On 9 June 1865, Charles Dickens was involved in a railway accident on a viaduct at Staplehurst, Kent, while returning from France with his mistress Ellen Ternan. Ten people died and forty were injured. Dickens himself died five years to the day after the crash. I stopped mid-sentence – a broken train of thought. On
It’s been a while. Let me get used to it.I knew about the widows, of course, but hadn’t quite expected the crutches, the walking-frames, or that poor agitated soul endlessly pacing at the front. On the other hand, the baby chirruping during the one minute’s silence could hardly have given any offence. It’s been a
Two houses up, old Eddie died last week and a man I’ve never seen before is throwing things into the garden from the back door: a cardboard box, black plastic bags, a broken kitchen chair. The garden isn’t much, but Eddie had laid a path, hollowed a goldfish pond, sown a rockery with alpine
You are not churchy, I feel certain of it.You do not demand a particular hat or coatOr a room filled with a particular scent.You do not only like hymns And if someone laughs you don’t mind.There is no special kind of poem for youOr single word to wrap your meanings inNor can any category contain
Goddard prints his footsteps in the gloom and, from the transepts, Breathes an air swaying with a pleasant doom, not quite his own. He marks the candles, too, stacked and swelling for another age, And, for the thousandth time, repeats their sigh, repeats their sigh. Still the organ keys lie waiting for him, like the
through the French windows we see Vanessabarefoot on the misty suburban lawndoing an arabesque on the wet grassas we troop down to the breakfast tableher stepfather behind his black moustachesatisfied to have woken us at dawnwith a shout come on, get up! Vanessaat fifteen or sixteen prepares herselfto quietly drop the bomb of pregnancybetween the
Ball-bearings, silver, tilted inhis lidless gold tobacco tintip out and strike the garage floorlike props dropped by a conjurorwho scrabbles for them in the darkblackthreaded by the scent of barkto feel, in earth caked on a spade,the soul his careless ghost mislaidslip through cold hands that disinterthe winter bulbs he left for her,while cobwebs, hung
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