The room shakes. He holds the hairspring up to the light. In the hour before the jets come he plays old cassettes of Farid El-Atrache and dreams of Beluga where his son, Tariq, once drew a clock in the sand. They bring him pieces of broken time: cracked faces, lost years, and place them into
Flaubert said he could hear the fallof the words several pages aheadbefore he’d even written them. Your poems felt like that to me —or should I say, feel like that:they haven’t died, as you have, and never will, singer of backyards, afterlives, banished gods and the lost places of the earth. Seeing in inanimate things
First you have to give your name.Only when Callum finds it on his listwill he open the door and let you in. They have emptied the waiting roomof all but half-a-dozen chairs.We take it in turns. Each of us is called. We are all of an age, some with sticksmost grey-haired. One by onewe leave
To gambol and to sometimeslollop through the meadow,head, a yo-yo, beech-green eyes. To be a dog — to be a German Shepherd dog sniffing einfach, einfach, in between botanic explorations. Or a Vizsla — chieftain of the hunting arts, Hungarian and fed on chops, oroh to be a spaniel, simply that and snuffle pungent mushrooms
A 3×5 snap, black-and-white, fading, fallsfrom the pages. Summer ’68, Cuckmere Havensnatched with a child’s Instamatic: blurry, askew –tilted skyward mid-skirmish from a grassed-overtrench carved into the Downs. Resurrected:grinning urchins gangly in shorts – Bell, Lomax, Leeper – hamming it up as prisoner and Jerries,a penknife’s glint at the throat of a boy whose namenow
Each night at ten the fossoyeur powdered white with limereads the tally by the excavation.The trussed lie there hooded, tagged, after the weather the viewers sleep. The mice fear death, the unselected,for they have a pulse of finite beatsand even the rats along the foundationswhen exposed by the digger’s jawspin around each other like eels.Death’s
I wish I’d gone to Icelandwith Auden and MacNeiceto feed my brain on silenceor talk of war and peace. I wish I’d seen Craiglockhart under a Scottish moonand talked about the slaughterwith Owen and Sassoon. But I was a Belfast studentwith Heaney and his clan.I never got to talk at all –one had to be
We recognise each other at the same time –Mr Fleet, my old geography teacher. He says Time flies and our names come to each other like a mnemonic, decades since we last met. He’s dressed for the weather, with binoculars,but he’ll not see a rarer bird on his walk than me.He fires off big questions
Knowing the pelvis frail, he thrust at a slower pace so not to break or bruise. He once hospitalised old Lady Agatha,his only surviving patron, after she demandedher antique legs be lifted up onto his shoulders,while he penetrated with aplomb. She said it was the most exhilarating birthdayshe had had since she ate partridge with
Long after there is no point feeling lossI cross this now familiar dry plateauand stop, hearing my footsteps also stop.Silence, a fresh sheet falling on a bed, settles. Not quite a silence after all:a quiet breathing in the winter hedgeand sheep, cropping. Birds – a flock of something,plovers, peewit, I don’t know, but breathing,alive, quiet.
If I’ve shown up at your room, drunk, at 3am, then let’s at least agree that lesser men have sunklower, and that my being here at least shows you and me have a unique connection, that drew us two together against all odds: something mostly complex, though grave, something ultimately true,or that at least when
They sense the clocks have changed but can’t tell if an hour’s been lost or gained. It’s a struggle to name the day of the week Monday or Friday it’s all the same. There isn’t a deadline they have to meet no future appointments they need to keep. Like insects trapped between panes of glass
The hitch down Spring Bank Holiday was back to this, Stumbling through high-rise canyons blocking views Of dandelions and desolation, lying thumb Raised up in hope and forced to thinkOf two nights earlier, when kiss on fumbling kiss Had come to nothing much,minds left to muse On after smoke and talk and all the drink,Tongues
Mum said he only used it once,the year I was born,fighting the tag An Older Dad,sporting trumped-up auburnin all of my baby photos. So what if he kayaked with me,dug an allotment,laid a lawn and its paving stones,swam and roller-skated,taught me a two-handed backhand? I learned to mention his white hairevery chance I got,feeling a
Absorbed by the TV in the corner, the pair of us on the sofa – but what of the space in between? The introduction of a rug or low table, nothing to obscure the picture. An emptiness remains: colourless, formless in either light or dark. Neither any use for it nor to it, we stare
i.m. Colin Falck (1934-2020) It arrived, a something out of nothing, to becomeThe last good poem you would make, as, out of the dumbSilence, words, knowing they belonged to other words,Lit and jostled on the lines, the end of season birdsAlong the wires which as one will rise and flock,Shaping the surrounding air to the
The fall of a girl’s hair, the flare of a skirt –the merciless daily things that break your heartare there for you to learn your skills from. The hurtof living is what stings us into art. Cool your desires to ice, then start to play.Compose it all like music: use what you need:secrets; strange worlds;
after Baudelaire Now comes the hour when a flower feelsPerfume evaporate as from a bowlOf incense, when sounds make the evening’s soulSad languorous waltzes so that the head reels. Perfumes evaporate as from a bowl,A mandolin’s strings pluck a heart that keels,Sad languorous waltzes so that the head reels;The sky sad, beautiful, will take its
Keep your distance – here be dragons Agues of all kinds blown in from the East Time to fear door-knobs, be wary of cheek-to-cheek Kiss nothing, stay Within the boundaries, do what they say Soon we won’t know ourselves, bolted Behind untouchable doors, masked Like smash-and-grab merchants or terrorists Or like surgeons Bent over
You were seven and hadn’t askedfor one in months, but the salt windhad whipped your energy away,before a piled-up plate of squidat our favourite place on the promhad left you sagging in your seat. Even as I threw you overa shoulder and braced for the trudgeto our house, my back was hintingat a future without