A poem for The Dead

Sorrows

He weighed six stone -

The size of my daughter, aged ten -

The skin baggy on the bone,

The meat of him gone.

Death reduces, like a good sauce.

A scrawny thing, a corpse -

Carries no weight, no remorse,

No apology, no applause.

And memory, eaten at by worms,

Claws at skeletons, at the marrow;

And grief struggles to find a form,

Scraping and picking and gnawing

At sorrows.

Welcoming the Slaughter, a poem on love and breakdown

Ben and Jane (an extract)

Jane has boxes for everything.

She keeps them under the bed,

In the bedroom of the house

In her head.

Her mother gave her the boxes;

Label them carefully, she said.

What kind of boxes? Egg boxes?

Tea chests?  Crates? 

She was anxious to get it right.

If you like. 

What kind of guidance was that?

Her first box was Anxiety:

A shoe box, big enough for boots;

They’d been in a sale;

They chafed her heels.

The lid didn’t fit.

 

She’d found the house in a memory,

Though she couldn’t remember it.

The front door,

Fanlighted, letter-boxed,

Its number an opaque code,

Leads to the stairs,

And off the landing is the bedroom,

Cluttered with boxes.

There is a window,

Its sill cluttered with boxes.

Light streams against the pane,

But the view is a blank,

As if the house were in a carwash.

 

The other rooms feel forbidding. 

She thinks there are lodgers,

Whom she may have met,

Or would have liked to.

Sometimes,

She hears their voices,

Soft, sociable noises,

The clink of glasses,

Murmured laughter;

 

Sometimes,

A nervous greeting:

The bleating of a small animal,

Welcoming the slaughter.

 

Other times,

When alone,

She sits on the bed

And imagines herself crying,

Wanting a mother for the daughter.

Holding on? Or letting go? A poem

Sedimentation

The years accumulate,

Are stacked and packed

Onto shelves that bend

With the weight that

Selves can barely bear;

Each volume printed,

Indexed, the pages uncut,

Stored against time,

In the library of us,

Undusted,

As if we could be read,

Could read, would read,

The diary we would keep,

Were there time,

Time to retreat, to start again.

And Time’s bending in the river’s flow:

The silted corners,

The stagnant oxbow lake,

The tributaries turned to backwater

Rush by now, glimpsed;

And all that fear and hope

Kicking against the current

That’s pulling us out to sea.

And what to say?

Tongue swollen with a brackish discontent

And life’s failures a wishbone in the throat.

The floods and droughts:

The ink running from the page,

Fading in the sun.

The time, the time …

The mind flails,

Swimming in the deep water of itself,

Or beached upon its own desolate shore.

Each day now begins blank, unwritten,

And closes so.

Each night the detritus settles, thickens,

And flowing slows.

And death opens its black, toothless mouth -

A lipless, estuary-wide smile -

And yawns.

Dark Atlas, poem

Dark Atlas

A map’s been nailed to the four corners of a round table.

There’s a key; there’s a scale; there are symbols:

Figures in a landscape, a path to follow;

Birds taking flight: an eagle, a swallow.

There is a route marked in red -

A river like an artery that has bled

Over mountain and forest to the ocean

Of our unknowing: a feeling, a prehension.

And somewhere in the dark atlas of the mind

Is the conceit in the relief of a journey that is signed.