Category: Uncategorized
Sligo and Mayo
I said it’s hard to know where to belong Sligo or Mayo, wherever you’re from Hard to know whether it makes sense to go Beyond the abundance of places you know Call to mind all of the dream-lands you yearn The fingertip trace of the flesh as you learn The abstract and actual, landscape and plough Maps of mine workings uncovered below Go back again and leave me no trace But the hope of your image in this other place While places unravel and make themselves wrong And Sligo or Mayo is where we belong
Vacancies
Each week, new souls troop in
and make it theirs,
arriving in the dark with the
flicker of a torch
looking for keys and instructions
Nothing for the first two days,
they rise, assuming form,
on the third morning
stretching out into the grounds,
the salt air, the sea itself
Unravelling like bundles of wool, or nerves,
raising voices into laughter,
a pattern so unchanging
that I took it that they must be
following orders
Except once, when I was up
repairing the fence on the cliff
with galvanised wire
and heard the phone ring
for what seemed an eternity
Within an hour they’d packed and gone,
these unseen arrivals,
abandoning their post,
advancing or retreating
to who knows where, or why.
Swindon Works Scrapyard, 1974
We got in through a break in the fence,
behind a burnt-out carriage
I stumbled over sleepers,
my redundant dad,
just out of the infirmary,
and one lung short of a pair,
pulled up and paused for breath,
let me run on ahead
Between the awesome, silent hulks,
their weary liveries fading,
with doors ajar and windows out,
all lights and power gone,
I only have two pictures from the day,
one of him, unfocused, and tipped
at almost 45 degrees,
the camera too heavy for my hands
The other, one he took
of the flank of a machine
where a nameplate had been shorn away,
and in white paint on rust
someone had daubed “Undaunted”
Epitaph or rechristening, I’m not sure;
it stood at the head of a column
of decaying locomotives
that stretched as far
as my five year old eyes could see
To a blurred and distant place where
everything will eventually come
to the end of its usefulness,
its working life,
its line.
Ophelia
All summer long
she kept herself immaculate for him,
waiting on the pauses
when he would turn aside his rage
and speak more tenderly,
as if remembering
the territories of love
that existed in the comfortable,
sane and unspoken,
gesturing in flowers
and walks in shaded gardens by a stream
Harder for him, she thought,
like free verse or a vocation’s call;
no intuition learned at the breast
can give him what I know
and what he needs to know
Thus, surefootedly,
she marked her days:
the path by the brook
and her father’s rooms in court
But her gentleness made less easy
things that might have swayed him
back into his first passion,
resting as it did
so heavy on the shoulders of his grief
Blurring his resolve,
blunting and distracting him
into a unity
he thought he could ill afford:
the lover’s whispered poison in the ear
So she, unaware
that difference could exist
between speech and meaning,
intention and thought,
and thus without either
redemption or metaphor
with which she could betray him back,
betrayed herself instead
Paradoxically making herself
more real, it seemed,
by her chosen isolation
among her water-mirrored selves
Despite the weakly choking death
all later representations afford,
this was no girl smitten beyond a cure;
the woman falls deliberately
to death’s baptismal waters,
and rises, swan-like,
singing from her rest
The flat and the jumps
The blunt fog lifts slowly.
I gently drum my fingers on the counter,
reminding myself of Lambourn,
the morning gallops
After this pint, the horses.
In these more antisocial times
I miss the smoke-filled warmth of the bar,
its slack, convivial nature;
a quiet word, a tip and a punt,
gamblers conspiring
in a shared and risky bet
But that was long ago,
before she left,
and now I look
ten years beyond myself,
a Turf Accountant gone to seed,
No legs for the distance
I stumble at the fences
my pride won’t let me mend,
and always seem to fade
at the turn for home
From These Foolish Things
A tinkling piano in the next apartment makes its notes motifs of other lands, like streams hinted at deep beyond the trees and disparities between what was said and meant. I think of how I heard its random notes before and the broken past is placed into my hands, for histories are notes in changing keys and time is cliched out in grains of sand - its sirens wait upon each island shore, where, shipwrecked, I will gather when I land tree hulks and stream water, hidden before; I plan boats and kindle fires for my fear, brought on in the night by jungle screams, I wake from distant and terrible dreams, I could not go so far when you were here.
Finsey-Obay
I saw my love slowly walk into cloud
Down by the sea, over Finsey-Obay
Sky-blue, cotton wool, linen for shrouds
Full fathom five in Pevensey Bay
Under the blanket, smothering doubt,
Down where the longing is taken away
The tide will come in when the light has gone out
Full fathom five in Pevensey Bay
The heart-stopped song will slender away
When salvage has taken the body and shroud
And all of her glory has drifted away
Down by the sea, over Finsey-Obay
After Housman
Why think you that love is clear
and gentle as a mountain spring?
All the things you gave me, dear,
were no more than a thief could bring
And there’s no thief can hope to hold
all they by deceit have gained;
But tried you me to bribe with gold
on which another’s mark remained
Yet knew I not a thief with gall
enough to break a valued thing;
Who sooner would abandon all
and steal the waters from the spring
Here Endeth The Lesson
The authors of A Shropshire Lad and Wessex Tales had got to you; You copied all the faults they had and amplified your failings too So you fucked others in your turn, fools who learned to rhyme by rote; The verses they thought they could churn out by the yard stick in my throat Dismal poems that hardly scan are detrimental to your health; Print as sparsely as you can and don't anthologise yourself
Lady Disdain
Time will catch you
Time will tell
Truth will out
And so to hell
Love will slake you
Drought devour
Falsehood promise
Cunning flower
Time will break you
Time stand still
Lies absolve
Your life until
Love can halt your
Famine flood
Truth becoming
Almost good