Poems
Extract from ‘Who’s there?’ - 2017
A man called Harold
stands in front of me
head bowed very concentratedly
rolling and unrolling my sleeve
I stand very still
I don’t want to disturb him
I want to carry on standing like this
for as long as he is engaged in this
I can see that this is something he needs to do
and that I am more than happy
to be part of that need
We are two people
standing in the middle of a room
rolling and unrolling a need
Nobby falls like a small rotting stump
slowly sideways
It is a gentle not unhappy thud
on the dark carpet
of mulch and leaves and needles and loam
It is forgiving ground
where Nobby lies on his side alone
There’s a moment of pure unnoticing
where everything appears to be in its place
Nobby on the floor with his smiling face
The world opens out or shuts down
(which is it, which is it)
Alive Alive O - 2015
Deep Sea Diver
There’s a field inside my head
It’s dark and flat and a moon hangs
above it in whose silvery light
nothing appears to live
It’s very mysterious and simple,
on a different planet
to this one here
that moves and is manifold:
each one of the tens of millions of blades of grass
shivers in its singularity;
one sheep’s crusty underwool is home
to a greenbottle settling down to lay
her two hundred and fifty possibilities
while another stares out
of the glazed globe of an eye
not unlike a man who’s lost his mind
but found there cause instead
to be vaguely, dully, afraid of everything
And beneath the sheep
and field and flattened buttercups,
miles and miles beneath
all is shift and shale,
burn and boil
Old underearth,
unseeable, unexplorable;
who scrambles through your soft weak rock,
who swims through your molten ocean,
what holds court at the centre
of your solid iron ball the size of the moon?
Once I plumbed down
level by level
into the sea,
into the realm
of the falling debris,
dead and dying-fish-eating creatures
into the freezing black waters
of blind long-tentacled things;
down among the deepwater canyons I went
and still nowhere near was I
to the outer core
of the earth’s interior,
its massive indoors
when I saw hanging there
a sole, or flounder
a self never before seen
but one who remained unchanged
in the bright beam of my look
And I rose to the surface
like one who had only that to do
where slowly over the years
all that I held dear came loose
and I took to the fields
that covered the earth
like so many soft dressings
and I lay down and looked up at the sky
where I saw a fish hanging
in the black, where I saw a moon
Salvation Jane - 2008
You drew breath
as a boy draws something silver from a river,
an angler from the sea a bale of weed;
as a woman draws herself from a bath,
as blood is drawn from a vein.
You drew breath as thread is drawn through
the eye of a needle, wet sheets through a mangle,
as steel is drawn through a die to make wire
and oil draws up through wick its flag of fire.
You drew breath as a reservoir draws from a well
of ink and a mouth and a nose and eyes are drawn,
as a sheet is drawn from under the dying
and over the heads of the dead.
You drew breath as the last wheezing pint is drawn,
as money and a bow and the tide are drawn;
as up over her head a woman draws
a dress and down onto her a man.
You drew breath as a cloud draws its pall
across the moon, across the car park
where a sky-blue line draws the way
all the way to Maternity; as all in blue
they drew a semi-circle round the bed,
a line and then a knife across the skin;
as in another room someone drew
a curtain round its runner, a hand across
a pair of finished eyes. You drew breath
as they drew you – besmeared and blue – out
and sublime was your fury at being drawn
into this air, this theatre; you drew breath
for the first time – for a second I held mine.
At Home in the Dark
The Fitter
It can take days. The vision, you see, is vital,
without it, it's nothing - a soft toy. Pass me
my eyes, pointing to an old biscuit tin.
It's a kind of hunting all over again, with books
open, photos pinned, ready with needle
and glue. They caught the body years ago,
that was the easy part. But he speaks now
of a soul; what, for instance, did the creature see?
Moorland, scrub, veld, or sodden jungle,
desert, wood, the same indigo skies?
The man who fits the eyes has never left
his semi in Cardiff, but he's a master of precision,
nothing's too small, or extinct. Recently
though, a slip in concentration perhaps -
an upright grizzly in the Natural History
has the eyes of a man stranded in his front room,
the telly blizzarding, the fire gone dead;
a bison's head looms out of a wall, dazed,
like a woman just woken, sleep crusting her eyes;
and a pair of monkeys stare out from a London window,
like lovers come to the end, at a loss
in front of what has been, what is to come,
deaf to the whirr and gong of the clock on the hour.
His eyes brim at night from all the detail.
There's a tea-towel over the mirror and it takes him a while
to sleep. Everything's always awake, he says.