2004-06-03T02:10:00.000-07:00

DICK JONES' PATTERAN PAGES - POETRY ARCHIVE

A CLEAR BLUE SKY

My dad was a man of prose – a specialist: words used
like gardening tools to conjure shapes, to fashion patterns.
Language mattered: correspondence ran to pages –
letters to the council; ‘thank you’ cards to nurses
that read like testimonials. Even notes to the milkman
came across like billets doux to an old and valued friend.
And the writing: tiny box-shaped words in biro,
whispering in lines, or gathered quietly in the margins,
small-voiced but insistent, looking for truths.

When he knew that he was dying, he sat at the edge
of his life, scribbling a commentary. Twinges
from a cancer hotspot got a note immediately,
draped around the Guardian crossword clues
or squeezed between the calculations in his ledger:
where it hurt, for what duration, and, in imagistic detail,
the character of pain (like a voice, like broken glass, an ache
like winter rheumatism). And, towards the end, in his little diary,
potted phrases: “Slept well”, “Insomnia”, “Coughing still”.

For we who sat around his bed, it was the silence
that confounded. To the nurses plumping pillows, lifting cups
from which he didn’t want to drink; to waiting family
fiddling with the radio, sifting through his laundry,
he said nothing. All his words were spent just days ahead
of the breath that carried them. And then, the afternoon
of the day he died, the clouds drew back, late spring appeared.
Mum leaned back towards the window, smiled and said:
‘Look - a clear blue sky’, and we turned to see.

My father didn’t turn his head. Whatever sky he saw
was far behind in time, or maybe just ahead. Whatever sky it was,
no messianic veil, no chariots of fire obscured the view.
His great abundance, just like ours, was absolutely empty –
birdless, sunless, silent and ineffable, mocking the mad commotion
down below. He drew in breath, breathed out and said:
‘A clear blue sky’, floating the words on the sterile air
like leaves. He didn’t speak again; he died that night and,
one by one, the stars went out, an alphabet, a lexicon, set free.

A DREAM OF FIELDS
I lay on my side in the sun,
the spilled world piled
behind my shoulder. In my left
eye, the blue sky; in my right,
the green grass. And, dividing,
yellow, the line of the shape-shifting
corn. You wander away, climbing
the ladder of stalks, scribbled
like chalk marks on the symmetry,
but real as breathing in a dream of fields.

A HISTORY OF FLOWERS

On Pendeen Watch the clifftop flowers
arrive in season, stacked and ranked
according to their station and
their order. The long sea-voice below

speaks open mouthed and sibilant, a great
breathing of rhymes. But the flowers
are rushed, impermanent and, within
their time, must first comprehend

then speak to the world the story
at their core. Juice will rise in green
at first, soaking then into the pink
of campion, the blue of vetch and cornflower,

yellow of the gorse, the cinqfoil
and the tansy. Point and counterpoint:
the scatter-beat of time against
the rhythm of the stars.

ABOVE MEDBOURNE

The slow hill.
The long wind.
The one cloud,
high-shouldered,
hoarding its rain.

The crooked lane.
The big sky.
The spinning crowd
of rooks, adrift, unpinned,
like a broken wheel.

AFTER THE FUNERAL

The funeral is over. In a cloud of friends
and family you walk the sunlit path.
The hearses croon and glide away; the afternoon unbends
like a slow river. Pausing, he draws a breath,

this mourner, bolder than the rest,
touches your elbow as you mount the step.
They see you through a gauze of grief, obsessed
with the processes of loss – the map

destroyed, the compass spinning, spinning
and, shadowless, you, impeccably alone,
pale and beautiful with pain at the beginning
of this passage taken on your own.

Thus you pass through doorways, sit in chairs,
sip tea. And all the time they watch, they listen,
waiting for the cataract . You climb the stairs;
they breathe as one; tears glisten

as they speculate your progress
from the landing to his bedroom door.
But, wrapped in their vicarious distress,
they miss your swift return, along the corridor,

into the garden, down the path. And there you hesitate
where zebra sunlight stripes the rowan tree,
where as a child you hid away to incubate
your dreams; where, if you closed your eyes, they couldn’t see.

Inside the circle of your desolation, time
consumes itself; your foetal self-embrace
circulates memory like a nursery rhyme:
the pulse-familiar patterns of his face,

his voice, his hair, his body’s warmth. But light
endures and into your vacuum dark
its blade intrudes, wounds you awake. And sight
restored, you drown in your senses: stark

leaves on a flickering sky, the sea-green
scent of weeds, crow-call, the lark that outsails
her shadow, bloody fuscias in the shade. Between
the bud and the burial, there the flower prevails.

AFTERMATH

There is the heaped equality
of spectacles, the comfort
of linked arms -
wire, gold and tortoiseshell,
the white opacity
of the tilted lens.

There is the kicking scramble
of empty shoes, piled
like bean pods, shelled
of movement, scuffed and dusty
from the longest walk
in the world.

There is the dead-leaf clothing,
the empty-handed gloves
and headless hats and caps;
the hanks of hair, bagged,
sprung teeth in boxes,
stamped and labelled.

Bones we know;
we scramble up and out
of the millennium
on bones. These clothes,
These artefacts endure,
unfinished, unconsumed.

ANCIENT MUSIC

[1.] 1945: EMANNUEL ROAD

Banded light, I should remember first,
from the bottle-green, ruby-red window.
Soused in colour, wordless, thought-free,
I kick air, anticipating dance;
beat palmless hands together,
finding rhythm. From another room,
through formless darkness, shellac hisses
introducing flaring brass:
Carrol Gibbons, Henry Hall.
My parents foxtrot through my light, in love.
I sing the blues.

..

Dad and Monty had a decent war,
home-guarding Clapham Common,
listening for the 'cello hum
of bombers, then the woodwind of incendiaries.
Crouching in the doorway
of the burned-out Coach and Horses,
they evaluate the midnight orchestras,
mark them out of ten, emerge,
pissed and applauding,
to the siren's lone soprano.

..

[2.] 1948: HOCKENDEN LANE

Motionless, alone, midsummer afternoon.
At face-level, fat leaves,
spatulate, grey-green and velvet, soft
as dog's ears. Beyond is Grandad's
strawberry patch and the great red
seeded buboes, half seen through stems,
like rumours of a new disease
amongst us. Twisted netting hangs
from sticks, a shredded tent
against the crows. A July breeze
sidles round the cottage corner,
shivering the tin-lids, bottle-tops
and scraps of silver foil that hang
like fetishes to scare the birds away.
Their scintillation catches
late sunlight; faint brittle voices, polyrhythmic, sounds like thin ice
breaking. Shadows find me still standing,
my face in leaves, listening.

..

[3.] 1952 NORBITON AVENUE

The day they told us
that the king had died
the church bells at St John’s
were inconcolable. The wireless news
came wrapped in Handel
and my mother, ironing in the kitchen
froze, the bright hoof hovering above
creased sheets. On the trolleybus
to school, passengers stared
at their hands. The conductor haunted
the stairs in black. We crooned,
adrift through empty streets.

..

[4.] 1952 LATCHMERE ROAD SCHOOL

In the Assembly Hall shoes barked
across the blockboard floor as we jolted
into fishbone lines. A monstrous silence
bound us; we forgot to speak. My eyes slid, panic-stricken, across scraped heads
and blazer backs to the black bands
on the teachers’folded arms, to the melting
ice-cream colours of the Union Jack,
loose-furled beneath the portrait of the king,
to the glaucous sea-green light
that pressed against high windows.
When the hymn broke like the first wave,
least expected, I was caught broadside:
brute music from the baby grand, slammed hard; the ragged engine of four hundred voices
grinding against the tide. Seized
by a greater grief than my own
(motiveless, unfocussed – who was this king
who had died in bed, not by the sword
in battle?), I sobbed. What did I hear
unlocked inside those throats? What broke,
shook loose and rattled down
the centuries before my birth?
That calling out to an old god,
so far from song, an ululation thickening
the air and silting up my breathing.
Gathered up into a lavender bosom,
I was hustled into daylight
and a thin persistent rain. Faceless,
my guardian, she rocked me, rocked me,
the two of us riding at anchor
on a dim swell of voices, storm-broken,
soughing like an old wind.

ANARAXIA
There is a tune half-heard
around the curl of a corner
half-remembered. Mum leans forward
out of the armchair. Distant bells,

a Crosby song, something whistled
once in a dark street in the rain?
The story ends; she dropped it somewhere,
cracked it, missed the point,

some crucial phrase that ran
into the fog of her once-hearing.
Or slipped, maybe, beneath the tread
of the tune, half heard.

APOLOGIA # 1

sorry

so very sorry

very sorry

mea culpa
mea culpa maxima

so sorry: this begged sorry
begged from you / pushed up against
the basilisk wall
of your faith
which admits of no sorry / just judgement
& the sword
(much like mine / much like mine)

i give you my
full sorry / my public sorry / my chanted sorry /
my truly believer sunday worship sorry /
my man of piss & vinegar sorry / my dada kissing baby sorry /
my frontier tough but tender sorry /
sorry like we’re not so different /
not so different /
step behind the curtain &
we’re not so different
you & i /
only painted that way /
you more of the night /
i more of the day /
you
so far from grits & beers
& the game tonight
& the pedal steel
& the pickup truck
& the t-bone sunset
& the townhall steps
& the stars where they always are

& i
on the old front lawn
being
sorry
real
sorry

.. ..

APOLOGIA # 2

hi america
i let you down:
i fell at the fence
i took my eye
off the ball
i fumbled the catch
i fell short of touch
i slipped on the ice
i let go
of the wheel
i looked up
from the hymn sheet
i closed
the wrong eye
& i missed my aim

& i guess
they finally
found out
the truth
& for that
i’m truly truly
sorry

AUGUST 6th 1945

Went shopping that day. In the square
flowers in bloom, but on the turn.
I noticed how there is a sort of grandeur

in the passing of flowers. Youth, the full flush,
cannot have it all. The trees were turning too –
a curl and twist to each leaf,

some falling, some fallen. Early, I thought,
too soon, too little time in the world.
I paused, put down my bags.

There is a bench near the post office.
I sit there in the summer, in autumn
and watch the birds, the children.

I sat there on that day and, leaning back,
looked up through the branches. Did I
see the ‘plane or only hear it?

Three breaths, nine heartbeats. Then the light.
And then the heat. And then the sound.
And only my shadow left behind.

BAD LIGHT STOPPED PLAY
Alan said
(and Keith agreed)
it's when you get past fifty
that mortality
becomes an issue.
Wrists and fingers,
one time nifty,
stiffen.
Easy catches miss you;
once-demon bowlers
slump in deckchairs
sipping whisky.

Keith remarked
(and Alan nodded)
that, like smirking boys again, you're shifty
when the girls walk by.
Oh yes, they'll kiss you
on acquaintance,
but their smiles are misty,
drifting, painted onto tissue.
Forty-odd and rising,
the scoreboard climbs
to tickle fifty.

BALEZINO STATION

At Balezino Station we disembark in silence
under the great arch of night. First
whispers leave breath hanging, shining

like bright smoke. The old moon
leans through cloud. A silver wind
blows the stars about like spray.

A tide of trees floods the half-dark,
sucks at the line’s edge. Motionless,
we diminish, here at the junction between

two hemispheres. Behind us bloodless territories
of turned soil and domestic waters
and beyond the taiga, the first forest

to come tumbling out of the young dreaming
of the world. And now the thin edge
of an eastern wind brings tears of resin,

a scent of green disorder, a cataract
of leaves and berries far ahead. Darkness
crowds us back onto the train. Rocked

but sleepless, we sit and stand by night-
curtained windows, watching the dim images
of ourselves watching the flying trees.

BEBEE HELEN’S MERRIPEN

Sometimes they would stand
in twos and threes at the edge
of the road, arms folded,
eyes unfocussed, expecting nothing
but more of the same.

Dogs bark staccato
over the pulse of generators.
Washing flickers between the vans,
random semaphore, and clocks
run slow. Sun rises over the warehouse,
sets behind the chain link fence.

But on Sunday old Aunt Helen died.
Inside her trailer mourners fidget,
watched by the gold-haloed faces
of her best Crown Derby plates.
No-one speaks but half-words form
in the gas fire’s popping,
in the wind around
the broken door.

Holding flowers and a card
he cannot read, brush-headed Johnny,
the boxer hero, racks tears
into a cushion. Sister Lizzie
glances sideways, gnaws a fingernail.

Traffic raises curtains
in the rain and Georgie stands
where his mother used to sit at night
with her rollies and her pint of tea.

Arms folded and his eyes
unfocussed, he dreams awake,
pondering atavistic visions
of the fires of Little Egypt,

of the briar
and the gorse,
of slower tides than these
that pull them all from history
and into the new lands.

BIRTHQUAKE

He is hypothesis,
an act of faith, a theory.
He’s rumour without
a name. What’s the evidence?
Radar graffiti – a splash of
chalk dust in the dark.
“Look, you can see his hand!”
No, it’s just a phantom
caught on polaroid, foam
blown off water,
cuckoospit, thistledown.

And yet we watch,
the two of us, solemnly,
breathing through our mouths,
seismologists on stakeout, waiting
for the independent pulse.
And there, and there again:
a ripple in the skin, miniature
techtonics; something stirring
at the core. He is on his way
from a dark place to break
the surface of the world.

BODY BEAUTIFUL

I have become my bones.
I wear my skin
like a shield of leaves,
like wing cases. I am safe
here at my core.

My mother grooms herself.
She turns and turns before mirrors,
buffing the gold, the downy,
the over-ripe as if
you can hide behind beauty forever.

My father watches apples
falling in October. No-one
will gather them now.
He dreams the old dream
of fruit that lies unharvested.

My lover drinks. His eyes
burn at me across
the beaker’s rim. ‘What is the nature
of this journey that she needs
no flesh, no comfort?’

I have become my bones.
They are a cage for the dust
that is my element.
I diminish. It is cold
here at my core.

BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIR

We took you to the edge of the sea,
to tug your anchor, stretch your world.
We knew the sea’s edge and beyond.
We had ridden it hard through years,

reached landfall on its horses,
vaulted from their rolling backs
onto stones, laughing but afraid.
We’d heard the voices in its throat

and tried to listen the long vowels
into meaning. A lost language,
broken into spray and ripples
when we came ashore.

You watched the horses solemnly,
Canute without a care. They turned
and rode away again; you turned
and stamped up the shingle,

lay down and curled into sleep.
You dreamed the slow chant
of the tide, its wordless lullaby,
and were at peace.

CATs

From how you match
these soulless shapes
(that have no sister
halves in nature),
we shall judge
the weight in grammes,
the height in centimetres
and the speed in megahertz
of your intelligence.

You will go
from this place
chopped like logic
into lengths.
You may not feel
the afterburn
of our surgery
out here where
sunshine lingers
and the scent
of autumn

CENTRAL HEATING

I remember mornings
waking cold
into strange grey light
like after disaster.

Breath hung
in a hoar-frost globe.
I lay excited
in the arctic dark.

My body foetal-coiled
for warmth beneath
the eiderdown, I wove
iceflow fantasies:

exile on the iron moon,
staring at new stars;
abandoned on a mountainside,
dying a hero.

Downstairs my father
rumbled in the kitchen,
raking through the embers,
laying new foundations.

This secret ceremony,
always heard, never seen.
Anthracite, Welsh nuts,
coke that only glowed –

holy fire lagging the pipes,
comforting the water,
heat rising with the sun
like muffled music.

Now with a muted bump,
my boiler lights itself
ungrudgingly and heat flows
greased, obedient.

We crawl, machine-led,
into the morning whilst
outside the world lies bound
in antique ice.

CREDERE

If God did not already exist, it would be necessary to invent him. VOLTAIRE
‘He’s God, cried all the creatures…’ From ‘The Owl Who Was God’ by JAMES THURBER.

If there has to be a God –
no option on the broken
road, the bridge of sighs –
then let it be a dancing god,

like Shiva but a voiceless one,
indifferent, treading out
the double loop, the bee’s infinity
of weaving round and round until

the measure’s known by all.
Or if not the dancer,
how about a singer?
One who cants in tongues,

a lingua franca from the
furnace heat (ex corde vita),
singing the blues, sean nos,
la duende, passionate, engaged,

yet powerless to lift the curse
of Sisyphus, or block the juggernaut,
or move the stone. These gods omnipotent,
who claim our praise and swallow

our prayers like hungry birds,
are dreams that draw
on the oxygen of our need.
We might as well worship

water falling, shape-shifting
clouds, the janus faces watching
from the cliffs that tell us
what we want to know.

98288

I am a survivor, one who has come
through fog then fire to stand
before you here. I am an
ordinary man on a journey

through the dark. And my life
is a commodity: I give you, out
of a dream, my wife, my child,
the vapour they became;

this number etched in midnight
blue inside my arm; the names
that I, the cantor, sing in place
of the Kaddish – Westerbork and

Birkenau, Monowitz and
Buchenwald; the pall of ashes
rising through the dawn.
I float my memories on

the still air, watch a small, bleak
wisdom rise behind your eyes.
These are the words: when I’m gone,
bear this for me. Never forget.

DAVE

The cat slept the day through,
a black sleep, coiled and dreamless,
dense and impenetrable. Here
was something too dark and still,
like at the tree’s heart, or earth
packed too thick around roots.
We watched from the doorway,
speculating, breathing slowly, waiting
for the stars to rise.

And that night my cat danced
for me, electric eyes alight
fnside a twist of smoke. Here
was something whole and of
itself, abroad in a public world
but once from another place,
watched for the last time
from where the light shines
just outside the circle’s rim.

DIE MAUER IST RUNTER

The wall is down. Incredulous
we contemplate, through raw gateways,
dawn in the West. You, the baker,
me, the busdriver, there the student
carrying a flag, there the woman
who cannot forget or forgive;
we move through rubble,
through the searchlights,
through the watercannon's crazy rain.

This is the real dance;
we stitch its paces
over the Kaiser's cobbles,
in between the Weimar tramlines,
through Hitler's broken archways, empty squares,
up and down the grim lattices
of Russian tanktracks.
Laughing, we invade the territory
inside each other's arms.

DRIVING TO AMERICA

From that first bright prairie morning
at the frontier of my days
I have been
driving to America

From the flock and horsehair saddle
of a South London cinema seat –
Jimmy Stewart shrugging on
a sheepskin coat in
Where The River Bends –
I have been driving to America.

Through the canyons
and the arroyos.
and the sagebrush trails
of my back garden,
lost in the folds of
of a bright red cowboy shirt
(all the way from Montreal)
and squinting from beneath the brim
of Grandpa’s panama,
I have been
driving to America.

Through the longing
for that too bright silver
Lone Star pistol, hinged like for real
before the trigger-guard, with a cylinder
that actually revolved
and a hammer you could cock,
in a holster like the rawhide one
that the kid next-door-but-one wore
hanging low, I have been
driving to America.

Through the pages
of the yellow paperbacks
that ranged along my windowsill
(“Triggernometry: a Gallery of Gunfighters”,
“Desperate Men: the James Gang
and Butch Cassidy”), through their
dusty streets and through
the batwing doors
of their saloons
and in the cool dark
of their livery stables,
the bright noon heat of their
desert days, and in the cordite stench
of their gun battles (the OK Corral,
the Lincoln County Cattle Wars,
Jack McCall shooting Hickock in the back
in Deadwood, South Dakota), I have been
driving to America.

Then through the skidpan hiss
of blue and purple-labelled 78s
(London American and Capitol),
the jump-jive scamper of Gene Vincent’s
Bluecaps or the thick fat gumbo
beat of New Orleans – “I’m Walkin’”,
“Blueberry Hill”, or the Macon, Georgia scream of Little Richard, or the hound dog
longing of “One Night (With You)” –
Presley’s eyes sleepy with lust,
the lip flickering into a sneer…

Then later through the rattling snares
and sneezing cymbals in the blare
of Ory’s blue trombone, white-heat
of Armstrong’s cornet;
then the crosstown traffic clamour
of Gillespie, Parker, Monk;
the high water, muddy river surge
of Mingus, Jimmy Knepper, Roland Kirk;
and the basement pulse of Howling Wolf
and Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy,
under the Clarkdale and Chicago stars; B.B., Albert, Freddie King, rocking with eyes tight shut in front of a herd of nodding saxes; through the tumbleweed, alfalfa, cottonfield and city cellar chaos
of its music, I have been
driving to America.

On the flatbed back
of a farmboy’s truck, heading south
from Iowa to Denver, Colorado,
Montana Slim, Sal Paradise
beside me on the dream-road
to Anywhere, USA;
through mirror shades, the smoke
from a chewed cigar, blue diesel
haze, the silver powder of a starry night
or the yellow flare
of what might be a prairie moon, I have been
driving to America…

And now, anonymous, unshadowed,
hidden in the lee
of a southbound truck,
I wait at the border.
Five black Canada geese
pull themselves across the sky,
quitting the mudbanks
of the Fraser River
for the deep-rift gorges of
the long Columbia. A high sun
straddles the 49th and through
its dancing tarmac mist we roll
like conquerors who have crossed
immeasurable distances and now awaken
in clear light on the real highway,
driving to America.

EVENT HORIZON

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light… HENRY VAUGHAN

A dark treat, this sudden encounter with death.
Expecting the shadow-flicker in his neck,
the guttering fuse, she saw that he lay still
and that fine silver dust hung in the air.

Silence boomed in her blood. She forgot
to breathe. She stared into the hole in time
through which he’d slipped . She saw dark wings
that beat too fast for angels’, saw

the broken place where bones come from
and where bones go. All this in a heartbeat.
Wiser than scripture, swifter than light:
a destination on the other side of grief.

FALSE DAWN

Through half-parted curtains,
the early sun is trapped
between two lips of cloud.

I look back at you
still sleeping
in a private night.

A line of hair
lifts against your breath
and settles, lifts again.

The cloud-mouth closes,
drinking the last light.
Thin rain crosses the rooftops

towards us. I look back
at you, still sleeping.
False dawn - light dies

at inception; you live alone
in a dark land.

FINISTERRE

The ‘phone rang early on this morning
much as any other. One of the nurses
at the home. You recognised her voice,
the tall one. Cleared her throat: “I’m sorry,
very sorry. Your mother passed away
last night. Died in her sleep. She looked

so peaceful…” Silence, just the view
through the bedroom window. Autumn’s
edge. You cleared your throat.
Platitudes, you notice, edges buffed
by years of distant comfort, administered
over the winding of so many sheets.

Strange employment, you reflect, working
at the edge of finisterre, both gardener
and ferryman. And then you drove there,
numb, between the unharvested fields.
The day before, you wheeled her
down the drive, the beeches crowding,

still in leaf, a draft of crows above each one.
And from behind the Hall, like vapour rising,
Shillington bells afloat, now clear, now cloudy,
ringing away the years for both of you.
For her, a wedding just before the war,
or maybe bells occluded in a winter mist

on Erith Marshes, standing at the garden gate,
bonneted for church. For you, the ring of six
cascaded like a silver chain, unlinking
as it fell. You turned. Along the fenceline,
through the trees and into the fields beyond,
a child is running hard towards the world’s edge.

FIRST ECLIPSE

A full eclipse, they told us:
bit by bit, a feeble daytime moon
will efface the sun, enfold us
in a counterfeit of night at noon.
Around the edges of the lunar disc
a crown of fire will burn so bright
that scrutiny by naked eye would risk
blindness. Thrilled, we learned that light
that violent must be sifted
through a darkened lens. And so
the grownups stood about, eyes lifted,
penitents in sunglasses who know
the world’s about to end. Meanwhile,
we children lay in long grass, sharing
out the negatives I’d brought – a pile
of family snaps from home. Pairing
them up like playing cards, I dealt,
choosing for myself a glossy square
of clouds on a bright black day, and knelt
(like a penitent) to outstare
the slow mutating sun. Indistinct
at first, but then, from partial darkness,
bold and clear, Mum and Dad, arms linked,
strode out of their past. The starkness
of that moment’s image – of their smug duality
before my birth – was blinding and I dropped
my hand. Lost in eclipse, I couldn’t see
where light began or where the darkness stopped.

FISH

A small island race raised
on this brief silver harvest:
fish slithering like coins
from treasure chests hefted
down from rusting boats
that seem too nutshell frail
to ride these stacked northern seas.
Cluttered quays slick with moss,
bleak streets and blunt-nosed cottages.

Nothing glitters or shines here
by design, nothing radiates. Rain
ties the clouds to the cobbles
all year round. But then the boats
come sidling out of mist and spill
their trove and a sort of richness
shimmers briefly in the dark.

A DREAM OF AEROPLANES # 1

FLIGHTPATHS - 1913

The strangest of times: a skein of geese
crossing the bedroom window, heading west
and no body of water within seven miles.
I am playing the pagan - lying late amongst
the Sunday morning bells.
Heaven is a cloudless sky
in late September, harvest past,
leaves on the turn.

At first I think I hear the binder,
wheels beating, turning at the headrow,
but the fields are bare.
Such a beating, a clattering.
More geese searching for a lake
in this land of furrows? Or
the rector in his Wolsely
come to seek me out?

And then my window darkens
into the shape of wings, jagged wings –
Weston mill uprooted, reeling across the fields?
Certainly a hurricane of sorts
in the throat of this beast
squatting low over the beeches,
dabbling its feet in leaves, roaring
in a black updraft of rooks.

An aeroplane, fearful in the untried air –
nothing like the rising bird
it mocks, This is a man,
dressed in wire and canvas,
climbing out of the long grass.
This is a godless man ascending,
out of the dust, towards the light.

FOX HUNTING

Up on Bell's Hill, hours
after sundown; watchless
thus timeless; starlight printed
on the earth below:

all the lights of Exeter
in a black bowl. We breathe
through our mouths. No wind
in the hillside beeches

or the hawthorn hedge
we crouch behind. Bob looms
at my side, log-still,
indistinct, yet electric

with attention, his cradled shotgun
staring at the ground,
round-eyed. An owl quavers
in the ice-heart of the wood.

Movement at the field's edge: shadow
on shadow; an elision of shape
and formlessness. The fox slides
along a dark rail, single-

purposed, the fanatic's way -
hand over hand through
the long grass
at the field's edge.

Bob's gun coughs twice,
dry-voiced. Night cracks
like slate; shards fly
and the world tips up.

We stare, bloodshot, jangling,
into the bright darkness.
Shadows realign at the field's edge.
Night self-heals, like water.

FRONTIERS

No one likes a hospital. They house
mortality. There’s that perception
more of the pain they have to incubate
than of that which they relieve.

Heartbreak hotels, full of jangling traffic,
they seem to me - long visceral tunnels,
flapping rubber doors like valves,
white antibodies pushing trollies,
knackered doctors, heads on desks.

So when, this Christmas, it's my dad I'm visiting,
I step into the antiseptic fug
with more than usual trepidation.
Spat out by a peristaltic lift,
I shuffle, fruitless, flowerless, down the bed-line.

Jones, J.C. (k.a. 'Jack') the scribbled notice says.
But in his place lies an ice-warrior,
half-submerged beneath a glacial sheet.
Some arctic wind has drifted snow
against his bones and now

ghost-whispers come down time
within his slight breathing.
December in his veins,
and in the evening sky
against the windows.

I sit at the bedhead, watching the reptile pulse
in throat and eyelid, icicle drips
of glucose ticking silently. I am a stranger
in your world of white light,
filaments and dials.

I am invisible: its customs disregard
my useless love. Its ministers, purposeful
and sure of their ground, occupy
the space between us, lifting
and settling like nesting birds.

You hibernate, safe within your cage of branches.
Electronic doors discharge me, unprepared
for these old lands made strange.
A raw wind pulls the rain across the car park;
hope shreds, like the clouds.

Somehow disenfranchised now, I drive
through limbo. Blurred, dissolving
in my rearview mirror, the hospital tips
and sinks like a ship of lights.

GOD

Sitting alone on a broken wall
in the white sandblasted Provencal heat
in La Chartreuse de la Verne,

I watch a nun duck beneath
a blue-green lintel (the mottled
stone unique to this region).

Her purpose sought within
the cool dark room beyond,
I watch unnoticed. But

her long hard shadow
touches me like a black ray.
For a moment she denies me

the certainty of sunlight
and her God breathes once
within that skipped heartbeat.

And then she’s gone and
the old engine of the sun
turns the world again.

Later, in the barred
and spotted light of
ancient cloisters closed

round brilliant terraces full
of crosses scattered amongst the
olive trees, the same dispassionate

breeze shape-shifts the leaves;
it raises dust,
transfigures heat into gold.

And later yet,
seated at the border of
God’s promontory, where

the fallen masonry squares shoulders
with the prehistoric fixity of
uncut limestone, there the fume

of holy order dissipates. Where cork
and chestnut trees grow wild
across the folds and pits

and hollows of this valley;
where base physics drains
the sap and salt flies in

the Mistrale, there the snake
drops eggs , cool-white amongst
the roots and butterflies

blow like cinders; in the throat
of the lizard a pulse beats slow.
And through the distant veil

of plainsong barely heard,
the thermal voice of
original earth whispers,

wordless, unarticulated. And
within it there is nothing
of praise or supplication, no

grammar of hope, expectancy,
no syntax of desire. This is
the uninflected voice,

the broken consonants
of falling water, the endless
vowels of the wind.

GRASSCUTTERS AT SVERDLOVSK

Across the wide flat road, potholed
all the way to Moscow, we were told,
grasscutters move like dreamers through a gauze
of dust. An old man stoops and draws

the dry stalks into shocks. And, following, a child
hefts a pitchfork twice his size, hoists the piled
grass onto a flatbed cart. Between the shafts
a cartoon horse lifts its tail through drafts

of summer flies. Behind, at the other side
of wasteground, raised on a crooked tide
of flats and billboards, Uncle Lenin's gazing
po-faced from the recent past, appraising

the shifting landscape, long skyline
and a red sun sinking fast. Wall-eyed, he's blind
(now, as ever) to the eternal - the slow
cycle of a young man's scythe, the scavenger crow

following the mowers, the new wind that turns
the scarlet faces of the poppies. Lenin burns
briefly in the sunset, then the shadows blur
the certainty of his smile, confer

upon the tombstone flats the anonymity
of dusk. Rocked home in the tram, we
(free spirits from the wild west)
yearn for the old world - a horse at rest,

the stacking of the sheaves, the silent drift
of harvesters effacing the bright, swift
water-words of capital and labour. It seems
the only certainty, this gathering-in of our early summer dreams.

GREATER LOVE

Maybe it’s what we do the best;
God knows, we’ve had the practise,
pinpointing the targets, demolishing the rest.
Brothers in arms, entente or bund or axis,

we’ll usurp the role of wind and water
and efface the world in seconds.
But what drives us hungry to the slaughter?
Look to the prophets. Revelations reckons

the millennium for the schism.
Our imperative, God’s engine: it’s divinity
leads us to the edge. We embrace the cataclysm
laughing. Angel dust, blood of Mohammed – all infinity

at the end. Crusade or jihad, genocide
or a few dumb peasants wasted in the rain,
it’s dignity, nobility – indeed, love sanctified –
that draws us to the bloodfeast once again.

And there’s no greater love than the gift
of flesh and spirit. Jubilant, we oxidise the rivers,
turn the sand to glass. Cast the earth adrift!
We so love the world we’ll take it with us.

HARVEST HOME

He stuck the cigarette
in the corner of his mouth,
lit it, coughed again.

Above the cornfield, crows
rose up like ashes.
He watched them riding thermals
into the thick blue.

Shifting his weight (husk-
weight, light as chaff),
he squinted tears, refracted the bright,
hard truth of corn on the edge

of culling into every August
past. From scythe to combine
he had breathed the dust,
sweated the daylight up to

harvest home and beyond.
Now breath was measured,
here, on a doorstep chair
a day or two from harvest.

STILLE NACHT

On the night
that I was born ,
the bells rang out
across the world.

In Coventry, in Dresden,
the bones of two cathedrals
sheltered worshippers with candles,
witnessing the ruins.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau,
the story goes,
the death’s-head guards
sang, “Stille nacht,

heilige nacht”. Their voices
slipped across the Polish snow.
The sweetest tenor was Ukrainian,
the man they called Peter the Silent.

He never spoke and he killed
with a lead-filled stick.
In the Union Factory, packing shells,
they dreamed of Moses.

**

In Horton Kirby, fields froze
and ice ambushed the lanes.
My father rose in the cold
blue-before-dawn light

and cycled sideways,
wreathed in silver mist,
to the hospital. Each turn
of the track betrayed him

and scarred by thorns and gravel,
he bled by our bedside.
My mother laughed, she remembers,
as the nurse administered.

**

“Been in the wars?” she asked.
Outside, across the Weald,
from a cloudless dawn
the buzz bombs crumpled London.

**

Outside a town in the Ardennes
Private Taunitz hung
like a crippled kite
high in a tree.

A cruciform against the sky,
he seemed to run forever
through the branches,
running home for the new year.

Outside Budapest three men
diced for roubles
in the shelter of a tank.
Fitful rain, a moonless night.

Sasha struck a match
across the red star
on his helmet, the red star
that led them to this place.

Extra vodka, extra cigarettes,
a rabbit stewed,
the tolling of artillery
to celebrate the day.

**

The blackouts drawn,
December light invaded.
We awoke, slapped hard
by the early world.

Our siren voices
climbed into the morning,
a choir of outrage,
insect-thin but passionate.

Through tears our parents
smiled: within the song
of our despair they heard
a different tune:

and as our voices
sucked the air, swallowing
the grumble of the bombs,
only the bells survived.

IDIOGLOSSIA

Out of silence you release
a cataract of syllables:
consonants collide
and vowels burst
like bubbles. It’s
a mash of nouns,
a fractured trail
of verbs. It’s
three coins rattling
in a glass; a rippled
plait of water over
stones; beads falling
from a broken thread.

It’s information, or
a disembodied song,
or verse unchained
from its syllables.
It’s messages from
before your own blood –
time of the shared heart,
the underwater breath.

IMMORTALITY

I am not afraid of death, my death.
I am, of course, immortal. A child sits
at my gate; implacable, he admits
nobody. I borrow his breath

and through it speak
with dumb authority to those
bereft. Such green wisdom flows
from innocence: that bleak

and curtained room beyond is locked
to me. My world is light:
big windows, open doors; by night,
imperfect darkness, stocked

with childhood stars. My death
is inconceivable. Unlike yours;
you die and I diminish too because
my child goes with you, his implacability, his breath.

IN ANOTHER ROOM

I remember only this,
now, so far removed in place and time:
great windows framed the stars,
the clock unwound that primal rhyme,
the ballad of the hours
passing, and the Judas kiss
of a full moon’s rising light
betrayed the night.

Memory decays; only a sense remains
of emptiness, of spectrum drift
across the universe of that room.
Lost in the stars, my red shift
fading in the half-gloom
between the moon and dawn. It drains
to grey, the darkness. Through the haze
somewhere, in another room, a piano plays.

IN PARENTHESES

From the fastness of our dreams
where no clouds obscure the view,
we put aside our petty schemes
and envy deeds that others do.

Is there more to life than this?
we ask at break of every day.
The morning call, the goodnight kiss,
the foot upon the primrose way?

Safe or sorry, choice is clear:
not pig in sty but Socrates.
Cultivate the known, the near,
you live life in parentheses.

INSOMNIA

Tonight, from the window I stare back,
a deconstructed mask amongst trace elements
of moonlight, rain, black leaves. I am
part shapes remembered and part shapes
unrecognized. In this cone of silence
just before the dawn, the shadow world
is palpable: gods and monsters glide and crawl
by my garden gate. Half-dreams,
uncertain memories blow like feathers.
Here and now, I sense, is the sticking place
where all things meet: skeletons into flesh,
ghosts into plasma, rumours, fears, impossibilities
hard copied on the dark. No sound
within the distant rim of a long train
unwinding. The night and I, strange company
in a world without hours. And then,
when I turn away and
there’s just my breath and the falling rain.

IRMA WOOD – 1908 : 2003

I’m looking out across the autumn fields,
heavy with the news. The motif is gold
and red – riches even in the curl and fall
and life that burns up to the last.

Your birthday, way back when. Autumn,
just like now . Twilight. The daykids gone for tea;
we, the boarders, round the kitchen table,
knees on chairs, fists bunched under chins,
observing you like naturalists. Brief candlelight –
just one – its image doubled in your glasses.
Our unthinking love ticking like a clock
that will never run down. “How old are you now?”
I asked. (I have no notion. I am 12: beyond my sprig
of years, the trees grow high and wide).
“I’m 50”, you announced. “Half a century today”.

I was appalled: so close, so very close to death.
With the snuffing of that candle, shadows
will gather, as they have before. Silently I wept
and you read the tears, each one, and rose
and held me, nearly half a century ago.

KIT’S FUNERAL

Where and when do our paths cross?
We call out our commentaries
across measureless distance

as we walk through roadless space.
We settle for echoes of each other’s voices,
even the shreds of our own returning.

At a death our paths cross.
Startled we congregate
like birds caught unawares

by a strange new season.
In groups we peck
at the awful truth,

whispering our anecdotes,
changing the shape and constitution
of a thin life in the telling.

Legend climbs like bindweed
and the familiar cast of face
and form adopts new contours.

Nothing endures.. Nursing
bright new grief, we catch
our homeward trains alone.

Through brief windows, light blinks
on a disordered world. Closing
one book, we open another

LA CHARTREUSE DE LA VERNE

(A development of the poem 'God')

God stepped on my shadow today?
I seemed to feel the tug of his foot fall
here in the charterhouse courtyard
at the bright-hot pitch of noon.

From the valley, a blue updraft
of dust and seeds and wings.
In the cork-oaks and olive trees,
cicadas stirred their bones.

But inside that black splash
of no light, I stood alone.
From the deep, cool limewashed chapels,
into the fallen cloisters, through

the tangled, pungent maquis binding
graveyard crosses to the ground,
Certainty paces with her novice, Hope.
Shadows abound here – hard, black

manifestos, chiselled out of the light
that infects the world. In the sacristy
ghost windows lie embedded in the flagstones,
conduits to another place. But Certainty

steps lightly, followed close by Hope,
immaculate. Doors can be closed and shutters
drawn together. Lectio divina, mandatum
and the silence of the night.

Here, where I wander strung between
solstice and equinox, I am either trapped
inside this shadow or I trail it over stones
like an unshed skin. Man or master,

what I know is that where the light falls
I shall interrupt it, cast my cruciform
over the earth from dawn to dusk.
Old engine sun will charge my fuse

for free. I will stalk myself in black,
uncertain, short on hope, until God climbs
back into the machine, and then
beyond where all is shadow.

LIGHT

Some mornings I lie half awake
waiting for the slow secret
of light to be revealed.

From rumour
into palpable fact,
the proposition of light

is merciless: the great affirmative
blades its arrival
into walls and ceiling.

Light like a voice
talks in corners,
disputes with darkness.

Light besieges the house;
a million photon breaths
liberate the windows.

In love with light,
called out of black sleep,
I rise into its clamour.

LOOKING BEYOND

You hold the paperweight
on your open palm
and peer, shortsighted,
into its strange disorder -

its shattered galaxies, starbursts,
its frozen wavetop spray.
"My life today", you said,
"feels like this looks",

and you smiled towards
your summer wedding and
the old parameters restored -
the men in suits,

the Orange Day parade,
the priest you fear, the dog
you love, the certainties,
the certainties.

"Before you put it down",
I said, "look deep.
The more you look,
the more there is beyond".

"Beyond is the problem", you replied,
slipping the paperweight
into the drawer.
"Beyond is the problem".

LOVE SONG TOO LATE

Sloane Square. Startled, I’m hissed awake
by sliding doors, stabbed in the eye
by neon, mugged by a memory.

It’s ten years ago and every girl
wears your face. I stumble up,
appalled. Two strap-hangers

and a black girl in a turban
look up, look down. Just another
psycho on the Circle Line, He’ll turn

and turn about the dark heart
of the city, on the run
from the surface world.

Hamstrung by dreams, I am for moments
lunatic with grief. I’m crucified
between the doors as the years

suck backwards. Wars unwaged
and buildings dream bound, tears
unshed and love unconsummated.

For a second time you drown
in a tidal crowd. But this time
I call your name and a stranger turns.

LUNATICS

We stopped the car beside a nighttime field
of barley, wheat or root-crops. Darkness
dusted all at ground level into grey.
Inconsequential, anyway, beneath a bold
unclouded moon, full-faced and staring us down,
fresh from the seat of light. Its power:
to generate and regenerate, to pull
new tides, administer madness.
We wished the same but
into separate wells, deep and distant:
Deliver me safe and settle me
into the world - tomorrow,
tomorrow. Silent, we drove on,
chartless and compass-free.

MAL

Strange word, ‘stroke’ - a gentle sleep
and then you wake up,
changed. Caressed by infirmity
on the brown hill, kissed
by disability as you climb
the long drive. The farmhouse tips
and, heart in crescendo,
you embrace the grass.

Indifferent sheep manoeuvre,
crowding out your sky.
You lie in a lump, adrift
at the field’s edge, floating
on the dead raft
of your limbs.
The sun nails light
into your one good eye.

Near dusk her scarecrow voice
scatters your crowding dreams:
she calls you from the house,
the sound of your name
curling out of the past,
a gull-cry, fierce, impatient,
tearing at the membrane
that has dimmed your world.

Root-still, potato-eyed,
you are another species now.
Your medium is clay and saturation.
Mummified, like the bog-man
trapped by time, you lie dumbfounded,
mud-bound and uncomprehending
as the sun slips down
behind the hill.

The urgent fingers
scavenging for a heartbeat,
fluttering like bird-wings
at your throat,
are busy in the dark.
You feel nothing
of their loving panic,
their distress.

All love, all optimism, pain,
all memory, desire coarsen,
thicken into vegetable silence.
A dim siren wobbles in the dark.
And then rough hands manhandle
your clod-heavy bulk..
Night swallows the spinning light
and closes in like smoke.

MATINS

The Sunday morning bells of All Saints church
sound across where once were fields.
No memories here for those that hear them now
in this land of settlers. No cursing farmer
in a hoblit kitchen, dragging a brush
through a daughter’s tangled hair,
or struggling with a collar stud before
a tinplate mirror. No families stepping,
black-clad dancers, over furrows, trailing
honest mud through the lichgate. Now
the matins bells pull cars from drives,
through tree lined avenues and lunch
is in the oven, set to gas mark three;
the video’s on timer set to catch
the cricket from Australia.

All around the steeple pigeons spin,
unseated by the rolling bells. The slow
parabola of their fall towards the yews
is etched into the air, the route unaltered,
down the curling path of centuries.

MICHAEL COLLINS ORBITS THE MOON

I am elected watchman. It’s my lot
to turn and turn about in my tiny cradle. Not
my fortune or my obligation
to first-foot the moon or talk of it to nations.

Not for me grey beach or empty ocean,
not for me earthlight or the silent locomotion
of the stars. Uncrowded by the voices
of the world I slip away. The world rejoices

and I fold myself into the secret night
behind the moon. Afloat in amniotic light
I remain an embryo, a diagramme, a plan.
This egg will carry me unborn while man

takes giant steps below. But unevolved, unhatched,
Columbia and I become initials scratched
on incomprehensible darkness. I’m serene
in my awful solitude, turning through this lane between

the impassive weight of galaxies and the husk
of the moon. I close my eyes; a kind of dusk
prevails, half-recollection of diurnal time,
a rhythm bound into the rhyme

of seasons. And I dream of the grass
of prairies, lost highways that pass,
relentless and unbending, by abandoned outposts,
forts and chapels, and dead cowtowns whose brave boothill ghosts

still ride the range; the empty-hearted homesteads
whose screendoors still bang on windy nights; dry riverbeds
enclosed by old barbed wire, and oil-well donkeys, one end
gazing at the sand, the other at the stars. Trails bend

and turn upon themselves and men and women pause
inside their journeys, build fences, write down laws
amd call their scratches in the sand Jerusalem.
But clear night brings the stars - still over Bethlehem

or singing like a choir in Cassiopeia. And I ride
Columbia back into the hard blue scrutiny of earth. The tide
of their voices wakes me. Exultant, I invoke the charter
of my race: small steps like mine are mighty steps, ad inexplorata.

MOONSTRUCK NO MORE

You could drown in a sky like this.
It's an upside-down ocean. The stars
are the reflections of some other source,
something dreamed: light shattered and
spread. The moon endures, but it's old
and powerless now. Look - it's caught up
in winter branches; last leaves spared
by a cleansing wind efface it. And the
new tide sucks it into a coin of glass,
elliptical, cloudy, like clear recollection
fading. I walk home across black grass,
trailing my breath. In the dark November
small hours, dawn is only a rumour.
Certain of its truth, I wander east
towards tomorrow, chartless and compass-free.

MR MOORE'S WALL-CLOCK

Mr Moore lived in a lean-to shack
(two-roomed and shingle-boarded) at the back
of the barn where Grandad kept his car.
Clad with roofing felt and thick with tar
which bubbled in the sun, it shrunk
into the lee of the outbuildings, sunk
deep in a reef of marigolds and nettles,
like the shipwreck that tilts and settles,
shapeless and unnoticed. In the long days,
we children wound our orbit round pathways
of cinders, followed the beaten circuits through
bluebells and cabbage-patches, flew
back to the cottages like swifts at sunset.
And the world was one green hill, the sky a net
that trawled us through the seasons. Time
was a circle dance, two hands in rhyme,
turning, trapped, around the Roman face
of Mr Moore's Prince Albert watch. Period and place
conspired: early summer, watch chain swinging
in the sun; a crowd of heads inclined to hear the singing
of the wheels. Snapping the brass lid shut,
he muttered, "Tempus fuggit", and withdrew. Cut
free from the web, we reeled away
around the orchard tracks. And then, one day,
one June, I crouched inside his smoker's bow
beside an empty grate. Outside the undertow
of low clouds hissed against the single pane,
damping dust, rattling nettles, a long rain
from the east. Granny plumped his pillows, twitched
the patchwork counterpane his wife had stitched
in the days of the old queen. Now he lay
log-still, dream-bound and seventy years away
along the parabola of Vinson's paddock, chasing
Painted Ladies with his cap. Granny ministered, replacing
flowers unnoticed (willowherb and foxglove), winding up
the lamp-wick, slipping the sill of a china cup
beneath his Kaiser Bill moustache. And I lay coiled
in the cage of the hearthside chair, breathing oiled
darkness, ghost fumes of black tobacco,
calcium tang of lime and plaster, scent-echo
of caves, primeval places. And behind the chanting
of the rain, a tenor voice called time, counting
down the seconds: Mr Moore's old hanging clock, walking
across the wall on one brass leg, soft-talking,
like the messenger whose tale is too important
to be shouted loud. Not this harbinger's way, to rant
about decay, the end of worlds. So, doomed,
I watched and heard the hours unwind, consumed
by the oldest story. Mr Moore slept and I dreamed
for the last time. How brief the story seemed -
the fable of the wheel that turns from light
into shadow, from my midday to Mr Moore's midnight.

NIGHT POACHERS

Full moon
bold as a cry,
clean as new ice.

Two men running
noiseless across
frozen fields.

Gin traps in
canvas bags
rattle like teeth.

They fall laughing
in clouds into
the lee of a wall.

A dog barks;
a man calls.
The sounds curl away.

The men sleep
wrapped around
their prey
like lovers.

NO HAND WRITES

No hand writes.

No paper
pretty in pink
or green lined
or headed
or just plain white
and folded four times
carefully.

No pen primed
by thumb
or uncapped
to the salt air
and surfing sideways
breaking words
like foam.

No -
just the envelope
unworded
unaccommodated.

But the envelope
is hollow
like an ear
and I have breathed
into it once
wordless
and sealed it with
a movement of the tongue
unspeaking.

And delivered it
to your door.

NO HOME BUT THE STRUGGLE

You tread the edge
of this bright world
gingerly, unsteadily as if
for you it lay in shadows.

Old red heat grown dull
in the world still glows
in you: a bust of Uncle Joe
watches you dine

(cold commons in the kitchen
with the morning news)
and that photograph in passe-partout –
the comrades in the trenches

outside Burgos, 1936, all fags
and grins and black and white
bandannas. The flat’s upstairs –
steeper every month – above

an Asian supermarket. Great confusion
yesterday when you asked
in early morning stupor
(stunned by a dream of Ronnie Gold

drunk in an alley after Cable Street)
for the Daily Herald.
Consternation too when leaning
on stick and counter you recalled

young Harry Patchett who,
in September ’39, sung the Internationale
to his public as he clipped
their tickets on the 131

to Dalston Junction. Poor Salim –
too polite to interrupt – smiling
towards the shelves of catfood
planning reorientation round

a centralised display. Competition’s fierce
with Tesco by the roundabout.
Belts to be tightened, profits trimmed
this fiscal year. Family first,

family first. Oh, yes, they took
your family first: both grandparents
left the ghetto in a lorry –
Lodz had become too crowded

and they needed workers
somewhere east of the city.
Three years on you knew
the truth. You stood outside

The Greyhound by Whitechapel Underground,
the letter in your hand,
and wept without a sound;
wept not just for a photograph

of Papi and Baba, stiff and grim
in some Carpathian valley,
but for a sea that parted
once again, but a different sea

a red, unfathomable tide in flood,
now and forever. You wept without
a sound, even as Whitechapel fell
about your ears in 1944.

And you’re weeping now
with a squeezy bottle of Domestos
in your hand, weeping
for another world

that never really wobbled
out of night and into dawn:
Uncle Joe, the Catalonian comrades,
Harry Patchett, Ronnie Gold,

the red blood of the Party
beating deep and strong,
all gone, all gone to ashes.
Salim looks around for his mother.

What to do? He seems always
so sad, this solitary pensioner
who drops his coins, forgets
to pay his bills. “And where”,

his angry mother whispers,
“are his sons? Do they
not care that he’s shaving
in cold water? What

of his church? Can they not
take him in?” They help him
to the door. He smells of piss.
They shake their heads

and lock up for the night.
Such times with fortune hostage
to the flagship enterprises. What
a world, such changes, revolution

turning on a dollar dropped.
Solly under a street light,
sodium shadows falling long
and ragged over the paving stones

that Hitler missed. What
a world, implacable, unchanging.
Solly treads the edge
of this dark world unsteadily.

OLD MAN SUNBATHING ON MARLOES BEACH

A grounded boat picked clean
is his body. Beached, naked,
he breathes the tide.

Baked dry and hard
like a starfish, he scars
the white sand.

His skin wraps him, thin,
like autumn leaves,
their dust, their tenacity.

The sun walks home
across the sand
and out to sea.

A star pins light back
into the sky. A man
has become his shadow.

ON CASHEL HILL

“And you tell me that he vanished,
out on the hillside. Nothing found,
no body, not a trace of where he’d been
or where he’d gone?”

She topped the Guinness, placed it
like a sacrament upon the bar.
We studied it. “Oh no”, she whispered.
“Disappeared completely. But…”

(she grinned and moved away),
“they’ve seen him late at night
still looking for his sheep, O’Faherty.
Just a shadow by the burial ground,

whistling up his flock”. They laughed
and tipped their pints. I laughed
and tipped mine too. Through the door
of Boulger’s Bar the day was

Connemara silver-grey. Peat fires burning
in July – the tint of them
on the edge of a salt breeze
in from Cashel Bay.

Later, high up Cashel Hill
the fog came down like wet wool.
Blinded, I perched on rock,
only my breathing shifting

the warp and weft of it. Close-knit
into that fleece of wraiths and phantoms,
robbed of the milky distance of bays
and mountains, I could speculate

the ghost of O’Faherty, white
on white, footsure, eternal, stepping
across the tussocks like a dancer.
I rose and followed him down,

a twisting fume inside smoke,
and stepped back into watery sunlight
amongst the gravestones
in the burial ground.

ON FRATTON MOOR

A summer night. No moon.
I step outside and close the door.
Trees breathe like sleepers. Soon
last lights will wither. Fratton Moor

and the long horizon will conspire
in the dark while the house behind
becomes a dolmen, barrow-still, entire
of itself. Staring hard, I’m blind

in the shadow’s heart. No rowan tree,
no hand before my eyes.
The moor moves like an inland sea
tugged inside the sky’s

black tide. This is oblivion.
Yet even here where night
is all, the high meridian
leaks: bleak as ice the acid light

of stars drips down through history,
etching a message from an alien place.
Confused, I cannot read the mystery
syllables. I drown in time and place.

ON GLASS

“Had an uncle once – well, not an uncle really;
he was, in fact, my father’s cousin. Barking mad”.
(This story told around the dinner table – late December,
drifting snow, and within, a singing fire and candlelight).
“Convinced his arse was made of crystal glass
and spent his days and nights avoiding chairs.
Tripped and fell and died of shock!” We laughed amidst
the switching, brandy-coloured blades of light,
the blue confusion of the smoke from our cigars.

Round wineglass rims we trailed our moistened fingers
And they siren-sang in discord, beautiful and false.
We blew across the kissing lips of bottles and
They boomed and hooted, hollow-voiced, like
Phantom lighthouses. The onyx window threw back
The illusion of our faces while beyond impenetrable glass
The cold world shifted, settled, unwatched, unwatching.

PHOTOS

What makes light, wakes us;
what shapes light guides us inside days.
We drink it through our skin; we are

wet with its silver scales. It sticks
through holes like big nails, scratches
us and we bleed light back. It squirts

out of sudden conduits – broken windows,
shifted curtains, open doors, It drips
from leaves, cleaning them greener,

slides like mercury released; it flows
up slopes and hides behind shadows.
Light must spill over all we are

and all we do. Light alone survives us;
We die in open places and light
will shine our bones the whiter.

PIGEONHOLED

Some deep mystery of plumbing
or a soft door flapping in a wild wind -
the air is taking a beating somewhere
in the walls. I put down the paper

and rise listening. Only the creak
of heating, the calm breathing
of distant traffic. Again, a fan-dance,
a regatta of sails in a storm, applause.

A bird caught behind the firescreen,
swallowed by the house at night.
I ease the gas fire forward, peep
behind the screen. A shape shifts

in the dark – a plume of soot,
a gust of down. The next is
a hand-held blur: a fly-half
heading home, the bird against

my chest like a second heart,
I skim the corridor, clear the stairs
and hit the grass running. My face
is full of wings and she rises

up the flue of air between
the fir trees and across the roofs.
We are released, me, to dark
containment, she, to the empty sky.

ROSIE SLEEPING

Your soft clock
scatters seconds like
peas on a drum.

A feather pulse
stutters in your
neck. Your bird-

breath barely lifts
the cotton strand
across your lips.

But, as I turn
away, a breeze
that has yet

to blow touches
your cheek and
you smile, lopsided,

arch, and life
rehearses in your
unaccommodated face

SONG WITHOUT WORDS

Sometimes a poem just happens in plain air.
Mute, like mimes, the actors shimmer briefly
and are gone, leaving their outlines etched in light,
wordless but entire. Consider: the cemetery fence,
the graves beyond; the balding man, late middle-aged
who walked towards the fence; fresh blooms against
a tombstone and dead flowers lobbed towards the dump,
the arc they made; the boy with Downs who stumbled,
weeping, close behind. The man, the flowers and the boy.
The air that framed them and the light that picked them out.

POPPIES

Waiting for the poppies
at the field’s edge,
blood-red amongst
the charlock and
the chamomile.

But this is also
a time of turned
flints and hidden
thorns. And a fire
will bind the days
like shocked corn.

ROOM

“Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire”,
you used to say. And each night
I stayed with you I would consider
that velvet gradient and breath

would catch and falter. So steep,
the climb away from firelight into
the half-dark shadowfields above.
Yellow bulbs that melted buttery hollows

into the hard darkness, the ghost-
scent of lavender, the bulk of a double bed
like a grounded barge, and the cold
that hung shimmering like the northern lights.

The cottage is gone now under roads
that tie another world together. Cars
carry their interiors, brash, impersonal,
through different nightscapes.

Lights bloom within them like
clever flowers; sunless heat like
a birthright; motion as an imperative
in a land that would be still.

SEA OF STARS

They will ask,
should I return,
to give them names
for all the things I saw.

Even as I fed back
voltage, trickle chemistry
past their electrodes;
even as I shared

my heartbeat with their monitors,
my blood with their microscopes,
they would question
in quiet voices,

seeking out new nouns
with which to corner
the ineffable, new verbs
to charge the immaterial.

As now their aerial voices -
filtered through ionosphere,
the shingle-clouds of asteroids,
across these tideless oceans -

whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty
silence. I trail interrogation

like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence
I no longer heed
their eyes that scrutinize,

lidless, unswerving. This dark
accomodates a billion eyes,speculating
my parabola by day, by night, probing
for my tiny skidding light.

Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes - long black sargassos drifting, planet wrack and flotsam, dereliction.

And beyond, always beyond,
the bright flying splinters of the stars.

SHEEP ON THE BROWN HILL

There are sheep,
hopeless, round-shouldered clouds
of wool. They have the eyes
of demons

yet the mouths
they clamp round nettles
seem innocent of teeth.
They have the cloven hoof

yet their legs
seem afterthoughts, a child's
charcoal lines
drawn at all four corners.

Knee-high again,
I hang like a casualty
on the barbed-wire fence,
gaping, contemplating

sheep in orbit
around the hilltop house.
No route or destination;
no sense of purpose

to be found within
this witless shifting traffic.
I look for patterns,
signs of navigation.

Sun moves through thin clouds;
wind wraps the house,
sings in wires.
Sheep crop and shuffle

all day long. Nothing alters
on the brown hill.
One generation inhales;
its descendants sigh.

I am an old coat now,
stretched on thorns.
Night slides across and finds me,
purposeless yet blessed.

SIMON WIESENTHAL LEAVES MAUTHAUSEN

Simon Wiesenthal leaves Mauthausen.
Is it spring or autumn? Birds are singing
rising from the wire in the long dawn rain.
Wiesenthal carries the bag the GIs gave him.

Smoking, they lounge in groups by their jeeps.
Maidens of war, they see all, know nothing.
Scorched earth, still warm. Maybe the victors
fired the villages, or the vanquished in retreat.

Ah, the villages, where they knew nothing,
where they toiled with their heads down
in the black wind. Now they group like cattle
lost amongst their cottages, their hayricks burning.

Wiesenthal walks in a straight line, one foot
placed with calculated care before the other.
Something like rejoicing trips his heart
as he approaches, step by step, a horizon

owned by no one. He won’t look back.
The wire will bind his dreams until death
and towers will stand four-square at the corners
of everywhere he goes and voices will crack sleep

in countless rooms, strange and familiar.
Israel will be raised on a raft of bones.
“It will survive me. But I must walk in a straight line
for as long as shadows fall”.

SLOW DANCING

A long time away from home;
too much needing to be said, and so,
after smiles and silence, Dad began
to talk about the War: Home Guard
manoeuvres on the common, chucking
hand grenades at concrete blocks. And Mum
remembered the doodlebugs that split
the ceiling, shedding plaster on the lodger’s bed
the day before he flew in from Johannesburg
on leave. The central heating clicks, the autumn
evening clogs the windows and it seems as if
old leaves will bank against the doors.
But memory rings, pure as struck glass
and a sort of luminescence pushes shadows back.
Clocks stop in their tracks. Invisible, unbodied
like a wireless ghost, I hear faint music
and the tread and slide of dancing feet
in some abandoned ballroom.
Now I am a guest between the sideboard
and those books along the wall
whose patient stillness framed my childhood.
I watch them both slow dancing back towards
the days of different light, their dream-time.

STAINED GLASS

The quality of light: this,
a piece of late evening sky.
How darkness can shine:
last of the sun, first breath
of the stars, a waxing moon.
Judas walks out of the small room.
They are still dining. No one knows
but Jesus and his head is turned away.
They can’t escape, these protagonists,
caught between ruby and green,
the dark blue light,
the black bars of lead.

STORM

Incandescent, sky splits –
bruise becomes wound,
wound becomes light

like glass. Wind bays, blunders
amongst the panic-stricken
trees. Clouds discharge

into fat green rain. Light thickens,
distorts, breaks into shards,
sets fire to water.

The window lens dilates.
We curl into ourselves,
seek shelter within

the ridiculous harbour
of our folded wings.
Behind the flapping dark

the world convulses,
crying aloud the ceaseless
vowels of the wind.

THE SUN HOTEL, DEDHAM, 1954

Awake to the hysteria
of bells - medieval laughter
out of my stained glass dream.

Paddling Daddy's slippers
across bare boards
(as black and ancient as the mud

that silts up the Stour),
I reach the leaded window.
Beyond, the church squats on its bones,

brooding music. Hymns are hatched
stillborn; organ voices rage in vain,
quelled by the crowing of the bells.

The street in both directions
is innocent of cars. Phantom mist -
an atavistic veil - blurs outlines:

passers-by are cloaked and cowled,
pacing the tracks and byways
of their ancestors.

My child's breath smokes
the glass. Morning thickens;
even the light seems ancient now.

Yawning, I curl back
into a tumulus of sheets.
The bells cascade, mocking the shape

of my few years. I sleep
and now, in the mapless dark,
my green heart beates faster.

Mine is the steady pulse
that animates this room;
its beams draw new sap

from my source. Plaster,
lath and tiles expand;
the house tests its roots.

The bells rejoice a continuity of mornings.
This, the moment and the lost years
are swallowed in their shining.

TEMPLE BAR, DUBLIN

They give a lick of blue and red
to the woodwork, paint the doors
bright green, skew the Victorian railings
into artful dereliction, wait for the weeds
and poppies, then cry, “Bohemia!”
In checks and chinos, Yanks cruise
the allies seeking out the nachos,
tacos, Budweiser, here amongst
forefathers’ shadows. Germans dance
in the street outside the Boogie Room.
Japanese students slip between these
Hustling Western bravoes, sharp-white
in their Hard Rock Cafe Dublin t-shirts,
looking for the Kerry Dancers under neon.

On the corner of Meeting House Square
a red-haired boy blows ‘Drowsy Maggie’
out of a penny whistle and the flux
of glass and concrete shivers like
a curtain. Green hills bulge
like muscles through the tarmac;
roots of hawthorn flex through paving stones;
the blood of fuscia spills
through breaking windows
and the Liffey swallows bridges
all the way from Dublin to the sea.

THE SHEDS

Sheds: haunches nestled into
banked earth. Cow parsley, ragwort,
bedding high sides. Blunt faces
nose-ringed with hanging padlocks.

Inside, a stook of exhausted
spades, a knackered
wheelbarrow, face-down,
a crippled bike, kept for spares.

Here, where the sheds are,
clocks run slow. One man,
slouched in a doorway,
hand-rolls a cigarette.

Another taps out a briar
onto a windowsill
and then repacks the bowl.
Rapt, he stares across the match flame.

Kids roll and scatter,
break like high-tide
at the allotment's edge.
They watch, uncomprehending,

the semaphore of sweet-peas,
rocking, bean-rows, carrot-tops;
the closed and secret faces
of the sheds.

The sun goes down
behind the recreation ground,
Breaking ranks, shadow-wrapped,
the houses sidle in.

THE TIES THAT BIND

On the morning of the day
that you left, I looked through
the window and over the fields.
Two hares were bowling

across the grass like hats
in the wind. They danced
and sprung apart and danced
again and were gone.

And a mob of seagulls swung
in from the west, scattered
then gathered again in a brawl
of wings and were gone.

Love or combat, the wind blew them
into the world and out again,
strung together like dancers bound
to the end of the dance.

UP

The ice is melting.
It pinks and shivers
like thin music. Black

windows in the ground
go soft and vanish.
Cobweb dewdrops glow

like moonstones in the
dark blue before dawn.
You wake. You breathe

deep. First light, bright
like spray across the ceiling.
You’ve slept and dreamed

beneath this cracked map
of an inverted world
too long. You’ve read

your fortune in its
one-lane highways,
nowhere roads too long,

looking for compass north.
Now the ice is melting. Breathe
deep. Rise into light.

THE WAY THINGS ARE

Sit down here, by this closed window
and think of it this way:
that not even dust remains
of what once might have been.
You know the properties
of hope, of dreams, of rumours:
how rich the imagined landscape,
how true that stranger’s voice.
And then a sighting here and there
of those enchanters in their motley,
dancing like dervishes and singing
in the old tongue? Maybe.
But now consider this:
the light that shivers
in my brandy glass, the blue
fumes from my cigarette,
are of the real world.
Watch them with me now,
just the two of us, and know
from these my words and this
the sound of my voice,
the way things are.

UNCLE BILL

Uncle Bill was a bad man. Mother
said as much each time the departing AJS
got curtains twitching down the avenue.
She’s sniff the blue smoke, fold her arms

and step indoors. He’d walked out on two wives
and dumped a mistress (off the back
of his motorbike – figuratively speaking –
in the middle of Carshalton Park).

The moustache – Clark Gable style – above a row
of gleaming teeth; the sideways glance, the shift
of eyes away, the quick, one-sided grin that passed
for interaction; whirring breath in the back

of the throat, like clockwork in reverse, at the end
of every major utterance –evidence all of
a long steep fall from grace away
from magnolia walls and a well-cut lawn.

I was unimpressed. Any man who could whistle
and spit simultaneously; stump upstairs like Grendel
coming home, farting loud on every step; change
a set of spark plugs in a storm on Kingston Hill;

switch the pipe to the side of his mouth and float
smoke rings like shaky haloes ceiling high,
was a buccaneer in tweeds and leathers, unsafe, risky,
blowing in from a world beyond the garden gate.

VANISHING POINT

Those Start-rite kids.
A tam o’ shantered boy,
a bobble-hatted girl,
both austerity booted
and utility wrapped
against the winter
of the world.
I used to wonder
where they were going.
Somewhere far away,
so swaddled and determined.
I bet they had their gloves
on long elastic through
each sleeve. I bet they had
their Chilprufe vests, their Aertex
shirts buttoned up across
their breakfasts. Bet they had
hope in their hearts, dreams
unconsumed by fire or water,
as each set sensible foot
on the long, straight highway.
So much is promised us
in a hurting world between here
and the vanishing point

WAKING

Waking to wind and a thin rain
anxious at my window, I scan
the sketchmap cracks on the ceiling,
look for early bearings, a route
out of dreaming. Slow light
arrives between the rain
and - half heard then gone –
the long dream ebbs across stones.
Distant traffic mumbles, house-bones
crack, rumours of another nation
stirring. Tidal, the postman’s bike
comes surfing up my drive.
The world slips real fingers
through my door.

WAVELENGTHS

#1. Bonsai 1005 1 GHz Pentium III Processor

I paddle the keys and pixels break surface
like bubbles. The blue window shivers into a spray
of letters, uniform, a lingua franca. The world and his wife
are talking hard, a promiscuity of speech that melts
into the pool, unvoiced. This is language out of light,
words squeezed and shredded out of shape and form,
electronic runes and glyphs squirted into bits
and bytes down filaments. These digits, these encryptions,
they’re mouthless, lost in space. No tongues or lips
articulate the cries and whispers of the slave electrons
working the binary roads. Behind the brilliant lexicon,
just the insect voices and the hum of spinning disks.

...

#2. Icom 756 Pro Mk II HF transceiver

Still dark outside. 0500 zulu and a cold wind
rocks the antenna tower. I’m beaming west
on 20 meters, listening through the chuckle
of morse, the whooping heterodyne. I’m looking
for Australia on the long path, vaulting scraps
of landscape and the great bare, muscled back
of ocean; skidding in across the eastern shores,
magnet-voiced and listening hard. A VK3,
a loner by two hundred miles of fence-line;
a little wooden house, a splinter in the prairie skin.
Just him, his wife and daughters, fixing the broken wire
that separates the cowboys and the kangaroos
from dreamtime. Now the aerial image shimmers,
breaks. I lose his voice as the skywave shifts;
lose his tale of full moons, crowding stars
and voices in the wind. I drift with the tidal ebb
and flow of distant storms, spikes of wireless sound
and silence. But I’ve spoken; he has spoken.
Breath has shaped and joined our words.
We have thrown a line across the earth
and tugged it once or twice.

WHEAL DREAM

So I shall build it here
to rest upon and pierce
to the core this,

the old world. I claim
the seams of tin,
the springs loaded

inside rock. My drills,
my hammers will release
their tension and I

shall be known
by the hard-drawn smoke
that, rising, wires

my stone-dream
to the sky.
Tinmaster.

And my dream
shall falter in
a world that moves

too fast. And I
shall dwindle too.
My name will rust;

my span of arms
outstretched would bridge
the tiny artery

of the lane
they have named
Wheal Dream.

(c) Dick Jones

Dick Jones' Poetry Archive