white
flesh in a mound and kept from sight,
but he doesn’t tell us
whether these boys’ hair always smelled of cinnamon
or if their nights cost more than spices.
A woman goes into the night café,
chooses a clean
knife and a spoon
and takes up her tray.
Quickly the manageress leans from the counter.
(As when a policeman arrests a friend
her eyes plunge and her voice roughens.)
She points to a notice with her red nail:
‘After 11 we serve only accompanied females.’
The woman fumbles her grip
on her bag, and it slips.
Her forces tumble.
People look on as she scrabbles
for money and tampax.
A thousand shadows accompany her
down the stiff lino, through the street lighting.
The poet sits in a harbour bar
where the tables are smooth and solid to lean on.
It’s peaceful. Men gaze
for hours at beer and brass glistening.
The sea laps. The door swings.
The poet feels poems
invade him. All day he has been stone-breaking
he says. He would be happier in cafés
in other countries, drinking, watching;
he feels he’s a familiar sort of poet
but he’s at ease with it.
Besides, he’s not actually writing a poem:
there’s plenty, he’s sure,
in drink and hearing the sea move.
For what is Emily Dickinson doing
back at the house – the home?
A doctor emerges, wiping his face,
and pins a notice on the porch.
After a while you don’t even ask.
No history
gets at this picture:
a woman named Sappho
sat in bars by purple water
with her feet crossed at the ankles
and her hair flaming with violets
never smiling when she didn’t feel like it.
‘End here, it’s hopeful,’
says the poet, getting up from the table.
If no revolution come
If no revolution come
star clusters
will brush heavy on the sky
and grapes burst
into the mouths of fifteen
well-fed men,
these honest men
will build them houses like pork palaces
if no revolution come,
short-life dust children
will be crumbling in the sun –
they have to score like this
if no revolution come.
The sadness of people
don’t look at it too long:
you’re studying for madness
if no revolution come.
If no revolution come
it will be born sleeping,
it will be heavy as baby
playing on mama’s bones,
it will be gun-thumping on Sunday
and easy good time
for men who make money,
for men who make money
grow like a roof
so the rubbish of people
can’t live underneath.
If no revolution come
star clusters
will drop heavy from the sky
and blood burst
out of the mouths of fifteen
washing women,
and the land-owners will drink us
one body by one:
they have to score like this
if no revolution come.
A safe light
I hung up the sheets in moonlight,
surprised that it really was so
steady, a quickly moving pencil
flowing onto the stained cotton.
How the valves
in that map
of taut fabric
blew in and blew out
then spread flat
over the tiles
while the moon filled them with light.
A hundred feet above the town
only the clicking pegs
and radio news from our kitchen.
One moth hesitated
tapping at our lighted window
and in the same way the moonlight
covered the streets, all night.
Near Dawlish
Her fast asleep face turns from me,
the oil on her eyelids gleams
and the shadow of a removed moustache
darkens the curve of her mouth,
her lips are still flattened together
and years occupy her face,
her holiday embroidery glistens,
her fingers quiver then rest.
I perch in my pink dress
sleepiness fanning my cheeks,
not lurching, not touching
as the train leaps.
Mother you should not be sleeping.
Look how dirty my face is, and lick
the smuts off me with your salt spit.
Golden corn rocks to the window
as the train jerks. Your narrowing body leaves me
frightened, too frightened to cry for you.
The last day of the exhausted month
The last day of the exhausted month
of August. Hydrangeas
purple and white like flesh immersed in water
with no shine
to keep the air off them
open their tepid petals more and more widely.
The newly-poured tar smells antiseptic
like sheets moulding on feverish skin:
surfaces of bedrock, glasslike passivity.
The last day of the exhausted month
goes quickly. A brown parcel
arrives with clothes left at the summer lodgings,
split and too small.
A dog noses
better not look at it too closely
God knows why they bothered to send them at all.
A smell of cat
joins us just before eating.
The cat is dead but its brown
smell still seeps from my tub of roses.
Second marriages
These second marriages arching within
smiles of their former friends:
his former wife and her child-swapping
remnants of weekday companionship,
her former husband, his regular
friends who encircled her
those wet Saturdays after the baby was born.
The children’s early birthdays, the tea
and talk about socialisation;
the shared potties.
Frozen in these is the father’s
morning exit from the maternity hospital.
Sliced from the album those gowns
that blood; the shawl in a heap,
those marital triumphant
glances at night when they got him to sleep.
Second marriages endure without these
public and early successes,
no longer tempting others or fate
by their caresses.
The deserted table
Coiled peel goes soft on the deserted table
where faïence, bubble glasses, and the rest
of riches thicken.
People have left their bread and potatoes.
Each evening baskets
of broken dinner hit the disposal unit.
Four children, product of two marriages,
two wives, countless slighter relations
and friends all come to the table
bringing new wines discovered on holiday,
fresh thirtyish faces, the chopped
Japanese dip of perfectly nouris
hed hairstyles,
more children, more confident voices,
wave after wave consuming the table.
The writer’s son
The father is a writer; the son
(almost incapable of speech)
explores him.
‘Why did you take my language
my childhood
my body all sand?
why did you gather my movements
waves pouncing
eyes steering me till I crumbled?
We’re riveted. I’m in the house
hung up with verbiage like nets.
A patchwork monster at the desk
bending the keys of your electric typewriter.
You’re best at talking. I know
your hesitant, plain vowels.
Your boy’s voice, blurred,
passed through my cot bars, stealing my baby magic.
You were the one they smiled at.’
Ollie and Charles at St Andrew’s Park
Up at the park once more
the afternoon ends.
My sister and I huddle in quilted jackets.
A cigarette burn
crinkles the pushchair waterproofs,
the baby relaxes
sucking his hood’s curled edges.
Still out of breath
from shoving and easing the wheels
on broken pavement we stay here.
Daffodils break in the wintry bushes
and Ollie and Charles in drab parkas
run, letting us wait by the swings.
Under eskimo hoods their hair springs
dun coloured, child-smelling.
They squat, and we speak quietly,
occasionally scanning the indigo patched
shadows with children melted against them.
Winter fairs
The winter fairs are all over.
The smells of coffee and naphtha
thin and are quite gone.
An orange tossed in the air
hung like a wonder
everyone would catch once,
the children’s excitable cheeks
and woollen caps that they wore
tight, up to the ears,
are all quietened, disbudded;
now am I walking the streets
noting a bit of gold paper? –
a curl of peeI suggesting the whole
aromatic globe in the air.
In a wood near Turku
The summer cabins are padlocked.
Their smell of sandshoes
evaporates over the lake water
leaving pine walls to shoulder the ice.
Resin seals them in hard splashes.
The woodman
knocks at their sapless branches.
He gets sweet puffballs
and chanterelles in his jacket,
strips off fungus like yellow leather,
thumbs it, then hacks the tree trunk.
Hazy and cold as summer dawn
the day goes on,
wood rustles on wood,
close, as the mist thins
like smoke around the top of the pine trees
and once more the saw whines.
Landscape from the Monet Exhibition at Cardiff
My train halts in the snowfilled station.
Gauges tick and then cease
on ice as the track settles
and iron-bound rolling stock creaks.
Two work-people
walk up alongside us,
wool-wadded, shifting their picks,
the sun, small as a rose,
buds there in the distance.
The gangs throw handfuls of salt like sowers
and light fires to keep the points moving.
Here are trees, made with two strokes.
A lady with a tray of white teacups
walks lifting steam from window to window.
I’d like to pull down the sash and stay
here in the blue where it’s still work time.
The hills smell cold and are far away
at standstill, where lamps bloom.
Breakfast
Often when the bread tin is empty
and there’s no more money for the fire
I think of you, and the breakfast you laid for me
– black bread and honey and beer.
I threw out a panful of wine yesterday –
the aluminium had turned sour –
I have two colours of bread to choose from,
I’d take the white if I were poor,
so indigence is distant as my hands
stiff in unheated washing water,
but you, with your generous gift of butter
and cheese with poppy seeds, all in one morning meal
have drawn the blinds up at the bedside window
and I can watch the ships’ tall masts appear.
Index
(Titles and subtitles are in italics,
first lines in roman type.)
A barefoot girl hugs the wall 21
A Bit of Love 43
A candle for the ship’s breakfast 203
A cow here in the June meadow 390
A draught like a bony finger 274
A dream of wool 333
A fat young man in BERBER’S ICE CREAM PARLOUR 314
A heap of cloud 99
A Loose Curl 40
A lorry-load of stuff 170
A May evening and a bright moon 162
A meditation of the glasshouses 338
A mortgage on a pear tree 326
A pæony truss on Sussex place 337
A pear tree stands in its own maze 326
A pretty shape 217
A safe light 414
A skater comes to this blue pond 382
A wash of stars covers the sky 161
A winter imagination 148
Adders 248
After a night jagged by guard-dogs and nightingales 297
After all they didn’t taste of salt 159
After midday the great lazy 363
Afterword 269
Agapanthus above Porthmeor 93
Ahead of us, moving through time 381
Ahvenanmaa 240
Air layering 336
All the breaths of your life 55
All the squares of trampoline are taken 227
All the things you are not yet 214
All through sour soil the gorse thrusts 151
All you who are awake in the dark of the night 92
Almost island and jewel of all islands 59
Always rain, September rain 68
An Irish miner in Staffordshire 350
And besides, we might play cards 20
And now we come to the unknown land 50
And this is where they met in secret 55
And what a load of leaf 149
And when at last the voyage was over 24
Annunciation off East Street 392
Approaches to winter 404
Are they blue or not blue? 39
As good as it gets 191
At Cabourg 329
At Cabourg II 295
At Ease 90
At Great Neck one Easter 391
At the Emporium 204
At the Spit 49
At three in the morning 353
Athletes 149
Babes in the Wood 261
Baby sleep 219
Barclays Bank, St Ives 100
Barnoon 136
Baron Hardup 296
Basement at Eighteen Folgate Street 99
Basketball player on Pentecost Monday 221
Bathing at Balnacarry 258
Beautiful John Donne 103
Beautiful today the 142
Because she told a lie, he says 189
Beetroot Soup 255
Below Hungerford Bridge 156
Beneath the bulk of the block the bins 89
Bewick’s swans 381
Big barbershop man
304
Bildad 96
Blackberries after Michaelmas 152
Blue against blue; blue into deeper blue 93
Bluebell Hollows 39
Boatman 79
Borrowed light 147
Bouncing boy 227
Boys on the Top Board 259
Breakfast 422
Breast to breast against the azaleas 240
Breeze of ghosts 284
Bridal 154
Bride in the mud of the yard 154
Bristol Docks 186
Brown coal 301
But tell me, Elpenor 26
By chance I was alone in my bed the morning 234
Cajun 262
Candle poem 203
Candlemas 349
Christmas caves 274
Christmas roses 355
City lilacs 125
Clearing the mirror to see your face 195
Cliffs of Fall 58
Clinic day 403
Close to the earth, creeping, lowly 44
Cloud 115
Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden 321
Coiled peel goes soft on the deserted table 417
Cold pinches the hills around Florence 384
Come Out Now 76
Convolvulus 129
Cool as sleep, the crates ring 403
Counting Backwards 19
Cowboys 156
Crossing the field 126
Cursing softly and letting the matches drop 374
Cutting open the lemons 159