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.
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 nourished 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.
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.
FROM
THE SEA SKATER
(1986)
The bride’s nights in a strange village
At three in the morning
while mist limps between houses
while cloaks and blankets
dampen with dew
the bride sleeps with her husband
bundled in a red blanket,
her mouth parts and a bubble
of sour breathing goes free.
She humps wool up to her ears
while her husband tightens his arms
and rocks her, mumbling. Neither awakes.
In the second month of the marriage
the bride wakes after midnight.
Damp-bodied
she lunges from sleep
hair pricking with sweat
breath knocking her sides.
She eels from her husband’s grip
and crouches, listening.
The night is enlarged by sounds.
The rain has started.
It threshes leaves secretively
and there in the blackness
of whining dogs it finds out the house.
Its hiss enfolds her, blots up
her skin, then sifts off, whispering
in her like mirrors
the length of the rainy village.
Christmas roses
I remember years ago, that we had Christmas roses:
cold, greeny things under the snow –
fantastic hellebores, harbingers
of the century’s worst winter.
On little fields stitched
over with drystone
we broke snow curds, our sledge
tossing us out at the wall.
For twelve years a plateau of sea
stopped at my parents’ window.
Here the slow Flatholm foghorn
sucking at the house fabric
recalls my little month-old brother,
kept in the house for weeks
while those snow days piled up like plates
to an impossible tower.
They were building the match factory
to serve moors seeded with conifers
that year of the Bay of Pigs,
the year of Cuba, when adults muttered
of taking to the moors with a shotgun
when the bomb dropped.
Such conversation, rapaciously
stored in a nine-year-old’s memory
breeds when I stare down Bridgwater Bay
to that glassy CEGB elegance, Hinkley
Point, treating the landscape like snow,
melting down marshes and long, lost
muddy horizons.
Fir thickets replace those cushions
of scratchy heather, and prick out the noise
of larks in the air, so constant
I never knew what it was.
Little hellebores with green veins,
not at all tender, and scentless
on frosty ground, with your own small
melt, your engine of growth:
that was the way I liked you.
I imagine you sent back from Africa
I imagine you sent back from Africa
leaving a patchwork of rust and khaki
sand silt in your tea and your blood.
The metal of tanks and cans
puckers your taste-buds.
Your tongue jumps from the touch
of charge left in a dying battery.
You spread your cards in the shade
of roving lorries whose canvas
tents twenty soldiers.
The greased cards patter
in chosen spaces.
I imagine you sent back from Africa
with a tin mug kept for the bullet hole
in at one angle and out another.
You mount the train at the port
asking if anywhere on earth
offers such grey, mild people.
Someone draws down the blind.
You see his buttons, his wrist,
his teeth filled to the roots.
He weakens the sunlight for you
and keeps watch on your face.
Your day sinks in a hollow of sleep
racket and megaphoned voices.
The troop-ship booms once. Laden
with new men she moves down the Sound
low in the water, egg-carrying.
But for you daylight
with your relieved breath
supping up train dirt.
A jolt is a rescue from sleep
and a glaze of filth from the arm-rest
patches your cheek. You try to catch voices
calling out stations closer to home.
In memoriam Cyril Smith 1913–1945
I’ve approached him since childhood,
since he was old, blurred,
my stake in the playground chants
and war games,
a word like ‘brother’
mixed with a death story.
Wearing shorts and a smile
he stayed in the photograph box.
His hair was receding early.
He had Grandpa’s long lip and my mother’s love.
The jungle obliterates a city
of cries and murmurs,
bloody discharges
and unsent telegrams.
Now he is immanent
breaking off thoughts
printing that roll of film
one sweaty evening,
Four decades
have raised a thicket of deaths around him
a fence of thorn and a fence of roses.
His mother, my grandmother,
his father, his brother,
his camp companions
his one postcard.
The circle closes
in skin, limbs
and new resemblances.
We wanted to bring him
through life with us
but he grows younger.
We’ve passed him
holding out arms.
The parachute packers
The parachute packers with white faces
swathed over with sleep
and the stale bodily smell of sheets
make haste to tin huts where a twelve-hour
shift starts in ten minutes.
Their bare legs pump bicycle pedals,
they clatter on wooden-soled sandals
into the dazzling light over the work benches.
They rub in today’s issue of hand-cream.
Their fingers skim on the silk
as the unwieldy billows of parachute flatten
like sea-waves, oiled, folded in sevens.
The only silk to be had
comes in a military packaging:
dull-green, printed, discreet,
gone into fashioning parachutes
to be wondered at like the flowers’
down-spinning, seed-bearing canopies
lodged in the silt of village memory.
A girl pulling swedes in a field
senses the shadow of parachutes
and gapes up, knees braced
and hair tangling. She must be riddled,
her warm juices all spilled
for looking upwards too early
into the dawn, leafy with parachutes.
Heavenly wide canopies
bring down stolid chaps with their rifle butts
ready to crack, with papers
to govern the upturned land,
with boots, barbed wire and lists on fine paper
thousands of names long.
I look up now at two seagulls,
at cloud drifts and a lamp-post
bent like a feeding swan,
and at the sound of needles
seaming up parachutes in Nissen huts
with a hiss and pull through the stuff
of these celestial ball-dresses
for nuns, agents, snow-on-the-boots men
sewn into a flower’s corolla
to the music of Workers’ Playtime.
At dusk the parachute packers
release their hair from its nets
and ride down lanes whitened by cow-parsley
to village halls, where the dances
and beer and the first cigarettes
expunge the clouds of parachute silk
and rules touching their hair and flesh.
In the bar they’re the girls who pack parachutes
for our boys. They can forget
the coughs of the guard on duty,
the boredom and long hours
and half-heard cries of caught parachutists.
Porpoise washed up on the beach
After midday the great lazy
slaps of the sea,
the whistling of a boy who likes the empty
hour while the beach is feeding,
the cliffs vacant, gulls untidily drowsing
far out on the water.
I walked on in the dazzle
round to the next cove
where the sea was running backwards like mercury
from people busy at cutting
windows in the side of a beached porpoise.
The creature had died recently.
Naturally its blood was mammalian,
its skin supple and tough; it made me
instantly think of uses for it –
shoe soling, sealing the hulls of boats –
something to explain the intent knives
and people swiftly looking at me.
But there was no mussel harvest on the rocks
or boat blinding through noon
out to the crab pots,
not here but elsewhere the settled
stupor of digestion went on.
The porpoise had brought the boys between fourteen and eighteen,
lengthened their lives by a burning
profitless noon-time,
so they cut windows out of surprise
or idleness, finding the thing here
like a blank wall, inviting them.
They jumped from its body, prodded it,
looked in its mouth and its eyes,
hauled up its tail like a child’s drawing
and became serious.
Each had the use of the knife in turn
and paused over the usual graffiti
to test words first with a knife-point
and fit the grey boulder of flesh under them.
Clapping their wings the gulls came back from the sea,
the pink screens of the hotel opened,
the last boy scoured the knife with sand.
I walked back along the shingle
breathing away the bloody trail of the porpoise
and saw the boys’ wet heads glittering,