Counting Backwards Read online

  from that rust-bucket slumped in the sand –

  the Alba’s an old hand at drowning.

  I was two when they first plumped me down

  between Man’s Head and the Island

  where fox-trails of water ran out

  over Porthmeor strand.

  I smell something which reminds me

  of not being born,

  my mother walks on the shoreline

  a figure or maybe a figurehead

  with a smile of wood.

  In the big glare of the white day

  I clutch at the sand’s

  talkative hiss of grains,

  lose my balance, and suddenly

  scud on all fours

  into the narcissi.

  Dolphins whistling

  Yes, we believed that the oceans were endless

  surging with whales, serpents and mermaids,

  demon-haunted and full of sweet voices

  to lure us over the edge of the world,

  we were conquerors, pirates, explorers, vagabonds

  war-makers, sea-rovers, we ploughed

  the wave’s furrow, made maps

  that led others to the sea’s harvest

  and sometimes we believed we heard dolphins whistling,

  through the wine-dark waters we heard dolphins whistling.

  We were restless and the oceans were endless,

  rich in cod and silver-scaled herring

  so thick with pilchard we dipped in our buckets

  and threw the waste on the fields to rot,

  we were mariners, fishers of Iceland, Newfoundlanders

  fortune-makers, sea-rovers, we ploughed

  the wave’s furrow and earned our harvest

  hungrily trawling the broad waters,

  and sometimes we believed we heard dolphins whistling,

  through blue-green depths we heard dolphins whistling.

  The catch was good and the oceans were endless

  so we fed them with run-off and chemical rivers

  pair-fished them, scoured the sea-bed for pearls

  and searched the deep where the sperm-whale plays,

  we were ambergris merchants, fish farmers, cod-bank strippers

  coral-crushers, reef-poisoners, we ploughed

  the sea’s furrow and seized our harvest

  although we had to go far to find it

  for the fish grew small and the whales were strangers,

  coral was grey and cod-banks empty,

  algae bloomed and the pilchards vanished

  while the huer’s lookout was sold for a chalet,

  and the dolphins called their names to one another

  through the dark spaces of the water

  as mothers call their children at nightfall

  and grow fearful for an answer.

  We were conquerors, pirates, explorers, vagabonds

  war-makers, sea-rovers, we ploughed

  the wave’s furrow, drew maps

  to leads others to the sea’s harvest,

  and we believed that the oceans were endless

  and we believed we could hear the dolphins whistling.

  Borrowed light

  Such a connoisseur of borrowed light!

  Pale as a figurehead, undismayed

  by the rough footpath

  you climbed towards the view.

  At the top, silent, you would breathe in

  the spread of land you didn’t care to own,

  your face for a moment stern

  and rapt, careless of children.

  Such a connoisseur of borrowed light!

  Even when your voice grew harsh

  as those small stones rattling

  down the adder path,

  or when a January wind

  harried cloud shadows

  over the built-up valleys

  you would climb as far as that boulder

  where the view began,

  and watch its unravelling.

  You met equally

  the landscape knitting itself

  from russet, indigo

  and crawling tractors,

  or the blinding stare of the sea.

  A winter imagination

  Surely it’s not too much to ask

  from a winter imagination:

  the clattering of chairs onto a pavement

  the promptness of waiters before days waste them

  and of course, the flickering of leaves,

  the insouciant, constant

  rapture of following the breeze.

  Last night my daughter dreamed

  that we would die, mother and father

  gone while she stood watching.

  I soothed her in my arms, promised her husband,

  babies, troops of friends:

  like the defences of a vulnerable kingdom

  I named them, one by one. She slept rosily

  but for me the bone-cold passages

  still rang to her cry

  You’ll die and I’ll be alone.

  Surely it’s not too much to ask

  for a warm day to take away such dreams

  for violet, midge-haunted shadows

  under the sycamore that grows like a weed,

  for this year’s beautiful girls

  to flaunt their bellies, while the boys

  who won’t stop talking, trot to keep up.

  One of them is after my daughter

  but her lovely eyes are blue with distance.

  She is off at the gallop, dreamless.

  Athletes

  And what a load of leaf

  there was on the trees by June.

  From sticky fists

  rammed in the eye of the bud

  they’d opened wide,

  and when the wind blew

  the horse chestnuts were athletes

  running with torches of green

  in the half-marathon of summer.

  Pneumonia

  on our raft

  after the long night of storm

  the water bubbles

  the sea is calm

  the planks squeak lazily

  where the ropes chafe them

  the sea bulges

  ready to open

  why it should smell like jonquils

  no one knows

  the idling of the sun

  changes everything

  on our raft

  after the long night of storm

  the water bubbles

  eye-level

  why not watch it for ever

  Wall is the book

  (for Anne Stevenson)

  Wall is the book of these old lands

  each page scripted by stones,

  each lichen frond, orange or golden,

  wall’s stubborn illumination.

  Read wall slowly, for it takes time

  to grasp the sentence of stone.

  Wall breaks in a tumbled caesura

  of boulders. Read on

  where pucker of breeze on a tarn’s shield

  breaks the mirror of wall

  and bog cotton trembles. It rains

  on a draggle of sheep in the field

  where wall breaks the force

  and bite of steel from the north

  whence weather and danger come.

  Wall is the holy book of these old lands

  each age scripted by stone.

  Gorse

  All through sour soil the gorse thrusts.

  It is rough furze first, chopped to free the fields.

  Burned off in sheets of carbon, it lives

  down at the roots, grappling peat sponge,

  black as an eclipse of the sun.

  But when the gorse is out of blossom

  kissing is then out of fashion.

  Like ill-fitting shoes, gorse flowers

  pinch and pinch until the sun touches them.

  Now in the lanes a spice of coconut,

  now the gorse thriving to wipe

 
the eye of winter with a cloth of gold,

  now the bees in their bee kitchen

  pilot themselves above the spines,

  burrow past rapiers

  bumbling, lunge into flowers

  like drunks strangely kept safe

  in a world full of harms,

  and now it comes –

  a prickle of intricate buds

  a breath of perfume,

  a flare along the roadways, a torch

  barely mastered in the runner’s arms

  leaping the verges to set April alight.

  Blackberries after Michaelmas

  These blackberries belong to the devil.

  Don’t try to eat them now

  or drop them in your pail.

  Their flaccid sweetness

  belongs to the one who ruined Adam,

  set him to work in these hard fields

  set him wallowing in green water

  for pilchard and mackerel.

  These blackberries are the devil’s

  and have his spit on them –

  look where it settles.

  To my nine-year-old self

  You must forgive me. Don’t look so surprised,

  perplexed, and eager to be gone,

  balancing on your hands or on the tightrope.

  You would rather run than walk, rather climb than run

  rather leap from a height than anything.

  I have spoiled this body we once shared.

  Look at the scars, and watch the way I move,

  careful of a bad back or a bruised foot.

  Do you remember how, three minutes after waking

  we’d jump straight out of the ground floor window

  into the summer morning?

  That dream we had, no doubt it’s as fresh in your mind

  as the white paper to write it on.

  We made a start, but something else came up –

  a baby vole, or a bag of sherbet lemons –

  and besides, that summer of ambition

  created an ice-lolly factory, a wasp trap

  and a den by the cesspit.

  I’d like to say that we could be friends

  but the truth is we have nothing in common

  beyond a few shared years. I won’t keep you then.

  Time to pick rosehips for tuppence a pound,

  time to hide down scared lanes

  from men in cars after girl-children.

  or to lunge out over the water

  on a rope that swings from that tree

  long buried in housing –

  but no, I shan’t cloud your morning. God knows

  I have fears enough for us both –

  I leave you in an ecstasy of concentration

  slowly peeling a ripe scab from your knee

  to taste it on your tongue.

  Fallen angel

  Waist-deep in snow and wading

  through the world’s cold,

  this fallen angel with wings furled

  on his way home from Bethlehem,

  the story all told.

  Centuries after the birth

  through drab years with the promise fading

  like gilt off the gold,

  fallen angel still tramping the earth –

  so long, the way back to Bethlehem

  through the world’s cold.

  Bridal

  Bride in the mud of the yard,

  bare feet skilled to find

  the nub of hard ground.

  She stands as if she were transparent,

  ears spiked, fingers encircled,

  skirts stitched with metal.

  Mud squelches through the keyhole

  between first and second toe,

  she slips, rescues herself.

  Silence of banknotes

  from sweaty hands, pinned to her dress

  so the president’s face shows.

  She drives the cows in

  through velvet of shit and slime,

  their soiled tails switching

  their dirty udders craving release

  as women crave the gums of their babies

  in the first shudder of feeding.

  In the silence of the marriage night

  with a befuddled bridegroom

  too old for the task at hand

  she will not cry out.

  Bride in the mud of the yard,

  thirteen and hopping

  through velvet of cowshit

  from stone to stone.

  Still life with ironing

  I love it when you look at me like this,

  and the washed smell of your blue denim

  We are washed out, the two of us,

  shadows of what we have been.

  A moth in the bowl of a paper lampshade,

  a gust of night and a baby’s cry,

  a drop of milk on the wrist, inside

  where the blood beats time.

  Sometimes a heatwave is too much to take.

  We are not up to it, up for it,

  bare enough, blank enough. We fake

  pleasure but turn towards evening,

  to the clink of a glass, the settling of blackbirds

  the talkative hose in the next garden,

  a shirt with the buttons undone

  and shadows put in by the iron.

  Spanish Irish

  It is your impulse I remember,

  the movement that made you your own,

  the way you laughed when you were told

  some daily but delightful thing,

  and the way you could not be fooled.

  When I saw that man who recalled you

  I put out my hand to keep him

  as if his Spanish Irish face

  must lighten in recognition,

  and I was on the point of speaking

  the pleasure of your name.

  Cowboys

  They rode the ridge those five minutes

  I was caught in traffic

  watching nothing but rain

  falling on slate,

  they rode the beauty of angles,

  they laddered oblivion

  and saved their own lives eight times

  as their boots spun,

  they rode without harness

  astride the ridge of the roof,

  they chucked a rope around the chimney

  before it galloped off,

  they rode in a rain-sweat,

  they might have fallen like snow,

  they hollered across the prairie

  until the roofs echoed.

  Below Hungerford Bridge

  Below Hungerford Bridge the river

  oils its own surface like a seabird.

  Tide fights with current, crowds

  surge to a concert, the light thickens.

  How unaccountable the dead are:

  I think you rear from your photograph

  with an expression of terror: I can’t move.

  Will you let me out of here?

  I think I see T.S. Eliot

  wan in his green make-up

  but slyly playful, a big cat

  gone shabby with keeping.

  The traffic halts. There’s nothing

  but a few pile-driven wharves

  and the river remembering

  its old courses.

  Ophelia

  I dreamed my love became a boat

  on the saltings in winter

  after long treading the green water,

  I dreamed my love flew to the bar

  where the tide teemed with the river,

  and bucked and fought there,

  I dreamed that my love’s timber

  was a bed for eelgrass

  and marsh samphire,

  I dreamed my love became a boat

  on the saltings in winter

  after long treading the green water,

  and beneath his shroud of skin

  was a rib chamber

  for winds to whistle in.
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  Winter bonfire

  My mind aches where I cannot touch it.

  It has put a net over some words,

  it is hiding a poem.

  Who is that man tending flames in his garden,

  and why does he heap armfuls of paper

  on his winter bonfire?

  If I write down anything

  no matter how stealthily

  the poem will know it.

  One A.M.

  Melancholy at one A.M. –

  the poem ended

  or else just quietly

  lying under the table

  gnawing the bone of its being –

  the lighthouse in its bowl of sea

  the town by its holy well

  and the owls hunting.

  Surf hollows the base of the cliffs,

  owls hollow the safety of night