The sun a low-slung coin of salt
burning the cobalt blue to flame.
On smoke-smirred glass, fire assaults
a concrete henge; the sky reclaims
the vacant stars and extant trees,
as you, by train, pull in late.
The mind wants what it cannot see,
home is what we come to hate.
Feel the darkness of the evening,
hear water coursing quick as lime
through the building’s mouldering lair,
and ask the dusk for three small things:
a line of coke, endless drink - and time.
Time to forget ever living there.
You had a certain way
Of saying it, gifting it
A mythic quality;
So that even now
I cannot stand
To hear it.
You are not the plum.
Do you wish to go back
To the throes of youth?
First love, early learning?
A life lived in reverse
Where your heart
Is ever broken?
But you are the prune.
You fell in the spring.
It fizzled out in the heat
Of dazzling summer.
And now the rain:
A reminder of how you saw
Not one season together.
You are not the plum.
Those summer streets
Seemed to know you.
They carry you still.
If I’d known then how a whim
Would backfire so spectacularly
I’d have got off the train.
But you are the prune.
Your kind, concerned parents.
That strange, stilted dinner.
Our strained, sexless sleep.
Falling apart on your brother’s bed.
Tenderly you took my hand.
I blubbed like a shipwreck.
And as the plume de ma tante.
You were a lost soul,
Still grieving for another.
You couldn’t let go.
Crossing Hungerford Bridge
Over the insistent water,
Swirling a morbid ink.
Your ruin is my ploy.
What was it after all?
A choking gall,
A preserving sweet.
Bring me a higher love.
Bring me a higher love.
Bring me a higher love.
Two lovers embrace.
Your fingers slip loose
One last time.
It’s that higher love
I’ve been thinking of.
Autumn. The pink-footed
Geese return.
On Arctic wind borne,
Anser brachyrhynchus
Drawn south for winter
By the failing sun.
Icelandic guests
Yakking to and fro
In loose formation,
From roosting site
To tattie fields.
Heading eastwards tonight,
Under the tattered canopy
Of variegated cloud,
In thin, ragged lines.
As pixelated soundwave,
Rippling and scratching
Across a dusk sky
Too pure to photograph,
Too perfect to be real.
There was a limit to our love.
No small distance – five hundred miles –
Put paid to us ever walking up the aisle.
Jetting in on German Wings,
You met me in linen trousers,
Charcoal vest, kohl-lined eyes.
Fist raised to greet me.
Taller than I remembered. Almost
As tall as me. I did like that.
We stayed in someone else’s flat:
A demilitarised Eurozone. I didn’t mind,
Though I never did understand the who,
What, or why we were hiding from.
We spoke very little, but that was fine.
Gothic Cologne was drab and bland,
And finding somewhere to dine,
Your eagerness to please pained me.
We watched young couples reel in the street,
Drunk as spinning tops. Next day,
In glib sunshine we biked beside the Rhine,
Startled flustered pedestrians. Later,
Cycling to the cinema, on the cusp
Of dusk, a small dog reared up and bit me
On the leg. You didn’t stop, or look back.
On a daytrip to Amsterdam, I forgot
My passport, and your quickfire German
Convinced the border guard to let us go.
Awkwardly skirted the coffee shops
And red lights. Fell into a bar.
Fell into a fight. Fell quiet.
When man took a shine to you, I knew.
Back in Cologne, we listened to Feist,
And the sky fell in on us, one last time.
For Mark
They say the rain in Spain
Stays mainly on the plain,
But in the hills of Bilbao
It falls mainly on us, most foully.
We two entombed in our tents,
Unfree to discover this Biscay
City – its peoples, its streets,
Its sun-prized dust. So rent,
Our canvassed air is Emin-esque,
Hot with memories and reminiscences.
My mind punning as readily as a
Sub-editor in The Sun’s offices
As I watch twinkling raindrops
Expiring in the mud. Toward me
You crawl, crossing a page where
Francis Bacon sits and stares,
Twin antennae twirling enigmatically
To reach a sense of recognition.
Dali would have us elsewhere:
Dodging bulls in Pamplona perhaps
Or Seville, or Guernica –
Our bodies and heads
Reconfigured by bomb blasts,
But we are here, you and I,
Where we have always been,
Plain as the still falling rain.
I think of Picasso, I think of Goya,
I think of Miro and a question mark
Hovers over my head.
Under my thumb I crack your back
And pinch you into my mouth:
A sacrificial sacrament,
A cultural remnant,
O crumb of Espagne.
Where were we again? Lostwithiel.
The dry-damp smell returns first:
Garden insinuating into the house
With decaying air, stirring growth.
The weight of rain pulling down the sky,
Flora in wan sunlight effervescing:
Synthesis of charcoal and wet bark,
Boiling water and cooking grease.
Domesticity. Creaking about
On buck-toothed floorboards.
Doo-dah, your Dalmatian, shedding
A scrim of fine albino hair, her smell
Dominating all others. Basket, blanket,
Biscuits. Shit. Mornings we breakfasted
Together, or else with your mother,
Sometimes your sister and her daughter,
Or some other waif or stray:
Your mother’s lover; the decorator.
Their faces all gone but I still see you
Weaving through the living room,
Short-haired and swishing, preparing
Simple meals, or a bowl of hash.
We drove through pasture
To Padstow, St Austell and St Ives.
Long walks by the Fowey stilled time
To a zero, a naught, a nothingness
Of pure leisure, a fallow period
Before serious purpose overtook us:
Work, study, adult responsibility,
A pressing distance closing in.
You took me to ‘the site’,
The abandoned holiday camp
Where you lived once
In a haze of Special Brew and smack.
Your pregnant friend,
Skin stretched tight across her face,
Drew hard on her cigarette,
Looked at me, and asked
If you were going straight.
We scored some hash, and left
Quickly. I noticed that
You didn’t answer her back.
Before long we began to wonder
What the fuck I was doing there.
We agreed to part and were reunited
In that final week above the lounge,
While your mother’s black and white TV
Flickered out its mournful coda.
My kin come from labouring stock:
Bricklayers, farmers, potters made good,
Kiln-stokers, Herdsmen. Markers of a path.
I was the first to go out into the world,
To take a different mortarboard in my hand,
Though my life feels the more limited now,
Being borne out of thought. Not for me
The diurnal life: the soil, the seasons,
The sun, the earth. I’ve taken my heirs’
Telluric inheritance, made of myself,
In this realm of words, a straw man,
For going against the grain of things.
My kin knit closer than cross-stitch.
They’re brickwork on a chimney-breast,
A hearthstone lit by filial warmth.
I envy their muddy boots and 4x4s,
Their ruddy-faced Cath Kidson kids.
And far-from-the-madding-crowd ways.
I feel it sharply when our paths collide.
When necessity dictates, we reconcile
With a familiar smile, firm handshake,
Or fumbled embrace. When done,
We part without a backward glance,
Saving face for the brace of grief
Still to come. Blood runs thicker
Than water. It mars the land with love.
We are as salt upon the earth.
East Beach, Nairn, 27 May 2018
You came out to find a poem,
To rekindle something in yourself
Among the dunes
Of Nairn’s East Beach
That vast expanse of beige sand
Where they trained for D-Day
In bloodless attacks
Before low bluffs
Fringed with gorse.
Nothing untoward here today,
The usual flotsam and jetsam,
And the obliterated remains
Of a billion molluscs,
Dismembered crustaceans,
Strewn about the beach.
A landscape arranged
In abstracted coastal hues:
Coffee, magnolia, aquamarine.
A sky of impeccable blue.
A view positively Caribbean
But for a brute easterly
Blasting across the sand.
You walk towards its source,
Fierce roar rushing
Into your ears.
A few families toughing it out,
Huddled under canvas
Beside windbreakers,
Wading in the frigid shallows.
Whitsun worshippers
Oblivious to the wind.
Lone walkers,
The odd stray dog,
And two kiteboarders.
One already in the water,
Curving a white wake
In the deep channel
Carved into the sand.
Another,
A woman,
Kite unfurled,
Struggling to take her horse
To water,
The wind
Having other ideas:
To draw her to the dunes,
Tear the lines
From her clenched fist,
Send her sailing
Across the town.
Tilting at 45 degrees
She has her toes in
As you walk by,
Making for the point,
Where sand meets mud
And you know
You’ve gone far enough.
Answering a call of nature
You piss into the wind,
Watch it blow away from you,
And bead on the grains.
By the time you turn
She has made it:
Both boarders are cresting
The little inlet's surface,
Kites hovering over them
Like a question mark,
A thought.
An aura.
A soul.
Shuttling and twisting
On the dazzling water,
They could be dancing
To Strauss, or Ravel.
They could be dancing.
Yeah.
Passing once more
You find your footprints,
Retrace your steps
Press on for home.
Our hedges are teeming
With little brown birds.
Flitting from grass to nest,
Privet to beech,
Darning
The green fabric
Of our garden.
Bathing in the dirt,
Lifting as one
When disturbed.
Sociable buggers
The little brown birds.
Their shrill calls
Punctuate our days.
We watch them
Going about their business.
Scuffling in the blossom.
Frotting in the bushes.
Watching the feeder
Like tiny hawks.
Peeking over the gutters,
Beaks stuffed with moss.
Nipping away
At our stonework.
Dropping
Their fledgling dead
On the driveway.
Making themselves
Comfortable
In our home.
Hard not to admire
The little brown birds,
Envy their freedom,
The habits
And certainties
Of their world.
This house is theirs
As much as ours.
When we leave
The little brown birds
Will have the place
To themselves again.
And they’ll wonder,
Who were those strange beings?
What did they want?
Where did they go?
The little brown birds
Won’t miss us at all.
Now I am not I,
Nor is my house now my house
‘Romance Sonambulo’, Garcia Lorca
He was sitting at a window
Watching the hour resolve itself
From the night’s black scrawl
To a muted green of dawn,
Listening
To the house
Coming back to life
In the morning’s pale cold.
The morning greeting him
With a stilled garden
Caught in the lure
Of autumn’s chill air.
Overnight, rain fell like lead,
Silvering the thatched lawn.
The beech hedge threaded
and interwoven by roiling coils
Of bramble. In the beds,
Apologetic poppies
Shaking sorry bonnets.
In the earth, worms ooze.
His eyes lit upon an apple tree
Planted by an unknown hand
Barely capable of bearing fruit
Its branches chafe
As if for warmth, like two hands
Over a hearth. Its neighbour
With one or two still clinging on:
Rotting baubles pecked by rooks,
Carcasses littering the grass,
Eviscerated carrion
And turning brown,
Left to spoil and seed.
He was sitting at a window
Looking upon a world
That was not his to know
A world being reformed
By the sun’s steady hand.
A garden which was like
A room of the mind
In a house returned to life.
After Pissarro
1.
Shock of winter
Shock of the ancient
Shock of renewal
2.
After snowfall
A palette of monochrome
Upstrokes and cross hatchings
Score marks and rough edges
Thumb smudges
Finger smears
Rubbings out
3.
Trees in startled thought
Like blown madwomen
In iron age wrought
Crown nature’s brain
4.
Frozen tableau
Cloud
Stout houses
Flecks of bird
Shrouded walkers
A road gently curves
Drawing the observer’s gaze
Shuttling train
5.
A picture forms
The sped century
Spreads a pall over southern London
The city’s softer side
Sydenham, Norwood, Dulwich
Fox Hill
Murmur of suburbia
Metropolitan harbinger
This is not the final work, that coarse, vexed canvas exiled to the attic, cut into pieces and burned by his darling Clementine in a barbaristic fit of pique. No, this is the precursor, the preamble, a hurried sketch, rapid-fire intervention between artist and sitter. This all that remains of Sutherland's daring. His erasure of the pugilist orator, Tory grandee, and replacement with an old man in a rumpled coat, all grandiosity muted. This and the photographs of the unveiling, gravelly recordings of Churchill's grave praise when gifted it for his 80th. “A remarkable example of modern art.” His gruff Marlborough drawl, leaden weight to his words. Remarkable magnanimity for a work deemed malignant, and his wife deemed fit only for a bonfire. The finest hours. So much to so few. Never in the histories. Instead, a neutered bulldog. Antique Victorian. Spent statesman. In its beginning, his ending. Little wonder he hated it.
They’re an unusual pair.
Him gangly and goofy, a string-bean Swede,
In jacket and trousers that don’t match.
Her diminutive and compact, blonde curls.
The farm-girl glamour she never lost.
Smartly dressed in Sunday best,
They might be off to church,
Or his father’s coaching inn, or else
Pushing the boat out a bit,
Taking a trip in a borrowed car
Or her father’s horse and trap,
On a road to who-knows-where,
Past milking fields, hedgerows
of hawthorn and ash, spring
Uncoiling into a hint of summer.
Or perhaps no further than this garden.
The evergreen lawn this portrait depicts
In varying shades of sepia grey -
Slight stain marring the print -
As something vague resolves itself
Into something indelibly real,
Like the familiar becoming loved.
All that a camera cannot capture:
Sun essaying from behind the clouds,
What words passed between them
As they held their smiling pose,
The footprints left in the deep grass
As they walked toward the house
In cahoots, closer than close.
September arrived in Laugharne
with weather fit for a pilgrimage:
This being Dylan Thomas Town,
the place where he lived,
worked and should have died.
Not on that trip to New York,
where 'eighteen straight'
and one misdiagnosis
did for him. He’s buried here
with Caitlin - under some
sore-thumb, cruciform stone
at St Martin’s: his painted cross
jarringly jagged and white
among the mellifluous
bible-black stones
of lesser-known folk.
We retraced Dylan’s steps,
til the weather closed in;
scarfed scones and jam
at his house: now a museum
bearing his name. My wife
breast-fed our first-born,
carried him in a loose sling,
as he snuffled and mumbled,
moored in gentle night.
Saw The Boathouse
where Thomas lived
with Caitlin and kids,
and composed poems
with one eye on the Taf,
that broad expanse
of table-flat water
encircled by hills,
palavers of curlews
giving flight
to his words.
His writing shed with cluttered desk,
shelves a jumble of well-thumbed books,
portraits and notes, a seldom-lit stove,
and an old grey jacket
draped over one splayed chair:
as if he’s just nipped out
for another beer
and will soon be back.
rediscovered
in my
grandparents’ loft
rusted
canisters
of cine film
we go over
for dinner
and to watch
old selves
in celluloid
me
my brother
my mother
and father
uncle
and partner
grandparents
curtains drawn
lights dimmed
the
projector
beams
a fine
blade
of light
into
the room
an image
of a garden
forms
flowerbeds
pink
with roses
then unfamiliar
faces
long-gone
aunts
and
uncles
great
grand
parents
resurrected
in Sixties
suburban
utopia
Brasso-faces
in suits
and skirts
nursing
cup and saucer
Potteries
china
reserved
for best
horn-rimmed
and ruddy
a young woman
laughs
and shakes
russet tresses
a tall man
pomaded
in shirt
and slacks
pings
with
rubber band
a glider
skyward
for two
small
brown-haired
children
a girl
in summer
frock
a boy
in short
trousers
run in circles
on the lawn
the plane falls
and is caught
by the roses
it is summer
high summer
flaming
june
my mother’s
birthday
the penny
drops
a jump cut
we are
next to
a field
my mother
throws
breadcrumbs
to a horse
at grass
a brown mare
just out
of shot
her foal
my mother
turns
a breeze
brushes
a strand
of her hair
she asks for
something
her small
mouth
pleading
can we have
more bread?
my mother says
from her spot
on the floor
in the film
someone
hands her
more
but when
she turns
the mare
bolts
and runs
across
the
paddock
with
her foal
the first
and last
and only
time
I saw
my mother
as a child
Our eldest brings stones
And sticks home from the park.
Bits of grit, lumps of gravel,
Marbled pebbles, tiny rocks;
Indiscriminately selected twigs;
Branches, feathers; lichen, bark.
What will grow from this stony rubbish?
He cannot know or say, though each
For him is as a curate’s egg,
Growing the small, neglected stack
In the corner of our porch
Where leaves and cobwebs collect.
A broken nest. A disturbed cairn.
A stone age ruin. Signifiers
Of his untroubled realm:
A time without rules, or doubt,
Cruelty, or loss - where things,
Like names, do no harm
And all his days voyages of discovery
Through those secret places close to home.
"I am at war with the obvious."
I have seen banality like pink blossomed trees,
toppling graves for Confederate generals,
slave owning families of Tennessee and Mississippi,
the light of the Deep South, its heart of darkness.
I showed a world of colour the Old Masters
never knew, uncovered the cruel majesty of consumables:
cutlery, some kid’s tricycle, a burning barbecue;
gas ovens, greasy garage walls, green bathrooms,
a woman with get-lost eyes wearing a navy dress,
sinewy grandmothers gripping bourbon tumblers on garish porch swings
deranged grandfathers brandishing their 45s in the care home.
I walked into to where colour split the world
and democratized the right to see and be seen.
I resurrected the south’s crumbling plantations, filled
for the tan dog a muddy puddle to lap at,
made of white bottles disparate clouds. I created
a new way to speak plainly that needed no words
Just don’t ask me why I did it. I did it. That's enough.
Hangover from yesteryear’s lesser days:
Rain, like wrapping paper, falls in sheets.
This house, shrouded in New Year's grey,
Was a cradle of ebullient Yuletide light;
Now the tree is back in its box, the wreath
Resting in peace in the wheelie bin.
Our firstborn has almost stopped teething.
We’ve barely dented the Roses tin,
A snowball of Christmas cake remains.
The nights are drawing out again. On the table,
Our 2yo scrawls with pens
While we await his late rival.
All our clocks are out of synch.
The boiler clicks off and on at once,
As if releasing an uncertain breath,
Or remembering something of significance.
Their movement is a kind of pain
circulating about the room.
The idiot flies are back again,
triangulating their doomed campaign
to quit the space they assume.
Their movement is a kind of pain,
limp prelude or weak refrain,
weaving at an invisible loom.
The idiot flies are back again.
Trapped by sunlight, held by rain –
above all nature abhors a vacuum –
their movement is a kind of pain
of ceaseless endeavour, one in vain
repeated, reprised and resumed.
The idiot flies are back again,
etching the signals of the brain,
until one smites them with a broom.
Their movement is a kind of pain.
The idiot flies are back again.
Fourteen years. Faster than an eye could flick.
Sweet little Ballater, this regal town
With its quaint cornershop confectioner,
Beeching-ed station, Balmoral Tavern,
Lochnagar Indian, two Co-ops, one Queen.
Still the same. Still different. Still home.
No flag atop the Balmoral pole this week,
Just a smattering of snow to help to keep
The skiers and lifties up at Glenshee.
Fourteen years ago you scrambled up
A hillside, young poet with an old soul,
Average mind, lungs full of hash smoke,
Trying to write, trying to know something
Of life: “the river shivers like a silver shoal,
A strip of foil unravelled.” The little distance
You’ve travelled. Returning with two sons,
A wife, your parents: older, slower, more
Mortal. Their bequest, this regal town,
These sterile fields, ancient woods,
Mountains and valleys echoing with
The sound of their unspoken thoughts.