It seems I’ve gone grey in here, ageing
into these mirrors, these lights, the chatter
the length of the long varnished bar,
among the tequilas muttering una más.
It seems you’re far away again. At home
the bed’s a mess and I forget to eat
so I’m here again, drinking to health
and good fortune, the long roads you’re out on.
The heart beats be safe, be safe, be safe, my love.
It’s that time again, the mood called Missing You
eating down into the bones. Una más,
Pablito por favor. Una más, una más.
She’ll say you know what I can’t remember about cucumbers?
and never tell. She’ll say I know, I look like a dog off the road.
She’ll say I asked can you play Wish upon a Star?
But he said Sorry lady our piano player never turned up.
She’ll say I have a friend, she has a house on the Grande Canale,
but I can never remember her name. It’s in the phone book though.
She’ll say We have to go there or we haven’t been.
I can’t read a map but I always know where I am.
She’ll say I’ll never make horseradish sauce again
though I’ll cry again, again, again.
She’ll say I never loved him, I was blinded by love,
So that’s that, the universe is flat,
and they think now it will go on forever
thinning out into the empire of no light,
into only distance beyond distances.
Question answered. The stars
no more than drifts of smoke
from one of God’s occasional cigarettes,
a habit he gave up long ago.
Not a lot to look forward to then:
the death of time, and all the lamps off.
Not much of anything these days: long
interrupted silences, slow afternoons.
My usual limp around the neighbourhood,
a word with the Brothers Fish, home
to the ring doves on the chimney pipes,
the caravan wind in the sawgrass.
Was it or was it not all an illusion:
he loved her, she loved him,
they would go dancing, dancing off
into the town & the dawn and the midday,
kids & all, grow old together
into two old beech trees at the lane’s end
whose branches nudge each other on the wind
sometimes as in some old school tale,
what they wanted to think of each other.
That world that never was, another propaganda,
another tale written by the victors.
there were occasions. Moments.
Some that persist in the memory,
that live in time. That they die with.
Came a time he knew she wasn’t listening,
he wasn’t listening either, even she
wasn’t listening to herself.
Time to go off into the dark weeds
that are always at the edges of all our lives,
time to go off into the shadows & lie down there.
Came home late on the last train,
shot the bolts home. Slept,
dreaming of missed trains, missed planes,
lost tickets, failed connections.
I hear you whisper in your sleep
in the soft feather of your voice
blessed be the rain, and wake again,
or dream again but you’re not here.
The night: rainless, moonless,
endless, I could lose myself easily,
asking Are we nearly there yet?
How long is this road?
Nothing between cause & effect,
nothing saves us. I’m getting old
with my pussycat, still a kid
cheering for the Indians.
Still rooting for the cowboy
in the black hat. I make it all up
as I go, spinning some thread
I am the Sultan of Reflections.
I am the consort of the Queen of Spain.
I am king of all the snows.
See how everything melts all around me.
The house on the hill, no one knows
who lives there, what they do there
with each other, praying and scrubbing
night and day but it does no-one any good.
Fields of yellow kale, sky, to the left
a stand of trees, scrub, sharp briars,
what happened there thirty years ago is never spoken of,
but the birds and the other wild life never go there.
The sharp spurs of the teazels, weaving on the wind,
landscape of innocence and childhood, pushy clouds.
Who knows where the bodies and the knives are?
Look to your right: the gravel ponds.
Getting old, wearing out, boring,
nobody fancies any of it, the body
for ever rudely introducing new pains
from parts I’d never thought about.
All I want for Christmas, really all I want,
is a plastic gorilla in a cage, this high,
that yells Help. Hey you. You.
I’m trapped in here. Get me out.
Over and over till the battery runs out.
It’s a long way from the Land of Green Ginger,
where my beery adolescence was misspent.
He reviews his territory, all forty foot of it,
mapped, a general planning his campaign,
Napoleon next door in his massive
vomit-green shorts. Him and his wife.
In his own little corner of his own Third Reich.
He identifies neglect, waste, labour requirements
for the next grand project in concrete,
the next five-year plan. Him and his dog.
His enemies are the slugs and the snails,
they die by the dozen and still they keep coming,
he stamps them, clubs them, salts them,
watching them foam into nothing at all.
Him and his dog in his flagstone empire.
Not that anything grows there these days.
He knows: under the paving the worms writhe,
and they’re every one of them enemies too.
Nobody out here but us spiders,
grown fat through the summer,
in early September hanging out
in all their glittering tiger-striped menace,
bloodsuckers, warriors in the endless wars,
gladiators in the arenas of their nets.
This is the empire of the vampire,
the Republic of Bad Manners.
In here I’m merely tolerated, the delegate
from Out There among the stars. In here
I have no friends, relatives, lovers, offspring, antecedents,
no language to know anything, I know nothing.
I am alone in my brief season out here
wondering this that the other, whether
we’re far enough back from the river
to withstand the tsunami.
We could end up
with a beachside residence in our old age,
our days spent beachcombing and renting deckchairs,
soon there’d be a promenade and a bandstand,
a stick of rock with EAST HAM-ON-SEA right through it.
Milly, ten years dead now. I recall
her saying such odd things:
I’m worried about the dog in the rhubarb.
The rain a catspaw at the window,
outside the wind another game in the weeds,
the storm over at last. Night coming.
I’d like to write to her to say the blackcurrant bush
cut from her garden has filled with fruit this year,
the first in fifteen, black pearls, enough to make a pie.
Eventually the stereo will turn itself off,
the phone will not ring, no one will call. It’s OK.
The captain’s sober and the ship sails at midnight.
‘I write from Amalfi, a white
winding bee’s nest, jewels cleft between
mountains falling seaward.
Too hot for my slow northern blood,
too claustrophobic, too many tourists
beneath the blue plastic umbrella
of the tour guide calling over and over
I’ll be right here, right here.
Always something to be done, forms
to fill, applications in by due date
in triplicate, signed, witnessed.
Though I’m busy doing nothing
I keep busy anyway, what with the compass
to invent, my Parsifal to write.
Always curiosities, gossip, love affairs
around the back streets of Salerno.
Just sitting watching everyone go by.
In the slow afternoons the old city
whispers to itself in doorways. I fancy
those conceived in the hours of siesta,
they are born clever and grow up
to be lawyers, loansharks, politicians
who steal from all the rest of us. Ciao.’
Gone into white mist, the way it is in the movies,
into states whose names we don’t know yet,
borders not yet thought of. Gone anyway. Dust.
So many centuries just getting up to go.
And it rains and rains. My love,
my life is turning into a list of things I used to do.
My love consoles me. Sometimes I think of her,
a bird high in the tree of the house, a river
of sunlight warm on her cheeks.
So much patience with paint, silk, the least gap
and it bleeds. In the end it’s a scarf in the wind, love,
The phone rings, it’s Anna, she says
I’m under a restraint order,
they can keep me here as long as they like,
they can do what they want with me.
But she doesn’t say where, there’s bugger all
I can do for Anna, lost daughter of my lost friend
Duncan the Drunken. She says only two of us
in here are ambient and all the rest are chairs.
And hangs up. The wires buzz in the ear,
all the way to Bristol and beyond. What was it
I was doing before Anna rang?
What to do now with the afternoon?
A Bloody Mary sort of Friday,
all the way on that long slide
into Monday, Tuesday, Thursday,
when the liver fails, the pump quits.
Prague, Amsterdam, Bilbão. Some place
you least expect, all around you
the big people in expensive suits
leaving footprints all over the maps.
Out amongst the scatter of languages and stars,
part of the world’s chatter that’s all of us,
in some distant place where even a fruitstand
by the tramstop glazed with rain is significant.
Allah il Allah. Father forgive.
O Israel. O mane padme hum. A man
running shouting into fire to any God that listens.
Every moment itself, at dusk the many greens
of the darkening garden, background to the sheer
white sheets of the hydrangea, the yellow cups
St John’s wort offers to the deepening blue.
The opening of the hour of the evening primrose,
last homeward chatter of the blackbird,
that moment the city’s traffic stills. Music,
perhaps, a little night music on the FM,
Bach’s Staccato in B Minor, a little Mozart,
Relax relax natters the DJ, a plane drills
a hole in the horizon, a siren wails its urgent mission,
and the world’s with us again. Nag. Nag.
Still, there were moments, yellow flowers
closing in the last of the light, musk
of lavender and woodruff and a cool breeze
in the long half-light that becomes no light at all.