SUMMER SUN HAS…

SUMMER SUN HAS…

Summer sun has all the new
plastic black guttering cracking
and creaking, expanding;
the sound along the terraces
unique, rousing.

As the heat fades they’ll retreat again,
regain their old state. All their
hidden musics dictate the noise
of neighbour’s grass cutters, something-elsers.

I thought of the endless dripping from
the corner gutter that turned to pouring
when the join went, and me trying
all sorts to stop it cheaply. How it
cost us dearly.

And I thought of us getting all
the soffits changed, fearing old asbestos;
but there was none. That also cost us.
To relish peace of mind,
is to pay its pound.

I thought of that lonely pigeon
three days up there alone, mate dead,
the feathers scattering in the after-draft.
Its grieving there, unfed; silent
in the dark,
in the head.

IT HAS BEEN TRAVELLING

                       a long way to him here. 
‘It is myself,’ he says, ‘my true nature
I have been trying so hard to avoid.’
It is a travelling shadow 
blown larger by the mind.

It has been travelling
a long way to him, for him to know it;
but time and distance confuse. It has been
pressing, yes, its shadow on him 
always.
               Perhaps it is stationary, and he moving
dragging it behind him. Perhaps
it has always been here, 
is meant to be here.

To imagine it is to answer it; 
guarantees nothing. So outgrow this waiting, 
this something missed.
Is it the shadow of something passed by,
an image retained on the retina,
as you drive on? 
                            The road ahead so empty,
no surprises, so he plays with this,
a little mystery, wrapped round with newspapers,
sweet wrappers, unfinished resignation letters:

kept close, for company. 

Chain

Each day’s like a chain that hangs from its cloud.
Tuesday was clumsy, loose, not reaching ground;
today is fine-spun, hall-marked, many linked –
each link frames a dimension of life.

Broken chains are dangerous, lash out
whenever air stirs, clouds mass, trees bend,
and no storm breaks. How many died, do you think,
their lost days clashing overhead?

These chains connect us, we would not be
without them. They themselves could be
the finest spun, glinting, and delicate.

But they are not.

Night of No Moon

Every time you turned the street turned with you:
the languages, distractions, sales, and somewhere
a street band. You turned and the current flowed
around you, through you; kept moving. The window display
was there for you. Streets of bodies eddying, surged.

You still felt their tug in a doorway. Turned, and
lifted away; it fell from you. You rose
quickly and above it all; shop lights far below.
Rose past cornices, pigeon spikes, to colder air;
the smells of fast food, music, muting.

A sudden panic; the city lights indistinguishable –
you were rising faster, ‘How will I breathe?’
Higher, higher to break through to sudden
openness, emptiness,
and strung there
were huge chains of lives, channelled
across darkness — people connected, singly,
as far as sight was possible.

A policemen next to you, his difficult face;
the barrista who snubbed you, the shop assistant
who had seemed distant,  all there together,
connecting.  And listening revealed
high tones, metallic, different timbres. The planets,
ringing in the openness.

Linked lines of lives stretched from planet
to planet and the sun’s radiance. All connected,
attuned  to a vast, opening sense
of awareness, completion.

 

FROM THE DUTCH

From one window a woman’s voice
an aria from Mozart, a clear cool breeze
in thick night heat.

Another window, a parrot flying,
a tropical storm trapped behind glass;
a noise like heaven tearing.

This window is empty, no one home
or elsewhere: shift workers
before early call. These I have known.

Here a laugh, a conversation;
an insistence of children, rolling banter,
close-woven tones of communion.

Another a blue flicker of a tv
and nothing else; the curtains open,
the night falling in like isolation.

Here the crackle of an argument
already full-throttle, self-feeding;
ending inevitable, origins forgotten.

And in and between each window, holes
gaping in the night’s fabric.
The hot night stalking restless.

 

THE LOOM IN THE LOFT

It was late Thursday, an April night,
you were summoning the cat;
next day was work again; then all was quiet.
Look up, you said, alarming me, brought me
down to the garden, in a clatter.

The sky, you said, just look. It took time
to work its charm. How, I griped,
trying to understand, could I lie immobile
when the sky was alive and brimming with light?
And the silence of it unnerving.

A predominant red with purple undertones;
shafts of white, bars of light
processing through, like high tones
on satin curtains. The light blues and greens tight
in the weave, soaked up by streetlights.

A loom of light, a night shift without rest breaks,
warping from the north strong striations
and the dipped sun wefting from the west.
The studs and button-pins of stars, constellations.
A slow ripple across the width of sky.

A silk dressing-gown draped across, and the guest
gone off to sleep with the cat at her feet.

DANDELIONS

The time of dandelions is early afternoon
when half the world thinks of siesta,
and half pauses to take breath

and the nettles rest on their push through tarmac
and working fingers into hairline cracks
of concrete: when half the world
thinks How untidy these weeds,
and the other half
A mouthful of food

is the time of dandelions.
Their square-cut, overlapping petals
spreading from a centre
with a splayed-hands gesture,
become sun-bright,
a light amongst lights, that underlying leaves
brighten to yellow.

Early afternoon, and the dust a little restless
emphasising how still it is;
the vibrating of light’s wavelengths,
the faint tingling of nerves, raises them
to a gold colour –
when half the world
turns over to begin a new dream, and half
unwraps its gift, the night’s work,
exploring the finer points
of the underlying argument:

the greenery
that makes the gold glow.

 

 

 

 

 

THE HUGE SLOW TUMBLE OF CLOUDS SIDEWAYS

 

across the blue sky’s bald pate,
lit and then obscured.
It had been dark all day —
I had no windows like these.

Nine-thirty flexitime nears,
while high above the miles of clouds
gather, move huge weathers.
Their scale constantly changes
how we seem to scurry,
our smallness, and how huge
their slow masses.

We live our lives in words
all scurrying together;
vocabularies like clouds:
huge, full of everything
to sustain us.
So why, then,
the traffic chaos, empty shops,
this late for work, this rush-hour,
these stops?

I have sent words out,
scurrying little helpers,
to draw you back from harm,
with a busy tie-ing in
of reasons for continuing,
where breath fails, voices crack,
on the roof edge.

And I have stood there,
face to face with that wordless place —
it has nothing to say to us
that words can understand

The Old Lad

In the apex of the barn gable an owl’s hole
perches on a stone head, and the head
stares out towards rectory trees
luring the valley between
to this bare, parched socket.

A pub sign, official designation,
rescued from the cellar of the reservoir;
the drowned village that bares its teeth
in the long hot summer.

A face uncomfortably blank like the blank
stare of the water; its wind-carved features,
brow, nose ridge, the deep eye-clefts;
straight mouth mean as a hill-winter.

A head tight to bursting
with indignations, straight-faced
with verticals and horizontals;
a labourer caricatured
by a neighbour fallen on easy times.

Too high in the barn
to be on equal terms with.

The head is brewing its word,
its kettle fired by the face’s
utter sobriety. A Viking
in his barn-ship wrecked
beside the ragged waters of the valley,
or Odin, caught out in trickery

tricking life from drudgery,
worth from existence, words
from the hinge of January.

.

 

Rivington Village, Horwich, Bolton, Lancashire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivington

from: BREXIT POEMS

WHY IS THERE NOTHING RATHER THAN SOMETHING?

If there ever was something
then it was in this place, here

– We left it in the hall, we said
we didn’t know if it’d be use to you

If there ever was a place
it was just here, the space left

– We got smashed, stoned, then fell asleep
when we came down
it’s as though it never was

No, they said, you don’t understand
this is where everything was
Why is there nothing now

Why have you taken it all away
Where have you the locked the world up

Denial, pain, anger, blame,
indifference, disgust –

the bran-tub of passed-down characteristics
and not the prizes

They said
This is what is left behind

the memory-smell on hands of money, coin
wall-shapes of lost furniture
rumours of four walls and roof, bought, owned

no sense of  difference, of space,
or certainty in the mind