and the poem makes its rest
by turning and turning
like a hare in its form.
Lemon and stars
The stars come so close
they seem not to be shining
but to be remaking the world
in their own pattern
and we seem to be caught in their dust
like the fingerprints of creatures
not yet imagined.
Besides, there is the starlight
not enough to make star-shadow
but enough, in the absence of moon
to heap up darkness
just here, under the lemon tree.
Cutting open the lemons
After all they didn’t taste of salt
or the winter storms.
I had not expected the insides to be so
offhandedly daffodil –
lemons should be more malleable
to the imagination –
but like babies they are sure
that the planting and tending
gives no right over them.
Hearing owls
The dark fabric of night not torn
but seamed with the flight of owls
hunting the margin of the Downs.
The houses pull their roofs over them,
the sleepers plunge beneath their bedclothes
at the onrush of wings,
the mouse runs with its trail of urine.
The owl pulls off a miracle
as it homes in
like a jump-jet in mid-Atlantic
sighting its landing area
in a waste of sea slop.
The mouse is done. The owl swallows
while a car passes, knowing nothing
of the owl agape at its own fortune.
‘Often they go just before dawn’
A wash of stars covers the sky
before the day comes,
before the slippery quickness of brush-strokes
dries to a surface,
a wash of stars covers the sky
announcing with pallor
that they are going out
or that something else –
call it a day, or dawn –
is about to come in.
Quick, quick, get up the ladder
and paint in more brightness
for the stars to be dark against.
May voyage
A May evening and a bright moon
riding easily in its mystery,
you come out onto the balcony
and gaze there, relaxed, intent
as the horizon softens towards France
and the moon voyages, voyages.
What storms have you seen!
Such a hurricane
when wind hurled around the building
like an express train,
but you fought it out of your home
and now you note the turning of the tide
as the moon voyages, voyages
from peace into deeper peace
from old age into youth,
behind you the French windows are open
ahead of you only the shining
sea and the lovely work of the moon
as it voyages, voyages
into the calm.
Out of the Blue
(2001)
Out of the Blue
Speak to me in the only language
I understand, help me to see
as you saw the enemy plane
pounce on you out of the sun:
one flash, cockling metal. Done.
Done for, they said, as he spun earthward
to the broad chalk bosom of England.
Done for and done.
You are the pilot of this poem,
you speaks its language, thumbs-up
to the tall dome of June.
Even when you long to bail out
you’ll stay with the crate.
Done for, they said, as his leather jacket
whipped through the branches.
Done for and done.
Where are we going and why so happy?
We ride the sky and the blue,
we are thumbs up, both of us
even though you are the owner
of that long-gone morning,
and I only write the poem.
You own that long-gone morning.
Solo, the machine-gun stitched you.
One flash did for you.
Your boots hit the ground
ploughing a fresh white scar in the downland.
They knew before they got to him,
from the way he was lying
done for, undone.
But where are we going?
You come to me out of the blue
strolling the springy downland
done for, thumbs up, oil on your hands.
The man on the roof
When my grandmother died my father eulogised her.
There she was, coming home with the pram
and her crowd of children
when something strange in the light
or its impediment getting at her from heaven
made her look up to see one of her children –
her eldest child, her son, him –
up on the roof, riding the horse of the homestead
with wild heels, daring her to defy him
and get him down. She got him down
with a word, as he remembers it,
her lovely penny-pale face looking up at his
from the path where her children swarmed and shouted
and it was this
he remembered when her coffin lay under his hands:
the roof, and his coming down.
When our priest died I remembered him
up on the roof, mending a tile
– a little job on hand, and a hammer
and air of busyness to keep him busy
while he pretended not to be pretending
to ride the roof in its wild beauty
over the unfamilied air of Liscannor
and half-way to America. Maybe.
Or maybe merely tapping the tile in
like a good workman.
‘How beautiful it was up on the roof,’
he said to the people at Mass.
My father touched his mother’s coffin
and did not say how golden her hair was.
Even I remember how golden it was
when the grey knot was undone.
Now they are gone into the ground,
both of them. They are riding on the roof,
their wild heels daring us to defy them,
and we are here on the ground
penny-pale and gaping.
They will not tell
how beautiful it is. I will not ask them.
Giraffes in Hull
Walking at all angles
to where the sky ends,
wantons with crane-yellow necks
and scarlet legs
stepping eastward, big eyes
supping the horizon.
Watch them as they go, the giraffes
breast-high to heaven,
herding the clouds.
Only Hull has enough sky for them.
Jacob’s drum
This is Jacob’s drum
how he beats on it how he fights on it
how he splits every crack of the house
how he booms
how he slams
hair wet-feathered sweat gathering
red-face Jacob throwing his money down
all on the drum his one number
beating repeating
O Jacob
don’t let go of it
don’t let anyone take your drum
don’t let anyone of all of them
who want you to be drumless
beating your song on nothing
Jacob they’d do it
believe them
it’s time they say
to put your drum away
do you remember the glow-worm Jacob?
how we looked and nearly touched it
but you didn’t want to hurt it?
I thought it was electric
some trash a child dropped
stuck to a rock
don’t put your finger on the light
you said and I stood still then
glow-worm Jacob remember it
I had the word but it was you
who told me it was living
and now I say to anyone
don’t touch Jacob’s drum
That old cinema of memory
O that old cinema of memory
with the same films always showing.
The censor has been at work again.
Is he protecting me, or am I protecting him?
This trailer’s a horror, I won’t watch it,
this one makes my heart burn with longing,
this is a mist of interrupted shapes
urgently speaking, just out of earshot –
experimental, I call it.
The projectionist should be on double time.
He’s got a kid in with him, they’re so bored
they play Brag rather than watch the screen.
The ice-cream girl’s tired of pacing the aisles.
She rests her thumbs in the tray-straps, and dreams.
It’s a rainy afternoon in Goole
and this cinema’s the last refuge
for men in macs and kids bunking off school.
They yawn, pick their nails and dream
by text-message. Look at the screen,
it says CU, CU, CU.
Depot
The panting of buses through caves of memory:
school bus with boys tossing off
in the back seat when I was eight,
knowing the words, not knowing
what it was those big boys were murkily doing,
and the conductor with fierce face
yelling down farm lanes at kids as they ran
Can you not get yourselves up in the morning?
The sway of buses into town
the way the unlopped branches of lime
knocked like sticks against railings,
the way women settled laps and bags,
shut their eyes, breathed out on a cigarette,
gave themselves to nothing for ten minutes
as someone else drove the cargo of life,
until the conductor broke their drowse
in a flurry of one-liners,
and they found coin in their fat purses.
A lorry-load of stuff
It was the green lorry with its greasy curtain
like a leather apron,
backing into the lane behind the terrace
for a lorry-load of stuff.
Cardboard boxes of books from the last move,
not opened since. That’s thirteen years
where A Beginner’s Guide to Birdsong
and Marxism Matters have not been wanted.
Two plastic caterpillars, clattering
like tongues. They were new once,
expensive enough to keep for no purpose.
The boxes exist, though they don’t fit.
A turquoise baby-bath, impregnated
with the white-knuckle grip of one baby
and the fat relaxed fist of the other.
One afternoon it served as a sledge
before the proper sledge, this one
(which we also don’t want). Remember those woods,
and our stopped breath that headlong
downhill with both boys crammed in front.
A proper lorry-load of stuff
needs bits of wood, likely shapes
that finally won’t hold shelves up.
It needs a toddler’s bike
hand-painted silver by a nine-year-old
then torn apart to make a go-kart.
If there is old food (lentils,
tins with rust-spots, onion sets
that never got planted, or could be gladioli)
so much the better. In a climate too cold
for cockroaches, you can afford to be careless
of larder shelves. And your lorry-load
is incomplete without the photographs
you kept taking, badly, from duty,
interrupting the happiest moments
as you saw them. The booty
of time, it was going to be. Lose them
to the panting of the lorry’s engine
impatient now, throbbing, and to the man
parting the curtain, chucking stuff in.
Virgin with Two Cardigans
There’s a stone set in the car-park wall
down at knee-level
which commends her.
There are these relics: a scrap of wool,
There is her stone, set in the car-park wall
its flinty lettering so bright cut
it would blind her.
Here, on this path, slowly, leaning
on two sticks, she still comes.
Trying to know all the new faces
she looks about her, tortoise-sweet.
How patiently she wants God to unbutton
her two cardigans,
but he is slow.
Here, buttoning her cardigans
with lumpy fingers she bungles
in the lee of a breeze-block wall.
Virgin with Pineapple
Virgin with the Globe as a Golden Ball
Virgin with Two Cardigans
pushing a pearl button
into the gnarl of its hole.
Ice coming
(after Doris Lessing)
First, the retreat of bees
lifting, heavy with the final
pollen of gorse and garden,
lugging the weight of it, like coal sacks
heaped on lorry-backs
in the ice-cream clamour of August.
The retreat of bees, lifting
all at once from city gardens –
suddenly the roses are scentless
as cold probes like a tongue,
crawling through the warm crevices
of Kew and Stepney. The ice comes
slowly, slowly, not to frighten anyone.
Not to frighten anyone. But the Snowdon
valleys are muffled with avalanche,
the Thames freezes, the Promenade des Anglais
clinks with a thousand icicles, where palms
died in a night, and the sea
of Greece stares back like stone
at the ice-Gorgon, white as a sheet.
Ice squeaks and whines. Snow slams
like a door miles off, exploding a forest
to shards and matchsticks. The glacier
is strangest, grey as an elephant,
too big to be heard. Big-foot, Gorgon –
a little mythology
rustles before it is stilled.
So it goes. Ivy, mahonia, viburnum
lift their fossilised flowers
under six feet of ice, for the bees
that are gone. As for being human
it worked once, but for now
and the foreseeable future
the conditions are wrong.
Cyclamen, blood-red
Cyclamen, blood-red, fly into winter
against the grey grain of concrete
eight floors up.
Winged, poised, intricate,
tough as old boots
flying the kite
of pure colour
season to season
under a laurel leaf
they make rebellion.
Piers Plowman
The Crucifixion & Harrowing of Hell
(from the C text)
‘It is finished,’ said Christ. Blood ebbed from his
face.
He was wan and pitiful as a dying prisoner.
The lord of light closed his eyes to the light,
day shrank back, the sun darkened in terror;
The temple walls collapsed into rubble
solid rock split, and it seemed black night.
Earth shivered like living flesh,
the dead heard, and emerged
rising up from their deep-dug graves
to tell the world why this storm was wrenching it.
‘For a bitter battle,’ said one dead man walking,
‘Life and Death are wrestling in the darkness
and no one knows who shall be the winner
until Sunday, when the sun rises,’
that said, he sank down
a dead man, into deep earth again.
Some said it was God’s own son who died so well.
Truly this was the son of God,
Some said he was a sorcerer, and practised witchcraft,
‘Let’s try him, find out if he’s really dead
or still alive, before they take down the body.’
There were two thieves that suffered death
on the cross beside Christ. An officer came
and broke their bones, the arms and legs on each man.