In the cool
after-dawn quiet
outside the becalmed
450-hp, 10-cylinder, 30-foot behemoth
dwarfed by two thousand years of redwood tree
paring my fingernails feels an uplifting, almost
spiritual experience. You have to wonder
what’s wrong with us
humans – or
right.
They say it’s about dignity.
A throwback to the dark ages,
denying four centuries of civilisation.
Their newspapers write about
human rights, and that faith, though
sacred, must learn to compromise.
They talk of enslavement:
it strips us of all individuality and
reduces us to chattels, they say.
Look, they whisper, there goes one.
I can’t think how they can submit
to such humiliation.
It frightens their children, they say,
and there’s something sinister
in not daring to meet face to face.
I walk their streets, safe
in my black oubliette. Thick cloth
softens whispers; the grille
in front of my eyes shuts out
their exposed flesh, shameless
behaviour, brash looks. Yes,
I have wondered what it’d be like
to feel free. But I tell myself,
Better the devil you know.
late morning stroll to the boulangerie
baguette and coffee and
the badly written crime novel
about la France profonde
where the bestial slaughter
of a beur hardly disturbs the idyll
gelatinous time
just now and then the whistle of trains
behind the bougainvilleas on fire
on the beach the babel of Europe on holiday
silhouette of a windmill
above gnarled vines
red soil of foothills
walls washed in Southern pastels
clink of ice cubes
impossibly green diabolo menthe
watch the summer melt
in the dark the fan spins
in the windowless bedroom
telling lies of a wide open sea
A blackbird binds the fragments of dreams
with the twine of his song;
a scattered archipelago of reality
emerges from the night:
clang of dawn deliveries; rumble
of dustmen’s carts on cobblestones;
the dragging steps of the Golem
after a night’s watch over his precarious city.
That was long afterwards, though. Where I was now
was just wanting to get her to stop,
stop the car on that narrow lane on a Welsh hillside
whose name I’ve forgotten
like the reason for our insane quarrel, or where I found
the recklessness that made me
open the door of a car driving along a narrow lane
on a Welsh hillside, jump outside
while she was still slowing down, bang the bonnet
and leave a dent that we both,
separately, secretly, worried about for the rest of
that holiday, because of course
we hadn’t taken out extra insurance for the rental car,
as you do when you are young
and still trust in things mostly turning out right, and still
capable of insane, inexplicable emotions
that will make you jump from a car on a Welsh hillside
and write a story afterwards,
long afterwards, a story about a man skipping stones
over the surface of a twilight pond,
about two people walking through endless cornfields
towards the grain silos of a sleepy town
somewhere in the dusty Midwest of the United States;
a story about love.
The cheerful confusion
of unidentified dawn birds,
punctuated by the bisyllabic
cackle of pheasants.
A little bird has dreamed
a strange amphibian dream
and practises a timid
ribbit – ribbit?
A blackbird and his rival
soar above the chorus;
another pheasant screech,
followed by heavy flutter.
A goose honks, once.
The ribbit has grown in confidence.
On a bleak beach
on the far side of the leaden Atlantic
an ungainly creature –
a huge sinister crow
assembled from canvas and metal struts –
hops, hesitates,
takes a desperate run,
lifts off towards lowering clouds and
plops back onto wet sand;
runs, rises, dips,
rises again to thin cheers, and flies
a short length of
the desolate beach.
Against the swell of the decades
I want to swim that ocean,
heave great boulders
into the obscene creature’s path –
let it crash. Let their dream
founder. Maybe then
there would have been no news
from Halifax today.
I imagine the dry crack,
unremarkable;
no one to observe the fissure,
all but invisible, on the distant face
of the glacier; impossibly slow
the slide of white on white;
the roar of descent, the splash
of the berg unheard –
their echoes yet to be born
at such a latitude, such a longitude:
this is how history is launched:
a frozen chunk of past drifting
blindly, with deadly precision,
into the future.
15 April 2012 – centenary of the Titanic sinking
Suddenly, halfway through
a steak and Guinness pie
at the Yew Tree in Chew Stoke
I realise this is happiness.
I have been away from you
and tomorrow I’m flying home.
There are yellowhammers
in the yew tree, and
I want to reach for my camera –
but they would only fly away.
this morning
I found
in my sock drawer
that missing
grey cotton
sock
it’s my birthday
maybe
all’s well
with the world
after all
whypoetry 