Poems
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LIGHTING THE FIRST FIRE OF AUTUMN
Here they are, the quartered logs in their wicker
Basket woven of what I take to be
Birch and split willow plaited together,
The copse offering itself for the burning
Indoors, twig against twig, tree within tree.
Rough-cut block capitals of an alphabet
Older than writing: poplar, beech, pine,
Chainsawed joints of the wood bled and dried out
For a year, lodged in the season's calendar,
Their rituals subordinate, now, to mine
As I build the pyre of oak twigs and newsprint
In the middle of the year's first cold morning.
The TV news shows tropical forests on fire,
Drought in east England, and the Midlands flooded,
A crude mosaic of weather that looks like a warning.
St Columcille said he feared death and hell -
But worse, the sound of an axe in a sacred grove.
Now every grove is sacred, and still we burn
Wood at times, for the fire also is sacred
And a house without it like a heart without love
When the world heads into darkness. The heat's core
Will show you again lost faces and glittering forests,
Mountain passes, caverns, an archetypal world
Recited in the twinkling of a dark pupil.
The epic buried inside us never rests:
Fire is the dark secret of the forest.
The green crowns drink sunlight until their dumb
Hearts are glutted with fire. Then, decaying or burning,
Give up whatever they have. A match flares
And the paper ignites. Watch, and the poems will come.
(From PLAYING WITH FIRE, published by Carcanet Press in 2006)
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FIVE LEMONS
Here are five lemons from the poet's garden,
the colour of white gold and icy sunshine,
flooded with green around the pointed nipples.
My younger daughter cuts one into quarters,
careful of fingers, bites the white-furred pith out,
devours the quartz-white segments with her eyes shut,
sighing and swaying in the sharp enjoyment.
Here are four lemons from the poet's garden:
one perched on three, a perfect tetrahedron.
The poet's widow showed me where to pick them,
kindly and shrewd, helping me find the best ones,
holding the branch down while I snapped the stalks off,
the cold breeze in our faces from the mountain.
We'll halve this one and squeeze it over couscous.
Here are three lemons from the poet's garden
still in the bowl, turned in a neat triangle,
yellower now. My elder daughter chooses,
after long thought, one for her still-life painting,
the twisted leaves like green airplane-propellers
with a Cezanne pear and a Braque violin,
fractured into art-deco Cubist slices.
Here are two lemons from the poet's garden
below his tall house on the terraced hillside,
red earth black-pitted with his fallen olives
between the gnarled trunks trailing silver foliage,
beside the boulders of the dusty torrent
rainless above that sea of sparkling turquoise.
The juice is perfect for a tuna salad.
Here is a lemon from the poet's garden,
the last of them. Long is the poet gone,
silent his grave on the hilltop under the cypress,
long the shadows drawn by moon and sun
out from the low walls and high gate of the graveyard.
I press the waxy peel to my face and breathe it.
There are no words for what the fragrance tells me.
(From PLAYING WITH FIRE, published by Carcanet Press in 2006)
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SCATTERING THE ASHES
At last the rain cleared and we found a barley-field
where the crop was knee-high, and in our town shoes
paced the lumpy furrows along the edge
until our trousers were soaked. My brother held it out,
open, and I pushed my hand in. It was like
dark corn, or oatmeal, or both, the fine dust
surprisingly heavy as it sighed through the green
blades and hit the earth. And like the sower
in that nursery picture ('To bed with the lamb,
and up with the laverock') we strode on, flinging it
broadcast, left and right, out over the field.
And there was no doubt that things were all in their places,
the tumbled clouds moving back, light in the wheel-ruts
and puddles of the lane as we walked to the car;
and yes, there were larks scribbling their songs on the sky
as the air warmed up. We noticed small steps
by a pool in the stream where a boy might have played
and people fetched water once, and wild watercress
that streamed like green hair inside the ribbed gloss of the current.
And then I was swinging the wheel as we found our way
round the lane corners in a maze of tall hedges
patched with wild roses, under steep slopes of larch
and sycamore, glimpsing the red sandstone of castles
hidden high in the woods. And the grit under our nails
was the midpoint of a spectrum that ran from the pattern in our cells
to the memories of two children, and it was all right.
(From PLAYING WITH FIRE, published by Carcanet Press in 2006.)
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MANTRA
Everything turns away,
All things arise and fall -
The buzzard turning the hill
Through the jewelled mill of his eye,
The seashell turned to stone
In the slow tides of shale,
The larch lost in cloud,
The shepherd's call on the air.
The pirouetting hare
Patrols the high wood,
Rain polishes rock,
The stone bridge swallows the stream.
Where is stillness found?
All things arise and turn,
Everything falls away.
(from SELECTED POEMS, Carcanet Press, 2000)
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THE TATTOOIST
She asked me for a butterfly,
there, on her shoulder. No one knows
what goes on under the skin.
I was a man with time to kill
for money, and an art to sell,
patient enough with my line
to take the minimum of pain
filling a chosen space
and never choosing the design.
I worked at a square inch,
a needle nuzzling the skin.
I wiped the blood off where the line
was drawn, a blue embroidery
in the margin of her world.
She paid, and I am free to stay
like the icecream man and the clairvoiyante
and the others who sell their addictions,
and she goes wrapped in the new web of her body.
She will never be naked again.
(from SELECTED POEMS, Carcanet Press, 2000)
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