over the wet surfaces of the kitchen
and you with your arms folded
in that tiny immemorial way you’ve observed,
your soft, small arms folded
over your chest where your breath
flows and unflows easily,
don’t need to look at me.
The bubble of your song bounces towards me
its surface tension strong
as it shudders, recovers.
You let the song go where it wants.
When you’ve fallen asleep, or I think you’ve fallen
I withdraw, still singing
or perhaps still listening to you sing,
but you feel me going. Why am I going
always going, instead of listening to you sing?
Your hand knows better than mine
and with authority
of touch I cannot match
wraps me round you again.
Viking cat in the dark
Viking cat in the dark
is paw-licked velvet, sinew of shadow,
a thread of smoke bitterly burning,
a quiver of black like a riddle.
The huts lie low
a hoard half-hidden
a clutch of eggs
in the dune’s hollow
and horned helmets
are nightmares to wake from
shapes cut from dreams
– but the cat leaps.
Like rain falling faster
the shadows whisper
and rain spatters
like death’s downpour:
‘Fight for me, dawn-slayer,
wake with me, sleep-sower,
keeper of dreams,
the dream we came for.’
There is no noise.
Only the quick
paws of the cat in the dark
like feet on the stairs,
but the cold grey hands of the sea clap
on the beached long-ships,
and a shape pours itself flat
to the chink of sword music.
Viking cat in the dark
is paw-licked velvet, sinew of shadow.
A thread of smoke, bitterly burning
quivers her body like a riddle.
Baby sleep
’s
not like any other
day sleep night sleep
long drive sleep
too cold too hot sleep
What’s that window doing shut? sleep
get a bit of peace sleep
hungry thirsty
need to pee
sleep,
baby sleep’s
all over the shop sleep
new nappy and babygro poppers
done up to the neck sleep
fat fingers
starfishing
damp feathers
on neck curling
baby lotion and talc sleep
sleep in Mum and Dad’s bed sleep
cry in sleep and then sleep sleep
sleep while the big peop
le wash and dress sleep
baby sleep
Frostbite
When you grow tired of the flame
wumping to life in the central heating boiler,
and the duvet sweats like obstinate flesh
in the middle of winter,
don’t finger the lightswitch. Leave the coil
of electricity sleeping. Go down
tread after tread by the draught
of heat coming upward. The voice
of the house is warning. Get out
it breathes, Leave us alone
to our shuffling of dust-mites, our sorting
of smell and shadow into home.
First the bolt, then the chain, then the Chubb.
You’re outside, but even in a nightdress
that comes to the thighs, you can’t rub the warmth off.
Basketball player on Pentecost Monday
With his hands he teaches wind to move –
not this shuffle of leaves
from rows of pollarded trees
but the salt-laden, incoming
breath of the Indies.
He’s six foot seven,
liquid in dull grey track suit,
his trainers undone.
There’s a small keen boy
at his heels, yapping
for ball-time, air-time.
It’s playtime in the gardens
with children sagely going round
on patient horses they strike with small
privileged hands.
Behind him, gravelly sand,
a guitarist picking
the bones of a tune
mournful as Sunday,
the empty horses
of carousels turning.
Tell the basketball player how tight
time is, how he’s reached perfection
at the same time as the man with his rake
puts the gravel straight on something.
Tell him this is the moment
the arrow of his life flew out of
to return into his breastbone.
Or say nothing.
Tiger lookout
Refrigerator days.
Ours is the size of a walk-in larder,
casing everything.
One word
which has gone out of fashion
is putrefaction.
When Simmonds fell from his tiger lookout
it was not the growl
nor the stripes
that said tiger.
It was the tiger’s breath.
All that old, bad meat
furring its teeth.
For a moment Simmonds was critical,
sniffing the exhalation of corpses,
the walk-in larder where he was going.
Tiger Moth caterpillar
Two spines curve in
as the sisters face on a gate
in their matching cardigans.
They are looking into something –
a stolen Swan Vesta box
plump with green privet,
and there’s one match left
with which to poke it –
their marvellous possession.
Inner thighs chafe on a crust of lichen.
Riding the gate is the best game
these two have ever come on.
The more bloody a ballad
they more they love it. Cigars,
betrayal, the flames of hell
and the slaughter of innocence
are what speaks, makes the gate creak.
Girls, give us a song
in your tidy cardigans. Your hair’s
deceptively sleek, you are
tangled, complicit, in on it.
Hungry Thames
Hungry Thames, I walk over the bridge
half-scared you’ll whittle me down
where the brown water is eager
and tipped with foam.
You sigh and suck. You lick at the steps
you would like to come up.
Hungry Thames, we feed you on concrete,
orange-peel, polystyrene cups,
we hold our kids by a handful of clothing
to let them look at your dimples,
your smiling waters. We should hold them tighter,
these are whirlpools, this is hunger
lashing its tail in the mud, deep down
where the river gets what it wants.
The wasp
Now winter comes and I am half-asleep
crawling the hollow of an apple, my sound
a battery toy in a child’s cupped hand,
or I climb to a ledge and lie, dulled
by its half-warmth. Half-wasp, I’m still
helpless not to sting your exploring finger
helpless in the pulse of my body.
The paddle of your hand churns
as you find something to kill me.
I keep on stinging. I cannot learn
through my crispness, the coat of warning
that says what I am.
Little Ellie and the timeshare salesman
The man who gave little Ellie his forever
love was a timeshare salesman.
He let her look round the place
when the carpet was freshly steam-cleaned
and the teabag box was full to the brim,
but he left little Ellie for an instant
and she spied the used teabag jam-jar
sodden and rusty as iron.
Oh Ellie, whispered little Ellie,
there have been many here before you.
But she was smiling at the door
when he gave her his hand, wet from the ballcock
he’d quickly fixed in the cistern.
In a serenade of gurgles and yawns
the plumbing talked itself down
and perfect Ellie was his dream.
How could he replace or kill her
with her genius for noticing nothing
but the nice day, the short walk to the pool
the view of the beach from the bathroom window?
Sweet Ellie never crossed the time-share salesman,
but tended her one week like a garden.
She did not keep a diary where the others
might be noted or brooded over.
Kindly she watches him run on the wheel
of his weeks till he gets back to nineteen
where she is always happy to wait for him.
Dusty geraniums come back to life
in the days where Ellie waters them,
and the time-share salesman slackens his smiles
at the sight of Ellie’s daring paëlla:
in week nineteen she is his forever.
Bouncing boy
(for Paul)
All the squares of trampoline are taken
by children leaping like chessmen
who won’t play the game. Up, flying.
from tiny freeholds, hitting the sky’s
elastic surprise, then down.
There’s a space for you always.
Two kids eating ice-cream
with careful darts of the tongue
watch as you start to climb
the icy November sky, hand over hand.
You hear the clap of the sea
and your bright blue trampoline applauding
with the dull fervour of rubber
each time you go down,
and the kids eating ice-cream
with wind in their teeth say nothing
as the time mounts and your turn
grows impossibly long.
Ghost at noon
On the white path at noon when the sun
burns through olive and eucalyptus
and the pale stones rattle
as if someone’s walking,
when the goat jumps and the sea shivers
like a dog turning its belly upward
to a hand that teases it,
and the sky is cloudless but suddenly
dark drops spatter the dust
and there, where no one is walking,
a line of wet footprints.
Crickets crackle in the dry maquis,
their sound unbroken.
No one is walking.
If you touch your finger to the dust, quickly,
you’ll catch the pressure just gone.
Greek beads
Small, silvery, slipping
from finger to finger,
beads for street corners,
beads for white noon
when shadows curl by the walls
and the dog in the square lolls
with his tongue unfurled,
beads for navy-blue evenings
when the smell of oranges
drifts to the fountain,
beads for waiting on the landing-stage,
for the heat that shimmers
from village to village,
for the boy guarding the goats
and the old woman hoeing in black,
beads for leaving to find work
and for the dream of coming back,
beads for remembering
and for forgetting,
wrapped round the wrists of babies
and the dying,
beads for the life we live in,
small, silvery, slipping
from finger to finger.
Tea at Brandt’s
Music plays gently. Yesterday’s morning paper
flutters at the end of its long emigration
from being news. This is the present,
but when? Coconut cake, a stained napkin,
a tea-glass bisected by long spoon.
Any minute now it’s going to rain.
What kind of animal is the past?
A wooden screen makes two rooms of one.
On the other side, where I saw her last,
my baby girl. I’ll wipe her nose with the napkin,
take her to the Ladies and change her,
blow the bubble of words towards her
that says, This is the present, there is no other.
We are men, not beasts
We are men, not beasts
though we fall in the dark
on the rattlesnake’s path
and flinch with fire of fear
running over our flesh
and beat it to death,
we are men, not beasts
and we walk upright
with the moss-feathered dark
like a shawl on our shoulders
and we carry fire
steeply, inside a cage of fingers,
we are men, not beasts,
and what we cannot help wanting
we banish – the barn yawn, the cow breath,
the stickiness we come from.
Index of titles and first lines
(Titles are shown in italics, first lines in roman type.)
A candle for the ship’s breakfast, 225
A cow here in the June meadow, 63
A cow here in the June meadow, 63
Adders, 204
A draught like a bony finger, 51
A dream of wool, 138
A fat young man in BERBER’S ICE CREAM PARLOUR, 184
After a night jagged by guard-dogs and nightingales, 168
After midday the great lazy, 102
Ahvenanmaa, 196
Air layering, 141
All the squares of trampoline are taken, 246
All the things you are not yet, 235
A lorry-load of stuff, 18
A meditation of the glasshouses, 143
A mortgage on a pear tree, 131
An Irish miner in Staffordshire, 156
A pæony truss on Sussex place, 132
A pear tree stands in its own maze, 131
Approaches to winter, 75
A pretty shape, 237
A safe light, 85
As good as it gets, 37
A skater comes to this blue pond, 119
At Cabourg, 135
At Cabourg II, 166
At Great Neck one Easter, 64
At the Emporium, 226
At three in the morning, 96
Babes in the Wood, 216
Baby sleep, 239
Baron Hardup, 167
Basketball player on Pentecost Monday, 241
Bathing at Balnacarry, 213
Because she told a lie, he says, 35
Beetroot Soup, 211
Big barbershop man, 175
Big barbershop man turning away, 175
Bouncing boy, 246
Boys on the Top Board, 214
Breakfast, 94
Breast to breast against the azaleas, 196
Breeze of ghosts, 60
Bristol Docks, 32
Brown coal, 172
By chance I was alone in my bed the morning, 191
Cajun, 217
Candle poem, 225
Candlemas, 154
Christmas caves, 51
Christmas roses, 97
Clearing the mirror to see your face, 42
Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden, 126
Coiled peel goes soft on the deserted table, 88
Cold pinches the hills around Florence, 122
Cool as sleep, the crates ring, 74
Cursing softly and letting the matches drop, 112
Cyclamen, blood-red, 21
Cyclamen, blood-red, fly into winter, 21
Dancing man, 164
Decoding a night’s dreams, 138
Deep in busy lizzies and black iron, 199
Dense slabs of braided-up lupins, 148
Depot, 17
Diving girl, 236
Do they wake careless and warm, 158
Domestic poem, 71
Drink and the Devil, 195
Dropped yolks of shore-lamp quiver on tarmac, 180
Dublin 1971, 151
Father, 216
First, the echo, 234
First, the retreat of bees, 20
Fishing beyond sunset, 229
Florence in permafrost, 122
For all frozen things, 133
For three years I’ve been wary of deep water, 103
Fortune-teller on Church Road, 40
Frostbite, 240
‘Fuck this staring paper and table, 81
Getting the Strap, 203
Ghost at noon, 247