Boats, harbour swell, bone-cutting wind
off the bay, and far inland
noise of the sea beating on stones.
I sit under the nightstar writing my music.
Winter’s a cry in me
that I loved you, here in a country
childhood blurs down the telephone wire,
dark with the deaths of friends, their news
coiled on the flat gull-hunted landscape.
* *
The headland in dawn light
whitens. Boats fishing the bay mouth
glitter, bird followed.
By Danes’ Dike the larks
threw down song. A harebell glimpsed
in the land wind was the pale stare
my grandfather grew, years at sea
seeking this landfall, its waves
folding the first of the light
where in death his eye
pearled as the eye of the caught fish
glazes on land, the sheen off him.
* *
Centuries back they walked off the sea,
sour and Danish, wanting
the green sea-glimpsed littoral,
Still dour, in a tone they have
of a slighted people, short
under the easterly. And whose history
if anyone knew was to complain –
the townsmen’s daughters gang-raped
under the fish quay, and him
with his head stoved in
still haunting the foggy landing.
* *
I can believe a time my father
sulked up and down furrows
cursing his masters. Black his face was
on the white upland of the Wolds.
By Flamborough the leathery sea
gutters again in my vision. Each day
I visit and stare, calling it
grey tongue, bell clapper.
I write. I drink whisky.
I loved a woman. I write
this shell shaped like an eye is a shell,
this stone shaped like a heart is a stone.
* *
Sea grey with fog, white
with my father’s spent anger, frost
nagging its offices, lugging his grudge
home through the evening. The place
I come to bury my dead is at street’s end
the old sea falling endlessly
Where that time is a bird gone
from its birdbones. Where I won’t stay.
Where the sea wears out its stones.
* *
I return. The sunlight through amber
is the bar at the Alpha Café.
The radio plays old dance records.
I visit the pinball machines in Fun City.
On the late night box it’s Renoir
singing: bullets fixed bayonets
the single shot of a pistol
to bring down one man with a tin flute.
Ten o’clock watching the cars go by.
If we flew in each other’s dreaming
in my skull I was with you
to whom these were love poems I guess.
* *
You moved I saw covies of birds
glide through the reeds. You sang
I heard waves break. Your name
called itself at a distance.
You with the sea strength.
You from the land of green ginger.
You in the wind in your dress
a flag with its shook sound.
Now moving with ebb sounds
moving with tide change
in the 5 a.m. river on sleep’s
sisterly arm you wake and break over me.