The boy who taught us how to charm the worms
by throwing Fairy Liquid on the grass,
then how to bait our hooks and cast a line
into the pool where little perch would rise,
who knew the Vulcan pinch and the Cruyff turn,
who whistled with his thumb and forefinger,
who understood how damp and sappy wood
burned slowly with a yellowy-green flame,
who showed us how to slap life from a fish,
who knew that hogweed bled a poison sap,
who taught us how to bluff at stud poker,
who told ghost stories in a broken whisper,
who took the first watch and the only watch,
who left the tent at dawn to steal the milk,
has been kicked to death in the car park of a pub
on the other side of the year two thousand,
a land we liked considering at length,
the things we’d do in it and who we’d be,
before we fell asleep while he stood guard
as the fire died and the stars formed up above.
Moorhen
Shy, maternal, unknowable
haunter of water edges, bearing a red
shield like a cross. There is no danger here.
Primitive three-pronged claw
designed for the packed mud and its sheen
of algae: a print from central casting.
Prey-bird in your forest of reeds,
a few scene-changes from being flightless,
you could walk back there again.
And why stop there?
Keep going, little moorhen.
You carry in your heart the code
to scale up, to sprout true teeth,
to rise with the ruby eyes of a dinosaur
from the lake where we hire boats by the hour.
Bananaquits, St Lucia
Floods and landslides block the airport road.
Bridges are down. We’re greeted by a bird
that urges us to quit.
Then days of firsts:
flying fish, twilights that fade in seconds,
a table laid with water pistols to squirt
any finch that rocks up thinking it’s Bede’s sparrow.
The Palm House in the Park gets off the ground
easily, a wrought iron memory palace
filled with light, where I’d sleep under glass
in my pram during winter opening hours,
or so the story goes.
A hummingbird
that doesn’t know the words docks with a flower.
This is only a flying visit. We leave tomorrow.
The Sloth
cold vision
Will have no counterfeit
Palmed off on it.
—Sylvia Plath
From the Deadwater Fell transmitter, a long walk down
towards the lake through planted slopes,
through stacked birthyards of timber sown
in groups
of Norway Spruce, Greek Fir, Scots Pine
neat as new towns, down quiet avenues
of firebreaks, stitched by the pitchy whine
of chainsaws—close by/far off: hard to say—
and after walking miles, through many years
of unclimbed heights and pillared depths, the day
has dropped its guard and a figment hangs in plain view
stopping you in your tracks. Either this is interference
from television (that bad medium
and fate for beasts like sloths that chance
their arm
quietly and in slow motion:
to be chopped up in a forest of fast editing),
or you are channelling a specimen
from an underfunded regional museum
where keepers tried to carefully compose
a dead tree’s dioramic universe
and there, arranged about its height and root and span
other once-living things—from a dual carriageway of ants
whose columns raised the tall standards
of leaves, to the windless canopy’s haunts
for birds
pinned into attitudes of song—
coincided as they never did in their days
or damp, electric nights. The whole display
could be viewed on two levels, so divided
species. You’d wonder: was it the same for us,
if those who gazed from the lower deck of the bus
that brought them loved the leafmould, where scarcely a ray
of skylight reached, and slowly the jaguar would appear
and then by following its eyes
into a deeper shade, the shy
tapir;
hunter and quarry tightly bound
in the coiled spring before the pounce and cry
that never came, an outcome undecided
so all the stronger impressed in a mind
drawn to the dark. Others preferred to wander
up serpentine stairs, past the fronds and vines
of the understory, true home of houseplants, the anaconda
that shivered the perpendiculars into life,
where, at the end of a short climb
into this world of bough and limb
and leaf,
you’d find the sloth. You’d think: The sloth!
It smiled back, always a model of good grace
in its airy offices, grateful for each throng
of gazes crowded in its field of vision.
It read your minds. I’d shinny up and hang
like that, given half a chance . . . Seeing the face
of a classmate cloud with the facticity of its former being
could blow-dart this: That sloth’s got sawdust in its skull –
Still, it thrived beyond the elements
where no sap rose and no rain fell
which meant,
next to the plasticized tree toad,
the Spanish moss, the monkey with the eyes,
and the tree itself, as rootless as a flag pole,
it became the quickest creature in this jungle.
Stared at long enough, you’d swear its mouth
suppressed a steady deepening, a grin
returned, with interest, and slowly you came to realize
how those shirt-hanger toes were moving by degrees
(you used to take magic on trust)
around the clock-face of the tree
and crossed
the shiny, equatorial bark
by increments the adults couldn’t see.
What an afterlife. To hang there, upside down
in another hemisphere. After the moist
and rich rafters of the Atlantic Forest,
the journey home seemed drab and undershadowed.
Years passed. Time lapsed. Some kind of slow ingress or drain
meant every pilgrimage to this land of zero growth
grew less revered, until you shot
a glance so quick that you forgot
the sloth
soon as you re-entered the day,
while it listened to rain drumming on the skylight
during unvisited hours, the short-cased tick
of museum beetles, the totem pole’s dull cracks
as the building cooled. Downstairs, the jaguar laid
his long ambush. All lived their second lives
like that, far longer than their firsts. Until, one night,
a fire burned the roof off that world, and the rain
—for the first time since time stopped—
beaded its fur. The sloth was trapped
again
and cast to star on a ghost train
as Pan (unbilled); singed, motheaten, bent
upright, an interior gargoyle set to pounce
on paying passengers like you, who went
and saw, among the skeletons and bats,
the sloth, caught in a flash, just like it once
appeared to a troop of sheltering monkeys in the light
of an ancient storm. Your childhood wasn’t properly earthed:
the carefully curated tree,
the ghost train in its tented fair
were free
to flicker into life, or fall
from view, every discarnate spectacle
and image creeping to some further lair
like this, where the biomass retires to lick
its wounds. Sitkas and larch tower in their dark
postwar vertical hold, silent and still,
and you catch up with yourself. Neither hide nor hair
of the sloth has been seen in years, but this forest you stand
inside is a kind of mind, the rain
its cold vascular system, planned
to drain
into a manmade lake or climb
the living wood to meet itself in time
on the ends of needles, dendrites, pineal
seed cones human eyes will never see,
where a shy dryad has found a place to dwell
high in the branches of its modal tree
and refuses to have anything to do with you again.
Critique of Pure Reason
Who hasn’t thought of two raindrops
that, by some hydrostatic fluke,
fall side by side the whole way down?
And talking to one another, too!
Like skydivers before they pull
the cord lip-read, except raindrop falls
are graceful, free from all the roar
of air—this being what they were made for.
What conversations to imagine,
though there’s scant time to get beyond
pleasantries, chit chat, the weather,
and seeing as this won’t happen again
their talk turns urgent, to the point.
Entering the last hundred feet
through a broken pane in a station roof
or towards a road japanned with rain
or the opened chute of a sycamore
is an ecstasy of parting—Be good.
I doubt I’ll see you anytime soon—
and at this point the daydream stops
and raindrops stop being raindrops.
Lunula
after Yakuo Tokuken
The moon curves through its million-mile course . . .
You can spot the weirdos a mile away,
telling us how its orbit strays
from earth at the speed a fingernail grows.
The Gadget
An algorithm yoked to a smart microphone
means it can throw my voice. (Years ago, this meant
the cutting out of a comic book coupon
down the dotted line, a postal order sent
to a PO Box on the Avenue of the Americas
where every handshake buzzed and sea monkeys swam;
on the wing and a prayer of knowing what a ‘zip code’ was,
in the hope the whole thing wasn’t an elaborate scam.)
Is that me, trapped in the anchorhold of a post box?
Is that me, in my own pocket, on ringtone?
This is more fun than black soap or x-ray specs.
I laugh on the edge of the centre of attention.
But the gadget can be serious and tactical.
It can throw a thousand lumens and singe eyebrows.
It ships with an optional anodized strike bezel
and defends itself with an avian shrill that could ‘rouse
Saint Michael the Archangel’s flapping host’
according to the literature. More practical
perhaps is the way it calculates how lost
I’d be without it, and chirrups reminders, missed calls.
I’d tell you its name, but then you might guess my password.
I’d tell you its name, but it won’t recognize your voice.
If found, it will thrum in your hand like a frightened bird
as it arms itself and becomes a small device.
Can yours do this? Positioned at my temple
its alchemic palladiums and golds
excite me, bringing pleasure. Or, with a simple
click it can open a vein in spring lancet mode.
Box of sobs, bearer of pipesmoke, putty,
the inkiness of a comic read by torchlight,
it can dowse a water main in the darkest city,
and I’ve wondered if it feels me feeling sorry for it;
this thing that fits in my hand but can never outlive me,
this thing that sulks on standby facing the iron pole
of the planet, that knows my blood type and search history.
It points towards the presence of a soul.
The Keeper of Red Carpets
Come in. Please be careful. Mind your step.
He keeps them in the dark.
It stinks, I know. Like a stable or a paddock.
Perspective slackens like an ankle rope
in a gallery. Carpets sleep off the world,
digesting its flash and glamour,
its royal visits and movie premiers.
He’s dragged last night’s returns in, tired and soiled,
to see to their cigarette burns, studs of gum.
Always the indents of heels:
money’s bitemarks leave a trail.
A few lie about—unfiled—like ruin columns.
Armed with a dandy brush he settles them down
with a beating and a groom,
and talks to them when the stain removal fumes
fuddle him and make his eyes run.
Safe now from so much as a glance,
he sleeps among them in the racks.
The stockroom phone is ringing off the hook.
Somebody’s always looking to make an entrance.
Entry, 1981
potters’ fields, barrows, plague pits
that contain the only record of lives
lived—no cuneiform, glyph, or notch
on a stick, in clay, to mark they came
this way, got taxed, dwelt here, did that—
those who escaped paper and ink
to leave their traces downriver
in blood, colostrum, marrow. So,
to discover we had personal data
was a big deal that April. School hours,
when anything that broke the humdrum
was welcomed—somebody bringing in
a piece of Skylab, the x-ray van, a poet
in class—or the Careers Officer
who pitched up in the sickbay. Summoned
from History, we formed a queue
to have our fortunes told. His machine
shuffled and riffled—blackjack inside
a tumble dryer—our aptitudes
and details matched at dizzying speeds
to a shrinking sector called utopia,
and five minutes later dealt our cards.
The Careers Officer had other schools
to visit, and many more predictions
before sundown. I’ve a memory now
of him pulling a plastic shroud over
his big machine, bossing around
the two caretakers who lugged it out
like a mandarin’s sedan, with him
leading his own procession, a man
whose card was marked but didn’t know it.
Life During the Great Acceleration
I was a data furrier. After mink came sable.
The two escaped and ran down the same cable.
I was a datafarrier. I shod the switchers
that galloped on the spot in air-cooled pastures.
I was a data cooper, a hooper of light:
gallons, firkins, barrels and hogsheads of bytes.
I was a data monger. I sold your histories
to the highest bidder among disinterested third parties.
I was a datafettler, defragger of drives,
a grinder of rough edges, a filer of lives.
I was a datacollier and went down the pit.
At the end of each shift I was strip-searched for pixels or bits.
I was a data tanner. I lifted your skin
while it was still blood-warm with information.
Moss
At the junction where The Wrong Side of the Tracks
meets Memory Lane where the mighty sodium mast
looks down on everything from a kestrel’s height
as the cutting passes through the fossil record
and filed horizons where sandstone turns the green
of a sea wall ferns the green of a banker’s lamp
beyond Broad Green where we trespass on the line
and put our ears to the rail like they did in films
where an Iron Age head listens to the party wall
of a pond where thrown-back carp bask in their status
and all are shaken by timetable where the moon
fits the description of the smoked-out sun
over Manchester to the east which we can hear
as loom rumble through the steel where buddleia
holds the signal at maroon for miles in summer
where we time our blinks with the freight train’s red lantern
so as not to miss a thing where stones pulled up
to cast leave an empty chocolate tray in the earth
where the great spoil banks of the motorway are seeded
and goblins weave down minor roads on mopeds
with the horsepower of sewing machines in fishtail
parkas where the fields brew runoff and plinths
of concrete stand with no discernible function
where the night glitters in a ring around potato drills
and we are young and green in the old and afterwards
stood out in it not knowing the storm has passed
and the first landscape of speed is gathering moss
Sparrowhawk
I’m all in. This I can get behind.
I’m doing my Dracula cape routine.
You look horrified. The starling’s beak
opens. Fuck, help me out here
are the words you’d feed it. Embarrassed
to be caught in such a shameful act?
A pillow fight? A slash through the puffa?
I don’t think so. Just distracted.
Your move. Stop watching me eating.
Hard to tear your gaze away