Lissom as lilies, they shake dark curls
And watch the car.
I say: Are you girls all right?
And she says: We don’t like
The look of them. Two men
In the dark of the car, also smoking.
She swings the gate shut.
They might be my daughters –
A little older, I reckon –
But those men don’t look
Much like the sons of anyone.
It’s late, almost two A.M.
They are both inside the gate
With one shoe-strap broken
A packet of cigarettes
Brief lovely dresses.
I ask: Will you be all right?
They don’t want to come inside,
They just didn’t like the gate open
When those men were waiting
Like that, with the engine going
And from time to time a rev
So we don’t forget.
In Praise of the Piano
In praise of the piano that slips out of tune
I raise my needle from the dusty record
And watch the vinyl turn and turn,
In praise of the unrepeatable, the original,
The one thought clinging to the one word
I dip my nib into the inkwell,
In praise of the only known photograph
Of your great-grandmother, I hoard
Film, blackout, developing bath.
O needle jumping on dusty vinyl
O letter stuffed in dirty pigeonhole
The fragile, the original
The one word before the blot falls.
Finger ballet on the telephone switchboard,
The one word that flows from the lips
And the one heart by which it is heard
Unrepeatable, fragile. In praise
Of all that cleaves to the note, then slips
From it, and never stays.
Re-opening the old mines
But you would have to go below
The bare bright surface. And I suppose
Out of the dark would come marching
Men with tattoos
Of dust on their forearms,
And as for the gorse burning its own fuse
Or the boy who drops to his knees
Shuffling along his seam
Towards the pock of an explosion
Heard from above, miles out
In the fishing grounds,
He’s in the shop, serving
Eighty flavours of ice cream.
Drip drip goes brown water
Into the shaft while harebells quiver.
Under the houses there’s a cavern
So deep that when the camera
Was lowered it swung pendulum
While the void kept opening
But I suppose that in the veiny dark
Tunnels that knit the rock
They are still blasting,
And ponies which never see the light
Snuff sugar and are content
As may be among the rare metals:
Antimony, molybdenum,
Wolframite, uranium
Gold, silver and indium.
Inside the Wave
And when at last the voyage was over
The ship docked and the men paid off,
The crew became a scattering
Dotted, unremarkable,
In houses along the hill top
Where the lamps flared in welcome
And then grew dim, where a woman turned
As if from habit to the wall.
In the bronze mirror there was a woman
Combing what was left of her hair
And beside her, grimacing,
A dirty old mariner.
He swore and knocked back the chair.
Yes, then Odysseus opened his mouth
And all that was left
Was the sound an old man makes
Between a laugh and a cough.
His toenails were goat’s hooves
His hair a wild
Nest of old stories,
He straddled the tiles
As a man of the sea does
But she would not touch
His barnacled lips.
From the fountain, pulse by pulse
Came gouts of blood.
Everything stayed as it was,
There was no unravelling
Of wake behind him,
No abandoning
Unwanted memories and men.
Besides, the earth stank.
He went down to the black rock
Where the sea pours
And the white sand blows,
He turned his back to the land
And thought of nothing
For the voyage was over,
The ship dragged by a chain
Onto the ramp for inspection.
The waves turned and turned
Neither toward nor away from him,
Swash and backwash
Crossing, repeating,
But never the same.
At the lip of the wave, foam
Stuttered and broke,
It was on the inside
Of the wave he chose
To meditate endlessly
Without words or song,
And so he lay down
To watch it at eye-level,
About to topple
About to be whole.
Odysseus to Elpenor
But tell me, Elpenor
Now that I have conjured you
From those caverns so deep
No camera can fathom them
Now you have come to drink the wine
Poured on the ground in libation
And slake your fleshless appetite
On the snuff of blood,
Tell me how you came here
Fleeing like a cloud shadow
Over restless water –
You frighten me, Elpenor.
Look, I have drawn my sword
Are you not afraid?
You were a handsome fighter –
Will you come on?
Take the heat of my hand
Elpenor, between your palms.
Bow your head for a blessing
Houseless boy, and now tell me
How you came to die.
We are not heroes, any of us,
Only familiars
Of grey shores and the sea-pulse,
Laggards, like the tide.
Was it you, Elpenor
Who rowed when the wind died
Until your hands bled?
You fell asleep in Circe’s house
Drunk, like all of us,
Playing the fool
As you plunged from the roof.
When your neck broke
We were already racing
Down to the harbour
Where our black ship quivered,
Even when our sails filled
And we scudded before the wind
We could not catch your shadow.
We had left you behind
But you are ahead of us
Waiting, unpropitiated
Poor boy, unburied
Come to lap at the blood.
Dawn pushes away night’s curtain
Your body must be burned
And your hair tied with ribbons
As a remembrance.
You ask me in the name of my son
Not to let you be forgotten
But to build your grave mound
Where the pebbles meet the tide
‘And thrust into its heart my oar
So that I may row myself forever.’
Plane tree outside Ward 78
The tree outside the window
Is lost and gone,
Billow of leaf in the summer dark,
A buffet of rain.
I might owe this tree to morphine,
I might wake in the morning
Hung in water,
Nothing to do with dreams.
I cannot sleep.
Pain is yards away
Held off like bad weather,
In the ward’s beautiful contentment
Freed by opiates.
Hooked to oxygen
We live for the moment.
The shaft
I don’t need to go to the sun –
It lies on my pillow.
Without movement or speech
Day deepens its sweetness.
Sea shanties from the water,
A brush of traffic,
But it’s quiet here.
Who would have thought that pain
And weakness had such gifts
Hidden in their rough hearts?
Leave the door open
Leave the door open! We cheep and command
From the shared double bed or from the cot
With bars that make tigers out of the dark.
We want the fume and coil of your cigarettes,
The smoke that has embraced us from birth,
The click of your footsteps on the wooden landing,
The wedge of light that parts us from the dark
As I hold, hold to it like a sword.
Leave the door open. Go downstairs, go out
After priming the neighbours to listen,
Go to your world: the cider-bottle cap
Askew on its stem, the pellucid gin,
The ashtray overflowing with stubs,
Radio laughter and suppressed voices
As you creak upstairs without waking us,
But don’t forget to leave the light on
So the spill of it falls where it must.
We can breathe now in our coffin of sheets
So tangled we can’t get out of them,
As long as you leave the door open.
My life’s stem was cut
My life’s stem was cut,
But quickly, lovingly
I was lifted up,
I heard the rush of the tap
And I was set in water
In the blue vase, beautiful
In lip and curve,
And here I am
Opening one petal
As the tea cools.
I wait while the sun moves
And the bees finish their dancing,
I know I am dying
But why not keep flowering
As long as I can
From my cut stem?
The Bare Leg
There we sat in the clattering dark
As the carriages swayed downhill
Under London’s invisible rivers,
There our faces were mute
With a day of burdens
As we recovered ourselves,
Some read star signs from a column
In a left-behind newspaper,
Some sighed and shut their eyes.
When the train came to a halt
For nothing in the dark of the tunnel
We breathed out silence
And when the voice came
Lulling with news of a red signal
We sighed again and rolled our eyes
Or adjusted our standing positions
To lean into one another more gently
And if we had room to turn our heads
We looked down the long corridor
Of carriages aligned
As if the driver had drawn them
Onto the straight, and left them perfect
And in the next-to-one carriage
Less crowded than our own
A bare leg stretched into the aisle
Taking up room
As if this were a beach in summer.
We studied the delicate anatomy
Of shin and knee
The putting together and planting
Of toe and heel
The tension of thigh,
And beyond it nothing
For the body was hidden
By the bulk of a boy
Inopportunely leaning
To adjust his headphones.
As if this were a beach in summer
The leg took its own time
And flexed luxuriously
While the signal held against us
And delay surged into time
Lost, irrecoverable.
The driver told us again
We would be on the move shortly
But no one believed him.
This was what we had always known
Was about to happen: the calf tightening
The vessel of the hip cupping
The thrust of the bare leg,
The naked precision of the human
As it steps into action,
And down the long corridor, swaying
As the train resumed,
The chant, the murmur
Of foot soles, someone
Merely walking into the next room.
The Place of Ordinary Souls
In such meadows the days pass
Without shadow, unremarkable.
On time, the bus pants at its halt,
Passengers peel their thighs
From hot vinyl, and step down.
Swift-heeled Achilles strides
Through the fields of asphodel
Flanked by heroes and warriors
Who have left their mark on the earth
And want nothing to do with us.
With impatient glance at the starry fields
And kit on their backs, they’re gone
Route-marching to Elysium
Where the gods are at home.
We are glad to see the back of them.
In the fields of asphodel we dawdle
Towards the rumour of a beauty spot
Which turns out to be shut.
No matter. Why not get out the picnic
And see if the tea’s still hot?
The bus shuttles all day long
With its cargo of ordinary souls.
We lie on our backs, eyes closed,
Dreaming of nothing while clouds pass.
(According to Greek legend, ordinary, unheroic souls pass the afterlife in the fields of asphodel.)
My daughter as Penelope
Seven years old last birthday,
With waist-length hair,
White tunic, yellow ribbon
Threaded at neck and hem,
She has learned her lines,
The chalked-in positions,
The music which means
She must come out of the wings.
In the dusty cave of the theatre
The children’s bare feet patter.
My daughter thrusts out her arm
And beats her suitors,
In pride at the laughter
She forgets the pause,
But chides them, berates them
Like an abandoned woman
Who has over cold years learned
To preserve the hearth.
Odysseus, so long expected
Would scarcely be welcome –
A man of many distractions
At this very moment
Oblivious of her
Conjuring the dead with blood.
My daughter as Penelope
Shakes back her hair and cries
That they should all go home
Here they will get nothing,
While the little capering boys
Evade her blows.
I made her tunic, I threaded
Those ribbons at neck and hem,
I brushed and loosened her hair.
She leaned against my shoulder
In pure naïvety. ‘I didn’t know
You could make anything
As good as this,’ she said.
The theatre swallowed the child.
We thought they were too young for it,
They would freeze, or be afraid,
But they w
ere blithe, barefoot,
Running from the underworld
To butt like kids against the white sheet
That marked the kingdom of the dead.
The skin rose on our arms
The hairs prickled. They’d gone.
My daughter as Penelope
Seven years old, thrusting
Her bare arm out of her chiton
Pushing away her suitors
As one may do in childhood.
The sheet quivered
For the dead could barely contain
Their desire for the living
And the play was long.
The cave of the stage grew vast –
A mouth without a tongue
Consuming our children.
The Lamplighter
Here, where the old Industrial School was
And then the porn-film sheds,
Stands the last lamp before the water.
Dead as he’s been these ninety years
The lamplighter on his beat
Walks with ladder on shoulder.
Above the Mardyke Steps and the donkey track
He fixes ladder to pole, stands back
Then climbs nimbly into the mass of flower.
His head is a ball of petals. He barely coughs
As the soft skin of petunia
Plasters itself against his nostrils.
Now he takes up his torch
Tips the lever and touches the gas.
A big rude flower, a dahlia