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