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.

  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.

  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.

  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 wor
st 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