Bird Life in West London
‘Two distincts, division none’ – Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle Dove’ I heard it again the other night, The owl whose call I used to imitate, Ooh-hoo, when you were dropping off – shrieks And giggles from you
Poems
Wednesday
Wednesday
The Man Opposite
Every now and then, during my late-nighttussle with rhyme and metre, I glance upat the top flat opposite, wondering whetherits male occupant, silhouetted and backlit,is thinking, each time he raises his headand seems to gaze back, how excitingit is to overlook on the ground flooropposite an insomniac poet constantlylicking his stanzas into shape, and maybeeven
Kimono Recycled
It was too tight even then, as if he wishedme slimmer or to spill out erotically at every move. Now, as I rip strips for shoebuffing, the cockerel-red cloth pulls hard against me, held by its gristle of seams.The stitches resist, baring white teeth that grin all the way to where he loved best.An embroidered
He Digesteth Harde Yron
Or rather the ostrich, like the crocodile, swallows hard stones such as quartz or granite which jostle in the gizzard to assist the slow work of digestion. Such was the work required to mill a wide diet of New Zealand vegetation that the enormous moas went miles in search of the right stones which can
Wednesday
Mexico
Working from hammock in Mexico, Watching how far centavos go, The beer is cheap, tequila strong, Here you can sleep and all day long. Hola to holidays in the sun! Don’t want to do it – doesn’t get done. From sunset strip to sunrise glow History runs deep in Mexico. Sipping a cola, eating ice-cream,
Installation
I close the door to his roomwhich had stayed propped openthroughout his illness, and behind itfind a few of his things.His heavy brown shoes angledas if he’s just taken them off,jacket and cap hung on the peg,walking stick against the wall.Mechanically,as a bulldozer collapses a site,we’d removed from the wardrobestacks of folded clothes.But here, behind
Wednesday
Woodlouse
Nearly sucking up a woodlouse in the vacuum cleaner, an unseen finger taps me on the head. Surely, it says, you have the time to find a bit of card or an old envelope and move this little fellow to the flower bed? Plucked from the wall, it rolls into a ball and waves its
Wednesday
The Ghost House
I looked through the window and I saw a sunny day. I say sunny day, but the thing about sun is how it casts shadows. It draws the shape of the house across the patio, and what this shape is is a ghost house, here, creeping its way across these slabs, as the day lengthens,
Vow
I do not take you to be my husband or my fiancé, or even now my friend. I do not wish to have or to hold your head at the toilet’s rim. Nor keep you at arm’s length when you were other-him. I’ve had you better and the worst. I’ve certainly had you richer. As
Monday
The Tearing Ledge
Islands, illusions,our dark wrecking spell,five twisted pins at St Warna’s Well. Islands, illusionsin a Bryher of mist,Bishop Rock Lighthouse serpent-kissed. Islands, illusionsfrom East to West Porth,seas without God, skies without north. Islands, illusionsnear this world’s edge,storm petrels circle the Tearing Ledge. Islands, illusionson lost sailors’ lips,the Dogs of Scilly devour their ships.
Sunday
Sidcup, 1940
I was writing my doll’s name on the back of her neck when Mummy caught fire — a noisy distraction. She was wearing a loose blue flowered smock (an old maternity smock, I now deduce, from her pregnancy with my sister four years earlier, being used as an overall, not to waste it); the hem
Wednesday
The Christmas Game
When we found them under the tree there were twenty-two men all dressed in white, packed in two boxes of rosewood, between ancient and brittle layers of yellow paper. We set them out in classic style, carrying their rigid bodies up and down, up and down, until the light began to fail; one motionless fielder
Christmas ’84
These mornings when he’s not rota’d on picket, he spends the shift he would’ve spent in darkness in the spare room, sawing, painting, making a doll’s house. His wife, in secret moments, sews bits and bobs of fabric into dolls’ dresses: twists of foil are jewellery, pages of old colouring books wallpaper. It’s for their
Oboe Wind
after Harry South’s closing theme to ‘The Sweeney’ It blows through a scrapyard,through unstable towersof Capris, Granadas, Transit vans … through yellow teeth and fingers,a clouded bar’s persiflagethen out onto the street to lift comb-overs, flares,wide lapels, facial hair –a balm for sore ribs, black eyes. In search of a decade’s soulit winds through a
Wednesday
Menopausal Women
We struggle to remember what we came up for – spaghetti or air – who our neighbour said was coming to fix what, the conifer we’ve just planted. We watch too much Netflix, play word games online when we should be asleep. We cast off covers, cast them on again, force ourselves to rest upright
To Marilyn from London
You did London early, at nineteen: the basement room, the geriatric nursing, cinema queues, modish fall-apart dresses, and marriage at Stoke Newington Registry Office, Spring 1955, on the rebound. Marrying was what we did in those days. And soon enough you were back in Wellington with your eye-shadow and your Edith Piaf records buying kitchen
Abergavenny in December
Dull day. The Black Mountains in mist. The houses crawl up the lower slopes like rising damp. I wander the town devoid of purpose. November’s fallen leaves siliconed to the wet Monmouth Road. At five the streets eerily vacated as if there’s a curfew. Everything already now so last year. Weatherspoon’s beerhall empty but for
Wednesday
Witness appeal
Spring cartwheels down these country lanes, knocks fern and dock for six as frost exhumes with petrol fumes tar potholes leaves can’t fix, while bluebells smoke as downpours choke torrentially inside each rainswept flume of beech or broom chiffchaff and finch survive. Here pimpernel bedraggle a grass verge where, windblown, dog violets snitch through hedge
View
What luck that Sweatenham’shad been flattened, its concrete baseremaining: the perfect spotto sit the works caravan on blocksand our paint shop beside it. Ern and Jud deftly navigatedthe Land Rover around dead tyres,mangled iron, sprouting steel rods,backing it into positionin full view of the Newcastle Street shops and the windows above them,all day traffic to
A Pub Wall in 1974
Thinking about those nights Kindles a strange felicity: Drinking by candlelight In a pub off the Earls Court Road In the time of the Three Day Week, Because there was no electricity. Certainly we were political. Nothing, though, seemed as serious— Intimate and critical – As the play our