The wind sucks clouds. In the indrawn breath
grass bends and nods, like Mandarins.
The sun hunches, and begins to set no sooner
than it’s risen. This
depopulated place! Where moorland birds
repeat a sound, like copper, beaten.
The very moon imagines things –
a desert dusk, with itself as scimitar …
As the wind keeps up, closer than
I’ve heard my name in … how long?
and the dark coheres; an old idea
returns again, the prodigal friend:
of leaving: for Szechwan, or Persia.
1987
Α boomin echo doon the corridor,
her door’s the only ane open
lik a shell, an a wumman sweepin:
saft soun, wings.
A licht-bulb, hingit fi the ceilin
by a short cord.
A slever ο gless in the oose
an a black hair. she telt me
they’ve killed 5000 people in Beijing.
Nou this wumman’s haunin her gear
brushes an pens, her worn claes
for me tae cairry. But she’d a bin waitin
when they cam, chewin her gum
blawn them a bubble size ο China.
This is a place your friens disappear:
trust naebody. Luve a.
1993
Mother-May-I
go down the bottom of the lane,
to the yellow-headed piss-the-beds,
and hunker at the may-hedge, skirts
fanned out
in the dirt and see the dump
where we’re not allowed –
twisty trees, the burn, and say:
all hushed sweetie-breath:
they are the woods
where men
lift up your skirt
and take down your pants
even although you’re crying.
Mother may I
leave these lasses’ games
and play at Man-hunt, just
in the scheme Mother
may I
tell small lies: we were sot
in the lane, sat on garage ramps,
picking harling
with bitten nails, as myths
from the woods behind the dump
where hitch-hikers rot
in the curling roots of trees,
and men
leave tight rolled-up
dirty magazines.
Mother may we
pull our soft backsides
through the jagged may’s
white blossom, run across the stinky dump
and muck about
at the woods and burn
dead pleased
to see the white dye
of our gym-rubbers seep downstream?
1994
What are we doing when we toss a coin,
just a 5p-piece into the shallow dish
of the fountain in the city-centre
shopping arcade? We look down
the hand-rail of the escalator
through two–three inches of water
at a scatter of coins: round, flat, worthless,
reflections of perspex foliage
and a neon sign – FOUNTAIN.
So we glide from mezzanine to ground,
laden with prams, and bags printed
Athena, Argos, Olympus; thinking: now
in Arcadia est I’ll besport myself
at the water’s edge with kids,
coffee in a polystyrene cup.
We know it’s all false: no artesian well
really leaps through strata
fathoms under Man at C&A, but
who these days can thrust her wrists
into a giggling hillside spring
above some ancient city?
So we flick in coins, show the children how:
make a wish! What for, in the shopping mall?
A wee stroke of luck? A something else, a nod
toward a goddess we almost sense
in the verdant plastic? Who says
we can’t respond; don’t still feel,
as it were, the dowser’s twitch
up through the twin handles of the buggy.
1994
i. Ultrasound
Oh whistle and I’ll come to ye,
my lad, my wee shilpit ghost
summonsed from tomorrow.
Second sight,
a seer’s mothy flicker,
this is what I see
with eyes closed;
a keek-aboot among secrets.
If Pandora
could have scanned
her dark box,
and kept it locked –
this ghoul’s skull, punched eyes
is tiny Hope’s,
hauled silver-quick
in a net of sound,
then, for pity’s sake, lowered.
1999
So little of the world is bequeathed
through us, our gifts
instead, are passed among the living
– like words, or the bolus
of chewed bread
a woman presses with her tongue
into the gorgeous open mouth of her infant.
1999
Tradition suggests that certain of the Gaelic women poets were buried face down.
So they buried her, and turned home,
a drab psalm
hanging about them like haar,
not knowing the liquid
trickling from her lips
would seek its way down,
and that caught in her slowly
unravelling plait of grey hair
were summer seeds:
meadowsweet, bastard balm,
tokens of honesty, already
beginning their crawl
toward light, so showing her,
when the time came,
how to dig herself out –
to surface and greet them,
mouth young, and full again
of dirt, and spit, and poetry.
1999
slever. sliver
gless: glass
oose: fluff
a wumman sweepin.
we were sot : we were so (to rhyme with ‘not’)