Counting Backwards Read online

  as we eat a meal out on the balcony

  but the door refuses to open

  and although my sisters have prepared food elaborately

  you do not advance to us, smiling.

  The children have put sauce on the side of their plates

  thinking you will come and swipe a chip,

  thinking this meal is one you cooked

  as always, humming to yourself in the kitchen,

  breaking off to tap the barometer

  and watch starlings roost on the pier.

  How long it takes to stop being busy with that day,

  each second of it like the shard

  of a pot which someone has laboured to dig up

  and piece together without knowledge

  of language or context.

  Slow, slow, the deciphering.

  The Tarn

  Still as the water is

  the wind draws on it in iron

  this is the purple country, the border

  where we threw ourselves down

  onto the heather.

  Even the lapwing knows how to pretend.

  She runs with her broken wing

  to hide the fact of her young.

  A cold small rain spatters the tarn

  the wind writes on the dark water.

  The Gift

  You never wanted the taste

  of the future on your tongue.

  How often, hurriedly, I saw you

  swallow a premonition.

  If the gift comes, you told me,

  do not let it in.

  Obedient, I wrote poems

  but the gift still came

  though the doors were bolted.

  I’m here, it told me

  to make you know things

  but not their names.

  What Will You Say

  (after Baudelaire)

  What will you say, my soul, poor and alone,

  and my heart with its heart sucked out,

  What will you say tonight to the one

  (if she’s really the one this time)?

  totheverybeautifultotheverygoodtotheverydear

  Ah no. Speak clearly. What will you say

  to her, so good, so fair, so dear

  whose heavenly gaze has made your desert flower?

  You’ll say you’ve had enough. No more.

  You’ve no pride left but what goes to praise her.

  No strength left but in her douce power,

  no senses but what she gives.

  Sweet authority! Douce power!

  or do you mean you’re shit-scared

  to go anywhere without her?

  Is she your mother?

  Her look clothes us in light.

  Her ghost is the scent of a rose.

  Let her ghost dance with the air

  let its torch blaze through the streets –

  You’d like that, no doubt.

  When you’ve given up running after her

  her ghost will issue commands

  to do what you’ve already done.

  It’s over with you. If she won’t feed you

  you must stay hungry. She is your guardian

  angel, your bodyguard, no one

  comes close, you can’t love anyone.

  Cloud

  Nature came to us abhorring sharp edges

  raw sunlight and the absence of cloud:

  it is November deep in the mist

  and by a gate a man stands lost in thought –

  how that farm hunkers ruddily in a crease of land

  and the dog yaps into the twilight –

  We used to say we were walking in the cloud

  do you remember? – and we were born there

  natives of chrysanthemums, bonfire afternoons,

  makers of the finest shades of meaning.

  Low over the hill the cloud hangs.

  Mist fills the serrations of plough.

  I Have Been Thinking of You So Loudly

  I have been thinking of you so loudly

  that perhaps as you walked down the street you turned

  on hearing your name’s decibels

  sing from pavement, hoardings and walls

  until like glass from last night’s disasters

  your name shattered. Soon sweepers will come

  and all my love of you will vanish

  as if it had never been.

  Meanwhile, hurry before lateness catches you,

  run until the wind blows out your coat,

  don’t stand irresolute

  like me, thinking too loudly.

  The Kingdom of the Dead

  The kingdom of the dead is like an owl

  in the heart of the city, hunting

  at the Downs’ margin.

  Over Carter’s Steam Fair,

  over the illicitly parked cars

  where lovers tighten and quicken,

  it glides with a tilt of the wing.

  The kingdom of the dead is like a mouse

  in the owl’s eye, a streak of brown

  at the Downs’ margin.

  Under the bright hooves of Carter’s horses it hides

  this mouse, a drop of water

  which flows in its terror

  into a beer can.

  The kingdom of the dead is like the boot

  of a boy in the bliss of fair-time

  rucking the grass at the Downs’ margin.

  Carter’s is turning out now, he runs

  in and out of the horses

  and kicks the beer can

  into the touch of heaven.

  The Last Heartbeat

  The last heartbeat washes the body clean of pain

  in a tide of endorphins,

  the last sound coils into the ears, and stirs

  ossicles, cochlea, the tiny hairs.

  For a day or more

  long after the onlookers

  have turned away

  thinking it’s all over

  the firework show of synapses

  and the glorious near-touch

  of axons in the brain

  slowly dies down

  to a last, exquisite connection.

  The Old Mastery

  Weary and longing to go home

  you dress slowly.

  Not much of your wardrobe likes you.

  You reach for those trousers again

  and buff up your shoes

  with the old mastery.

  The Overcoat

  It wears a smell of earth, not air.

  I am under it forever.

  Sometimes I sleep, sometimes I shiver.

  There is a map and I am on it.

  the bed’s icy geography

  is iron, dust-devil, ticking.

  Sometimes I fetch from my dreams

  the shapes of neighbours, friends,

  the smell of rubber perishing.

  Sometimes the bed-springs groan

  under the weight of the coat.

  It will not let me out.

  I hold fear so steadily

  it stays all in one piece.

  I hold the coat’s collar.

  I hold my breath while the ghost

  that lives inside it slides past me

  and is bequeathed.

  Window Cleaners at Ladysmith Road

  Some swear by vinegar and some by newspaper.

  Some brandish a shammy leather.

  Here they come with their creamy forearms,

  their raw red hands, pinnies and aprons

  until they stand at my shoulder.

  I smell them but don’t dare turn.

  They are judging smears on the glass,

  and as for me and the present

  they’ll soon have that off.

  A warped shine shows the street buckling

  into the past, as helpless as I am

  not to reflect those boys on the corner

  smoking Woodbines from the tobacconist’s

  which no longer exists.
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  I Heard You Sing in the Dark

  (for Tess)

  I heard you sing in the dark

  a few clear notes on the stairs

  a blackbird in the cold of dusk

  forever folding your wings

  and slipping, rustling down

  past leaves and ivy knots

  to where your song bubbled

  out of the crevices

  into cold, clear February dusk.

  I heard the notes plain

  rising to the surface

  of evening and then down again

  almost chuckling, in a blackbird’s cold

  liquid delight, and so I turned

  on the landing, and you were gone.

  La Recouvrance

  The schooner La Recouvrance is almost at the horizon now, sailing south-west. Much closer, the sea is recovering ground. In town the equinoctial spring tides will bring water up the slipway, over the wall and into the sandbagged streets. But here the tide can rise as far as it likes. This cove will be swallowed up soon. Anyone foolish enough to wait too long before they climb the rocks will be washed away like their own footprints. Each small, collapsing wave darkens another arc of the white sand. If you watch it like this you’ll be entranced and you won’t move until it’s too late. Today the sea has a particular smell that isn’t like sea at all. If you had your eyes closed you would guess at flowers in the distance. Nothing sweet or perfumed, but a sharp, early narcissus.

  You’ve brought the child down here with you, although it’s not very safe. You lift her over the clefts and gullies, carrying everything you need in a backpack and coming back for her. She waits for you obediently, perched above the drop.

  There are just the two of you in the sea. Thigh deep, and now waist deep. The incoming tide pushes against you, and you hold the child’s hand, but there are no rips here. Every so often a wave lifts her off her feet. She can swim quite strongly now, and the lift of the sea makes her laugh, showing her sharp little teeth. She dips her head under a wave and brings it up. Her long hair is plastered to her skull and water streams down her face, shining.

  You say it’s time to go now. She swims into your arms and her strong, cold little body clings to yours. She winds her legs around your waist. Together you stagger towards the shore, but while you are still in the sea’s embrace you turn back to see La Recouvrance one last time. Her tall masts have vanished. Already she has dipped below the horizon, as she sails away to the bottom of the world.

  The Filament

  Step by step, holding the thread,

  step by step into the dark,

  step by step, holding a flag of light

  where the tunnel in secrecy closes

  like fist or crocus.

  My footsteps follow your footsteps

  into the dark where they are still

  after all these years

  just beyond my hearing,

  so I call to you in the language

  that even now we speak

  because you taught me to be haunted

  by the catch and space of it –

  because we paid for it.

  At the tunnel’s end a black lake,

  a small, desultory boat,

  the pluck of the water

  as the boat shapes from the shore

  while a boatman reads his newspaper

  with a desultory air.

  The cave roof glistens.

  The ribs and flanks of the chamber

  all give back the dark water.

  I am ready for the journey –

  Shall we take ship together? –

  Shall we lift my torch into the boat

  and sit athwart?

  Shall we pass our hands quickly

  through crocus and saffron

  like children playing with matches?

  Even if the boat never sets sail

  we can be content,

  and I won’t look at your face

  or write another word.

  Glad of These Times

  (2007)

  For Maurice Dunmore

  1928-2006

  City lilacs

  In crack-haunted alleys, overhangs,

  plots of sour earth that pass for gardens,

  in the space between wall and wheelie bin,

  where men with mobiles make urgent conversation,

  where bare-legged girls shiver in April winds,

  where a new mother stands on her doorstep and blinks

  at the brightness of morning, so suddenly born –

  in all these places the city lilacs are pushing

  their cones of blossom into the spring

  to be taken by the warm wind.

  Lilac, like love, makes no distinction.

  It will open for anyone.

  Even before love knows that it is love

  lilac knows it must blossom.

  In crack-haunted alleys, in overhangs,

  in somebody’s front garden

  abandoned to crisp packets and cans,

  on landscaped motorway roundabouts,

  in the depth of parks

  where men and women are lost in transactions

  of flesh and cash, where mobiles ring

  and the deal is done – here the city lilacs

  release their sweet, wild perfume

  then bow down, heavy with rain.

  Crossing the field

  To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.

  RUSSIAN PROVERB

  To cross the field on a sunset of spider-webs

  sprung and shining, thistle heads

  white with tufts that are harvest

  tended and brought to fruit by no one,

  to cross the long field as the sun goes down

  and the whale-back Scillies show damson

  twenty miles off, as the wind sculls

  out back, and five lighthouses

  one by one open their eyes,

  to cross the long field as it darkens

  when rooks are homeward, and gulls

  swing out from the tilt of land

  to the breast of ocean – now is the time

  the vixen stirs, and the green lane’s

  vivid with footprints.

  A field is enough to spend a life in.

  Harrow, granite and mattress springs,

  shards and bones, turquoise droppings

  from pigeons that gorge on nightshade berries,

  a charm of goldfinch, a flight of linnets,

  fieldfare and January redwing

  venturing westward in the dusk,

  all are folded in the dark of the field,

  all are folded into the dark of the field

  and need more days

  to paint them, than life gives.

  Litany

  For the length of time it takes a bruise to fade

  for the heavy weight on getting out of bed,

  for the hair’s grey, for the skin’s tired grain,

  for the spider naevus and drinker’s nose

  for the vocabulary of palliation and Macmillan

  for friends who know the best funeral readings,

  for the everydayness of pain, for waiting patiently

  to ask the pharmacist about your medication

  for elastic bandages and ulcer dressings,

  for knowing what to say

  when your friend says how much she still misses him,

  for needing a coat although it is warm,

  for the length of time it takes a wound to heal,

  for the strange pity you feel

  when told off by the blank sure faces

  of the young who own and know everything,

  for the bare flesh of the next generation,

  for the word ‘generation’, which used to mean nothing.

  Don’t count John among the dreams

  (i.m. John Kipling, son of Rudyard Kipling,

  who died in the Battle of Loos in 1915)

  Don’t count Joh
n among the dreams

  a parent cherishes for his children –

  that they will be different from him,

  not poets but the stuff of poems.

  Don’t count John among the dreams

  of leaders, warriors, eagle-eyed stalkers

  picking up the track of lions.

  Even in the zoo he can barely see them –

  his eyes, like yours, are half-blind.

  Short, obedient, hirsute

  how he would love to delight you.

  He reads every word you write.

  Don’t count John among your dreams.

  Don’t wangle a commission for him,

  don’t wangle a death for him.

  He is barely eighteen.

  Without his spectacles, after a shell-blast,

  he will be seen one more time

  before the next shell sees to him.

  Wounding, weeping from pain,

  he will be able to see nothing.