from that rust-bucket slumped in the sand –
the Alba’s an old hand at drowning.
I was two when they first plumped me down
between Man’s Head and the Island
where fox-trails of water ran out
over Porthmeor strand.
I smell something which reminds me
of not being born,
my mother walks on the shoreline
a figure or maybe a figurehead
with a smile of wood.
In the big glare of the white day
I clutch at the sand’s
talkative hiss of grains,
lose my balance, and suddenly
scud on all fours
into the narcissi.
Dolphins whistling
Yes, we believed that the oceans were endless
surging with whales, serpents and mermaids,
demon-haunted and full of sweet voices
to lure us over the edge of the world,
we were conquerors, pirates, explorers, vagabonds
war-makers, sea-rovers, we ploughed
the wave’s furrow, made maps
that led others to the sea’s harvest
and sometimes we believed we heard dolphins whistling,
through the wine-dark waters we heard dolphins whistling.
We were restless and the oceans were endless,
rich in cod and silver-scaled herring
so thick with pilchard we dipped in our buckets
and threw the waste on the fields to rot,
we were mariners, fishers of Iceland, Newfoundlanders
fortune-makers, sea-rovers, we ploughed
the wave’s furrow and earned our harvest
hungrily trawling the broad waters,
and sometimes we believed we heard dolphins whistling,
through blue-green depths we heard dolphins whistling.
The catch was good and the oceans were endless
so we fed them with run-off and chemical rivers
pair-fished them, scoured the sea-bed for pearls
and searched the deep where the sperm-whale plays,
we were ambergris merchants, fish farmers, cod-bank strippers
coral-crushers, reef-poisoners, we ploughed
the sea’s furrow and seized our harvest
although we had to go far to find it
for the fish grew small and the whales were strangers,
coral was grey and cod-banks empty,
algae bloomed and the pilchards vanished
while the huer’s lookout was sold for a chalet,
and the dolphins called their names to one another
through the dark spaces of the water
as mothers call their children at nightfall
and grow fearful for an answer.
We were conquerors, pirates, explorers, vagabonds
war-makers, sea-rovers, we ploughed
the wave’s furrow, drew maps
to leads others to the sea’s harvest,
and we believed that the oceans were endless
and we believed we could hear the dolphins whistling.
Borrowed light
Such a connoisseur of borrowed light!
Pale as a figurehead, undismayed
by the rough footpath
you climbed towards the view.
At the top, silent, you would breathe in
the spread of land you didn’t care to own,
your face for a moment stern
and rapt, careless of children.
Such a connoisseur of borrowed light!
Even when your voice grew harsh
as those small stones rattling
down the adder path,
or when a January wind
harried cloud shadows
over the built-up valleys
you would climb as far as that boulder
where the view began,
and watch its unravelling.
You met equally
the landscape knitting itself
from russet, indigo
and crawling tractors,
or the blinding stare of the sea.
A winter imagination
Surely it’s not too much to ask
from a winter imagination:
the clattering of chairs onto a pavement
the promptness of waiters before days waste them
and of course, the flickering of leaves,
the insouciant, constant
rapture of following the breeze.
Last night my daughter dreamed
that we would die, mother and father
gone while she stood watching.
I soothed her in my arms, promised her husband,
babies, troops of friends:
like the defences of a vulnerable kingdom
I named them, one by one. She slept rosily
but for me the bone-cold passages
still rang to her cry
You’ll die and I’ll be alone.
Surely it’s not too much to ask
for a warm day to take away such dreams
for violet, midge-haunted shadows
under the sycamore that grows like a weed,
for this year’s beautiful girls
to flaunt their bellies, while the boys
who won’t stop talking, trot to keep up.
One of them is after my daughter
but her lovely eyes are blue with distance.
She is off at the gallop, dreamless.
Athletes
And what a load of leaf
there was on the trees by June.
From sticky fists
rammed in the eye of the bud
they’d opened wide,
and when the wind blew
the horse chestnuts were athletes
running with torches of green
in the half-marathon of summer.
Pneumonia
on our raft
after the long night of storm
the water bubbles
the sea is calm
the planks squeak lazily
where the ropes chafe them
the sea bulges
ready to open
why it should smell like jonquils
no one knows
the idling of the sun
changes everything
on our raft
after the long night of storm
the water bubbles
eye-level
why not watch it for ever
Wall is the book
(for Anne Stevenson)
Wall is the book of these old lands
each page scripted by stones,
each lichen frond, orange or golden,
wall’s stubborn illumination.
Read wall slowly, for it takes time
to grasp the sentence of stone.
Wall breaks in a tumbled caesura
of boulders. Read on
where pucker of breeze on a tarn’s shield
breaks the mirror of wall
and bog cotton trembles. It rains
on a draggle of sheep in the field
where wall breaks the force
and bite of steel from the north
whence weather and danger come.
Wall is the holy book of these old lands
each age scripted by stone.
Gorse
All through sour soil the gorse thrusts.
It is rough furze first, chopped to free the fields.
Burned off in sheets of carbon, it lives
down at the roots, grappling peat sponge,
black as an eclipse of the sun.
But when the gorse is out of blossom
kissing is then out of fashion.
Like ill-fitting shoes, gorse flowers
pinch and pinch until the sun touches them.
Now in the lanes a spice of coconut,
now the gorse thriving to wipe
the eye of winter with a cloth of gold,
now the bees in their bee kitchen
pilot themselves above the spines,
burrow past rapiers
bumbling, lunge into flowers
like drunks strangely kept safe
in a world full of harms,
and now it comes –
a prickle of intricate buds
a breath of perfume,
a flare along the roadways, a torch
barely mastered in the runner’s arms
leaping the verges to set April alight.
Blackberries after Michaelmas
These blackberries belong to the devil.
Don’t try to eat them now
or drop them in your pail.
Their flaccid sweetness
belongs to the one who ruined Adam,
set him to work in these hard fields
set him wallowing in green water
for pilchard and mackerel.
These blackberries are the devil’s
and have his spit on them –
look where it settles.
To my nine-year-old self
You must forgive me. Don’t look so surprised,
perplexed, and eager to be gone,
balancing on your hands or on the tightrope.
You would rather run than walk, rather climb than run
rather leap from a height than anything.
I have spoiled this body we once shared.
Look at the scars, and watch the way I move,
careful of a bad back or a bruised foot.
Do you remember how, three minutes after waking
we’d jump straight out of the ground floor window
into the summer morning?
That dream we had, no doubt it’s as fresh in your mind
as the white paper to write it on.
We made a start, but something else came up –
a baby vole, or a bag of sherbet lemons –
and besides, that summer of ambition
created an ice-lolly factory, a wasp trap
and a den by the cesspit.
I’d like to say that we could be friends
but the truth is we have nothing in common
beyond a few shared years. I won’t keep you then.
Time to pick rosehips for tuppence a pound,
time to hide down scared lanes
from men in cars after girl-children.
or to lunge out over the water
on a rope that swings from that tree
long buried in housing –
but no, I shan’t cloud your morning. God knows
I have fears enough for us both –
I leave you in an ecstasy of concentration
slowly peeling a ripe scab from your knee
to taste it on your tongue.
Fallen angel
Waist-deep in snow and wading
through the world’s cold,
this fallen angel with wings furled
on his way home from Bethlehem,
the story all told.
Centuries after the birth
through drab years with the promise fading
like gilt off the gold,
fallen angel still tramping the earth –
so long, the way back to Bethlehem
through the world’s cold.
Bridal
Bride in the mud of the yard,
bare feet skilled to find
the nub of hard ground.
She stands as if she were transparent,
ears spiked, fingers encircled,
skirts stitched with metal.
Mud squelches through the keyhole
between first and second toe,
she slips, rescues herself.
Silence of banknotes
from sweaty hands, pinned to her dress
so the president’s face shows.
She drives the cows in
through velvet of shit and slime,
their soiled tails switching
their dirty udders craving release
as women crave the gums of their babies
in the first shudder of feeding.
In the silence of the marriage night
with a befuddled bridegroom
too old for the task at hand
she will not cry out.
Bride in the mud of the yard,
thirteen and hopping
through velvet of cowshit
from stone to stone.
Still life with ironing
I love it when you look at me like this,
and the washed smell of your blue denim
We are washed out, the two of us,
shadows of what we have been.
A moth in the bowl of a paper lampshade,
a gust of night and a baby’s cry,
a drop of milk on the wrist, inside
where the blood beats time.
We are not up to it, up for it,
bare enough, blank enough. We fake
pleasure but turn towards evening,
to the clink of a glass, the settling of blackbirds
the talkative hose in the next garden,
a shirt with the buttons undone
and shadows put in by the iron.
Spanish Irish
It is your impulse I remember,
the movement that made you your own,
the way you laughed when you were told
some daily but delightful thing,
and the way you could not be fooled.
When I saw that man who recalled you
I put out my hand to keep him
as if his Spanish Irish face
must lighten in recognition,
and I was on the point of speaking
the pleasure of your name.
Cowboys
They rode the ridge those five minutes
I was caught in traffic
watching nothing but rain
falling on slate,
they rode the beauty of angles,
they laddered oblivion
and saved their own lives eight times
as their boots spun,
they rode without harness
astride the ridge of the roof,
they chucked a rope around the chimney
before it galloped off,
they rode in a rain-sweat,
they might have fallen like snow,
they hollered across the prairie
until the roofs echoed.
Below Hungerford Bridge
Below Hungerford Bridge the river
oils its own surface like a seabird.
Tide fights with current, crowds
surge to a concert, the light thickens.
How unaccountable the dead are:
I think you rear from your photograph
with an expression of terror: I can’t move.
Will you let me out of here?
I think I see T.S. Eliot
wan in his green make-up
but slyly playful, a big cat
gone shabby with keeping.
The traffic halts. There’s nothing
but a few pile-driven wharves
and the river remembering
its old courses.
Ophelia
I dreamed my love became a boat
on the saltings in winter
after long treading the green water,
I dreamed my love flew to the bar
where the tide teemed with the river,
and bucked and fought there,
I dreamed that my love’s timber
was a bed for eelgrass
and marsh samphire,
I dreamed my love became a boat
on the saltings in winter
after long treading the green water,
and beneath his shroud of skin
was a rib chamber
for winds to whistle in.
Winter bonfire
My mind aches where I cannot touch it.
It has put a net over some words,
it is hiding a poem.
Who is that man tending flames in his garden,
and why does he heap armfuls of paper
on his winter bonfire?
If I write down anything
no matter how stealthily
the poem will know it.
One A.M.
Melancholy at one A.M. –
the poem ended
or else just quietly
lying under the table
gnawing the bone of its being –
the lighthouse in its bowl of sea
the town by its holy well
and the owls hunting.
Surf hollows the base of the cliffs,
owls hollow the safety of night