On these long, fruitful days, the Rioja which captures the sun of other Julys, is relaxing us, as is the summer, into this unwinding and earthy wine, into sex on the hoof, on the sofa, the Persian rug on the sitting room floor, in the hall, the kitchen by the cooker, up against the fridge,
I am your memories. They are not me. So it feels strange to be remembered by These relics of my personality. Although you mourn me, is it really me You mourn, or thoughts of me that make you cry? I am your memories. They are not me. Ridiculous, such immortality! To live like this, to
When she thinks (if she does) of the first James it is of a six-year-old who died when she was fourteen, of meningitis. His spirit, like a trespassing sprite, flew into his parents’ marriage bed and lurked there as they comforted each other. A month later, conspiring with the genie of ovulation and the hormone
While in the mirror I’m an aging face More or less the same day after day, In the mind’s darker space There are these handles to enticing doors Of occasional abrupt transition, Doors of entry, doors Of intercommunications Obeying the same laws. So many rooms! Such impatience! Backwards and forwards I make my way With
All spring the scattered bands gathered, the People, the Human Beings, all those like themselves on this earth — Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho. Movement and magnetism, wildness in the air, the power of the buffalo and the People swarming and flowing north to the sweetness of the old land and the old ways, up
On our anniversary, you drag the sofa-bed into the old conservatory. The January moon swells to cliché and under a ten-tog duvet we shiver. Frost plays havoc with the view. Years slip, sheets cool, the roof weeps and timber withers in its frame. We are unhinged, the window slides, the stars keep their distance, and
Living up to its fabled buzz, the Kop roared and rose even before kick-off. Down in the main stand I watched; John Barnes adjusting his captain’s band on the hallowed turf. Waves of red in rows and rows – a kid in that season’s kit, I swelled with a kind of borrowed pride, belonging without
Nothing I write will be as durable as the rhyme for remembering the genders of third declension nouns, stuck in my head ever since Miss Garai’s Latin class. Masculini generis I used to fancy I shared it with generations of English schoolboys, the colonial servant dispensing justice under a tree in the African bush, are
Intimacy these days discomforts. More our style is the park or the pub, or three-minded chess with young Kasparov. A bracket-dash-colon smile implies we have no longings to confess. Always, though, I’ll text a bunch of preset flowers on the eve of her six-month scan. ‘Thank you, dear heart, for remembering.’ Then come the hours
Scarborough 1939 Mum’s slipping on her see-through dress. Outside our council house a chauffered Rolls is waiting. It’s a beautiful summer. There’s been so much yearning. At the Floral Hall violins are fainting and the black-and-white minstrels have ripe red lips. I’ve won third prize for my Bluebird sand- carving. Soldiers are wrapping barbed-wire round
the english foxhound likes to bay his enemy is the wind instead of grief he feels relief at every innovative gust
Two poems in memory of Mick Imlah 1. ‘Hardy and Housman lived round here,’ I said, slumped in an armchair in your flat. ‘Compared to those two, we’re small beer — Hardy and Housman, geniuses crowned here! No blue plaques for us, who’ve gone to ground here… We’re pygmies, compared to giants like that, Hardy
I was in love for a whole week after Episode One: Your voice so tender, so knowledgeable, your slender hands and feet. In Episode Two, doubts crept in. Were you hogging the camera or was it just that the camera loved your profile, your man-of-the-people T shirts, your breeze-ruffled hair? Episode Three opens with you
Lapwing leans against the wind, First hint of changing season Come to turn the soil to stone And bring the blanket snow. Until the gentle snowdrops show In the hedgerows, And the fields grow green again, In the warm summer days.
As I make my way to the greenhouses a seagull kills me in its pure white throat. Quiet in the tomatoes. Quiet among the beans. Soft dark patches where the rain leaks in. Can I come home? Has it been too long? Tall weeds growing through the coils of hose.
He was there again in the small hours: not this time in a dream, but in a dream of dreaming. Even so the two of us looked aside, stuck for something to discuss that was not a matter of life and death, so we fell back on football and the elections. Then suddenly he started
Whatever savants say, the world is flat, not round; the ships that crowd the bay are for its limit bound. Their cargoes likewise, all consigned to one address, at the world’s waterfall plunge into nothingness. The brightwork, the white sails unfurled against the sky, the million knots and nails for such a voyage, why?
My love arrived with tulips, ‘ten for a fiver’, picked up from the supermarket at the end of the street. Fresh off the plane, perhaps he would have preferred to wash his hands but stood in his coat in the kitchen watching me cut through the cellophane and crush the stems with the stainless heel
All in the half-dark, we watch the dead playing the parts of the living, in roles we have seen before: The Quiet Man, or The Song of Bernadette. A stranger in a blue Thames van came from somewhere to the west as night drew in, to unload the big, flat cans with reels in them
Feeling my age, too soon too tired, Whatever gifts I had no more required, I am a hireling called in to be fired. Time was I was ambitious, heretofore. Not any more, not any more. Ridding myself of papers, pots, coins, books, No longer vain about what had been looks, The broth boiled over by