ozzed up in their turn By Mandyias upon the sand Who half the time had wrinkled lips  And half in sneering cold command. Oz hands on Mandyias to man. Like mighty works atop a shelf  Look on them early as you can Ye mighty and despair yourself.

He left pawprints in the corridors.  Attendants followed at a distance, collecting  his droppings and listening for pronouncements.  When they saw his tongue lolling, they knew he was thirsty, pressing forward with a pail.  Some nights, hectored by matters of the state,  they would hear him roar in his chambers,  beat his paws against the walls and  hanker for the cold, black skies. His speeches  were fabled: beginning with a growl, building  to a pitch of fury across the despatch box.  They set them down in Hansard.    For counsel, he spoke with the kittiwakes    and warblers that settled at his window.

On a winter’s day, we took a trip to Wrabness. I was forcibly struck by Wrabness’s drabness. An empty street, as if everyone was ill. The air was preternaturally still. There was a single closed and shuttered shop. No birds sang. It wasn’t Adlestrop. Down at the estuary, the water was slate-grey, the sand and stones the colour of wet clay. The trees were black and bare, the sky was white. The windless air retained a wintry bite. When we got back to the station, our train had gone. We waited on the platform as an hour dragged on. Wrabness will remain with me, I think: a cold, astringent but refreshing drink.

Strange how the wind in certain placesbecomes your mindand your mind the sea.Shifting with degrees of perspicacity. Strange how the pines in certain placesbecome the fretand the fret the breeze.Tidal. Sputtering with incivilities. Strange how your bones in certain placesbecome the stones that make freeto stand. Or fall.Or to mutiny.

So as to not leave any marks on the freshly emulsioned walls by leaning the metal stepladder against them, and to save me the groan of starting next morning by heaving it up off the floorboards and lugging it into position, I stand it upright, dead centre of the empty lounge overnight, clothe the rungs with my overalls; no better place for my scaly gloves than snug on the ends of both stiles, as though waving or ready to grab you.

Still clear, their first steps, the fields we camped in, the rained-on holiday lets… less so the white-lined blur of car journeys – their songs, games, laughter, arguments… their silences that gave way to sleep, the engine’s drone. Miles rolled into hours, years.            Between the land and the sea we were never so near to ‘there’, so closely strapped in to love as inside those distances,  a home of sorts, or nearly there.

I am floating on heather again. A fleece unshorn for fifty years slips off me, rolls down the hill. Its tumbleweed won’t stop till the village where Gary and Bill wait for me and Emmy unlocks  the corrugated hall and Stahl repairs his Morris outside Nancy’s shop. It’s early May. The bleating fields and the drone of Glyn’s tractor rise. The sunlight brims with larks. I am not the man I became but inside a song, a dazzling stream, the laughter of friends on the breeze.

Om – OMG! The cosmos sings! A few can hear             its soft wild background murmur, its love song from the wild frontier.             Then wonder shades to worry,             as Earth, distressed, gets warmer. We share forebodings with our friends.             We start to say we’re sorry,             we say we’ll make amends.

What’s day to a miner? Shovels and picks. Ten fathoms deep the mind plays tricks. Like: I’m lying in bed with the sun flooding in. I’m married to a bright young thing in a yellow dress. She sings to me. I pull her close. My hands are clean. My hands aren’t clean. We dream the day then rise at dusk to claim our pay with coated hands. Example two: above the cart, a chink of blue waving like a tiny flame that somehow knows me, calls my name and guides us to a richer seam. Shovel, pick, shovel, pick, the sun’s a ghost, the light’s a trick – yet who’s to say the light’s not true? The mind does what it has to do to save itself from total dark.

Who were they kidding? Themselves for their sins? Or the man with a tripod calling say cheese to these old fashioned guests with their fixed wooden grins in the coffin shaped shadows of pollarded trees? Sometimes they seem no further away than the lift of a veil or the drop of a hat or the time it might take for the bride’s bouquet to hang in the air before being caught while the groom, exposed, not ready yet, is cupping his hand after cadging a smoke from his rakish best man whose waved cigarette is flourished around another blue joke, tasteless, unsavoury, so un-PC that the dead all around laugh uproariously.

Coming back from the doctor, you have little to say. Treading the sorrowful stones of the Galgenstraat, our view across the Ij impeded by a new apartment block on the site of the fearful gibbet where Rembrandt van Rijn observed Elsje Christiaen tied to its arms, she was barely sixteen and you complain of the cold, leaves turning, autumn sun spattering  the narrow street, three young girls playing hockey, long legs, long honey coloured hair, rosy cheeked and out of breath, ‘Dangerous, they could be killed!’ I turn but you’re not listening, looking more like your old self suddenly, quite cheered up.