As ever, the straight track between trees
receding out of the eye of the painting
into brown distance, water, a haze
already forming on the vague hills, sky.
I am again in my own true country
that surely existed, a map in a drawer,
a postcard, a print in a seafront café,
a place it has always just stopped raining.
The macadam shines, two bands of emerald
are kerbside grass, trees in the wind
and the afternoon sunlight’s arrival
So much childhood: the sun’s raw eye,
the northern sea grey and unlovable,
the swift constellations of birds
over the bayline, like silk’s shine.
Like salt scattered across tables.
Like the Pleiades, some place we’ll not go
past the flightpath of the terns,
the cold salt aching down the easterly.
Salt. Stiffens locks, the keys
jam in the doors, doors in their jambs,
the windows in the windworked shutters,
the widows stiffening in easy chairs.
Clear again is one moment, as to detail
precise in my imprecise memory, it begins
this long tale I am telling myself
as to why and who am I on this road.
I am six, I am getting in wood,
it is evening in winter, the ice
plates the horsetrough, in my hands
the sticks in the woodpile are frozen.
On the third step of the mounting block
there’s a white milk can, waiting,
the air round and the winter stone
wear off the milk’s heat: the moment.
We will die, all: my father, mother,
such kin and such friends as all love
and the world lends, and I
no exception fall out of knowing.
It was death looked at me then
in the white shadow in kindling,
a dark brief face in the ice,
I broke sticks. The sun lay
over field frost. The farm clanked,
humming milk, moaning complaint,
long ago, its moment comes back now.
I am again under Orion, the moon again,
by the sea that returns everything lost
in the tide’s rope tangled up, the birds
at the watery limits of the English.
I’m the sea gone sour, going radioactive,
betimes touchy as anti-matter, untouchable
in the north, I go down hissing
leukaemia between the lovers’ sheets, the blood
will wither in its artery, the sperm
shudder in the egg, the marrowbone,
the molecule unwind within the heart, the brain
stare into nothing and be dumb.
This is not a melody nor a tale told for children.
This is not a telegram to the poets in Minneapolis.
This is not an answer nor a question.
This is not a message. This is not a song.
Now we are travelling into Cumbria, the road
running out to water down the lost peninsula.
Now I am far away recalling winter and the fog
across another country, continent, biography.
When what I think to say is that we’re done,
where everywhere is in the crosshairs,
everywhere is targeted, we are the printout,
we are the coded blips, we are the software.
‘Filled with longing, capable of grief.’
Tough luck Susie Rainbow fare thee well.
She got the hero not the message, hostage
this may be all too long a night along the road,
and I begin again. Again. I who left
everything behind I have forgotten nothing,
so it appears. With our desire we continue.
Grabbing any end of rope, we might be anywhere
or anyone under the blue star of evening
spreading out our maps, we might be
you and I my love and love each other.
A white sheet perhaps, the glance of shirts
across the winds of March, a glimpse
of washing in the gale in next door’s yard,
the kitchen window staring into nothing –
soil, these fingers and these tongues
the crocus and the snowdrop put through frost,
a cat’s dance through the cold we hoped
would grow to summer, last the flash
across the wind-whipped shrubbery,
the shed in fire, the glare that wastes us
with its glance, the crack of sheets
in wind, their sudden whiteness.