Romance
Seven poems thinking about romance
She has a dance I cannot see
She has a dance I cannot see;
perhaps a seed of sycamore
that screws the air or loves the soil
so unaware; perhaps a star
not quite coal red, not quite glass blue,
not quite not there; perhaps a spun
and sombre march of weeping wives
who pull their hair and court the fall;
perhaps them all.
Rue the dire event
In my cell of grey shame,
chained within ‘if only’s,
where dreaming is Houdiniing,
I nostalgise your eyes.
Adoring them was obvious
for all of us. I’d fallen for
their milky gold,
their whale-calf blue,
the startle of each day.
Once helium silver,
then a ready-tongue pink
troping, trading into
every sunset ever seen.
Rainbow banquet of gaze.
Wavelengths of rarity.
A nettle-sting sparkling
in eyes of invisible ink.
Hues from a star’s deepest chamber,
brightness pressed on itself,
painting everything in
an awefull desert glare.
In the hour of the flood,
I’d heard,
your orbs were terrible waters,
drowning purple, shattered wood,
woemen and children gulping
all the way down.
You were so cruel,
oh, to be heat by your side
and then see receding change
in eyes of bluebell, church lilac
and lily wonce more.
I will scorch everything
to be coloured
by your looke again.
Your who
We were elsewhere
but I twist a little when I hear of your before,
how I’ll never be in those stories
you lay out for me
over Darjeeling tea and Gitanes
like snails about to race,
though they alone
are reason for your who
I’m falling for
like the smoke-blue shadow
crawling beneath your high town window.
From The Mermaid to The Welsh
Dawn. Uncertain light. As if the world,
irresolute, might fall back against the night.
The porter barrels like a belch
from The Mermaid to The Welsh,
down the snug, ship-cracked, sea-leaning
lanes of sleepers smuggled beneath
cockle-headed homes. His rum-rheumy eyes
carry closing time, and then some.
His shift begins. Limescaled tea and a smoke
leant at an entrance with the look of a lychgate,
lovelybitter nicotine in the breaking air.
Then a phone rings forever
so he stubs out his moment.
Up two floors. Opens 214.
Through respectable sleep
213
had heard a gull’s diving scream
beyond the beach,
but thought maybe,
the sound could be
in closer reach,
so called front desk
to have it checked
and now in ever-so-nice,
complimentary dressing-gowns
and a glaringly normal hall,
peer at what the papers will call
‘a bloody scene’.
Strange how no one sees the indigo wings
cast like rain across fertile things;
across a ready soil of rigor mortis,
beauty powders, pewter and silted fear
from which a flowering grief will appear
for a rigid family far from here.
As she fell and died – a little knife
bookmarking her heart – she rememberdreamed
a not-following-kiss when, though wanting more,
she’d fallen back against an alley wall
and looked up, past the buildings’ leer,
into black canals of universe
and time-taut stars and knew a bliss
like a rising river, which was lovelier
than the succumb could ever have been.
Now police come in crunching boots
and eggs are cooked for guests.
The room reset, the porter, uncertain, sits
in indigo shadows that seem to beat
with tastes of beer, cigarette sucks,
once-a-year weekend trips,
phone calls home to tell the truth
and falling seconds after a kiss.
He thinks maybe he sees the wings,
stretching from the promise to the cheat.
The Four Element Problem
‘Why are we here?’
Then a teacup and saucer
on a table, a rattle
of baked, glazed earth.
‘Someone is guilty.’
The people sit straighter,
creaks of button-pinned leather
wash between drywood knocks
of the clock at the doors
of locked-in, drowning seconds.
‘This is absurd’
someone says, no one knows who
but they all agree. And a breeze
trickspirits in from the garden,
an airfooted fox on cold black dew.
‘The key to the whole mystery…’
and, despite themselves, they ear forwards,
throats pulsing with desperate fire
beneath tennis shirts and ties,
headscarves and pullovers,
tunics, chains and the forged necklaces
of denouement gods.
The light and I wait for you
Flight-winged book on my lap, tea in steam,
window-silhouetted to be the first sight you’d see –
I’m a painting by Vanessa Bell. Light loses its pose,
passing like gossip from the turpentine energy
of new afternoon to a wrinkle of quarter past three,
then out to that smudging evening maybe. You might
be in a cab coming home, you could be caught still
in the golden mouth of the city, over which I watch
thoughts of birds tunneling through sky. At a distance
things are symbols. Closer, questions. The door starts.
Every fresh, stepped-back look, another chance.
The Sacrifice
Look! The youngrich are rapture bright,
with skin that soaks up all the light.
All the light that touches them
remains as gem or anadem.
Steady glow, empire-stable,
morning-caught at breakfast table.
Deeper though, through constant dapple
in the tiny family chapel,
under the Burne-Jones window scenes
which winter-shine with John’s dark dreams,
the light from these a nurse’s milk,
nourish of colour, tender silk.
The world sea, horse-blue in its lashings,
the Babylon-red of beastly thrashings.
The richyoung keep their caresses,
stardew gilds their eased successes.
Buttercup spots on beach-brown tummy
from drunkenly adoring mummy.
Indian veranda blaze,
candlelit bops in Oxbridge days.
They keep it all, absorbed and worn –
bring every dawn to those high-born!
To those comfortable in their vowels,
who fuck in bluebells, fuck with howls
at the radiance of being,
at light’s selective seeing.
They take it in. They take it all.
Delicate and untouchable.
Prometheus’s gift unspun,
they sing the anthem of sun.
And soon, some, in the field’s fast flare
and mugwhump blast will brighten there.
Brighter and brighter and brighter
they’ll get, brighter and brighter.
And is there the blinding ecstasy
of mummy’s true God still for tea?