Category Archives: All poems
Party
You wake up in a leafy street at dusk – it might
be Cambridge, Massachusetts: wide sidewalks,
separated from the street by strips of lawn;
white porches, pastel clapboard mansions
with wooden pillars propping up solid suburbia.
A yellow house pours honey-coloured light
from every window. On a gentle tide of voices,
music, laughter, clinking glasses you wash up
against the Doric columns of the open entrance
and are swept inside. Past the grand staircase
with its sweeping banisters you drift through
rooms with crimson sofas, Tiffany lamps, tight
crowds of people lost in conversation, out
on a balcony where girls in flapper dresses
smoke black Sobranies, and in the library
men drinking rye talk baseball scores.
Notes floating from a grand piano draw you
to a ballroom where a boy in white tuxedo
and a girl in red glide dreamily across the floor,
oblivious to your silent passing. Lured by
a hallway’s chequer board of black and white
you sink into the dark recesses of the house.
The happy din of voices dies away; the grand
piano tinkles to a stop; the muffled sound
of car doors slamming, then the hectic play
of headlights on the walls; and you remain,
a shadow drifting noiselessly from room
to room, turning the lights out one by one.
Salisbury Cathedral
Some people say an ancient race landed
a spaceship here a thousand years ago.
They sent out scouts; explored the land;
settled, and tilled the soil. Then famine came,
and war. All memory ends here.
The travellers are gone; their ship, forgotten.
Until tonight. Tonight I walk the length
of the great hull. Anchored by buttresses,
pinned down by rusty scaffolding, it lies
a prisoner under an alien sky, the spire
straining to make contact with the stars.
A late car passes in the rain. Lights flicker
on the walls. I hear the swish of tyres
on wet tarmac; the hum of mighty engines
waking up. The ship is stirring. Timber
creaks; a finial falls, a flying buttress
scatters Purbeck stone, the sheer sides
soar up, vanish into space –
I shut my eyes – and it is nothing –
just a tale – as insubstantial as the wind
that shakes the chestnut trees and chases
leaves across the black, deserted Close.
A lesson from the DSLR workshop
Set up the tripod
set a long exposure
catch silhouettes
of ancient hills
stone cottages
bare trees
the moon’s trajectory
and if a farmer crossed
his yard
a cyclist passed
before the lens
they’re gone
as if they’d never been
Exposed to time man disappears
Too steep
I had no say in this matter.
At no point was there any consultation.
I was not properly briefed,
nor were the risks pointed out to me.
No mention was made of responsibilities,
commitments, complications,
and no, I did not sign
on any kind of dotted line.
I was not given an itinerary,
and I never saw a bill of fare –
and if I had, I have a pretty good notion
it would’ve been the kind without prices.
And now, out of the blue, you have the gall
to ask me to pay for the trip?
I’ll admit: it had its moments,
and I’m not saying all of it was not worth it –
but I draw the line at coughing up
for a stone and inscription, too.
Footwear
I’m not the kind to walk boldly,
barefoot. I have tried sidling
through life on stocking feet,
but in the long run it wouldn’t do.
Then I met of a pair of
sensible brown lace-ups.
They mean business and
get things done for me.
As the lace-ups leave for work,
the light-weight, cutting-edge
Gore-Tex hiking boots that live
in the mudroom tap their soles.
Upstairs in the wardrobe
a pair of crimson high heels
are in a sulk. My ballerinas
chatter away companionably.
Sometimes in public places
an enormous pair of shiny black
clown shoes slip over my feet.
People point and laugh; I trip.
I keep away from jackboots.
They might make me march
in step, and to music
I never hope to hear again.
Paper thin
In the small hours
I listen to the busy
comings and goings
of ambulances
swapping stories
from behind
the paper thin facade
of everyday
Newfoundland I
Nobody seems to know why the Vikings came
to L’Anse aux Meadows. Surely not
for the meadows (no grass here), nor
the grapes the Vinland of the ancient saga
conjures up (no grapes). I blame
the boredom of interminable winter night,
the Norse testosterone egged on by mead.
Maybe they didn’t come at all –
the experts differ. But here we stand,
stooped in a spick and span,
faithfully reconstructed sod house.
The Basques, though,
they were here for sure,
across the Strait in Labrador.
A hundred years of slaughtering
the Right Whale, pouring him in barrels
to illuminate the salons of old Europe.
We visited the traces of their trade
in Red Bay, and saw a few survivors
(whales, not Basques: they all were home
by sixteen hundred.)
So were the Portuguese from Bonavista –
more canny than the Irish and the Welsh,
the Dorset men and those from Devon
who kept returning season after season,
then left their homes for good,
built shacks, a fish flake to eke out
precarious livings salting cod
until the fish was finally gone
from Newfoundland –
and now it was the outporters
themselves who were hung out to dry,
uprooted once again, their salt box homes
abandoned, shattered windowpanes
inviting in the fog… Fuck Off ’s the message
globalisation sends to Newfoundland,
and those who have a soul to sell jump ship
to drill for oil in Fort McMurray.
For those whose soul’s not marketable
there’s a shop in Water Street, Fog Off,
that sells cool sweaters to keep tourists warm
and gives a share to charity:
for those whose minds fog up
with alcohol, with drugs and
homelessness in a lost land.
Newfoundland II
A strange place, this –
and what a lucky find!
The right whale, codfish, seals:
mysterious plenty
at the rim of nothingness,
a mirage found in ice and fog,
free for the taking,
and taken –
by Basques and Bretons,
Welshmen, Irish,
men from Dorset, Devon.
A new found land –
paid for in shipwreck,
frozen limbs,
exile and loneliness,
abandoned homes,
deserted hearts.
A strange place, this.
The sadness of a lucky find.
El Horcajo
The hills like dusty waves –
and that’s an eagle, surely,
floating over El Horcajo.
A herd of black pigs
snuffle close to greet the car
along the bumpy track.
Dishevelled chickens
stalk the courtyard
stabbing at grains of corn.
Behind the wire-mesh window
a yellow digger dozes
in the evening sun.
Dusk, and a restless bird calls
in a foreign language.
On the edge of sleep
the sound of phantom cowbells.
In the small hours
thin dogs howl from hill
to distant hill:
discordant whale song
in this sea of soil.
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