Into the
Walled Garden
Selected Works 2001 -2010
© Clive Gilson 2011
Published by Dancing Pig Media at Smashwords
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Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from The British Library.
ISBN 978-0-9568932-5-3
Dancing Pig Media
22 Shakespeare Avenue, Bath, BA2 4RF, United Kingdom
Cover image: “Ki” by Andy Reis, Brazil
Image supplied by stock.xchn vi (www.sxc.hu)
Contents
Preface
Is this book just vanity on my part? The short answer is yes.
That said, I don’t think that anyone who writes, whatever their level of competence, does so entirely altruistically. We want to be read, we want an ISBN number or two to our names and we want to gather dust in the lending libraries of last resort…
This collection has come into existence for all of the reasons stated above, but it is also a product of circumstance. Over the last ten years or so I have worked through the small hours with the everlasting support of my wife, Karen. Unfortunately, Karen is with us no more, having succumbed after a long illness to the ravages of cancer and its treatments, and so, propelled by the twin forces of vanity and gratitude for Karen’s support and forbearance, this collection stands.
I have no idea who will actually read these pieces, nor do I have any idea how they will take to them. The point now, in these months following Karen’s death, is not one of sales or critical acclaim, but is rather an act of remembrance and thanks for the best of years.
As we do, so shall this book…gather dust, I mean, which is the only inevitability that any of us can ever face. It doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t find grounds for optimism even in the darkest of times. Maybe somewhere in all of this you will find your own optimism too. I certainly have.
Clive Gilson
Cirencester, July 2010.
2001
Wearing Out
Inside out, flat on a table, all patchwork lining and elbows,
scissors shut, threads sticking out between the blades,
silk discarded, off cuts, frayed with use,
a needle, thread and a steady hand,
hung on wire at the back of a wardrobe,
worn again, hands in shallow pockets.
3rd Hut
Behind doors locked from the outside,
foetal, hands clasped between his legs,
pupils wide, listening for laughter,
the night bark, counting hours
by the metronome of thick soled boots
and the whip of batons,
he wills dawn to break.
To see is to remember.
He sees a friend, a man
with whom he played football
on scrub land when they were young,
when the colour of a shirt
was all that separated them.
Butchers, bakers, plumbers, teachers…
They broke bread across tables
that now lay shattered by shells
falling from a distant hill.
Pots, pans and drying clothes
hung in those kitchens.
To hear is to remember.
He hears a handle turn on rust,
grinding dust on its spindle thread.
A door slams into a wall.
Scum littered jokes are laughed at,
flesh breaks on rough sawn planks.
Forgotten names leave gaps in the world.
Beams of sharp moonlight
break through shuttered windows.
Time passes with the rhythm
of blunt wooden sticks on swollen feet.
In the 3rd hut the names that still
fill the gaps wait for roll call.
And We Danced
Vague, alien, animated shapes
moved with staccato stubbornness
across a shadow shouldered world
of strobing cigarette smoke
beneath a balcony wasted with the slow eyed
voyeur tribe, the lonely loves labouring
to pose and peer down into low temptation.
In a corner, perched on yellow plastic,
buttoned still where crisps and crumbs
congealed with ash and ale we sat
with bottles drawn to lips that talked away
the smallest hours with large, hollow vowels.
There we sat,
above the crowding,
behind the dance.
Bands and beer and trinkets bright we stole,
magpies parading black and white,
scavenging clean the way beneath our feet.
Agreeing loudly to hide nervous laughter,
drum safe within the hangar
we shared our private jokes
with red labelled bottles brown and full.
She blessed our blessed single lives.
and told me of the enemy who comes with love,
of the men she cared to forget,
never forgotten, who lived in the place
from where I came.
I said aloud its name.
Quite where the conversation changed,
where the thieving pilfered its way
into this world we looked upon
was not ours to know in the small hours
above the dance,
behind the crowding.
‘Boo to the world’ we said, quietly,
outrageous brevity linking arms
with nervous hands that trembling met
and stuck with sweat and beer
on that yellow plastic kissing couch.
Another beer to talk with seemed a good idea.
And then we danced, crowded,
breaking into shuffled rhythms
with the impossible flesh of gym tanned youth,
of flashing hair and leotards,
on podiums above our heads.
Close, closer in the crowd,
watching unfocussed rambling hands
wander late that night
in search of a warm place to rest,
we laughed again,
blue into brown,
sparkling.
I walked her to her coat
and paid a silver penny
to a man behind a glass wall.
In the velour warmth of an old brown Ford,
driven, like Miss Daisy, homeward
I looked into soft brown eyes
that guarded no more.
Under the passing flare of streetlights,
as morning’s toppling milk bottles
accompanied the things that she said,
those soft brown eyes touched mine.
She fell asleep.
Putting her softly safe,
protesting some alcoholic chivalry
I went home…
Too much beer.
I looked again another day into her eyes.
We traded baubles, solitary birds,
pleasant enough the world as we chirped,
but well away from the sticky rent
of worn out plastic seats.
Arif’s Legs
Flip-flops smack hard baked sand,
a rhythmic chattering beneath the soft glide
of cheap silk sarongs and ludicrously loud
beach shirts. Cracked earth and spare weeds
line a path that passes bare tables
in the yawning shadows of a Nepalese restaurant.
Arif swings out of the shade and waits
in the sun on a corner. He squats, smiling,
in the company of mangy mongrels,
lounging the day away, waiting,
for half finished meals and overflowing bins at dusk.
In the down draught of beer guts and sweat
Arif’s limbs jut and break at right angles.
He crawls on one bent leg, propelled
forwards by one smashed and twisted arm.
His left hand bends impossibly backwards.
His right arm, his good arm is raised,
palm upwards and creased with dirt.
Flint brown eyes glint as he smiles
under the spindle bower, with dogs
scratching their arses and the sores
behind their ears. Arif waits, counting
the slap of fat foot falls, preparing his smile.
Seeing colours emerge from the heat haze,
Arif shuffles out onto the path, beams,
and knowing the many colours of money,
declares his eternal love for Manchester United.
At One Blow
For Gerhart Riegner
“Received alarming report that in Fuhrer’s headquarters plans discussed and under consideration according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering 3½ - 4 millions should after deportation and concentration in the East be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish Question in Europe”
From a telegram sent to London & Washington by Gerhart Riegner in August 1942 containing a report on the Wannsee Conference, January 1942.
Yellow paper, annotated, the surface
barely scratched, broken codes,
confusion, evidence ignored,
insubstantial, too few to witness,
and tired with the effort of making war,
of moulding a new world in the shape
of this collective act of will,
there is a comment:
“A rather wild story”.
Badger Hunting
Wet grass and wellington boots.
In dew drop glitter and the endless
chatter of bright eyed expectation,
we wandered along the bank
of a skittling, rain swollen stream.
Through the layered water flows
stones glistened and caught sun beams.
Spots of colour flashed, blue-green dapples,
refracted moments of peace and dazzle
amid the muddy squelch of our heavy feet.
From a gully, sunk dark and deep,
parallel to the gravel bottomed water,
a robin skimmed, dodging our loud bustle,
and breasted the long, wet grass,
disappearing into a tangle banked hedgerow.
By a rocky waterfall, she tested the ground
and held my hand as she paddled,
happily waiting for the spill of water
over the top her wellington boots,
laughing at my overgrown caution.
Looking up through bare branches at the sun
we caught the shift of small white clouds
along the morning’s cascade breeze.
Below the crown of newly budding leaves
the sky stood still and giggling, we revolved.
With every step we soaked and soiled
our trouser bottoms, watching the windows
that looked out above us for the twitch,
the curtain sweep that would show
a watching eye and a mother’s smile.
In the mud, we looked for paw prints,
counting claw marks to catch the passage
of night barking badgers, but all we found
were the stamped treads of early morning
boots and the scratchings of a dog.
Then, by a winter bare drooping hazelnut ,
where the last husks of fallen autumn rotted,
we found the track of the black and white,
the rooter of the dusk, dipping to drink
before trotting away into the bog grass.
With high pitched screams of delight
and close held hands, warm and light,
we tracked the broken shapes of running paws.
Indian scouts, tassel jacketed frontier heroes both,
we forged our very own earnest little blaze.
Moss stained, abandoned, fungus crowned logs,
that flaked and crumbled in the damp morning stew,
lay across our stumbling, soggy way.
We found the head of the hill tumbling water
and prodded out the smell of black leaf pools.
Where the water bubbled free and fresh,
between wind-cracked, tumbled branches
and thickly braided bramble tangles,
we found the dens, the scrape footed doorways,
that hid the hunted badgers safe from day.
All at once, loud and strong ,she babbled,
chattering, in harmony with the free flowing gossip
from the sun gleam stream below us.
Collecting hazelnuts and cracking them with stones,
we idled, passing happy minutes with sleeping Brock.
Balancing Mixed Vegetables On A Motorway Bridge
Fergus vomits in the street.
Walking to the pub he stops
and deposits bile in the gutter.
“Better out…” he says.
Fergus walks miles out of his way
to find a bridge over the ring road
and urged on by boys who admire
the calculated insanity of the man,
he climbs onto the safety rail
and walks backwards with his eyes shut.
None of the boys can tear their eyes
away from road kill fascination.
Fergus shouts and cracks a smile.
The boys grin and shout back,
in thrall to the image of a body
lying fifty feet below them.
The trick is being in control,
balancing the weight of possibility
against their lack of imagination.
The boys are sick in the gutter,
depositing small rivers of Tetley’s
finest ale down the drains.
Bantry, With An Umbrella
On the way down we stopped on a beach,
bordered by tufts of marram that clung to our boots
like dead men’s hands crawling across the empty spaces
littered with bottle tops and shivering plastic bags,
where black headed gulls skirled below the black rocks
that rose to the headland. We kicked over the tracing
seaweed, skimming pebbles on rolling curls of white
and gray, and lifted sand in the tread of our boots,
as the wind whipped in between buttons on our coats.
After lunch in a timbered pub, Guinness smoothed,
warmed after the rain, jackets dripping puddles
of rainwater onto stripped and stained boards
in a place where suits ate lasagne and mussels
and skies loomed, as oiled as the seal heads
out in the bay, we sat and made jokes about weather,
whiling away a few minutes with impossible clues
in a cryptic crossword maze, our straying hands
making the best of drying hair in a firelight glow.
Headlights on, mid afternoon, passing zipped up cars,
driving down a track of mud and shingle, passed gates
that led to half built bungalows squatting below branches
that scattered water and autumn leaves to the wind,
where half-hearted dogs barked sadly from under the shadow
of rain swollen eaves, we drifted sideways at a bend by a path
We found a spur, a break in the overhang, parked and sat
beneath glass, alone with a curl surf tide that wrapped its weight
around an island whose head bobbed for air in the clouds.
Walking up from the beach, pulled inside out by the sharp
Atlantic squall, a wee man emerged from between tufts
of sodden gorse. Ambling up with a smile and a question
or two, he explained about surveying and places to stay
with a Jamesons for warmth. Manoeuvring a green Mercedes
out from behind wind bent trees, he disappeared, red lights
merging with the dusk and rain, still smiling at the thought
of talking away the late afternoon minutes with impatient lovers,
lovers too polite to be rude in the mists of Bantry Bay.
Inside the gray upholstered world of a Fiat,
while the skies poured out their hearts to the tip of our hats,
with you astride my lap, jeans wrapped around your ankles,
your mouth buried into my neck in soft, warm sighs,
the shape of the handbrake imprinting on your left knee,
I felt your warmth thrill through me in deep kisses,
The mists sloped in on the island, lights and sounds faded
beneath the rising night at the end of a simple, waterlogged day,
when we made love in a Fiat on the edge of Bantry Bay.
Between The Lines
The tiger, crayon camouflage, red stripes,
is made bold by grubby hands, a bitten lip,
a felt tip pressed too hard.
Later, on a nettle fringed path, gingerly
sliding passed the stings, she looks for
the prowler, tiger wild.
By thistles, roped, and shaggy, a horse
stops browsing, brown eyed and fly flecked,
heavy with becalmed summer sun.
Surprised she drops her most brilliant thing,
red stripes on white, sugar-sweet and sticky,
grass stalks and dry earth.
In the stalking grass, between the lines,
the tiger licks a paw and skips away
chasing pollen heavy bees.
On The Never Never
A patchwork of bricks and crumbling edges,
damp, dark moss creeping along canals of mortar,
marks the spot where a body is buried
at the edge of a shaggy, sun starved lawn,
brick meets cold earth, a fringe of grass
windblown on a bloom of loose blown leaves.
Delivered in blood on whispered wondering
about football boots and strapping lads,
the infant boy opened his eyes and cried,
His mother held him on her stomach,
while he choked and swallowed mucous
and was carried away from his mother’s breast.
Born and died in sixty-one and there was I,
blue and borrowing for Christmas sixty-two,
borrowing his time, borrowing his place.
One infant lays in a solitary, unvisited grave,
lays with me upon my chest
and opens his eyes to watch me sleep.
We are breathless both and silent. I may
look as he would have. I may sound
as he would have. I have borrowed his time.
Brilliant Miaow
Every smile,
every move,
every padding paw
every pounce,
every tumble,
every honest flaw.
Blanket ponies,
grass green air,
painted whiskers twitching,
Coloured faces,
button noses,
dream weavers stitching.
Behind the scenes,
at front of house
parents standing proud,
while under lights,
the youngest act
before a captured crowd.
Standing high,
singing loud,
beaming under lights,
hands sting,
flowers bloom,
grinning in the night.
Every laugh,
every prowl,
every why and how?
Every spark,
every graze,
every brilliant miaow.
Burn Out
Fantasies become more real than the world outside the window
and days pass by marked by the spill from dirty ashtrays.
Crumpled tissues fall from an overflowing blue plastic wastebasket.
A page sits white, unspoilt, waiting for words of substance,
while the eyes that stare upon the empty spaces fill with images of glittering prizes.
Too easy to make another cup of tea or drift away on radio voices,
anything rather than commit thought, that crime against creeping indolence.
Sounding positive is all hollow echoes and bouncing sounds.
Conversations happen and you try for depth, for a resonance,
for any bloody sound in your voice except the wasted flatness of vowel
and the consonant without edge. There are no ideas.
Burning Books
Four hundred and fifty one degrees Fahrenheit.
Crisply charred letters fall like snowflakes,
perfect crystalline structures.
Black windows glitter diamond spots of light
where sparks dribble across the night.
Each floating ember is a letter,
a burning flicker of inspiration
falling to earth, fading and dying
on cold, hard ground.
Feverish tongues lick spines,
curling through bindings,
obscuring sense and sentiment,
unravelling logic and argument,
laughing at a lover’s pains
and life’s raw comedy.
Stanzas weep. Chapters suffocate.
Somewhere, out there
at the edge of the fire glow,
a blank page is set and the story
starts again from the beginning.
Calm
Tears may fall beneath this down turned veil,
rain upon an unwashed face, where stains
are drawn upon deepening crags.
Beauty, fondly remembered, shines on the crest
of each scar crack ridge, each care roughly worn.
I shall not turn my face from the light,
but lift the close meshed net from these eyes
and reveal these shadows, this cold profile,
this eroding salt water landscape.
Tears may fall beneath this down turned veil
and fill the gullies, drip by slow caught drip,
that lay bare beneath heavy lidded thunderheads.
Laughter pricks and picks its way
across this pitted diamond mask,
dancing faery steps through rippling, moonlit pools.
The hurricane wind lies quietly in these eyes now.
I have found calm among the dark edges
that rise and smile with your soft and gentle voice.
Capulet
Love, the blush on a man’s rarely open face,
is the flower laden line delivered blooming
in the crimson shadow of Capulet,
cast from under the mask of muses.
Love, adored of doubts and doubters,
is the stage upon which we hope and dream,
a tide, bade stay by a broken voice,
that foaming breaks across this sea of words.
Love, the fleeting glance that catches hold,
becomes the dance of eyes entranced.
Walking, hand in hand, with you, my Juliet,
we’ll leave Mercutio’s feud behind us ever more.
Cold Bone China
Wedding presents, a tea service, bone china,
cold, unwrapped, shadow perfect.
A bed, after an argument, parallel lines, protecting
space, personal, burrowing away from warm skin.
Waking tired to the bone in strangled silence,
making a cup of tea, with second best, for one.
The secret, second time around, is holiday vouchers,
a pot of tea and sleepy conversations in the morning
and because neither one of us can muster six cups alike,
there are no worries about spoiling the set.
Courtyard
With the sun at his back
he follows his shadow
across herringbone paviours
pitted by frost and chipped by ice,
worn smooth by boot heels.
Each brick was placed
by calloused hands,
butted against a neighbour,
crisp and clean, a geometrically
arranged enclosure.
The sun sweeps the sky,
a new broom, bright and bristling,
and stone weathers, dull but
not colourless under brilliant blue
brush strokes.
His eyes fix on a point, perspective,
above the patterns beneath his feet.
Each stone, individually set out,
imagined and roughly mapped,
is a monument to craft and guile.
The walker, focused, wrapped up
in end-of-year bottom line errands
and corporate reporting, walks on,
blissfully unaware of the plan, laid
with hard skin, blisters and scars.
Delamere Crow
Torn feathers ruffle in a slipstream breeze
as Delamere Crow parades, hop, hop, hop…
Blues and greens refract metallic sunlight
and burger bags waltz in small side eddies,
swag for the bag man.
A simple choice. Necessity. Bullet eye
seeks and finds on the hard shoulder.
Cigarette smoke billows out onto the wind.
Delamere Crow skips forward
and beads his butty question.
Leigh Delamere.
Strutting.
A crow.
Don’t Speak Saturdays
Beneath old bricks that hold a fire on winter mornings,
where mugs of tea steam
and spin sugar down in their vortex,
dissolving the crystal,
diamonds without edge,
kneels a man, his dressing gown hanging loosely
from care heavy shoulders, bowed, sagging.
The long blue cotton tie drags across the soles of his feet,
trailing the ribbons that floated once
upon a time happiness in the dun air.
One arm is slung atop a bowed iron fireguard,
the hinges of which have broken under the weight.
He flicks cigarette ash onto red glowing coals,
sweat glistening on his unwashed brow, in the gray sides.
A hook, buried in the cracked wall above the lintel,
dangles a scrap of Christmas tinsel, deep crimson,
shimmering in the heat rising from the fire,
mirroring his eyes, stuck fast in the light of roasting embers.
Pans unwashed, yoghurt pots half emptied,
their lids licked down on the worktop
where tannin stained mugs stack
and Marmite smeared knives lay discarded.
A bright red bike, plastic strips of pink
shining under a strip light,
lays abandoned in the middle of the floor.
The sound of metal on metal, draining away,
scratched and scraped,
veneers and layers,
braids that bear the day.
Faded, ringed eyes look out from under a fringe
of mouse brown hair tied back, tired.
Under a wrapping of worn white cotton,
plaid in delicacy, washed out grays and pinks,
tightly tied at the waste, the hem torn and frayed,
a woman, clatters through the debris of a kitchen,
aggressively stalking,
eyeing the wall with x-ray vision,
she too deposits ash on glass green,
hearing the song of another summer, No Doubt,
rattling in her head with the chorus, Don’t Speak.
A television, forced playmaking and white smiles,
games and videos and inane interviews
with manufactured wall posters ,
fame, escape from humdrum worlds,
laughter echoes for no one in particular.
Children, high chairs and pretend cats,
voices rising louder and louder,
attention sought
between the fire glow stare
and the muttering dishes,
still not aware that the snap would come,
that the ragged edge of this kitchen howling,
this unwashed, sullen, fire filleted morning
would fall on innocent heads, easy heads.
Dormitory
Sergei, my brother, wait with me now.
Blankets await our rest below cast iron columns,
between which our bare framed metal beds lie,
made sparse, empty, until our nail headed return.
Here we lie, together, breasting fitful sleep
for the corrugated clatter of ladle heads on bars.
Day, when all here are awake, is measured by blurs,
by the creak of the loom and the shuffle of socks
on splintered boards, is counted upon the draw
of thread across our hard bitten fingers.
Day is yard upon yard of cloth; enough it seems
to cover a world and lay a carpet from here to the moon.
I remember scratching my name upon a book cover
when the rains came and rotted our wheat.
The stars shine now, in summers that bake
the earth dry, above the crumbling concrete
and split, sagging, timbers that are the roof upon our world.
Men sit here, tired and worn down, talking quietly,
joking tragically, blunting their sullen frustrations
with coffee as thick as the sap that runs from under
the bark of the ash trees in the wood where we played.
Our silent moments, our dreams, your photograph,
all of these rest here with me when we lay
our soiled bodies down to sleep. Dust floats
through the empty day on shafts of light and warmth,
delivered by the prostitute sun through cheap
blown glass that hides the world outside, like smoke
curling through laughter in the bars that we visited.
Dust hacks away at our sleep as the old ones cough.
Dust, like the shadow herded hours, creeps across
the smooth scuffed floorboards and lays deep
in the fibre of the grey washed pillowcases
beneath our heads. When it is dark and a hundred
men lay together in the dim light of hissing gas lamps,
scratching their lice bitten armpits and crying for home,
when we keep our boots on to keep our feet warm,
that is when we look up at the bubbled window panes
and search for stars in gaps between the clouds.
But like the tight bound clouds that drift the moon away,
there is no space between our beds, just metal
and ancient breathing from under moth worried cloth,
weaved by others who slept here, others who have gone
to dust or to the iron earthed Steppe, men who worked
and slept as we work and sleep. We are hived away,
droning on from warp to warp, far from our poor brothers,
who struggle to scratch the hard fields, who watch
summer flowers stand tall on the steppes and drop
their pollen on the legs of lazy humming bees.
Rank upon rank lay now with me. Some sleep,
some lay with watery eyes fixed on splinters
in the beams above their heads, some talk in their sleep
of fires and rosy cheeks and warm bosomed girls.
With the thin warmth of my blanket tucked up to my chin,
with the hay sagging in my hollow centred mattress,
surrounded by the low stares of black cheek sunken eyes,
I think of you, Sergei, I think of home. Then, when I can number
the edges of the moon no more, I dream of carpet grass,
dream of flowers and smoke and the burn of vodka
on long nights after the sweat of autumn harvests.
In these dreams, Sergei, I watch your back arch
and your muscles ache, I watch the pot, watch the ladle
move slowly through lean soup and I remember
that I will not starve here. Wait for me, my brother,
stay well, keep well and pray that, one day,
we shall drink vodka together once more.
Fresh Earth
Spittle dew, will-o’-the-wisp,
brown spotted leaves
catching rainbow sun
in spheres of milky transparency,
joyful light and crawling dark,
a soft breeze, the falling leaf,
fragile, browning in this gift
of late autumn warmth,
sullen, hemmed in,
black-eyed buds hang still,
throwing seed eyes upon
the cooling wings
of far flung swallows,
spinnaker émigrés soaring blue,
and damp breath on a flower head
swells freshly turned earth spilling
out of crumbling terracotta pots.
Drowsy, late flying wasps churn
beneath an edge rolling with rain,
and full on heavy sail
the laden slavers heave to,
bellies brooding, fat and heavy,
their decks strewn with sodden gifts
looted from dreaming summer days.
Dull and slow, black rain starts,
hitting the pavement, teardrops
washing over the gunwales
as the barque overhead pitches.
A few straggling flower heads
shudder and petals fall,
soaking up surface water,
lying flat, sticking to a glue of dust
that binds these dogwatch days
to start and end, endlessly.
Ghost Lies in Light
For Mervyn Peake
An eye blinks beneath a veil
of splayed pine branches
and the sleeper awakes
where gaunt, blown limbs
wrap themselves in knots.
Purple dawn soaks into
the stiff sinews of the night.
He stretches his legs.
His breath is shallow
and he dare not brush
a pine needle from its place
in case the dead flex
their bleached white hands.
The sleeper stifles a cough.
By his knee, scrabbling
towards him, sparkling
emerald under the last
of the fading moonbeams
a beetle absorbs black sky,
and casts a shadow across
his leg, a presence at odds
with its miniature existence.
Hendon All Over Again
On a rain spotted driveway in front of a gaping garage mouth
I watched him carry his golf bag from that dry throat
into the limp gray cloud of a damp, cold sky on another hopeful Tuesday.
He lifted the rattling bag of tricks, wedging the cracked plastic base
on the cracked plastic bumper of his rusting, once white car.
His shoulders hunched a little, his arms strained thinner
than once I remember them being.
The step of the man was not quite so assured, with hips and knees
telling tales from years ago, when studs bit in deep green grass.
Woven into his dream of eighty-five, he backed out of the garage
straight into the bumper of my large, black, lumbering Americana.
Dapple-haired, pottering concern for the damage done,
he fussed and apologized impatiently, desperate for pot holes,
and so he sallied out once again on the tails of endless optimism,
chasing Arnold Palmer painfully around the green stuff.
*
In nineteen-sixty, when his arms and legs were fresh, strong, unscarred
he nearly made his history. The boys were leading in the cup final
by one goal to nil with just a two minutes left on the never tick of the clock.
They lost.
Dennis and Ron and Jimmy, I met them all years later
when they played some charity game with Tommy Steele.
I missed his autograph.
I stood, smartly dressed, in the gawping light of a solitary bulb,
watching the unknown names disappear to their car boots and West End bars,
waiting for Tommy to scratch his name in my gold embossed book.
I remember a thundering drive from outside the box that rattled the cross-bar.
The hunched man’s last right foot rocket before middle-aged fatherhood.
I remember the disappointment of the proffered page and steel eyed Steele.
Dennis and Ron and Jimmy, I met them all years later,
when I stood, smartly dressed, in a bar, knee-high to real giants,
while they reminisced, playing again the seconds of nearly men.
*
Small and close,
watching for his car at night,
he was my dark hero,
my Colossus, my Achilles, my certainty
in a childhood world of strange, wonderful worry.
*
By the time that Edward Heath bit the bullet from the miner’s smoking gun,
my Achilles had built his world around us with his sweat and blood,
parking shiny cars on the drive in the solid flesh of the suburban myth.
Reaching out and upward to hold the glittering prize upon the steps,
ribbon bedecked amid the roar of red and white scarves and bobble hats,
he caught the sun’s glare that summer and tanned.
Rash promises, belief in the future, Big Blue, and faith in the past,
broke the dreaming spire, the cathedral, terraced high and lofty,
broke the business on rationed oil and candle lit charades.
Three years decaying, three years of fading back,
the final minutes written again in the textbook rise of the self made man.
At the final whistle, losing it all again.
I remember the dull little place, flea infested and poked about,
that we fetched up in after the chaos of bailiffs and bank debentures.
The rented oblivion, dirty carpets and sofas propped on bricks,
from which he strove to rise again and walk from the tunnel.
We, as children, were aware of the effort to appear well and smile,
but to see him, prone and collapsed, migrained and unconscious
with the effort of it all, so sadly human.
Over the years between then and the optimistic golfer, tensions have risen high.
Struggling on with a box full of losers medals and honest press clippings
has taken it’s toll on his self esteem.
Bitterness ?
No, not really.
Moments when his eyes glaze as he imagines the nearly, the what ifs.
One more life lived,
written in his lined face and the painful gait of angered joints,
scripted on bare skin in blood and pressure sores,
has bowed his huge frame, but never broken it apart.
To the knee-high and to the grown
he is still a Colossus, still my Achilles raging,
the speared and bloody heel his endearing humanity,
the weakness that makes him loved.
Hesperus Wrecked
Pastels, deep flowing blues, long hours,
sunlight through closed shutters,
white incandescence streaming into the room,
an evening star, summer night perspiration,
fingers at play, sparring with shadows,
dog-day heat, when the world grows quiet,
oppressed, brazier red under cloudless heights,
swooning with the sway of dry edged palms,
borne on the effervescent Meltemi;
in these hours, breathless bodies lay prone,
panting, tender, bathed in sweat, peeling skin,
and they shift the tangled sheets from around
their feet, laced together, her legs astride his groin,
her head on his chest, and she sighs softly,
inhaling rapidly, tracing the contours
of his spent muscles with the tips
of her own exhausted fingers
in the quiet space between them,
where children’s voices drift on the wind
and the bleat of a solitary goat tethers
the harsh white moon, he holds her tightly,
enclosed in the drowse dead minutes
marked by the run of tears falling
across her cheek, mingling with the sweat
they have just bathed in
she looks up and smiles, iris wide and deep,
and hazel-blue is the colour of love beneath
wet eyelashes blinking in the silence,
in the heat of the night, in the light of blue
louvered shadows, and he is the first to break,
a joke; she looks like the “Wreck of the Hesperus”
Keeping The Fire In
Under a woven picture,
frayed at the edges,
lop-sided cottages and hayricks,
a brown tiled utilitarian Parkray,
chipped, smeared with soot,
with ash spilling from gaps
where the grout has lifted,
rattles into life asthmatic life,
shaking the dead heat
of the evening into fire,
letting yesterday’s burn out
bloom in a quarry tiled kitchen,
spilling embers onto a patterned
straw rug in front of the fire,
fragments of brief, spent lives
in the clinker of another day
it’s freezing out in the shed
where the bucket stands
and dust billows up and drifts,
smothering dented tins of matt
emulsion in a pale cloud,
ghosts and phantoms
flickering among ash
grained broom handles
the Parkray door will only shut
with a solid kick that scares the cat,
kettle song, a cigarette, and he works
the dying rakes, making them hold
and burn brightly behind smoked glass,
warming his loved ones
as they surface and chatter away
the sleep that has held them
Leaving Without You
Sitting in the middle of the living room floor,
eyes wide, screaming blue murder,
piercing the thick hide of the juggernaut mayhem
that crashed about your crawling play,
you clutched at your jumper
with sweet, inquisitive, wretched hands,
rocking, red eyed and stain lunged,
as we blew away the cobwebs,
the spindle legs
that towered into your sky
and held your world in place.
We made you cry.
Lena’s Parting Gifts
Trees hang low, their sodden branches weighed down
by water, glistening under iron skies.
Drip by drip a scale model railway track,
built on four courses of crumble-edged house bricks,
rusts away to thin brittle flakes,
wheels remembered without substance,
where the trees hang.
Overgrown, the autumn washed pinks
of straggling Lavatera blow west with the wind
that carries shallow bottomed grey-heads
over these slip-shod, rattle-tiled roofs.
Tendrils scratch their needle fingers
across long forgotten dirt smeared windows
where the trees hang.
Faint reds reflect on wet sliced flagstones
whose black edges creep in towards their centres,
the unswept stain of dry summer earth
trapped in rain heavy grass.
In the mirror shapes of a tall suburb
the sound of faint but constant water falls
where the trees hang.
Behind glass, spattered with opaque splashes,
sat on hard wearing crimson cloth,
earnest voices whisper, respecting dear memory,
but firing hoarsely nonetheless. Whipping words
declare that they were the ones who should have
the green model engine that ran on the tracks
where the trees hang.
Eyes strain. Some shape keepsakes for love,
others for the value in the object of desire.
Sitting or standing, looking out onto the path,
where the Lavatera blows west and red bricks merge
into wet reflections, fingers tap and elbows nudge
under a bare bulb, the shade already gone to a good home
where trees hang like these.
Lighter
breaking a home,
strange people offering
a place of safety,
walls that bind
love and hate,
madly expressed,
questions asked
above her head,
an absent father,
gone before
she could say “Daddy”
never quite there
in spirit, idly fathered,
shuttled between
half open doors,
boxes of toys and
second-hand clothes
by parents who smile
pleasantly in each other’s
company but leave her
to work things out
on her own
a private world,
playing kittens,
wondering what
the shape of love
might be if we all
walked on our hands?
and then she smiles
at the man who drove away,
conversations grow longer
and his grave astonishment
belatedly swells into an idiot grin,
the rooms in which they
have been sitting uneasily
grow a little lighter
Lovely Hair
“You know, you’ve lovely hair.
Do you stand out in the rain?
Must do to get those curls,
all tight and thick, like that.
Have you looked at him?
Didn’t I say he had lovely hair?
Now I wish I had hair like that…
but look at it,
plastered over my head
like… like…
Well, he has got lovely hair.”
“I’m sorry, twenty Silk Cut…
that’s four fifty”.
“What, am I in the way,
well I’ll be moving on then…
You’ve great hair when you smile.
Is the whisky in that bag?
No…
Well for fucks sake where…
Shit its in me holdall,
sorry.”
“Thanks, do you want them wrapped…”
“Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there behind me.
Busy here isn’t it…
Have you seen his hair?
Just look at those curls, magnificent!
Couldn’t poke a finger in there.
Did I tell you, did I,
that I’m half way Brighton Rock,
on the piano?
Been writing it for years on the piano.
Graham Greene as it should be seen…
Mind, Pinky will have curly hair in my version”.
Luton Skies
Cappuccino froth crusts on her top lip.
Beneath stainless steel and strip lights,
hung from lofted aluminium sheets,
flying on the wings of braided hawsers,
we walk, fingers entwined, gripping tightly,
towards the departure gate
that spreads the world out flat beyond these Luton skies.
Clipped, nasal, polished words drift passed me
as I watch the screens that number the night.
‘Don’t leave bags unattended’,
‘don’t park in the set-down area’,
‘don’t let your feelings show…’
Ambience is everything.
Branded neon and chords, arranged in translucent layers,
trash their way into my head.
Feeling physically sick I wash my way urgently over to the toilets.
Her daughters disappear politely as we slide over
Beside some brushed steel telephone boxes
to say our goodbyes.
She wants no ‘take cares’, no ‘miss you’s,
just to go and not to show any sadness.
I take my place, play my part, but the kisses are long and deep.
Alone, with the busy slope of backpacks,
of heavy shouldered travellers and of thumping cab boots,
I watch them queue, deposit loose change in Tupperware boxes
and disappear through metal hoops.
Melvyn’s Hair
His right hand curled into a fist, nails digging into his palm.
A chair toppled, twisting backwards, cavorting across the room.
Before his shadow had time to rise and stand with him
his punches drew blood to her face and lips,
grazing his knuckles, scar tissue white amongst flecks of red.
Afterwards, in the spinning freefall, when the sadist mourns
and breaks back to the remorseful child within he cried,
running hot water over his hands, washing away the stains.
Once upon the fairy tale of softly focused memory,
they had caught the tails of a whirlwind, of flying romance,
holding hands on moonlit streets, smoking the evenings away,
and dreaming up a thousand happy tomorrows.
Later, in rare moments of peace beneath the suburban hum
of a box blue living room, where a cat snuggled
under a white cotton sofa throw, she watched Melvyn’s hair.
A child, now seven, lay sleeping softly,
with Bunny wrapped safely in her cotton arms.
In these years of lonely desperation, when men came and went,
she had tried to break the bones of that smothering hand,
had tried to be the woman in a photograph by her chair,
hopeful of lovers, innocent, ambitious, unaware.
Her lovers, the friends who walked through her door,
said many understanding things.
Some fled the passion and the pain, some were asked to leave,
some were told in no uncertain terms.
The whirlwind returned from time to time,
loving freely and rattling roof tiles.
When the hurricane howled, when she could see the debris
of her world tear away from the land into her lover’s stormy eyes,