bikers glitter past, being seen together.
Sparrows have even more in common:
spasmodic chatter, pranks for ever
fizzling out to start again.
Then rain
hesitant and clumsy
after months of drought.
Which hardly matters to
some played-out busker
squatting on a playground log
or a frumpy pigeon that preens
and shuffles in a flattened sandpit.
2. IN THE GARDEN OF THE MUSÉE RODIN
A leaf spins down
and scrapes his shoulder.
Such soft percussion after
insistent crash of boulevards
wave upon wave...
then in Rodin’s sanctuary
footfalls and angry sighs jostling,
nudging him on through modest rooms
stuffed with writhing sculptures, tight-lipped
daguerreotype families hung in brass,
carefully labelled stumps and blocks
that chronicle a clouding vision...
He who became a lunatic with no asylum
now stands still
on a path that tilts and dips
under balding trees, breathes his fill
of clammy decay, begins to feel
he’ll measure up
to being mad again:
turned imbecile by hard facts and faces,
chased by volleys of wheels and lights
to take cover among falling leaves,
platinum ponds ruffled by smug ducks,
distant mothers behind prams, toddlers
in limbo, safely running circles...
Who can retrace such circles?
Will he always be heading straight
from A to B, or back,
only to check
his hell-bent intercity pace
in some unexpected garden
that hides from a wide confinement?
ALL
He had come to a meeting of roads we all
reach, if we travel long enough.
Not like the fork that Robert Frost recalled: two
paths diverging in a yellow wood.
Not a crossing of embroidered autumn lanes
where the fingerpost made Edward Thomas
quell a mocking voice with stoical resolve.
No: here you can’t hazard a guess
like the young with all before them, take any turn
because there’s always another, swept towards
a mirage of endless chance, stacking the stakes
high, spinning the roulette dizzy.
Here merge all routes he hoped to follow
all at once, cheating the odds, tireless.
Like railroad junctions darting in beside a headlong
train, all fold into one way ahead,
a beaten track more or less clear, its end known
if not grasped, every choice he once made
a looping round, often far round.
Blind bends and dead ground
promise no surprises now,
only a hint of how
an end will come, show
up the whole quest
for where it lead,
all doubts and queries put to rest.
IV. BELONGING
LOST AMONG PINES
[Basses Alpes]
Knuckled pine, miles of unbreaking waves,
spiked persistence, under it and underfoot
buried cones sprouting from quilted yellow needles.
Stand beside this ancient ribbed sea
that quenches its own thirst and try to
bear our frail girth and rootless passage.
Two well-hidden finches, shrill and upbeat,
making sure of each other across dry hectares
pierce the baked air. Are they near or far?
One day’s niche in their dangerous trek,
a thousand miles of awkward looping flight
to seek out old haunts and new supplies.
They leave behind an arctic, green sighing
that sharpens the spirit as it wanders
on muffled footfalls, aware of loss, waste
what’s owed to itself and never paid.
Will it stumble on some vista to measure
all this living, dying drought and juice?
Study muddled prints on a sandy track,
trying to trace some left by one loved beyond
bounds and time, her hand, voice and breath
too palpably absent. So why should solace
spring from one erect, sappy pine bud
pushing itself, like all of us, light-wards?
BETWEEN LIVES
‘One is always nearer by not keeping still.’
Thom Gunn: On the Move
Moor without peak or fold,
untinged by low, steely sun,
sole way north a track
beaten into heather, then shivered
rock climbing to crumbled pillars,
entrance to rough-hewn bow bridge
pitched over gorge, its deep-delved
torrent a distant hissing ribbon.
Eyes fixed ahead, scramble
to its crown, and plunge down,
loose stonework hurtling away
to silent freefall. Pass broken arch
and feel upland turf underfoot.
Steep-raked birch woods simmer,
their olive-lit under-carpet
seethes with hue and cry of living.
Loose-clothed in shifting shadows
a rotund figure who might be
hunter, butcher, cook or wrestler,
cuts up a carcass, sculpting out
joints and chops with delicate art,
at one with his task and himself.
Nearby in sheltered, green dell
long, low thatched hut, walled
in wood and wattle. Its doorway
profiles a busy, slender woman
coarse-gowned, raven hair tied aside,
shimmering like breeze-blown foliage.
What account would they take
of some dusty, wandering drudge
who combs a wilderness for days,
chances a ruin to exchange
his nowhere for somewhere else?
FLIGHT
1.
A 747 oddly low for here.
Caught in 8-mag monocular
helpless floundering white belly
puffs vapour scattered into crumbs,
four engines pitched uncertainly
between head for land or soar
and chance it in empty air.
Air-beached whale! Last
of its species about to
go extinct on touch-down.
Who can be aboard? Look for
portholed heads filled with
endless blue or capsized green,
each looking for more than is there.
2.
In forest dusk two Muntjak bolt with crackling thuds
over coppiced litter, turn stealthy,
flashing white arse from
trunk to trunk,
pause,
pick up caught breath
and crepitating shoulder,
slip along thread-needle pine trail
as the watcher cranes to sift hide from bark.
3.
In semi-darkness
stiff breeze shakes tatters.
Something amber dances in brambles.
Maybe a stray tag for rough shoot lot, rented
sliver of copse to stand all weathers and pick off
overfed fowl panicked by beaters into air, their last resort.
Fooled by a ragged balloon! Stretch its logo
and read Malvern Scout Group, just one
of jamboree helium-fuelled, bobbing
flights from a hundred miles
west of here, address tag
for kind return
still attached.
RESORT
I bus back to azure days of rock and sand
when dark seas pummelled walled bays,
children holidayed to bathe and dig,
feasted on sandwiches, hadn’t learnt
to spend or felt the fear of missing out.
Alone up front on top I spot
a purple smudge beyond rising hills
that edge the sea in concave cliffs.
A black tor’s wind turbine scythes
my landscape with maddening blades.
Tree-smacked the double-decker drops
into sheer-sided valley as if I drive
with abandon, lean into blind bends,
thread bottlenecks towards a stone town
that glints through thinning woods.
As we buck and brake at lights or road-works
I look up past fat-frying bars and gift shops
at faded Victorian hotels with their portals,
bay windows displaying well-spaced tables,
tall bedrooms behind nets and draped curtains.
I alight where strollers zig-zag up and down
shorn slopes that end in fenced-off crags
colonised by grunting, stiff-winged fulmar.
Far below a paddle steamer waits
to wallow out round long-deserted islands.
Not much footage unwinds from this patchwork
but here’s a sandy inlet of barnacled rock
where we sat braced against wind and spray.
Reading Bel Ami, I laughed at something flagrant.
What’s up, Daddy? (Don’t Fathers know better?)
BELONGING
(For Cathy )
I.
We’re trimming stalks and husks
in a strip-light sunset, earth
sodden, moss-filmed, passive.
Your fifth autumn. You sift
my debris as if it’s treasure,
neatly load the old barrow,
ask if mosquitoes dance
up and down spiders’ webs.
A question I needn’t spoil thanks to
rooks lolloping west to roost
miles beyond our hedged horizon,
in twos or threes, some silent,
intent on return, some so gorged
with croaking chatter they slew off
course and swivel idly back.
And wouldn’t you love to join them!
If they were scissors, you say,
there’d be holes in the sky.
What’s it like to be a rook?
“An ugly crow with pale face and beak.
Some might call you farmer’s friend
but who’d want to live or work
near a woodful of yackers like you?”
Easier said than what it might be like:
caught at dusk without a perch,
to drill at teeming fallow, mine for maggots,
shriek into dawn quarrel, taste
dry tongue as frost tightens.
When you’ve flown elsewhere, I wonder,
will you notice knots of black wings
making for some distant comfort,
and think of homing rooks and home?
II.
Your age again, I’m all weathers
outside flint-rendered hotchpotch cottage
near woods of towering beech and ash
under rookery flight path, our bowed roof
streaked white from its restless traffic.
Look-outs cling to topmost twigs,
welcome back wandering droves
with all’s-well bark. The sound
of permanence that makes it seem
we’re planted deep in tree-lined shadows,
though I long for roar and swell
of thick-flocking autumnal spates
when cackling jackdaws and shrill crows
join the daily forage, return and squabble
over where to ride out the night.
*
Above us now tail-enders mutter
between wing beats, and I kneel
to help you scrape up our cuttings,
but I’m back among flattened bluebells,
knees black with leaf-mould, to rescue
fledglings flung from nests by gales
before their first, haphazard flight.
Never mind the blank stares and idiot squeals:
they’re slop-fed in boxes by the coke boiler.
Tossed into aerial trials they flounder,
catch the knack, and never look back.
MOUNTAIN SUNDOWN
Low, lingering Norwegian sun
throws a birch pattern
over wood-clad room.
Most ponder their roaming day,
share it with postcards,
scribbling well-used phrases
that insist on being said,
miss the moment’s fullness
when hard, clean light scrubs
crags and brittle crests of trees,
and its slow dwindling unveils
clefts, groins, fine-hatched crannies.
And beyond it all I’m seeing
one distant once-loved woman
sigh before her mirror,
expectant or listless about
an evening out, testing herself
against invasive light,
trying to shun the moment’s weight.
AFTER THE SINGING
She lodged above a freezer shop.
He stood below her on the first dark step
beyond strip lights illuminating bargain buys.
Their concert so long rehearsed
with indifferent voices, was over.
Where should they go next?
Communal zest softened a broken past,
weekly shelter, somewhere to rub shoulders.
She shook and cried. He longed for her
to turn to him, sensing but not seeing
her morbid inwardness and taut temples.
He needed to cherish a crumpled face.
“I’ve been badly hurt. It ruins trust”,
she said. “I’m the one who’s always hurt,”
he said, feeling but not believing it.
Months later caught in the snare
of getting by and tired by devotion
that hadn’t begun to heal her pain
she caught him unawares, hit him,
he felt, with what he’d said too easily,
before they stumbled up those dark stairs.
He traced the mean corners of her mouth,
flinched from a fretful soprano full of rancour,
and to hold his own, crassly declared:
“So...Tempting fate is more than just a cliché.”
She consulted her watch, looked away
and said: “at least I’ve let you down gently.”
THE ASSUMPTION
......this
both the yeares and the dayes deep midnight is.
( John Donne: Nocturnal on St Lucies Day)
I watch you
file drudgery away
on the night of the year’s least light.
And I’m happy
for your respite.
Prospero’s staff is broken. Aerial-free you flit
among cabinets, copiers, stationery.
Do I walk with you
in moon-clouded vault
of the year’s midnight, or is it a trance?
Every thought
sways to a dance
as you waver in your tiredness and take a chance
with taunts and hints of affectionate sport.
O we’ve talked,
making every commonplace a comfort,
unquiet encounters this night will now eclipse.
Words cannot distort
heartfelt release
that says in no uncertain terms and not to please,
being loved from head to toe’s your just desert.
But here’s the lamp
where we are duty-bound to part
and night unlighted summons me away
to play another part
wearing hours away,
while you tread a straight, neatly-lighted way
with measured shadows that leave an undivided heart.
O the lamp inquires
and headlights probe as we stand
a pace apart in the year’s longest night,
and there’s your hand
limp and moon-white
like a question posed: welcome or withstand
this tender outbreak of long-restrained delight?
We’re watchers
at the year’s grave, benighted
under lamp-tinged brooms of ash that sweep beyond us,
your face uplifted,
traffic-lit, curious,
then snatched back, refusing to be sifted,
your breath charged and held, unutterably serious.
THE KISS
Recalling Vienna’s Upper Belvedere
I recap from Michelin and smile
at how you’d prepared me for Klimt’s Kiss,
dashing back up the hotel’s four floors
for a postcard just to show me
how tenderly the man’s hands rested.
Yet when we’d thawed out
from the Prince of Savoy’s walks,
and stood before the original,
my eye ran down each pattern of a coverlet
that draped her, till I saw feet pointed
limply at her lover as if to match
her look of comfort and assent.
‘Yes: we neglect our feet,’ you said
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