Counting Backwards Read online

and the poem makes its rest

  by turning and turning

  like a hare in its form.

  Lemon and stars

  The stars come so close

  they seem not to be shining

  but to be remaking the world

  in their own pattern

  and we seem to be caught in their dust

  like the fingerprints of creatures

  not yet imagined.

  Besides, there is the starlight

  not enough to make star-shadow

  but enough, in the absence of moon

  to heap up darkness

  just here, under the lemon tree.

  Cutting open the lemons

  After all they didn’t taste of salt

  or the winter storms.

  I had not expected the insides to be so

  offhandedly daffodil –

  lemons should be more malleable

  to the imagination –

  but like babies they are sure

  that the planting and tending

  gives no right over them.

  Hearing owls

  The dark fabric of night not torn

  but seamed with the flight of owls

  hunting the margin of the Downs.

  The houses pull their roofs over them,

  the sleepers plunge beneath their bedclothes

  at the onrush of wings,

  the mouse runs with its trail of urine.

  The owl pulls off a miracle

  as it homes in

  like a jump-jet in mid-Atlantic

  sighting its landing area

  in a waste of sea slop.

  The mouse is done. The owl swallows

  while a car passes, knowing nothing

  of the owl agape at its own fortune.

  ‘Often they go just before dawn’

  A wash of stars covers the sky

  before the day comes,

  before the slippery quickness of brush-strokes

  dries to a surface,

  a wash of stars covers the sky

  announcing with pallor

  that they are going out

  or that something else –

  call it a day, or dawn –

  is about to come in.

  Quick, quick, get up the ladder

  and paint in more brightness

  for the stars to be dark against.

  May voyage

  A May evening and a bright moon

  riding easily in its mystery,

  you come out onto the balcony

  and gaze there, relaxed, intent

  as the horizon softens towards France

  and the moon voyages, voyages.

  What storms have you seen!

  Such a hurricane

  when wind hurled around the building

  like an express train,

  but you fought it out of your home

  and now you note the turning of the tide

  as the moon voyages, voyages

  from peace into deeper peace

  from old age into youth,

  behind you the French windows are open

  ahead of you only the shining

  sea and the lovely work of the moon

  as it voyages, voyages

  into the calm.

  Out of the Blue

  (2001)

  Out of the Blue

  Speak to me in the only language

  I understand, help me to see

  as you saw the enemy plane

  pounce on you out of the sun:

  one flash, cockling metal. Done.

  Done for, they said, as he spun earthward

  to the broad chalk bosom of England.

  Done for and done.

  You are the pilot of this poem,

  you speaks its language, thumbs-up

  to the tall dome of June.

  Even when you long to bail out

  you’ll stay with the crate.

  Done for, they said, as his leather jacket

  whipped through the branches.

  Done for and done.

  Where are we going and why so happy?

  We ride the sky and the blue,

  we are thumbs up, both of us

  even though you are the owner

  of that long-gone morning,

  and I only write the poem.

  You own that long-gone morning.

  Solo, the machine-gun stitched you.

  One flash did for you.

  Your boots hit the ground

  ploughing a fresh white scar in the downland.

  They knew before they got to him,

  from the way he was lying

  done for, undone.

  But where are we going?

  You come to me out of the blue

  strolling the springy downland

  done for, thumbs up, oil on your hands.

  The man on the roof

  When my grandmother died my father eulogised her.

  There she was, coming home with the pram

  and her crowd of children

  when something strange in the light

  or its impediment getting at her from heaven

  made her look up to see one of her children –

  her eldest child, her son, him –

  up on the roof, riding the horse of the homestead

  with wild heels, daring her to defy him

  and get him down. She got him down

  with a word, as he remembers it,

  her lovely penny-pale face looking up at his

  from the path where her children swarmed and shouted

  and it was this

  he remembered when her coffin lay under his hands:

  the roof, and his coming down.

  When our priest died I remembered him

  up on the roof, mending a tile

  – a little job on hand, and a hammer

  and air of busyness to keep him busy

  while he pretended not to be pretending

  to ride the roof in its wild beauty

  over the unfamilied air of Liscannor

  and half-way to America. Maybe.

  Or maybe merely tapping the tile in

  like a good workman.

  ‘How beautiful it was up on the roof,’

  he said to the people at Mass.

  My father touched his mother’s coffin

  and did not say how golden her hair was.

  Even I remember how golden it was

  when the grey knot was undone.

  Now they are gone into the ground,

  both of them. They are riding on the roof,

  their wild heels daring us to defy them,

  and we are here on the ground

  penny-pale and gaping.

  They will not tell

  how beautiful it is. I will not ask them.

  Giraffes in Hull

  Walking at all angles

  to where the sky ends,

  wantons with crane-yellow necks

  and scarlet legs

  stepping eastward, big eyes

  supping the horizon.

  Watch them as they go, the giraffes

  breast-high to heaven,

  herding the clouds.

  Only Hull has enough sky for them.

  Jacob’s drum

  This is Jacob’s drum

  how he beats on it how he fights on it

  how he splits every crack of the house

  how he booms

  how he slams

  hair wet-feathered sweat gathering

  red-face Jacob throwing his money down

  all on the drum his one number

  beating repeating

  O Jacob

  don’t let go of it

  don’t let anyone take your drum

  don’t let anyone of all of them

  who want you to be drumless

  beating your song on nothing

  Jacob they’d do it

  believe them

  it’s time they say


  to put your drum away

  do you remember the glow-worm Jacob?

  how we looked and nearly touched it

  but you didn’t want to hurt it?

  I thought it was electric

  some trash a child dropped

  some flake of neon

  stuck to a rock

  don’t put your finger on the light

  you said and I stood still then

  glow-worm Jacob remember it

  I had the word but it was you

  who told me it was living

  and now I say to anyone

  don’t touch Jacob’s drum

  That old cinema of memory

  O that old cinema of memory

  with the same films always showing.

  The censor has been at work again.

  Is he protecting me, or am I protecting him?

  This trailer’s a horror, I won’t watch it,

  this one makes my heart burn with longing,

  this is a mist of interrupted shapes

  urgently speaking, just out of earshot –

  experimental, I call it.

  The projectionist should be on double time.

  He’s got a kid in with him, they’re so bored

  they play Brag rather than watch the screen.

  The ice-cream girl’s tired of pacing the aisles.

  She rests her thumbs in the tray-straps, and dreams.

  It’s a rainy afternoon in Goole

  and this cinema’s the last refuge

  for men in macs and kids bunking off school.

  They yawn, pick their nails and dream

  by text-message. Look at the screen,

  it says CU, CU, CU.

  Depot

  The panting of buses through caves of memory:

  school bus with boys tossing off

  in the back seat when I was eight,

  knowing the words, not knowing

  what it was those big boys were murkily doing,

  and the conductor with fierce face

  yelling down farm lanes at kids as they ran

  Can you not get yourselves up in the morning?

  The sway of buses into town

  the way the unlopped branches of lime

  knocked like sticks against railings,

  the way women settled laps and bags,

  shut their eyes, breathed out on a cigarette,

  gave themselves to nothing for ten minutes

  as someone else drove the cargo of life,

  until the conductor broke their drowse

  in a flurry of one-liners,

  and they found coin in their fat purses.

  A lorry-load of stuff

  It was the green lorry with its greasy curtain

  like a leather apron,

  backing into the lane behind the terrace

  for a lorry-load of stuff.

  Cardboard boxes of books from the last move,

  not opened since. That’s thirteen years

  where A Beginner’s Guide to Birdsong

  and Marxism Matters have not been wanted.

  Two plastic caterpillars, clattering

  like tongues. They were new once,

  expensive enough to keep for no purpose.

  The boxes exist, though they don’t fit.

  A turquoise baby-bath, impregnated

  with the white-knuckle grip of one baby

  and the fat relaxed fist of the other.

  One afternoon it served as a sledge

  before the proper sledge, this one

  (which we also don’t want). Remember those woods,

  and our stopped breath that headlong

  downhill with both boys crammed in front.

  A proper lorry-load of stuff

  needs bits of wood, likely shapes

  that finally won’t hold shelves up.

  It needs a toddler’s bike

  hand-painted silver by a nine-year-old

  then torn apart to make a go-kart.

  If there is old food (lentils,

  tins with rust-spots, onion sets

  that never got planted, or could be gladioli)

  so much the better. In a climate too cold

  for cockroaches, you can afford to be careless

  of larder shelves. And your lorry-load

  is incomplete without the photographs

  you kept taking, badly, from duty,

  interrupting the happiest moments

  as you saw them. The booty

  of time, it was going to be. Lose them

  to the panting of the lorry’s engine

  impatient now, throbbing, and to the man

  parting the curtain, chucking stuff in.

  Virgin with Two Cardigans

  There’s a stone set in the car-park wall

  down at knee-level

  which commends her.

  There are these relics: a scrap of wool,

  a lost button, an unfollowed pattern.

  There is her stone, set in the car-park wall

  its flinty lettering so bright cut

  it would blind her.

  Here, on this path, slowly, leaning

  on two sticks, she still comes.

  Trying to know all the new faces

  she looks about her, tortoise-sweet.

  How patiently she wants God to unbutton

  her two cardigans,

  but he is slow.

  Here, buttoning her cardigans

  with lumpy fingers she bungles

  in the lee of a breeze-block wall.

  Virgin with Pineapple

  Virgin with the Globe as a Golden Ball

  Virgin with Two Cardigans

  pushing a pearl button

  into the gnarl of its hole.

  Ice coming

  (after Doris Lessing)

  First, the retreat of bees

  lifting, heavy with the final

  pollen of gorse and garden,

  lugging the weight of it, like coal sacks

  heaped on lorry-backs

  in the ice-cream clamour of August.

  The retreat of bees, lifting

  all at once from city gardens –

  suddenly the roses are scentless

  as cold probes like a tongue,

  crawling through the warm crevices

  of Kew and Stepney. The ice comes

  slowly, slowly, not to frighten anyone.

  Not to frighten anyone. But the Snowdon

  valleys are muffled with avalanche,

  the Thames freezes, the Promenade des Anglais

  clinks with a thousand icicles, where palms

  died in a night, and the sea

  of Greece stares back like stone

  at the ice-Gorgon, white as a sheet.

  Ice squeaks and whines. Snow slams

  like a door miles off, exploding a forest

  to shards and matchsticks. The glacier

  is strangest, grey as an elephant,

  too big to be heard. Big-foot, Gorgon –

  a little mythology

  rustles before it is stilled.

  So it goes. Ivy, mahonia, viburnum

  lift their fossilised flowers

  under six feet of ice, for the bees

  that are gone. As for being human

  it worked once, but for now

  and the foreseeable future

  the conditions are wrong.

  Cyclamen, blood-red

  Cyclamen, blood-red, fly into winter

  against the grey grain of concrete

  eight floors up.

  Winged, poised, intricate,

  tough as old boots

  flying the kite

  of pure colour

  season to season

  under a laurel leaf

  they make rebellion.

  Piers Plowman

  The Crucifixion & Harrowing of Hell

  (from the C text)

  ‘It is finished,’ said Christ. Blood ebbed from his
face.

  He was wan and pitiful as a dying prisoner.

  The lord of light closed his eyes to the light,

  day shrank back, the sun darkened in terror;

  The temple walls collapsed into rubble

  solid rock split, and it seemed black night.

  Earth shivered like living flesh,

  the dead heard, and emerged

  rising up from their deep-dug graves

  to tell the world why this storm was wrenching it.

  ‘For a bitter battle,’ said one dead man walking,

  ‘Life and Death are wrestling in the darkness

  and no one knows who shall be the winner

  until Sunday, when the sun rises,’

  that said, he sank down

  a dead man, into deep earth again.

  Some said it was God’s own son who died so well.

  Truly this was the son of God,

  Some said he was a sorcerer, and practised witchcraft,

  ‘Let’s try him, find out if he’s really dead

  or still alive, before they take down the body.’

  There were two thieves that suffered death

  on the cross beside Christ. An officer came

  and broke their bones, the arms and legs on each man.