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Seaton Carew, 1979

I once was a prize bingo wage slave
marking your card for six bob an hour.
Evening stints on the mic, doing it right,

white trash m.c. toastin’ rhymes, any line
or four corners. Mates said my voice was pure
Shelley but, never mind the Buzzcocks,

this was business: Kelly’s eye, Maggie’s den,
baker’s dozen, two fat ladies, lucky seven.
When I wasn’t calling or checking boards,

I was painting manky outside walls
to Heart of Glass from the waltzers next-door.
Soon turned out to be a pain in the ass,

so I asked to have back the microphone.
To be alone in the box shelling ping-pongs
from their plastic pod; saving their random

skins from the angry swarm of compressed air.
You were living just a mile up the prom,
Mam far from happy to see me your man.

Bingo called, don’t move your markers,
hands off my daughter, wait for the check.

Barbury Castle

Meet me at the earthworks
in the small hours on the hill.
Up there, above your childhood,
at the swing-door of first light
as - mouthful of stars -
another time-laden night
does its excuse-me with the dawn.

Here, beyond the tidemark
of Swindon’s dirty ochre,
power up the heart’s deep electric
and bring to me your darkness.
Let me reach towards its livewire
it larksong static, earth your now
in the harebells, ox eye, horseshoe vetch.

Meet me at the earthworks:
murus gallicus, univallate,
gate-gone to cowslip, chalkhill blue,
bolt-shot to harebell and to you.
And, too you, I too am wide open;
under the ages’ weight of starlight
and slow time; waiting for the day.

Musandam

Musandam this Spring, and it catches me
unawares: you below the waterline, striped
with sunlight, shade and a sudden renewal;
the tidal come and go of your limbs
to the elver rhythm of the first stroke
taught you by your daddy when you were five.
Your legs forcep buoyancy from the waters
of Khor Ash Sham as I fill my lungs and dive,
once more down to the point of salvage:
this coralline shard of your living moment;
its passing prefigured in the pallor
of your sunken skin, its quickening a flux
of dark anemone upon the pubic bone.
Head above water, all is every day:
you smiling back at me and our good luck,
the bedu bond of salt yet in our guts
to cover the three days here and those three
beyond. It is back down there that everything
is reconceived and passion recommenced.
Through the memory-milt of gulf water
I’m brought up short against my complacency
and see anew the dhow-curve of your middle;
the pelvis set back, like an African girl,
the buttocks high and compact. Your circling
arms conduct an elegant stop-frame switch
of direction, clear of the island reef.
I surface again and take in the vista:
Musandam’s broken fist of limestone
shaken forever at Persia; its displaced
knuckles clenched in tectonic fury.
This was a pearl coast. Exfoliate but
fifty years from the oil-greased palm of
Arabia and you have the calloused hands
of oarsmen, pulling out to the beds to plunge
long and deep beyond the mortal breath
into zones such as this; redeeming
iridescence from the oyster dark.
With this as my blade, I dive once more
to prise the unworded hinge of moments
such as these: you below the waterline,
in concrete time, reflecting your own light.

At Uffington

You stepped back a pace to better
your gaze into the low winter sun
and frame the prospect: man bends
to boy with kite and deals with a roeue
top button and a candle flame inclined
to the draught at the door of implied
fatherhood. You too fasten this moment
smiling at its easy eternity;
its archetype of family
held safe, all the same, against
the chill of our unravelling.

I'll later drive north, the tug
of necessary space pulling
me back into normal orbit.
But, for now, we stand on Dragon Hill,
our own slain myth bleeding circumstance
onto hope. The boy persists;
circles the bare chalk patch, his arm
forty-five degrees supplicant:
EponaÆs child of flight and air
favoured, forsaken, lifted again.
fertility, death and healing: chaff
for the horse goddess. The fickle line
rises. Your restive hand finds mine,
capricious in turn. Caught beyond
caution, we rejoin the moment;
driving deep the flint of it into
the chalky quick of ancient time.
Scouring out our own curt lore
under the dancing hooves of
a white horse.

Digitalis

Between his first and third heart attack
passed my father’s Summer of Love.
An unknown younger man came back:

my ear-ring was no longer mocked
-nor the tattoo of an arrowed dove-
between his first and third heart attack.

A sudden awareness of hip-hop and rap
a shuffling of beat groups with dub;
as an unknown younger man came back.

I’d come across him trying on hats
and found him once weeping at foxgloves
between his first and third heart attack.

Aware that given time is not given back,
he started bending lifelong rules enough
to let me see the younger man come back.

Dad was Dylan, McCartney and Jack Kerouac
in that last fond Summer of Love;
between his first and third heart attack
when an unknown younger man came back.

Seascape

You asked what ailed me, spotting the sudden
riddle of distress in your spooked infant.
Darkness was upon me: darkness black
and boy-shaped; riding the press of sands,
smearing the sunlight in its own sharp threat.
Father, the distance then between us spanned
but the lag of seconds whilst you worked out
my dilemma. Then you saw him too: a dark
familiar child hemming itself onto
your own distraught blood. Clearing a nimbus,
the sun quickened his outline as you smiled
and pointed to your own burden, bigger
than mine and no less dogged in pursuit.
We’ve all got one it seems, even Daddy.
So that’s alright. Better to know. What now?
For all we ran that day, there was neither
catching nor escaping. Your shadow, long
beyond the sandbank; I am chasing it still.

Decades

I’m driving my mother
Through Connemara; on the shortest day
of the year. Lenaun, Kylemore,
Cashel, Cong, Maam Cross, Letterfrack:
the names slipping sequentially
through the gloom, like a rosary
of sung syllables through the knuckled
hours. Stone field, bog, lough, rock, bay,
swan, lough, bog, bay, field, stone.
It’s her seventieth birthday.
Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son and to the Holy
Spirit and to something else
I can’t quite name: a memory
maybe, a nurtured reflex or ghost
of the small boy that walks me yet.
Hauling me down to Stations
or Benediction, we bonded
through the resentment of missed
Blake’s Seven and mumbled decades.
My tribal drum was the rhythm
of words and words repeated;
phrases circling back upon them-
selves, like country lanes leading
to unclear crossroads. Snapping
to at the memory bell, I am summoned
to this newer communion
with the pissed crow of Ireland’s roads.

It is getting late. In my rear-view
the solstice sun is thinning out
against the wild Atlantic as
before me, black and huge, Croagh Patrick
mars the horizon with the dark
obligation of an evening
Mass from a Sunday teatime long
ago. Greater still, my mother
in the passenger seat; the decades
dropping from her sleeping face
till she’s the girl emerging
from John Collier’s factory gates
into my father’s embrace.
I am stumbling around
in the back seat of our clapped-out A40;
trying to get a better view, sniffing in the
moment with the gusto of my
full four-and-three-quarter years.

Later, at a smart restaurant
back in Westport,
it is she who will stumble;
words eluding
her in the stress of what
she thinks is expected of her. Sure
before her God, she wavers
before the cutlery. The chef’s
questions demanding the response
of an unfamiliar creed.
In a gesture learnt
from her, I reach out
across the space, hand enfolding hand,
fingers guiding fingers
to the right prayer; grasp,
at last, upon the right bead.

Adam's Grave

Here, time tocks heavily into its saddle,
sits deep behind the hill’s pommel to ride
a white horse across the afternoon’s map.
Overton, Kennet, flint, down and earthwork;
the gothic script snug in the contour’s whorl.
Early, I am fence-sitting at the parking space:
Knap Hill above me, Cross Dyke to my right,
less memento mori than man-shod eternities
hacking the Wiltshire skyline this dusk.
Your car shushes the valley floor, clears its
throat on the gravel and stops beside me.
Older now, the boy is yet pleased to be with,
still kingly in the mind’s longbarrow.
His face, lengthening towards manhood,
peers out, pale under the anorak caul,
then mouths my name at recognition.
Doors open, you and I judge distances;
these days these are fine calculations.
You wear the watch I gifted you: the time
I otherwise couldn’t give to make this work
properly.

We are a hill family, so we climb
to Adam’s Grave to watch the light
failing beautifully over Pewsey.
Pronouns fuse in the hill-top gale and we
are a tribe again, hunting the now for a pelt
of future history, slung across pixels,
captured digitally. You pan from your boy
to me and back again as he tests the incline;
himself no longer sure, waiting for me
to model a gravity. Together, we tumble,
the shutter clicks, catching the failed light
beautifully.

That Winter

After a month of snow came the rains:
chugging against the tide up Meaburn Edge,
peering through mizzle towards High Cup Nick,
all-but-stalling in lakes on the Reagill road.

The martins’ nest grew sodden and heavy;
broke its spittle moorings after the night
of gales, played mud-pies with my bedroom sill
then feasted on the garden table.

Mornings were night-black and blue with cold:
big icicles snottered the gable end,
drive time was lost scraping rime off the car,
while great tits diminished in the hard frost.

The Lyvennet heron, a leggy grey clock,
met me at the gate each day; his fish round,
pulling in at the rock below the weir,
let me know if I was early or late.

Past October, the neighbours went part-time,
became a T.V.’s blue glow, chimney smoke
or Berghaus dummy: muffling good mornings
through zipped-up layers of Gore-Tex and wool.

That weir’s white noise was my rock n’roll;
rose and fell with the flow and one night
coughed up a tree that stuck to its palate
for seven weeks, changing my lullaby

Alone in my kitchen, I’d light a candle,
and wonder about you: five hours away,
failing to follow, failing to follow
the script that winter, that bloody winter.

Wood On The Downs

After Paul Nash

We have been here before, a relationship of parts
which cannot be analyzed. Uffington, Hackpen,
Grim’s Ditch, Ogbourne St.George, Wayland’s Smithy,
Sparshott Firs, Bishopstone and Barbury;
all the trodden way from Overton
to Beacon Hill. Each place its genius loci,
a favourite colour: Ash-Blue, Ochre,
Lemon Yellow, Terra-Verte, Lamp Black, Sienna.
But today you ditch your winter tones
and bid for late spring. The trees are in leaf,
the chalk from the downland reflects light
from a milder sky. Through field glasses
one sees a landscape that one can see
in no other way. Here, then, is yours:
the stiff cilia of trunks - a brown-fringed
platoon lost on Hill 60 - ghosts of the vortex,
the leaching colours of coming summer,
the breast, lumbar and hip curve of hill
prone upon the bed of Buckinghamshire.
And there I join you eighty years away,
with my Trojan girl; lifting her face
to mine in the dappled light of the wood.
A relationship of parts which cannot
be analyzed, we have been here before.

Piazza

After Giacometti

Seven AM in Piazza Plebescito,
not the human figure but long shadows
cast in this bronze light of April morning.
Freeze the frame. Bookshop owner opening
up on Piazza Dante, the Crib Street
assistant with her new lover to meet,
a Mergellina fisherman dropping
off fresh vongole, the Vomero lawyer
and Caremar sailor bound for Ischia:
ghosts of the unreal city, thin as nails.

He’d make your head look like the blade of a knife.

Archives

After Christian Boltanski

We are all so complicated,
then die;
from one stage pass quickly
to the next, become
objects that were someone.

The eye seeks out pattern and is satisfied.
Say what you see
in a darkened room:
ten columns of three,
saints bones for the century.

Each one has his own life,
each her own story:
the children of Dijon,
unknown person,
stolen graduates of Vienna.

Into every eye shines a light,
its wires trailing clumsily
down the wall,
and beneath each face,
a tin box for the soul.

Because he never loses, he assures me
I will die before eight years is up.
He’s probably right,
I don’t look after myself well.
But I am going to try to survive.

Meaburn

Here for the weekend, you ask where the young
hang out nights in this back-of-beyond place.
A reasonable question in the world
of second lives. Our youth is here alright;
but to see them do what kids their age do
you have to climb the Edge, past the double
switchback and on up to the Corpse Road.
There the satellites pipe them to the future:
out over the tops - with nary a glance
behind - to the start of their endings,
to the cell-quickened heart of the mountain.