for TED HUGHES

today, holding your death’s

small hand, black-nailed

inside your much larger hand

leading it here, you

lay down with it

under the black

and somewhere behind the dance

you’d carried your death a long time

and each day

more of it grew large and less of you

until the coat you’d shaped so well, fell in

with no one to hold the sleeves out straight

it buckled and sank

and lay in its last strong pose

mouth empty, eyes turned inside out

then death stood carefully up

stood looking down at you

stood off a little way

and understood

its joggling bones would now go coatless

its name, even, would be spoken unclothed

death – as stark as that

so, cautiously

trying it out, death walked off

walked away, naked, left you there

in the hollow behind the words

quietly folded

under the black, and somewhere

behind the dance

 (28 October 1998)

THREE HAIKU

on frosted grass: the 
Brueghel birds
pecking up every seed, every seed



pusscat yawns, licks paw,
circles damp paw on face;
suddenly looks at me



dusk settles like an old cat: 
spreads its apron of fur;
folds its soft paws

SEEING THE PICTURE

First find the edges.

The stop-gap Angel blew in with a fluster,

bearing bananas and bleach,

telephone numbers, and such

kindness she made me cry.

Separate out the corners.

It is important to have enough

to hold onto. The table

for instance, and we used a chair

as a walking frame.

For two days no one came,

not even the stop-gap Angel.

Assemble the borders.

The step up to the bathroom: so high,

so hard to ascend,

and all his limbs trembling,

losing coherence.

It is easy to mistake one piece for another.

He had crawled a hundred yards

through the flooded garden

on hands and knees

to ring me.

There is often a piece missing.

On the 3rd day the doctor came.

By the evening

we had a commode, a zimmer frame,

a washing Angel

and a shopping Angel.

Many pieces are identical.

I was fighting exhaustion and despair,

lurching from task to task.

I wanted to go home.

My bones appeared where there had been curves.

When I sat down I couldn't get up again.

Gradually build inwards from the edges.

The millennium approached.

By the 5th day

we were beginning to cope.

Emptying the commode

wasn't as bad as I feared.

Match colour to colour, detail to detail.

He insisted on standing

to greet the new century:

'I'm going to be on my feet'.

I held his arm tightly. 

The night sky flared.

With the addition of one piece, suddenly whole areas join up.

It became clear

that every piece we'd placed

had led to this.

That this was going to be the picture

from now on.

SLEEPERS

in three of my rooms they sleep:
puppy, lover and old man


one on his back with arm outflung
another with long paws crossed
the third with open mouth and missing teeth


they will always be here now
in these three rooms 
of the house of my memory

THE DEATH FOX

overnight, as the frost made blades
of the grass, it had dragged
itself onto the lawn, 
and now lay with one back leg drawn up: 
out in the open, which every fox avoids.


i thought at first, looking
from an upstairs window, it was a cat.
i felt my muscles harden, the indrawn breath,
but its plume of tail was unmistakeable.


i went down, feeling reluctance 
and awe.  this visitor, soft-furred, 
outstretched and fleet even in death,
lay on its side: still running.


how had it died?  no bite,
no shocking gape in the flank. 
it looked as if it had been struck down
in flight.  gassed?


i stood a pace away, my steps
hollowed in frost.  
the pelt was cream and sorrel.  black
limbs, delicate.  i'd never seen a fox so close -


but nor was a fox there now;
even in the half-open eye:
no fox looking out. 


trespassing, i photographed
its mute departure;
the huge silence of it filling the garden.
it deserved sanctuary,
but i delayed.  


the fox
had come to me to bear witness;
i could not simply bury it
alongside its death.

ECLIPSE

who stole the moon?
there it was
polishing its saucepan face


when suddenly 
the old black rat of the night
crept up:  bite, bite, bite 


bit by bit
it bit it till it bled
red, red


but soon, fish-slithery
the moon slid out
from the rat's paws


and back to white
it ran across the sky
with many new bite marks
on its pitted saucepan face

THE FALL

no, there was no rail,
as we’d believed, 
at the edge: 

nothing to break our fall
but the fall itself.  

remember - how often we'd marvelled
at how the journey found its way
across an unmarked land?  

yet all the time we had been imagining 
coming at last, with inevitability,
to the edge.  

yearning to capitulate, we obeyed
the journey - which surely was destined,
even though the destination wandered - 

and told ourselves that even
at that last moment at the edge
we would stand translated.  

yet, from the outset did we not also say
(uneasily, not wanting it to be true) 

- the edge is not the end;
the ground is temporary.
the fall goes on.

OLD TREES

no need to cut it down, he said.
we'll build round it;
it's taken years to grow. 

the old lilac shifted,
stiff in its branches, leafless
in early spring. 

no need to cut the apple, 
either, he said.
(this short, opaquely solid,
kindly man). 

the boughs, thick as drainpipes, rested
athwart the broken stones.
we'll build round them: dip the wall 

where they lean, 
and let the new stones
cradle them.

THREE BOWLS

i’m not hard-hearted: i know when it creeps
belly-to-the-ground, raising those
blurred, blind eyes
the past is only pleading to be stroked 


i hear its seagull mewings
but i ignore them. it protests 
faithfulness – tells me that what we had
no one has ever had (it tells everyone that)


they’ve all walked through it: left their stains, 
turned down its corners, torn out its pages -
it has that stickiness
the covers of library books have


but i am preparing my home
for the future. the future
is cautious and alone, but i think it will come to me


i have seen in its eyes the astonishment
with which it rediscovers itself. i have woken
to its first fall of snow, before anyone
has crossed the yard. it has that clarity
with which you perceive
someone you are about to fall in love with


there are always enough people wanting
to give the past a home,
walking it on a leash, showing it off


i own no past: i have no place to keep it, 
nothing to feed it on. the future, 
if it can be coaxed inside,
will be my companion. i know
what it needs – and i have prepared them:
three empty bowls 


one for what comes next,
one for what cannot be,
and one for all the emptiness we must eat 
to grow strong

YOU

among a lot of hungry eyes
among a lot of caring lies
among a lot of passing kings
among a lot of other things
among a lot of situations
calling for my application 


you are something else again
you are worth the waiting game

EBBTIDE - a sonnet

Autumn is here.  Cats crouch and doze
indoors.  Too windy out, too grey,
for pleasant wanderings.  I close
the curtains early on the play
of rain on drumming windowpane,
and light the lamps, and pour some wine;
recall a year ago: the wane
of summer, and my dad's decline:
his final autumn...  But I did not know,
and had I known could not have turned
the wheel back on itself, the flow
of seasons widdershins, or learned
in any other way how death
waits patiently in every breath.

THEN INTO THE BIG BLACK

then into the big black
came a fish of gold

we were just somewhere
it was swimming through
- the world at its back pushing it on

its fugitive gold suddenly there 
in our unlit seas: cross-marked 
by all the waves it had eaten 
which had tried to eat it

from then on we followed it -
using the faint light it left behind 
in our songs, our celebrations

(The Goldfish - by Paul Klee)

THE STAR HORSE - for W.H. Auden

ever around the core the star horse goes:
trudging through sun-suds, winding its long coil
closer to something which intones its homing note.
but what we think is there has already gone:
our pulses knock to the beating of dead stars, 

and only one stammering instant since
Basho's frog hit the water,
Pompeii's people cooked, mudwrapped,
and the BBC announced war -
comes the star horse plodding around again,
tightening its coil. 

polishing your worm's egg, you repeat 
that - despite the self-perfecting pattern -
poetry, cooked or not,
makes nothing that would not anyway
have happened, happen.  

i counter: the past 
will never keep still long enough 
for history - only for poetry.
we give it burdens 
any beast would stumble under. 

to lose the mystery and name the view
is not the work.  yet the star horse, 
despite our broken offerings,
our bluff and blunder,
turns so often it cannot be out of true.

THE GREY

i am painting the grey
not that there is grey inside me - far from it! 

but the sentinels at my doors
are grey, and they guard me well 

so i paint the grey 
- it has many beautiful hues
there is no colour which cannot
become its own grey  

meanwhile the colours inside me 
leak a little more each day
into the sentinels

ORDINARY THINGS

a leaf
travelling across the pond
pushed by the wind


sunlight on the wall
blackbird splashing
pausing, splashing


such ordinary things
spilled tea
the watchful cat


ordinary things so precious
i am afraid to name them
a dented pillow
sunlight in its folds


impossible to understand
how light can fall on these hands
as if there's nothing to it:
the grace of ordinary things


so precariously ours
when whole stars are eaten 
and worlds boil dry

THE BLUE POETRY ANIMAL

at night i am free, because
at night i am wordless

only in the daylight am i this
blue poetry animal
caged in words 

do not feed me