All these years something grew in me, measuring,
cutting good wood, stitching my own sweet way with a dowel,
a nail, a joint, reassembling the forest into chairs
and cupboards in a room swollen with wood dust.
This was the page of my life. Then I was redundant.
So I come out to Wanstead most days, to the Flatts,
brooding briar and star moss, lichen, the ways of the ants
and the birds, if the day holds the rain off.
Most days in the city’s diet of sound I’m deaf in one ear,
in the other intermittently lucid on the left hand channel,
clairvoyant and amplified, the system working at last,
both speakers straight to the brain’s right side.
So today.
Today I lay watching a red kite rise and fall
in the shimmer of the updraughts, hearing
the far away laugh of the boy at the string’s end:
to him everything an amazement, like new made money.
And the wind through all easy. I pondered the weather,
and what waterlogged secrets the gravel ponds keep,
what guns and what corpses and why, when the day’s good
and nothing should wreck it some fool always does.
So today, I brought my Kalashnikov.
Away to one side sunlight was moving on towers
in Leyton and Leytonstone. Gulls, crows, one then
two magpies in the scribble of weeds. And the city
tuned itself out, its traffic a distant barking and child sounds.
As usual as ever I was taking a last backward glance
at the world’s green spatter of leaves, wind
haunting the grass, high up and invisible the larks’
where the captain had just flipped the no smoking sign.
Traffic noise began rolling in, sirens, then the buzz
of some model plane’s toy motor round and around
in the slow light that but for him would be bliss.
So today I put in a clip. Today I took off the safety.