We occur in different languages, she said;
I knew her once, before the fall
when she would club her way through bars

with voices that would come at you
straight out of centre-field
and keep on going, all the way
to God's depleted angels

But that was then and this is now,
as they like to say
in cheap old-fashioned films

and now she masks her beauty
with a history of duelling scars
picked up in Heidelburg and Mainz;
she is starving to be beautiful

while I am lost midway between
the Sudetenland and Hell,
the immaculate cathedrals,
a pair of flannel trousers
and Vienna in the later 1930s

It is raining
and rain is my best weather here

On the bus route home
the tar steams on the roadworks
by the former snooker hall

Two weeks ago, it burnt,
fire took it, welding
coloured balls into shapes
that would give
molecular physicists kittens

Not the first fire I’ve seen here,
the signal box at Friargate
when we were coming back

And where for days after
men with flags and dayglo jackets
stood sullenly proving
a friend’s local theory

(though he was talking of relationships)

If it don’t burn down,
it gets pissed on

before and after sleepless nights
the atrophy is tangible
as landscapes

in weary days
the distant fields
are cut away by sea in fog
to leave on clearing

only sky
and the brittle precipice
with slipping land beneath your feet
to end the walk
a mile or so
from where you were going

wherever that was

After the Anschluss,
things were getting sticky;

Pooh’s ever-growing demands
for autobahns and honey
increased the daily pressures
on your average bear,

His hand-painted soldiers
requisitioned all the Lego;
Meccano became a thing of the past
and we queued hours for Sticklebricks and Playdoh

It got so tight you couldn’t see
the wood for the trees,
or the honey for the bees,
as Pooh liked to say,

Sooty, the intellectuals said,
is just a media puppet
And they were the first to disappear
when Pooh banned Disney
and closed the universities down

Big Ted had had a much more laissez-faire approach,
until he fetched up in Rio
with an ice-pick in his back

Paddington, meanwhile,
was rumoured to be lying low,
also in South America,
where a taste for marmalade was not regarded yet
as a crime on a par with membership
of the Hanna-Barbera Gang.

Even Sooty was treading a fine line,
with some in the Party calling his
political correctness into question
in the light of his relationship with Matthew Corbett.

But what had really got everyone’s goat
was the way Larry the Lamb
had worked his way in with Pooh
and was now to be heard pontificating
on the racial impurities of pandas
and the need for an independent Ursine homeland,

That was where I came in;
I was writing op-eds for the Blue Peter Annual,
and political speeches for Rupert
(who was a close personal friend).

That placed us both in the frame;
You’d better go in disguise, he said,
Pooh’s got something up his sleeve,
and it’s not just a funny salute.

Sometimes in the Land of Fall and Twist,
you hear the underwater bells
clowning full in the west of the deep

But every time I want is gone;
this choir of unforgetful things
forcing up through empty shells

Can make believe that distance is
the cover turning at the world
making difference indistinct

Muffling changes in the shuffled pack
or turning over single pages twice
to reinvent for me the time

When you were away in the world and alive,
and the risen lord half-heartedly
curled your fingers around the book
and marked the chapter closed

One by one they stumble into view,
resolving from eternity or the static past,
whichever might seem closer at the time

shuffling into a light that is not light
but merely difference in perspective
through kaleidoscopic vistas

Each one momentous, harbinger or touchstone
silently aching to tell;
here they come, the coroners and suicides

the playwrights and magicians,
the murderers and child-brides,
empiricists and philosophes

all nameless now,
from the dark room where they sat
holding negatives to the barred windows

perhaps in retelling them
I come to understand what first moved me
down this lonely corridor

towards the light of someone else’s sun

(for Thom Gunn)

The six long figures peal through the iron air,
the age of reason and the life to come,
repeating in form their difference,
a constant shaping, working out in tone
the nuance of the passing year

perhaps you should try
to take a clack to gather
from the swirl and aether
a pennant or a mascot
for Mustardseed and Moth
and in the bells that circumstance
the alterations in ourselves,
discover true air upwards
from the frozen wayside ditch

Each figure making real
distinctions we will recognize
as reportage and homily
when finally the cold sun falls
cracking into icy hills

No single thing we do will be enough,
but each bell is insistent
on its right and its ability
to be transcribed into
the ringing actions of
each instant of
our metaphysic lives

The photograph shows only his hands
crossed in his lap holding drumsticks
as if to say “you know my name and face –
this is what I do”

But the picture is undated,
so which Ringo is it?
The sentimental journeyman,
the kid’s TV narrator?

Is it even him at all
or some or other drummer,
a stand-in or a double,
Keith Moon or Charlie Watts?

Each of whom might
do this some way else,
but obviously still attain
the moving, captured, pulse.

Hands, though, make
a better judge of age
than the face that can be lifted
or its blemishes obscured

Whatever way, these hands know time,
its weight and length,
the rhythm underpinning
something straight and holy

Drawing down eternity
to ninety seconds flat
where time lies under hands
in the sacred perfect furlong,

The sacred healing moment,
the perfect ancient rite that binds
unspoken wordless certainties
in something that we might or not

consider rock and roll

Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being... ultimate reality is what we call God. - R.S. Thomas

i

Well, it’s true enough
as far as it goes

but exceptions always prove
the unforgiving rule

In the sparse, cold
hinterland of doubt

the sliding faith’s
reluctant groove

erodes the sands
of languages

and makes a space
where you and I can go

spanned across the bay
as Norse or Celt alike


ii

thus I am happy
to walk this path

you also trod
to wring out verse

where Saxon oars go
four beats to a line

a coracle on a river
reaching southward like an arm

infiltrating and dividing,
while at the empty junction,

lines slip away into
the middle distance

and strangers talk all night
to get no closer


iii

Still, you must do something,
I suppose

so paint as black as night
the stalls at Derwenlas

to raise uncomprehending
bruitish eyes to heaven

And any one of us can raise
a golden-headed son

oblique to our chosen tongue
in a thinly papered manse

and scatter pearls before
our swinish kin

and that is what the church
might call a living

Heroes are rare - James Baldwin

It’s the gradual gentle things that slip away,
It’s only later you notice the lack.
One morning during the trial I woke
to her repeated absence for the first time,
a wound beyond reason becoming a grail.

This head I bring you, Peredur, is not 
what you’d expect, but you’re a purer fool 
than I could ever be, and she was loved
beyond explicable reason; thus guilty
I underwent the psychometric testing,

It’s no good to be weeping by a stream,
even if slaughtered enemies drift by,
fly-christened, dishonoured by eel and pike.
The balladeer sings of the ghosts in the water, 
and I have lost my touch and hers

Because she was not meant for me I bear
this constant wound, which says I am no good,
and renders these dominions under curse.
The clumsiness in I how act and speak
is taken as a measure of my thought,

Which can, in otherwise contrariness,
cover the fields like a river in flood,
like a hare at pace under blazing sun
but rests now, wounded under camouflage,
ready to spring like a bird from a trap
to rail at the moon, howling like an orphan

In the lashing rain you face the cliff
and know you do not have the strength
to either climb or fall. The light is fading 
and your valour, curled like a drenched wren
in a feathered ball weighing less than a soul,
is not enough to keep you honest now.

The heart breaks again at the point where
you’re forced to choose: to ascend, heroically,
against the slippery god-like face of rock
or let yourself down and be mortal,
and even Christ could not let that cup pass

In the broken, unrepented morning 
this is how King Pellam’s Land is lying, 
where you have come looking for something, 
but only finding barren wastes and me

Peredur, I see once more my younger 
self in you, coming all this way
for a grail you know can never be found

I cannot tell you what to do or say,
but ask the healing question, cure the wound