I’ve found out I am able to fly.
There are many who tell me
they take off all the time,
just like that,
to their heart’s content,
at the drop of a hat.
Well I don’t.
But in a dream recently
someone pushed me
off a ledge somewhere,
and I fell – but falling I knew
not to be afraid
and I flew.
And since then I have thought
though our future these days
looks to be in short supply:
if we wake up and begin
to dream, who knows
we may still fly.
On a train between one place and another.
Daffodils on the embankment.
Lambs in a dappled field.
You doze for a minute.
A jolt. You wake up.
The train’s stopped at one place or another.
Bare branches etched on a grey sky.
Winter on the air.
Crossing the cemetery
I am the first to imprint
my presence step by step
on the early snow.
Around me not a sound.
Only those are here
who will not walk again.
And look: the solitary track
of a small night creature
across my path.
Our broken blender,
stainless steel and spotless glass,
kept its pride of place
on the black marble countertop
for a full decade –
a household deity, sadly defunct.
So one day I decide
to take it to where superannuated
blenders go – but
in a gesture of not quite farewell
I plug it in and
turn the knob one final time.
A shudder, a shake,
a rattle, a rumble: a resurrection
right here in the kitchen.
And the blender, reinstated, sits
in its corner,
a serene benevolent buddha
surveying our comings
and goings as we near our own
fatal malfunction,
and from time to time rouses
itself, roars into life,
regales us with a raspberry shake
and a message:
You may feel faulty or rusty,
a reject –
but hey, why not give it
one last whirl
before someone pulls the plug.
(The line in a gesture of not quite farewell
was lifted from Robert Rehder’s On the
Nature of Physical Law)
The line “in a gesture of not quite farewell”
was lifted from Robert Rehder’s
On the Nature of Physical Law
Every night they’re working
on the Light Railway that runs up the valley
two streets distant from mine.
Every night I wake
to muffled poundings, the asthmatic trundle
of overloaded carts, the blare of signals –
and feel reassured, safe, earthed
against the monstrous suck of nothingness
above the railway, the street, my bed.
You think you know
such creatures don’t exist.
No lamias with exemptile eyes
to lever out after a kill.
No fifteen-foot-necked
pliant camelopardals. And
you’ve seen no lemmings
graze in clouds.
And yet – once it was true.
They were believed in.
Like Dürer’s sad rhinoceros,
shipped all the way from India,
drowned off Italy and buried
in a woodcut: scaly legs,
a twisted horn upon his back –
I give you: the rhinoceros!
And he still is as real, as true
as any of his cousins in the zoo.
It only takes a tiny leap of faith
to believe in Topsell’s Beasts –
because you must.
Of course reindeer will make
a sound like cracking nuts
when walking
if we believe the truth
that every creature is unique –
the lamia, the camelopardal,
Dürer’s rhinoceros, and you:
unique, unfathomable
and unquestionably right
the way you are. And this
we must believe.
It rolls up like a marble
over the grey wasteland of the moon.
And Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8,
first man in outer space, the man who says
that no, he didn’t tell his family what it was like
up there when he came back, he was too busy
catching up on the nitty-gritties of family life;
the astronaut who says that weightlessness
is boring, and puking in outer space the same
it is at home: uncomfortable; the space hero
who’s never seen and can’t recall the title
of Space Odyssey; who says the Star Trek motto
To boldly go where no man’s gone before
does nothing for him – the most prosaic man
to leave the soil of this blue planet says:
Hand me a roll of color quick, would you?
A beautiful blue marble, swirls of ochre and white,
it rolls up over the grey wasteland of the moon.
We wake up on it every morning.
Somebody hand me a roll of colour. Quick.
for Jack
We only ever truly see what we are missing.
That August night in 1328
Luigi Gonzaga brought to Mantua
an ache the size of a city and
a dagger for Rinaldo Bonacolsi.
Gonzaga had a mission: he saw
nine hundred gilded rooms
he and his line must build
and fill with all of Europe’s art –
a model city floating on four lakes,
a Mount Olympus rising from
the flatness of the valley of the Po.
We only ever truly see what we are missing.
Today we visited Gonzaga’s vision:
the palaces, the frescoes, statues,
tapestries, churches and squares
in all their glory and grandezza.
I was appreciative –
but I’m afraid it did not touch me.
We’d brought a different emptiness
to Mantua; and since it’s true
we only ever see what we are missing –
ah well: I only really saw the dogs.
I lift you up gently –
look, this is how we do it –
into the cradle of my arms.
I feel your solid weight,
breathe in your smell
of old dog asleep.
I carry you down
into the garden and
set you down softly
as I used to
for so many days
when you were alive
and let you go.
In each of our lives
everyone else is a tourist.
I wonder do they find
what the brochure promised:
sights, decent food, cheap booze –
or even the experience of a lifetime?
Back home, are they going to
print out their pictures
and hang them on empty walls?
Will they share the experience,
send others my way?
Should I consider refurbishing?
Though – they say the locals
in the summer resorts can’t wait
for the rains, the cool weather and
the shutters coming down for winter.
Sometimes I think I can almost
feel the weather turning.
whypoetry 