ICARUS UNBOUND

fetched in a screech
of downhill sky
Icarus, pitching
met the wind

coming at him
through unwaxed straps
learned
the wrong way up, to fly

Icarus: untied

out of upswept
plaster I built him
leaping with unpared wires
his ragged armature

cradled a hollowness
at core, yet undeterred
the sculpture warred with air

Icarus: flawed

the plaster figure
and the real man
drove themselves through me
all one rain-long Spring
until a creature clumsily conformed
spilt upside down

Icarus: unwarned
           
then came curious weeks
I left him standing
precarious
on the shed roof - every wind
promised a landing

yet, great white bat
he remained
shaking out scarred wings
tremulously restrained
bits fell off
perhaps to reconnoitre

Icarus: the loiterer

a late April storm
flashy and rowdy
took him
lightning-struck
who had yearned for light

now broken-backed
undone
his blind face
terrible with the knowledge
of the ground
its last embrace

Icarus: unbound

THIS EXTINCTION BUSINESS

in 1988 they said - there's a hole in the sky!
we're all going to die!
but by then we were hardened to
warnings: we'd grown a carapace.
for years we'd been going to die
at any moment: blown sky-high.  so what?

and now the planet's broken?
sure.  we've done our worst,
we deserve to reap the whirlwind.
but it's those others i hear:
their hooves thudding into extinction.
furred and scaled and feathered, winged and finned:
accusing us: we're as sentient as you!
this is our world, too!

but if i say - we're taking the others with us!
we deserve to die but they don't!
you ask - which others?  and look at me
as if this extinction business
has tipped me over the edge.

no; i am as sane as cold water.
when we have killed ourselves and all the others,
the hot poisoned wind will bear away
the guilt we cannot bear to own,
and our name will be a hissing on that wind.

FOXED AND FOLDED

i bought it in 1968 - it cost five shillings -

a paperback book of love poetry.  
the cover (psychedelic orange, 
pink and purple) still glows hopefully,

like an old dear in a gaudy cardigan.

the years have foxed the pages

deep brown.  corners are folded over,

so brittle they almost part.  i marked

the poems which spoke to me when i was twenty.  

not any more.  i read them now 
with a cold, discerning eye:

impatient with mismatched lines, loose

undisciplined sentiments.  
how harsh i've become!

i open the book at random, read:

'Here is an answer to play with:

the fire is dead.'

yes - too apt for comfort.  the years

which burned these pages brown

have all but burned me dry.  like this book,

my corners are turned over 

marking something which no longer matters.

LOSING TRACK

i used to be young and then
somehow i lost the knack.

you don't think of it as a skill:
cycling aloft on the wire,
but once belief goes - that's it:

you've veered off track
into a siding.  you recall
the switching point, the shudder
as your life became detached.

windows turn inward: reflect
your back-to-front face
which has forgotten how, lost when.

the dreams begin: leaving luggage
on a train. searching
through unknown cities. riding a bus
unable to name a destination.

i used to be young.
i didn't think of it as a skill.
you ask if i'd go back?

yes, but i don't remember these streets;
and anyway i've lost the knack.

SOU'WESTER

branches slap branches, flap

their few leaves, make wild

commotion and complaint: the air

is raving and motes of birds,

snatched in sky currents, fly

impossibly backwards.

the apple tree wags by the garden door,

smacks down a yellowed fruit on the flags

like a card player with a winning hand.

rooks, rain-beaded in the creaking willows,

wrap their hooks tight: jig to the beat of the storm.

HAIKU PEBBLES

a day of half-measures;
touching and just missing:
slightly off-centre


waking to a world
better than its dreams,
the snail delights in the rain


buzzard skywards
spiralling: leaves behind no marks
that i can discern


blackbird in the dusk sings
dusk in the blackbird:
theme and variations


each year the trees
blossom more beautifully
but my own flowers fade


rummaging in the bag
for a haiku, i found instead
empty space


puss cat intently
sniffing the rush matting:
remembrance of mice past


if it's true that
we reincarnate, then we are
our own ancestors


change the world
one doubt at a time: ask the
impossible question


this morning there was no world
beyond the dense white fog
which wrapped the field


i load up my plate
with the future.  the notice says:
all you can eat!

HARE’S BREADTH

where shall we put this
gift, which fate has wrapped
in new leaves
and sealed
with the dark startle
of the hare’s gaze?  where 

shall we fit it?  where keep
it safe?  between
great stones fitted knife-blade close,
under some restless
mountain, or in a mirror 
where no one has yet looked?  

do not try to fit it anywhere:
there is nowhere it belongs.
we must fit ourselves, instead,
into whatever space it leaves unfilled 

(though there is nowhere it has left unfilled)

THE HOUR BLUE

this is the moment
- there's one each day -
when dusk is deepening,

silence in the trees
(the birds have folded themselves small)
the wine is poured:

i want to raise my glass, 
smile at someone;
talk.  

it's nothing much.
it's everything.

THE ASHES SPEAK

all that is left of me is you:
do me credit.
achievements; dreams - grasped,
then lost: don't edit.

i was unkind: include that -
but marvellous too, don't forget.
i hid myself in words, so you couldn't find me;
all the same, we met.

cup my cold ashes in your hands,
then let them go.  as they billow past,
brush me off your coat onto the sand:
i was never meant to last.

all that is left of me is you:
so take me toward
somewhere i never really knew:
the best way forward.

MAGNOLIA STELLATA

this tree on its single leg

curtseying

to the glance of wings

as a bird flies through

its petals

caught up by the wind, fall back:

in the shape of a sword

ICARUS DOWNFALLEN

man goes flying

ground waits

man opens red heart goes flying

ground waits

man holds out heart-bird

ground swoops pecks it up

man rises light of heart free of heart

ground waits frowns

man rises rises

sun waits

ground waits sun waits

sea waits

man falls: sea wins

POEM FRAGMENT: TORN PAGE

a draft of an old poem of mine - probably from around 1995 - discovered on the back of a scribbled recipe.

DARK ANGEL

Someone has left a lily, tilted

in an antique flask - someone has painted

this annunciation before: the slide of planes

which descry the room, the collision of light

as if an angel lingered, beckoning –

having burned out the walls with its eyes.

The whole place now

stands open to brimming skies.

Leaving, the painter took his brushes. The lily

he’d found and cut with such reverence

he placed at the heart of the work -

then left the painting to compose itself. These walls

will never hold space the same way again,

because they have summoned an angel

to dispense the rain.

The room darkens

and the angel becomes more distinct.

A convulsion of light is its hand

burning the cup’s rim. All day the rain

has brimmed up there,

writhing and boiling, winding its dynamo.

The cup is taken: from an angel

with eyes through which rain pierces.

But had the painting shown any room

(since all rooms intersect) each would have held

an angel with its own annunciation. And wet tiles

with footprints leading away, and the soft drum

of rain on leaves.

Yet though in some rooms a lily, newly unclosed,

might lean - in others

the dark, inward-reaching eyes

would endlessly hold discourse with a rose.

Now with the unrolling of the sky and the light's wane

the thunder at last

brings down its harvest of tall rain.

TYGER, TYGER, FADING FAST

our world
is doing a slow fade.

today's young
don't want what we had;
they never do.
one lot clocks off, another clocks on.

you'd think
there was nothing to learn,
nothing to teach.

it's best to keep quiet
when we hear them
mapping the world and
finding tygers.

privately, i don't think
their tygers
are a patch on ours;
but i smile silently,
just as my elders did
when i staked my claim
to their world.

they've gone and i mourn
the loss: i think if we'd shared our world,
all our tygers
would have shone more brightly.

but so it goes:
each generation tucked up under
the earth of the next.
the tragedy is not that we die,
but that our worlds die with us.

one day
there will be no more tygers.
one day
there will be no one left to praise
their lovely faces.

THE HOUSE

this house is very present.  you'd not think

it had held this corner of a Saxon field

more than three hundred years;

though time, to it,

is just one now after another:

the first now and the first laid stone,

to this morning's turbulent now:

the sky dizzy with clouds and

driving blades of wind

through gappy window-frames.

like a great rock, unmoving

(even in the storm

which cracked apart the willow)

the house maintains its vigil:

mindless of sopping windowsills,

dark borders drawn around each flag,

wave-maps rising above the skirting boards

and walls mould-mottled -

these are just what happens

to a house that has known three hundred winters,

and been afloat more than once.

its walls bellying slightly,

there's not a right angle to it: but each stone

sits in mute agreement.

stalwart, it persists; and perhaps

sees us only as trails of light,

cross-webbing its rooms,

insubstantial wraiths: here and then gone.

skirted by the river (in spate, in drought)

and girdled by the field

whose edges are nibbled by rabbits,

the house sits under its thick straw wig,

in which the tiny commerce of woodlice

and the larger scuffings of mice

make whisperings.

at night, as its thick black timbers

creak, it hunkers down beneath stars

it has known since 1670.

NO THROUGH ROAD

Dying lasts – but living does not last.

The journey’s destination is soon clear

in the skin’s thinning and the greyed-out hair.

If we knew when we embarked

how quickly it would all be past –

would we set out? Death lasts,

but living does not last.

Dying is not a shadow, not a crow

circling, doesn’t stand in doorways

hooded and scythed. Its messages

are filled in against your name, like this,

and handed to you when you get your bones.

The waning powers, the sagging breasts suggest

death lasts, but living does not last.

Death abides elsewhere, an untold land -

yet every word that country speaks

is rooted in us as a royal command.

Death comes to us with empty hands,

and says: 'It is time for us to go.

Your years and days and hours are all gone past.

May you last longer than mere dying lasts'.

THE BUTTERFLY MAN

once you drove me to the train station,
but the car fell in a ditch, on the way.
it had to be hauled out by a tractor.
i don't know why you swerved,
but then - what butterfly flies straight?

i could always make out
the invisible scallop shell, the staff -
but it's your giggle i remember best.
you laughed, perhaps, because
as soon as truth stood to attention,
you were waiting for the pratfall?

i remember you doing
an enormous jigsaw:
butterflies in a thousand pieces!
those messenger-companions
who taught you every hither and thither turn
of the air-labyrinth.  a fine, erratic art.

your kindness saw me through many
tempests.  a Prospero yourself,
you were no stranger to self-sown whirlwinds.
i sent you poems: scorched birds
who'd come through the fire, and
generously you replied,
singling out phrases which pleased you -
giving me something back.

that's what you did well: you gave back...
and now the measure of that giving
is that this path is all done.
it's time to try out the air beyond the edge,
open your dappled wings and float.

"Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyager!"


(for Stanley, who died on 17th March 2013)

MORNING MIST

beyond its milky rim the field is dissolved.
a woodpecker's muffled yaffle
protests the silence which beads trunks and twigs.

this mute envelope
is winter's most delicate caress:
it makes everything into an absence.

it drains the colour, heft and tussle
of world: it denies world, world is not,
world was a failing work it has painted out.

a water-colourist
could not better its subtle splay of tones,
nor a poet be as deft at getting lost.

THE SEED IN THE GOURD

the one who waits in the desert                      
empty of pleasure                                    
and the memory of pleasure                            
calls on the spinner                                  
of the whirling thread                                
to heed her hollowness  

***                            
                                                 
turning to the place of beginnings          
in a wind-driven voice of red sand                    
she cries out -                                      
                                                     
i am far from myself                        
i am empty of all that i was                          
i am poured out, wasted                              
and dried to a stain                                  
                                                     
i am wasteground                            
an abandoned well                                    
cradle of scum and biting flies                      
i am the shed skin of the snake                      
the spat-out bones of the mouse                      
                                                     
i have dried myself to a gourd                        
i have shrivelled up with long waiting                
                                                     
hear me, thunder-voice                      
startler                                              
hear me, breaker of gourds                            
undoer of constraints                                
                                                     
unwind my burying clothes                  
unmake me into wholeness

***

turning to the place of adjustment          
in a wind-driven voice of red sand                    
she cries out -                                      
                                           
you widener, you awakener!                  
too well i have composed myself                      
too tightly i have become                            
this vessel that contains                            

you who gather up                                    
the fragments of being                                
and unbeing                                          
like fishbones after a feast                          
                                                     
open me and pour out the silence            
which knocks at my walls

***

turning to the place of kindling            
in a wind-driven voice of red sand                    
she cries out -                                      
                                                     
hear me, ardent unbeliever                  
hear me, stirrer into confusion                      
                                                     
i wait with the stones and bones                      
thrown down in disorder                              
                                                     
i know nothing that shall be                
i understand nothing that was                        
i weave nothing, i knot nothing                      
i close no doors                                      
                                                     
i have emptied myself                      
of all but emptiness                                  
                                                     
you widener, you awakener                  
you breather of gold into the dark                    
with the stars spinning in your fist                  
hear me -                                              
                                                     
my fire is gone out                        
i am ash and cold wood                                
i am blackened stone                                  
i am the dark stain beneath the sacrifice            
                                                     
restore to me pleasure                                
and the memory of pleasure

***

turning to the place of conclusion          
in a wind-driven voice of red sand                    
she cries out -                                      
                                         
my river is dried up                        
i gnaw at my banks no longer                          
i yearn for the lost distances                        
to be restored                                        
i yearn for the salt                                  
of remembering                                        

broaden my going                                      
eater of the path                                    
devourer of the pattern                              
hear me                                              
                                                     
i have drawn myself up together            
in one place                                          
i have guarded one seed                              
in my hollowness                                      
                                                     
shadow between the stars                    
rain on me                                            
rain on your daughter of red sand                    
and long waiting                                      
                                                     
thunder-voice                              
startler, spill your wise rain                        
and moisten me into renewal                          

joiner of the end and the beginning        
eater of time                                        
devourer of names                                    
hear my wind-driven voice                            
of red sand
                                           
hear the green cry                                    
of the seed in the gourd                              
                       
***
                   
standing where all is combined              
the one who has come to the centre                    
calls on the spinner                                  
of the whirling thread                                
to heed her hollowness

MAGNOLIA TREE

on its single leg
the magnolia tree
curtsies to the glancing of wings
as a bird flies through