Valedictory poems

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Feb 142010

Halving



There is a place I could feel at home
beneath a catastrophe of wires
in this white evening under plastic stars
I could feel all the warmth of the room
endlessly in glass in all its orchestrations and might
leaning through wet eyelids
with the valley held in frame despite
or beyond the singing shade where kids
parade in toiling sheets laughing there,
under the hills, under last year’s windows and black bricks,
the black earth with its island kisses there —
and in that place of tobacco and sticks
and seed-strewn avenues, poured at dusk,
filled with hosepipes, rag and bone men and musk —
coal-defined, small, so small, where the roads
turn before a regimented horizon
to take away the girl, to take away the codes
love ladles in, as the lovers run
taking the sales reps and their families
into the future deserts filled with flies,
into the son’s sour contralto cries,
beside the boiling copper lies;
there is a place I could feel at home,
with street names and clangour and dogs
locked in warm sheds beside a green lawn
and all the dread and all the wishes, knocks
and skirmishes, and wise hugs,
would leave us semi-carnal on the rocks
of a magisterial sea, the radio features there,
from a red summer and in that fine archipelago
of thin shouts one sleep would do me there,
one tiny sleep would really do for me and you.

Poem for my father

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Feb 142010

The Weapon

for Isobel Dixon

Waving hello through the Fiat’s fumes, we were waving goodbye,
a film in amber fields of Cornish shade and wheat,
yellow jerseys and a crop duster — that Corsair —
hurling its shoulders over seven-year-old dream-white air.

You had yellow fever in some antic grey chassis, too, mid-
Pacific, gauntleted, hung at my mother’s lips, that hand-painted
lilac studio shot laying near your sack of home, now twenty years apart.
In the end you waved from the car to me, crying some way in to life,

and at your breakable neighbourhood return: ripped up, corseted,
the surgery over, the coming months became love’s parasite
and you became my upholstery of broken evenings, knowing summer static.
But I broke free with all my feelings ending empty in a weapon.

HMS Devonshire, there I see you scrapped in shaking loyal air,
you are breathing in a new Korean din, and I’m inside a future destitution:
breathing still foreshortens time. I’m almost your age now.
A mouthful lies between us then in some disgust of stories and a past,

I am dwarfed beside you in that summer field, a child in mewling montage.
How can we love what’s not bestowed, in the happiest
prize blood brings? My life has always been this weaker separation since.
Plied in that robbery of nows, as you piled in your pillows, too.

Seated, hands planted firmly, so

Work in progress No Responses »
Feb 122010

The Writer


He sits in the fraying shirt with epaulettes,
hands placed squarely on the knees, so, loyal perhaps,
back taut. He sits in the beach-dreck chair
facing the south window, the long, taupe, negligible
oblong, where we hear (should we lean)
such tremendous sounds as the landscape affords.
He imagines tart packages of darkness in rotation,
winds over plantains, young birds, rasping yards
and, wrapped under the torrid roots, the thin worms
glistening in their white sinecures, eating the past.
We cherish his hard back. We stand behind him and work
around the den to see his grey ears, thick sideburns,
then notice the sudden fuchsia ridge, the blackened
accoutrements of the smashed face. He’s all caved in.
Days pass. Years. We wander. How could we not wander
about his intense, heavy frame. We watch the faceless one
watching, a damaged cuckold watching the shade
over the skins of the timbers, the skins of the walls
settling in the lank tableau. We are moving like hair
in the powdered light over the atrocious basin
of the head, until we notice the mirror sharply recovering
the battery and disgrace and find we are seated alone,
loving again in the wild escutcheons of the days.

The family have been informed

Work in progress 1 Response »
Jan 282010

This piece stems from the Bush/Cheney days. I still like it. It’s fascinating watching British TV now, as the whole war is disentangled in an understated, completely devastating way. A monstrous saga, still not at an end, and powered by abstract conviction about the world and its desirable shape, its desirable resources. One is left wondering if it was really about the oil, and more about some sense of structural legacy, a fear, ultimately, of impotence.

From the Centre


Once your eyes have adjusted to the burning
scan through those racing battalions:
that mouth, idle elbows, and then tilt your head like this
to observe an arranging sea of grit. You can sense

the singing or crying, crying or singing,
where it is a high-throated sort of commotion
for the day. Anyway, no one wings it
in the compound. We’re poverty in motion.

How we ended up here is funny, like a shiny
belly or bare flank, or it could be that ash-
coloured, hose-damp concrete there.
Every child distorts the man, and man the cash.

Look at it raining down — sordid, localised love
beside electric couples filming, or are they fleeing,
the gift. It is an entirely live feed while we learn scripture
from wire. Someone says, ‘Nomads in waiting,’

as we become scintillating, free in the debris.
Don’t catch life out, then, and watch the traffic.
Now you know when the slap up meals fall out
of those sacks we’ll be taking home our pick

of your bomb-retiring heroes, day and night,
night and day, those clean-cut silent flags of ham-
burger heaven still warm under props. Later we’ll
be zooming or seething through that dream

up dislocated arterial routes, shaky gorgons
in the zone. Together again, we are a modern fog,
the idea of the better dead, immortalised grey
eyes above subtitled totally idealised dialogue.

No one adheres to the precise terms any more.
The streets shiver like widows this afternoon of very
large government, we’ll ape out the speeches
of the ape. Our country is his artery.

A family affair

Work in progress No Responses »
Jan 282010

Here’s another filmic poem. I like to write from the perspective of a film maker, and often move around the poem in the way a camera man would. Checking the angles, looking for the cut away shots, adjusting the lighting to build the scene up. This poem takes place in an undetermined Latin American town. A small town. There’s an element of threat in the piece, which is another thing I like to see engineered into a poem. Some risk. Some tension.

Eduardo



Our fine neighbour, Eduardo,
known locally as ‘an hour with the pig’
is folded in viridian evening beside blocks and hooks.
Folded neat and hot, he is all helmet-like.

Teeth grind of moped. Lolloping begonias.
He plays Carmina Burana considering workaday beauty,
yet it is a bad Decca recording and he tires of it. He loves justice on TV
and the weekly surgery of romance: the doomed brides.

‘Eduardo,’ they shout. ‘Do not sleep at your sister’s place tonight.’
He is pinched up considering his inept grasp of planets,
He is everyone’s fastidious shark, happily cutting, cutting,
cutting to the end.

Fermina does not have his weakness for display.
She is emboldened by her single mole, a loyal creature
beneath the mighty storm and a century of town smoke.
‘She will phone tonight,’ Eduardo says,

‘and discuss the shapes of her cabaret, her sour winds of love.’
Eduardo imagines crudely that her mattress is the horn of plenty
despite his abhorrence of winter perfume
and spitting gutters. There are no coyotes.

He chews on the spandrels of some grey meat
and picks out sequin pips for Fermina’s wan retrieval this evening.
There is so much affection in his brother’s gaze.
Lodged inside the weathered purse of his face he is quite terrible.

He has always procrastinated over business meals like this.
Fermina will be revered inside a new family procedure
where we shall leach from out our shadows towards the stitches of stars.
Our mouths are gaping now in the drapery behind her.

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