void of memory: nothing
nil, nix. French dark is the old
song of absence and benighted
prayer. It’s the hiss of blood
in narrowed veins; the shaved
throat of harvested fields
killed game, baled straw
the inheld breath of woods
where a barn owl floats
in a pale aura, its sudden
migraine bringing you awake.
French dark has the numb
weight of human guilt where
the living struggle to exist like
thoughts without history;
by day it’s sun-struck glass, a
a windscreen blazing, a straight
road, your furious blinking
startling its after-image –
that inky thumbprint on your eyes.
Fricative
The poem was wary but
in love: it set out in search of its
Other, it set out on sturdy
legs through buttercups and sheep
shit, through mare’s tail and
lady’s smock and eyebright’s light
hail on the grass; it scooted
like a baby rabbit in fear of the new
life it had; it eeled through
a hulled swan’s ribs then into a blue
plastic bag, as beautiful as
anything it had seen because everything
was good, because it was in
love with its voice, with crushed herbs
black-bellied clouds, the
unassailable smell of things – scents
of dirt, death or procreation –
ewes trailing their afterbirth, dugs
tight with milk, tight as the
poem was, sculling its skiff of images
through rivers of grass, cloud
creeks, fjords of tidal blue sky
the hydrogen of galaxies.
The little raft of words disintegrated
and formed again with new
meanings or without meanings:
one minute a fridge-magnet
babble, the next the holy bible, the
next just itself: a poem
dissolving into sprigs of speckled
hawthorn blossom or a line
of ducklings piping to their mother
with all the uncertainty and
certainty of a language without
words under the lexicon
of the clouds’ dark bellies which
should by now have awoken
the old fallacy. How cool, how
confident it was until it
trod on something hidden, a thing
formed of metal’s stiff
grammar, its unforgiving syntax
unfurling below a dune of
unexpectedly hot sand; then orange
fire and the faraway sound
of its own legs crackling, crumpling
everything into the shock of
its body blown to bits – astonishing
stumps where its lines, caesuras
and sunlit stanzas might have tip
toed into further doubts
towards conclusions it could never
reach through an everlasting
fastidiousness, the scrupulous grace
that is a kind of joy; its aesthetics
a tremulous fluttering now, all ribbons
tattered, the way metre falters
and is recast as fricatives pent in
the poem’s mouth to
pronounce the other selves it
sought and recognises
here without affect; as if it had
walked calmly through
a city’s stammering walls of plate
glass, or time’s reprise or
a night-tarnished lake; as if it
had trudged into the
vastness of nothing much at all.
Io’s Sisters
The usual English summer:
early heat stoking speedwell
dog’s mercury stealing
a march, then months
of drizzle until rosehips
were fading coals
in the hedgerows
sloes a hidden bruise
slugs cruising a lacework
of green and bodies coming
home under Union Jacks
salutes, tributes, the Last Post.
Then on the fading cusp
of August, cows calling
nightlong into rain that
pelted the village:
knock-kneed, teats dragging
in mud, their lungs’ bellows
working the drenched ember
of summer, as if Hera’s spite
stranded them beyond
phonetical love; their eyes
goaded by flies, their tongues
turning a hoarse cud of longing.
Even in darkness
we question their sad
calling with the glib surety
of words, shaping these
smallest sounds as if glass
had broken in our mouths
to join up again as meaning
measure the loss in their
inhuman mooning yet
still fall short of ours.
Engorged, drooling
teat-sore, they drag their
banishment through wet
fields, call for their stolen
calves in pain so large
so inexpressible so deep
it erupts from the colossal
absence they circle as if
they have known in one
form, one incarnation, one
language of consonant
delight a delicacy they
could never speak in this
brute sphere, nor ever be
transfigured to themselves.
Happened
I saw the spider at its work, couldn’t
help it – even after making love – even
after Ingleborough rising through
aluminium vapour as if streaming
bright metallic dust. The spider, leisurely
at the kitchen window winding its sarong
around a louse like any butcher wrapping
meat (my mother pulling me to the street
corner shop to buy lungs for the cat, to
gawp at death). The spider toiling even
after sun had stared in at the blinds
after the lawn’s fine grass had tilted under
dew, adept at its old trade; even after
pavements in Rangoon washed clean
the monks shot down, bullets lashed
into the neem tree; even after Iraq’s epic
genealogy of loss, its Gilgamesh of names
inscribed upon each day where we’d buried
conscience the way a kill is wrapped –
hidden – the spider skating over torn silk
with its haversack of palpitating life.
There was home-baked bread on the
table, the espresso grumbling steam
the scent of coffee, and beans dark as
healed skin. There was honey from
Cumbrian hives varnishing the table’s
oak; there was the planet warming
up, we guessed – you’ll know now how
right we were. But what you don’t
know was that a woman was brushing
out her sable cloud of hair into that
moment’s scent of lavender cologne;
that there was a tap gushing, the
water garrulous, then silent. Do you
know what a spider does to live?
Then imagine it. Then see the day lapping
at the window, leaking in. That was
then, you’ll say, another time, the past
scrubbing something from your
fingernails, but wondering idly if her
&n
bsp; breasts were warm against my
hand, and if it happened like I said
if it happened at all: our flat
topped mountain’s blaze of silver
mist, its bog cotton, harebells
and pyre of cloud still there to see.
Geraniums
on the Cardiac Ward
You brought them to
my white room –
white mist outside
and faintest trees –
three flowers purple
as a cardinal’s hood
each petal delicately
etched
elegantly opulent.
That Indian summer
turned to gales
chasing paper on
the golf course;
the flowers lived
three days then
dropped at my
bedside
the filaments of
each anther blown.
I swam out from
morphine dreams
a golden river
god roused from
sleep to see them
scattered there
not knowing if
I’d ever wake
with you again.
Then winter sun
stark-lighting
each window
white sheets
billowing to spiral
incense-smoke
my heart wired
to a VDU that
threw its skipping
rope of life over
all that room’s
stalled time
and stillness
its dreamed-over
days a fading draft
of all I never
wanted to forget.
Montalto
The path slinks
above stone huts;
derelict, dung-floored
their stacks of dried
olivewood inhaling
horizons’ turquoise
their smoke of
burnt-down suns.
Terraces fall
to rosemary
balm of valerian
wild marjoram;
the valley sieving
lavender mist onto
aprons of cedar
and bristle pine.
I’m naked in
the river pool
its sudden green
gasping depth
swimming its
shoal-glimmer
dust scrim
indigo veil of
butterfly wings
the quenched
blade chill of
deep sunk rock.
Martins slowmo
above a painted
church – arrow
tailed, white arsed –
they ride a soaring
instinct only to rear
their young in humble
spittle-mud below: how
like us they are to
slum such coruscating
visions of height
and roofless air.
Pylons simmer
electrifying altitude;
each mountain
pass, each scraped
out col drifts belly
full of thunder.
Clouds saturate
and darken; the
river’s sacral flow
quickens, deepens
to cataract my frozen
thighs, as if I was some
spirito del’acqua rising
you say, laughing, bent
double under hissing
trees, your smile satirical
and unconvinced
as summer rain.
Easter Messaging
You text me snow on Whernside hill, a
verge of daffodils in hail – their trembling
carillons – then black-faced ewes
lagged by thorns in the east wind’s numb
degrees of ice. A continent apart, I mail you
the brief dusk of Abuja, the way those hills
like puys behind the town go milky grey
before a storm, that neon sign pinking a
street of royal palms, cars’ headlamps
silaging the night; then remember
to say that yesterday I saw a net of stars
cast from a mango hull of moon, the port
light’s wide-eyed constancy. Now a
space in which I brew black tea. Then yours
to tell our son is home tonight to keep you
company, down in the kitchen cutting up
courgettes. That brings the blue vein in
conflate in deeper brown, sheer aureoles
of watered silk. Here, the screen flares, a
crushed mosquito specks my arm; at home, the fire’s
down, he fetches logs, the door rattles in
its frame. I’m at the window’s double pane
where a siren scours the street below, such
a long fall of heat ebbing at the glass. I’ll
send you this as well, pushing words at
pixel-glittering space, remembering
the moon again, its birth-marked face
yawning on the wing as we turned to land
remembering your hand leading me to
bed before I left again for Africa. He’s stroking
bluesy chords; your lips are wet with Vei Cavour.
I don’t say how I think that nothing dies, yet
see him bent at my guitar to make its birch
throat sing, the way he will when we go under
grass and snow to launch the spring, the
ecstatic feet of lambs that earth electrifies.
Moon Illusion
Our biggest moon all winter
ripens over Kingsdale, one day away
from fullness, left-side licked
the way a horse laps snow.
A roan mare whinnies for her
mate; I passed a horse and rider in
the dusk, remember now she
raised her whip to greet me.
Moon floats towards a snow
dappled ridge; this moment
is cochineal, sunset blazing
at a cleft in basalt cloud.
Moss on the paddock fence is
this amazing green; my heart
pads out towards night’s deepest
shades, the licked moon’s
illusion, the mare’s inexplicable
loss; the way all sense of scale
is changed this close to dying
where everything is huge.
Cusp
December sky turns fire to earth
Sagittarius to Capricorn, mutable
to cardinal, the archer to the goat.
Windows’ white cataracts of
slowly pouring glass are blind
to the thinning milk of dawn.
Sleep’s vapour leaves our mouths:
in mine a jagged cusp of tooth my
tongue works, raw with speech.
Five degrees of frost sift over
fields; rabbits frozen to the road
their guts scarved out by crows.
Sky is cooling steel, the waterfall
a stiffened crinoline; cow parsley
a paper-cut, air the thinnest blade.
Herdwicks limp between thistles
fresh soil mounds: moles thresh
soil’s black curd below, breasting
revetments, tunnelling towards
faint susurrations where worms
glide in mucous, eating the dark.
We leave the house to itself, chose
a route, hike all day, silent as if our
thoughts never touch, fingers
stung by cold’s asp, breath’s white
grief in our hair, following the track
to the gill’s ruined mines – their
lost lode, slag-scatter,
milled
spoil, stubs of clay pipes hollow as
hawk’s bones. We creak over ice
panes, duck under thorn trees
rimed with spider silk: skeins of
all their deadly industry revealed.
We walk the valley’s shadow-side
back to a house dug so deep in
clay no weight of coal can heat
its glacial stone; flames braze
the fire-back, suck air through
cracked sash and dropped door.
No moon blurs clouds; a single
planet sets at the horizon, its slowly
swinging plumb line telling depths
of night so cold we hardly sleep – the
way we were as kids in our unheated
homes, the future somewhere else
but always curving back to us.
Each word hurts my tongue which
finds a chasm in the small space
mortality begins. Tonight, we
enter a new house, the night sky’s
shattered ice of stars, only
part awake, sapped by the febrile
cholera of dreams, our fading heart
rate, cold’s enchantment, the
clock’s false account of each
inseparable moment – cusp
of love’s last, longest state.
ELECTRICITY
èle’ctric a & n Of, charged with, capable of generating, operated or produced by, electricity; suddenly exciting, as if caused by electricity. – OED
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.” – Michael Faraday