Hunters in the Snow

I skate because the streets are made of ice,

because I have to learn, I skate

because the river’s hard and green,

because the birds are crows or magpies

but could be vultures overhead and in the trees,

I skate because the men are home from hunting

with just one fox across a shoulder,

because their sticks are raised and keen,

their dogs are slouched at heel, I skate

because I’m not aware they’re there,

because the trees are leafless, naked,

their darknesses exposed, I skate because

the men around the fire outside the pub

have nowhere else to go, I skate

because I am a girl and have no running shoes,

because the women are knee-deep

in freezing water, because the white peaks

are so very far away, I skate because a man

has painted me in his image of a girl at play,

because I must keep moving, I skate

because I am a girl, I have to learn,

because the streets are made of ice.

Star Pasture

Our liege

Of jewelled gravity

Set free

Has roped the breeze

And saddled him

To ride through winter’s mind,

Inconstant spring,

All summer’s Fabergé,

To find a season

Greenest green,

Demesne

Past altering.

Placemat

A restaurant paper placemat

is the best place to compose

a poem. There’s nothing venerable

about the surface, slightly rough,

perhaps a stain of sauce or tea.

You can try yourself out on a

paper placemat, not take things

so seriously. Thoughts fill

the squares and dimples while

a meal fills the stomach. The pen

flows like a good wine – with any luck

you’ll stagger home tonight,

fumble, swear, fail to fit the key.

Ever After

I’m convinced he would like a quiet wife.

One who would sit on her chair and eat granola and sip carrot juice

wearing a ring on only her wedding finger.

How peaceful to be concerned by nothing more than

juice, dried fruits and nuts, and natural yoghurt!

The mind like a quiet seed in the dark.

How irritating, the small explosion of a green shoot breaking into life.

No. He’d have nothing like that. Just a quiet wife on her chair

eating granola, sipping juice, her lips turning orange.

Outbound

We all need to someone to watch our back,

says the man on TV. Yours

hunches at the wheel

as we sail through vineyards dense

with straining vines. Our cases bulge and scrape

as we lift them from the boot. You’ve drawn

the short straw – the orange one

with a dodgy wheel, a missing handle.

You exhale stiffly. Airborne,

you stretch across an empty seat;

I stroke you, neck to coccyx.

The taxi driver has a back sprain

so we haul our cases in, and out:

25 kilos each, according to the airport scales.

Your body’s silky as I spoon you

in a Travelodge, your spine

between my breasts, against my belly,

encased between our bodies like a silver chain

between two squares of cotton.

I can’t sleep. I turn; you spoon me.

Somewhere, our taxi driver’s pulling up,

someone’s saying, No, really, not a problem,

as they reach in for their luggage,

steadying themselves.

The Man Who Tried to Kill the Stars

Half through his third

bottle of red, he took

the keys to the gun

cabinet, unlocked it,

loaded a rifle, stepped

out into the garden,

wet grass beneath

his feet, breath cloud-

plumed in cold air,

scanned the organic

darkness above,

sighted a target, fired,

then swung his gun

around the night sky,

aimed again, fired.

The stars impervious,

gazed down upon him,

as shots sang out.

bird

go winging slow across the sky

how slow it flew I couldn’t know

how slow because it was so high

the sky more pointless than the sea

where there are rocks and there is land

through which a being flying slow

as far as I could understand

would neither notice me nor know

that I was watching here below

the wingbeat steady as a man

who still has miles and miles to go

pub window

under the arch of the Shiraz Palace

round to the kitchen

tradesman’s entrance

young girl walks

in her long loose trousers

early perhaps for the evening rota

does a little shimmy

in her long loose body

nobody near her

nobody watching

On the Fellowship of Young Poets

for A.J. and N.C.

An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar… cheap joke, how it began

one ancient evening on the lash in Leeds.

Three likely lads, fresh from writing degrees,

thinking they knew it all and next to nowt

at once, as if the margins of hope and doubt

were clear as the angles on the pool table

they’d gathered round. Watch them now, unable

to imagine, as youth will, what’s up ahead,

each smoothly potting the yellows or reds

in the backroom of a pub’s smoky haze.

You want to tell them these are the best days,

aren’t they, but this is only a memory,

now the baize is cleared for one final whisky.

Sea-Change

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change…

Down there the fathom worker

Cleans a universe of sand,

Whitening bones, blurring wood

With weed and merhair strands

Our assiduous, unfailing tide

Washing the island away

And flooding Prospero’s cove.

Now all who were shore-born

Will leave in their boats. ‘Good sea’

Will be their greeting, temper

Of the moon their government.

Into the water they ease the old

To look for ancestry bleached

In grave-pools, anenome men.

From the string of abandoned boats

The young dive down to sacrifice

The swaying stubble of a forest

Will be their dark adventure:

White and green bodies met for

Sea marriage and sea justice,

And counsellors uttering bubbles.

Down in the slow-moving cold

Sway the grottoes of gods.

Above, the wave-pushed wreaths

And the dazzling stare of the sun

In his empty, shadowless temple.

At a Distance

They’ve taken down the trees

round Keeper’s Pool. The water’s lifeless,

bright and calm, the only creatures left

are two white swans, their nest

a circled heap of twigs and litter

a few yards from a park bench

looking at the view – the golf-course,

flagged and sweatered.

Forever symbols in some poem;

what these swans are is what they do.

They have no thought or use

for us, their watchers, or for the men

more distant in the fine spring rain

dragging their clubs across the green.

The Naked Limbs

           You told me that you’d read,

                And were struck by

                That night in bed,

A sermon on the naked limbs that lie

                Inside your soul,

           And as you told me so,

Our youngest son, whose loud voice cried, rushed

           Usurpingly to climb

Inside our sheets and quilt, with soaked pyjamas

                Stripped just in time,

And tears as suddenly stopped and hushed

      As those of laments and psalms are.

      He mumbles to your heart in bed:

You will lay him down when he is quieted.

Sepulchre

Her grief is like the shadow play

of bones snapped in an old X-ray

unsleeved to show what love had done

to her and her bright skeleton.

Lit up, half-cut, she starts to flag

still clutching her green shopping bag

of gin and ashes as she weaves

through deep, midge-haunted silences

exhausted to this break of trees

where, in its pop-up sepulchre,

the moon, as if consoling her,

unearths a white owl’s requiem

for her ripped dress, its unstitched hem

come loose, as she herself has come

bare-legged and torn to scatter him.

One Day in Italy

‘To arrive at the place you know not, you must go by the way you know not.’

– St. John of the Cross

How many times the bloody GPS

led us astray. It pointed us down stairs,

over a cliff, into a pathless field

barbed-wire barred and pocked with curious cows.

Castel Gandolfo, where Pope Benedict

lives out retirement from the Papacy,

was a particular disaster when

Ms. Garmin found a street of the same name

in a completely different town. And how

we found Pienza, only Jesus knows.

Still it’s in Italy, and here we are,

photographed sipping Strega in a bar,

lamps lighting up the narrow cobbled street

where soft rain falls and happy lovers meet.

Aerial

Neutral as a wheel

it is not culpable

for what it picks up.

Shock jocks, phone-in

bigots, ministerial

lies and bleating celebs.

A cup cannot be blamed

for what fills it.

No judgment.

No fear of offence just

submission

to whatever is snatched

out of the air by

chameleon range

be it war, corruption,

famine, peace, tsunamis,

laughter, conferences,

anger or simply

a brilliant new tune

hooking you

from the depths.