HOUSE PLANT
It was her attempt to green me,
a gift to encourage husbandry,
but put it in a corner where the light was poor,
forgot to water it.
We struggled for a while together,
but there was something
we couldn't make each other hear.
Long afterwards I'd catch myself
misunderstanding still,
talking as if she was there.
Eventually I moved her gift to the light,
kept the soil moist, watched it grow,
admired the veined dishes of its leaves,
the tapering lobes,
those silver freckles
echoing some forest skin.
It grew tall, stooped over me to hear,
quivered as I spoke,
the perfect listener, all ears,
and its reply - the spiked bud
of a new leaf
that I would one day find
unfolded for me.
THE VIGIL
I knew you
as a rough and heavy hand on my head,
just once or twice,
enough to keep me in my place;
as a fair man who treated everyone the same,
held them wrong until they proved themselves;
as a face turned the other way
whenever someone wanted you to listen.
I knew you
as an absence,
away in your allotment,
coming home with onions or swedes for tea,
the eczema of dried earth on your hands;
as a pile of pornographic magazines
I once found in the toolbox in your shed;
as a snoring from the old chair in the corner
when we tried to watch the news.
I knew you
as a cough ripping the shaft of your throat,
a gob of phlegm sizzling against the fireback;
as a crown of spots on a pitted nose,
trees of hair sprouting from your ears;
as watery eyes, lids drooping to reveal red rims,
eyes that once were tinder
and would burn at the slightest word.
And I knew you
when my grandmother died.
You talked to me of God then,
that mean bastard in the sky.
Now I sit beside your box,
on the table you once boasted cost you sixpence,
see you in a white shirt and collar,
black suit, trimmed hair, nails manicured,
hands clasped uncomfortably,
oiled and powdered face,
your carefully closed eyes
avoiding mine.
THE PAINTING
I'm held there by its presence,
mystified, try to read its marks and textures,
find a clue, a way in as it hangs before me
giving nothing but itself away.
I close my eyes, imagine how
he might have laid the canvas
on the studio floor, stood over it,
considered for a while,
stepped back perhaps and squinted,
dug his hands deep in his pockets,
hunched his shoulders.
I see him absently pick a brush up,
or an old blunt knife,
then put it down and roll a cigarette.
Before it's lit he moves.
Working plaster, marble-dust, cement,
pigments of white, grey and ochre,
sand and some of the earth he comes from
he paints a wall.
He makes it so it crumbles at the top
to show the layers that hold it,
the difficult edges, the complexity
of everyday matter. He watches
how the stuff he works with works,
how it pulls and pits,
scrapes and corrugates,
reads surfaces for marks, thumbprints,
scratchings he can turn into a sign.
He scores lines
as if he wants to write
but can't think what to say;
then carves into if, so it seems like
someone's breaking through.
But here he stops, stands back,
considers, once more digs his hands
deep in his pockets, moves away
leaving me hunch-shouldered in his absence
my fingers rolling an imaginary cigarette
IF YOU WERE A SPY
If you were a spy
you'd quote me Wordsworth as I passed:
'Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music;'
your face an uncrackable code
as you awaited my reply: 'There is a dark
inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements.....'
Nor would you bat an eyelid
at the dangerous ideas inside my heart.
You'd sacrifice your flesh to mine.
You'd do it for your country,
let me in without a visa
then steal my DNA.
In the middle of the night
you'd sup out like a dream
find a call-box on a by-pass, report
to your anonymous controller,
remove the roll of microfilm
secreted in your navel.
If you were a spy
I'd not see you again,
except as a distant figure in a crowd
who might be someone else.
COLD BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING
In 1968 The Prague Spring reached Coventry
where I remember sitting on a floor
strewn with empty coffee cups and lecture notes
with a woman I'd grow old misunderstanding.
We fed each other bread and butter pudding
while chanting to the news
Dubcek, Svoboda, Dubcek, Svoboda!
All over Europe it was the season
of kisses blown at tanks,
flowers placed in gun barrels.
But in the morning as we disentangled
from the narrow bed
to breakfast on last night's left-overs,
Dubeek and Svoboda
were already on their way to Moscow.
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
Sometimes its like playing hunt the thimble.
I get so close I burn. But the voice
that eggs me on's no kindly uncle,
doting aunt. There's a hint of malice
in those mocking tones, a taunt I recognise:
my worldly older cousin, now a blip
in the family's history; everyone tries
to change the subject when his name comes up.
I' d run his backstreet errands: sealed packets,
flash cars with engines idling. A fiver
bought my silence; I thought I'd cracked it.
No one explained the frogmen in the river,
the police car at the door or thought to quiz
a nine year old. I've not kept secrets since.
Now silence is a luxury I'm pleased
to live without. I travel to unspeakable events
and speak of them. The careful words I choose
must make their mark, my grubby-fingered questions
touch common wounds. I'll peer into the face
of grief confront the lost, seek put the missing.
Facts are, I've learnt, more intricate than fictions,
their truths more slippery, lies more convincing.
GETTING THE TIME IN
He's not right suited.
It's cold and there's folk about.
Came up to get his time in.
Six hours at six pounds an hour. Cash.
Beer money, a present for his grand-daughter,
a day out for Madge.
Comes up different days each week.
No routine. His business.
They'd like to know, but they won't.
The plumber's van by the barn.
Always one to watch, that Mick,
even at school. Snitched
when they taxed chips from the third years.
Soft too. Wouldn't fight.
So he pulls his hat down,
tries to walk without the limp.
Takes off with the chainsaw,
down to the woods, out of sight.
Stays there, stays at it.
Even when his back gives.
"Just you watch it lad. All it takes
is some nosy bugger to twig and make a call."
One day he'll slip, the saw snag
or his back take for good in the valley bottom.
Until then its different days each week.
His business. Cash. Getting his time in.
TONIGHT
I stare through the window as town lights slide
about the surface of the river.
I'm eating a bowl of cornflakes. Miles Davis
moves up beside me, the pure blade of his horn
cutting the day loose. And John Coltrane's here too,
just to my left - my good ear- and his breath
is eight bars of what no-one else can tell me.
Reflected in the glass, a voyeur
mimics how I put the spoon to my mouth,
dribble milk. I kill the lights, turn the music up.
I'm no longer hungry now it's dark.
If I close my eyes friends I never thought
I'd lose touch with crowd round. One wags a finger,
laughs, one smiles her seductive gap-toothed smile
knowing I'll never make the move. And one,
who shakes my hand to introduce himself again,
wears a pallid mask and the suit he kept
for christenings and funerals.
TIMING
From the radio a bluesman plays single notes
with impeccable timing. I think of him,
his ordinary living - an old janitor perhaps,
entering an empty concert hall, shuffling onstage
to lift the piano lid and start boodling.
Imagine this music in that space, the resonance
of improvised chords, the pauses
trembling sometimes just long enough
to touch silence, the sound of hammered wire
singing to plush seats, drapes, ornate plasterwork;
the molecules in the air refigured into a spell
that would outlast the moment
this solitary player quietly closed the lid,
shuffled off-stage to resume his rounds,
checking windows, doors, air conditioning.
All those who'd come later, be it to hear
Beethoven or Benny Goodman, would know
as they found their seats and settled expectantly
that already there was something
important in their lives they'd missed.
ORCHID DREAMS
A couple of chasers and he's away.
Tonight it's some gadger on the allotments
grew a rare orchid in a makeshift greenhouse-
old pallets, window frames, corrugated pvc,
made a barbed wire cage, padlocked the door.
When he found the door unhinged, the wire cut
it was every conservatory and greenhouse in town,
nicked so often it had to be jail- nine months,
put on 'gardens’ and there it was, behind the governor's azaleas,
company for a red-band's cannabis.
Come discharge he kicked off, tried for extra days
but they sent him on his way. He's regular now,
no sooner out than he's smashed a shop window.
Police arrive, he's waiting. Or he's burgled
the garden centre and phoned from inside.
Screws keep his overalls ready, treat him like staff
Nice one, we smile- the usual smile. Someone
throws a long look at the ceiling. We've time still.
One last round, the road home, the town's ghosts
huddled in their shadows, street-corner shufflers,
red-eyed derelicts, orchid dreamers.
A DEATH
The Chaplain away, it fell to me
to tell him. We sat in a bare room
on tubular chairs, shouts
and bangs of landing life outside.
I watched his mask- the glazed eyes,
lumps and scars from god knows what-
tremble, come alive, fall, fold.
His head dropped, shoulders shook.
The urge to touch an arm or put a hand
on his shoulder seemed as much
for my sake as his, so I sat still.
He willed the clock back, I willed it forward.
KEYS
There are five of them. They hang
from their chain like the fingers
of a smashed hand,
divining-bones.
One for the gates that clang time still,
one for heavy-hinged doors to lock
the day down, slammed answer
to a question out of place.
One for the cell of my office, its calendar,
its outside line, one for the desk,
its cabinet of sins, and one
a token no one can explain.
The long chain swings from my waist.
I'm a key-slave shackled to their spell.
Nagged by gravity
they wear my pocket thin.
Sometimes I'll reach a gate to hoik out
a mesh of metal wands in a knot
of links I have to shake free
like a shaman's rattle.
Beyond the bars a shadow in a recess shifts.
Let us through boss?
A dash, a skin of dust,
a sparrow on the gym roof.
