A cure taking hold,
Restructured in the earth
Us on the ends of telephone lines
Can’t question the meaning of life
Say what you think
What you would like to say,
To tell everyone before you go
What life was like when you were young
What the universe is like out there
What is dark matter?
Forced to acknowledge that what we see is only
A tiny fraction of what is there
Not content with what we can see,
We go searching for what we can’t
Plunging spears into dark water
Hoping for a fish
Waving nets in thin air
Planets, white dwarfs, dark stars, particles
The universe is full of dust
Not much to say
Most already said
Desire lines would lead to where?
A hot seashore with soft sand & shells & calm blue water
To sparkle through like bubbles
A driftwood hut empty, waiting to shelter us
Already sculpted & smoothed
To a mountain meadow full of wild flowers
Abbruzzo before the wars, & especially the rebuilding
When we all got impatient & greedy
And far too rich and alone.
Sunday 13 September [Pescara]
Substituting your kitchen with its linoleum
For the kitchen of my childhood
With its linoleum
And another mother, yours,
Busy at the stove
And different smells
And out the window, red roofs,
Not grey, not steaming chimneys,
But ochre walls, peeling in the sun
And the sound of other people’s lives,
Their arguments, their television,
And the smells of their Sunday lunches
Spilling over the boundaries of houses
Where our neighbourhood was silent silent as stone, and stern
And stern, and stone
In England we live without roots Sunday sounds of ice-cream vans
Without people around our table Playing Greensleeves and
Telling us of uncles & cousins stopping mid-phrase, and
Small conspiracies between grandsons
& grandmothers overhead the antique
planes circling
Fig trees, as if your leaves could hide droning like flies
The immodesty of your arching trunks
Totem poles of buttocks thighs & midriffs
Ruffs & dimples & labial folds
Your fruit swelling straight from a branch
Your leaves suggesting modesty
In false modesty, hiding nothing
Shameless fig tree
Some clutch of maidens, victims of a
Jealous god
...
After the First September Storm
Just the old men with their papers now
Raffia skirts of closed umbrellas
Ruffling in the wind
The turquoise sea in swells
The spray blown back
The first of autumn’s shells
& seppia bones, & sea-tossed things,
The new collection,
Uncollected on the sand
Thursday 17 September
Yesterday walked to Francavilla
All along the beach.
Clear sky, turquoise sea
Calm as a bath at first
And swimming out a bit
You see inland the Majella
Covered already with a fresh
Fall of snow
Then walking & walking
And a wind comes up,
A south wind, a Garbino
Here there are names for all the winds
And walking & walking
Passing dead fish, a dead cat
Washed up, someone discreetly
Covered it with a board
Live fish too, like minnows,
And one that jumps when I’m out
Swimming, and small creeping things
And a flat kind of beetle walking
Hopelessly towards the water
And upended by every wave.
Now and then a jogger.
Two nuns in white
Old men, old ladies, bending,
Knee deep, collecting something
In the shallow water
Sometimes a mother & a daughter,
Old, strolling, talking.
And when we get back to
The port, the wind full up
All the hairs along my arms
Standing up in goosebumps
In the September sun.
At home I sleep the late
Afternoon away, wake up
Thinking it must be late,
Already light, and we
Work in the garden a bit,
Pulling away canes & bindweed
From the eucalyptus & bamboo
That some day will bring
Privacy & life to this poor
Garden again.
...
[Tuesday] 22 September
Absolution
Just the sound of the bells signalling the start of mass
Might be enough to make you think that
A virtual absolution is as good as an actual one
Confessing to yourself is as good as kneeling in a darkened confessional
Whispering to a faceless priest who is only human
So that even before the bells stop clanging
Your slate of sin has been wiped clean
And you can begin again.
...
8? October [Yorkshire]
Travelling North, direct towards the dipper
As if you might break through the eggshell
Of sky and find yourself with no meaning of north
No more than two stars somewhere
In the Milky Way might chance to line up
To point at our pole
The semblance of drifting through space
When we are really moving at 220k/s
Sheep, walls, stones with sky coming through
9 October
Me north as home, you south
Like a dog chasing a stick
Lapping along the high ridge
With the wind, against the wind
Fine rain from a clear sky
And a haze & rainbow at the
High top end to end in the vales
And dales, stone & walls
Small light through a mislaid stone
Lead crystals in a lump of slate
...
Transumanza
Always moving towards the easy place
The green grass
I should do that too
Drive my flock of self
Over the last high pass
Down to the lowlands
Why can’t I do that too?
Drive myself down into the
Sweet meadows of the south
Knowing there will always be a spring
Instead of sticking it out in a high
Craggy place
In the thin cold air
As if it were enough to know
That you can go
And still come back
What if they tell me that my time is up
That I will never go again
Not even once
To the high peaks, to the seaside
And how in all this glory
Can it be a gene gone wrong
And why
And didn’t my body know I needed it
For longer
That I haven’t finished yet
And won’t in six months
Or even years
Is there ever a time you’re ready
To lay it down
To stop all t
he singing and dancing
To pass into what?
Is there any language, logic
Any algebra where death is not
The tragedy it seems
A geometry that makes it look
Alright to die
Where can it be proved
Some theorem
If P then Q and all is well
If not P then not Q either and all is gone
Or if not P then Q
Driving down the axes of your bones
12 November
And after all that
Cycling home through the dark streets
The homeless man with the penny whistle
Is playing your favourite tune
...
14 November 1998
Saturday’s Child
Born too late for loving and giving,
Saturday’s child must work for a living.
Born too soon for the Sabbath day,
Saturday’s child has rent to pay.
Now, earning a living’s not so bad,
Though just for one, it’s a little sad.
So loving and giving as best she can,
Saturday’s child found a man.
Married a Tuesday, full of grace,
(And unaccountably fair of face).
Both were open to a change,
Though a birthday’s hard to rearrange.
A proper job can be quite taxing
If your talent is relaxing.
Equally, hell can be being idle:
Work is a horse that’s hard to bridle.
Grace takes patience, Tuesdays know,
And Saturday’s child has far to go.
The day you’re born is the way you stay,
Whether it’s fair, or blithe, or gay.
So Saturday’s child’s still up at eight,
While gracious Tuesday lies in late.
And Saturday dreams of a lazy age,
But, ever practical, earns her wage.
Telescopes Tenerife]
Those few brave pilgrims
Standing white robed
At the boundary edge
Of earth and sky
On their dark mountain
In the thin, dark dry air,
For all their altitude
No nearer, really, to the stars
But hopeful
And so patient, tracking
High above the traffic
Of the lowlands, tracking
The minutiae of the Universe
Attentive to a different light.
22 November
Why is it that markets
Piled high with fruit & vegetables
Make you cry:
For all the terrible things we do
This earth keeps rewarding us
Keeps piling its treasures on our laps
Like a child that wants to be loved
Like something too trusting
That goes on wanting to be loved.
The old women with their kerchiefs
And their knuckled hands/fingers
Feeding strangers
Putting food on strangers’ tables
Sitting down to this melon
Which grew beneath her watchful eye
Attentive to its needs
And keep on doing it
While the daughters marry
And the sons move to the city
...
27 December [Swaffham Prior]
The English Walk/ Boxing Day
Thrashing
Slashing out into the descending dark hawkliness
Across a fen
Along a dyke
The hawthorns threshing in the wind thicket
Slick clay
The wind in the dog’s fur The bit that looks like Greece
The wind in your hair The twisted hawthorns – olive trunks
And tugging
The nettles, brambles whipping your knees And how on a summer
And darkness almost down day the light comes
The most almost lucid pewter light down through the
Lying in the puddles on the drove road meeting branches
And your feet sticky in the dark sucking clay
This after all the tensions The dark man stooping for the
Of families thrown together crown of thorns
The once a year of rubbing up the wrong way Guilt like a dark cloak
Difficult mothers, prickly daughters, sullen sons Pillager of pain
All of it kept in, the right words
The tightly buttoned waistcoat, belt How a dyke, a hedgerow,
and a fen can be
Primrose No.1: as it is a world, a life, a
Primrose No.2: sunset and a wedding ring refuge, a temple
Primrose No.3: cosmic light
Like refugees fleeing from
And then, at the least prompting the too-close parlours,
Leaping up to go out and walk the disputed music, the
‘The dog would like it’ twitches and irritations
For the sake of the dogs
For the dogs’ sake false laughs & too
many, the glut of empty
Imitations of the pony club mums words filling the rooms as
Flying out across the fen if they needed filling, as
Into its infinitely absorbing sky if listening together weren’t
as good as talking
Like a night march
Survived the war, returning home
The stout man with the crown of thorns
In his thick hand
Hurrying away ahead
Past thicket, shrine and travellers’ camp
All of it transformed
In a sudden gust Whipping out like dark ribbons
We are leaping up Swept up into the all absorbing
To out and walk [sic] sky
For the dogs’ sake The dark man
What is stifled With the crown of thorns
Left, we are out That wasn’t his
Thrashing out across a fen In his thick hand
With darkness almost coming down Hurrying ahead
Out along a dyke
With thicket walls and roof
The wind hacking at the hawthorns This is a kind of fanning
Brambles whipping up against your knees Of a dark flame
Past the bit that looks like Greece
The twisted hawthorn-olive trees Trudging in the dark
The way in summer sunlight Our bootsoles sucking at the
clay
Filters through the leafy roof
How a fen, a dyke, a hedge Bowing down the cloister
Can be world, temple, life. Of a hawthorn arch
The liquid pewter light
Lying on the puddles
Of the drove road
Travellers’ road
And your bootsoles sucking at the clay
Refugees of Christmas parlours.
Fleeing through the night
Each one’s irritations
Each one’s
All the difficult mothers
Prickly daughters
Sullen sons
...
1999
Sunday 31 January 1999
... The false starts
That line your green veins with bruise
...
In Me Now
In me now
Are traces of the Madagascar periwinkle
Mustard gas
And mutant genes
And things made inside mice
Marked cells
And strangers’ blood
And something iridescent in the lymph
Like in the spines of fish
That filter phosphorescence
From the sea
Inventory
Two scars are pink, one white
Where flesh was taken
Three small tube holes underneath
A collar bone
Two slits on tops of fe
et
A tiny dot tattoo for lining up the lungs
A cluster of white puncture marks
On each knob of hip-backbone
Where cores come out, and aspirate
And all the little needle nicks
Soft inside the elbow-skin
...
1 February 1999
Symptoms
Blood roaring in your ears
Like the sea
Heart thumping fast like at altitude
But no crest, no summit, no view
Nausea, swollen feet
Like pregnancy
But no child.
...
28 February
First sun for months, it seems
Warm & bright
Frogs mating, one on the back of the other
For hours
Planted seeds
Who will I have been
When I’m gone
Violation of the body
The little crowd of strangers
Who have taken my body
With needles and knives
And then gone home
To watch TV
And the bits of me, stashed
Away in freezers
A kind of immortality
There is no poetry to cancer
To the body betraying itself
Ravishing itself
Leaving itself drained
...
6 March
A child is like a clock
Resets your own sense of time
Poem for M.’s eightieth birthday
So much a secret kind of life
For me more imagined than known
Except as mother
Making sandwiches for school lunches
For picnics at St Hilaire
The brown paper bag, the apple
No fuss.
This image: legs crossed, one under, one free
on the sofa
sun streaming in
New Yorker rolled open