ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following:
Image, Grand Street Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Daily, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Quadrant, Southern Review, Stand, The Gift (Stride), Sou’wester, Times Literary Supplement, Wild Reckoning.
‘The Gifts’ was commissioned for broadcast by BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’.
‘Post-Mortem’ was commissioned for broadcast by BBC Radio 3’s ‘Poetry Proms’.
The writing of this has been greatly assisted by a K. Blundell Trust Award from the Society of Authors.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Soft Keys
Raising Sparks
Burning Babylon
PELT
I found the world’s pelt
nailed to the picture-rail
of a box-room in a cheap hotel.
So that’s why rivers dry to scabs,
that’s why the grass weeps every dawn,
that’s why the wind feels raw:
the earth’s an open wound,
and here, its skin hangs
like a trophy, atrophied beyond all
taxidermy, shrunk into a hearth rug.
Who fleeced it?
No record in the guest-book.
No-one paid, just pocketed the blade
and walked, leaving the bed
untouched, TV pleasing itself.
Maybe there was no knife.
Maybe the world shrugs off a hide
each year to grow a fresh one.
That pelt was thick as reindeer,
so black it flashed with blue.
I tried it on, of course, but no.
ASCENSION DAY
In the Blue Lobster Café backyard,
the head chef – arms outstretched –
bears what looks like a body,
but conjures six cook’s shirts,
hot-laundered, pegged out,
dripping in a drench of sun.
As they dry, their half-hearted
semaphore becomes
more urgent, untranslatable.
Sex and death are in the air
this May morning: pollen and spent
blossom on an aimless breeze;
crab-backs, prawn skins, clams,
black-violet mussel shells,
all reek in sun-baked bin-sacks.
FOOD FOR RISEN BODIES – I
A rare dish is right for those who
have lain bandaged in a tomb for weeks:
quince and quail to demonstrate
that fruit and birds still grow on trees,
eels to show that fish still needle streams.
Rarer still, some blind white crabs,
not bleached but blank, from such
a depth of ocean that the sun would drown
if it approached them. Two-thirds
of the earth is sea; and two-thirds of that sea
– away from currents, coasts and reefs –
is lifeless, colourless, pure weight.
CORPSE
This is my body, me, splayed
on the road’s crown like a shot bird.
Back street. No cars. Men step
over me, dogs and crows investigate.
My eyes gape. Circuitry of soul
is broken. I am in an odd shape
– twisted star – a pose I could never
strike in life. Gymnastic, almost.
This double-jointedness in death
soon tightens as the muscles lock.
My face cracks in the sun.
My hands point up and down the street,
as if to say ‘I came from here,
and there was where I headed . . .’
Pregnant with its own ferment,
my gut swells a blue uniform.
I do not recall the battle, army,
cause. I cannot see a bullet-hole.
There is a voice nearby – not loud.
The sky – not bright – is green with storms.
CORPOREALITY
Troops in the desert,
waiting for GO. On TV
the General, interviewed.
Behind, one of his men
21, 22, 23, is kissing his own
shadow in the blazing heat.
Press-ups? Get some shade boy!
But he won’t, 30, 31, it keeps
muscles tight, and kills
the boredom. More,
he’s hypnotised, rehearsing
death. Each 37,8,9 dip and lift
resolves his shadow, then
dissolves it into him,
the split of soul 43 from body
44 played over and over.
The sun has a dark heart,
dark as in invisible, as
in unseen, unencompassed.
Bodies get in its way,
so it blanks them out.
He’s up to 50, pushing 60,
General unclips microphone,
nods, walks away.
Couple of retakes, Sir?
When will you cross the desert?
Desert, as in empty,
though it is of course a flood,
an ocean of unbounded light.
And on its further shore
a woman turns fruit on
her market stall to help it ripen.
Her shadow, even when sun
is sieved through bone-
and-mustard coloured
canopies, is spilling over apples,
melons, dates. The day needs her
to stand and break its light,
since pure light is invisible.
Once, a girl, she stared it out
to spite her mother,
and the spiteful sun
gave her a dark print
of its heart in every blink.
ATTEMPTS ON YOUR LIFE