Enter Stage Right, a poem on beginnings and endings

Genesis

There are two family trees

Growing in fields far apart,

Yet the same sun feeds

Their myriad leaves,

Nurtures each soft unfolding,

Carelessly, as every god does -

The agenda uncertain;

And who’s to choose

The fates of these?

(It’s a tragedy, of course,

Greek, written by Anemophilous.)

The trees are old, of course,

Everything reaches back,

Everything must connect –

Darwin flecked, the past

Perfects itself in the future.

Each extinction a casting

Off of the failure

To see what was to come,

A leaving behind

Of the halt and the lame;

And to come was this: Us.

Even without God,

The definite article that is,

It’s a faith built on hubris.

Some believe in a more

Accidental evolution,

A lucky dip;

Our fingers sticky with chance,

And licked with glee

As we made it up a step;

Not so much a climbing down from

More a falling out of the tree.

Ah, the fall ... there’s the rub:

Mea culpa, mea culpa,

Mea maxima culpa.

Back to God:

The apple never falls far from the tree

And there has to be suffering.

Who wouldn’t want a heaven?

Move over,

There’s room on that cross for two.

Yes, the trees are old,

Their boughs and branches

Cast long shadows,

A shading from the sun,

A simple need to protect,

To keep under cover,

To maintain the flavour

Of the soupy stock.

Heinz 57; DNA.

Yet seeds in their thousands

Are released to indifferent winds,

Scimitar the air, spin,

Are carried to distant lands;

Or fruit is eaten

And birds take wing,

Swinging out over fields,

Crossing cities and towns,

Countries and continents,

Shitting indiscriminately.

Somewhere – here -

Two saplings shoulder

Up through the humus,

Bending tenuous

Stems towards the light;

Their numb heads favour heat,

Nuzzle up to warmth -

Replete in a secular blindness.

One bears fruit

(A thin skin wrapped around

The soft pale flesh,

Easily pitted);

The other nuts (gnarled

And knotted, hard to crack).

Their branches enfold,

And they grow into each other;

They caress;

They entwine;

They marry,

Urgent with the sap they carry.

Finally, they swarm,

And they smother,

Lying one upon the other.

And a shoot,

Green tipped, trusting,

Noses up through the earth,

Exhales the thin oxygen

Of hope and of death.

[Exeunt stage left.]

Phantom limn: Amputation a poem

Amputation

The sky is bright and clear

And very pale.

A winter sun is coming up,

Blazing in the trees behind me.

There’s light but no real heat,

And my coffee’s rapidly cooling.

Nevertheless, the temperature’s up;

There’s water in the air

And the whispered trickling

Of snow dissolving,

As though something secret,

Something slow and discreet

Were at work.

And last year’s grass shows through,

Like rucks in a threadbare carpet.

Over the dividing wall,

I can see into the neighbour’s kitchen.

The wife comes in and sees me staring,

Though my thoughts are elsewhere.

She looks back at me,

And while we’re too far away for detail,

I sense the frown on her face.

We have never spoken;

Our lives run on separate tracks,

Blurred with the motion of a moving train.

I look away and then back again.

I raise my hand, as though to wave,

And she turns aside,

Busies herself with something.

                                                                  

There was tree, I remember,

Which blocked our view of their house.

One day, in summer,

From the same window

I had watched my wife carry her case to the car,

I noticed that they had cut it down.

What was left was a staggering V-sign,

With its playful ambiguity,

The bole bifurcating about a yard from the ground,

And the two trunks rising and separating

For another yard or so.

(Should I have taken offence

At something unintended, apposite,

When simply more light was allowed

To spill on our side?)

The ends blazed white, raw,

Yet seemed a soft wound, benign.

They took the axe to them too.

I tried to run a film backwards in my head,

The tree being cut together,

As if I could have recalled its solidity,

Its stature,

The elusive music of its leaves,

But I couldn’t even remember

What type of tree it was,

Or how it had looked when whole.

With its constituent parts

Laid out on the lawn –

Branches of varying thickness

Grouped in separate piles:

Logs for sawing and burning –

It looked like a self-assembly kit

Sorted from its packaging;

A tree from IKEA -

As if happiness were a lifestyle

So easily constructed -

Though finally a puzzle with too many bits,

For all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

The snow has melted,

Has slowly unfixed its pieces

And put itself away,

And given me back the dead grass.

The wall remains, its grouting solid,

And behind it, the stump is still deeply rooted

In the damp, dark earth, still scratching

At its amputee’s itch of spring.

The past is the ocean, a poem on memory and love

Erosion

No one had told her that hell

Could come before death:

The horizon you tire of reaching,

That thin line, a shell;

The sound of your own breathing

Like the incessant waves on the beach.

A hundred miles from the sea,

Mrs Smith stands adrift,

Feels the swell buoy her up,

Her stomach shift.

Coffee spills from her coffee cup;

The fall to the floor an eternity.

Abandoned now, and stranded

Amongst the dead husband’s chattels,

She shakes the small round pills

From the smoked-glass bottle

That comes with the strained

Smiles of her doctor.  They spill

Into the cracked vessel

Of her palm.  She licks

Them up like the cat

Lapping at its milk.

Her rooms float and fill

With fog and she feels

Her way through them,

Her vision dim.

Her cat mews, rubs her legs,

Calling her from shipwreck.

When the mist swirls,

She lies upon the sofa,

Under a thin checked picnic

Blanket, in a soft cloud of coma,

Staring at nothing, staring;

The cat pads and curls

At her feet, purring, purring.

Run aground.

There’s a line-up on the mantelpiece –

Strangers with Identikit features,

Assembled into a puzzle of faces,

Who seem shifty and restless,

Peering through the dirty windows

Of their unhappiness,

Though one photo on the shelf

Holds her life in its frame -

A memory and a mirror -

And the faces seem more the same:

Each day bringing them nearer,

Pushing her from the shore of herself.

She remembers the day

As if it were yesterday;

Though yesterday has gone,

Lost in days of repetition,

Hour stacked on stale hour,

Year after year turning sour,

Until far enough back

The clouds break,

And the minutes, fresh,

Sparkle so she can count each one.

She feels the press of his flesh

On her fingers,

Senses the urgent tone,

How the seconds linger,

How each and every stone

On the beach behind shines;

The breaking of the waves

Stalled.

She recalls:

The borrowed car,

The promising early sun,

The lack of traffic,

The walk along the prom,

Shivering under the picnic blanket,

Their limbs knotting them into one.

Then the seaweed smell of decay.

Beyond that moment

She can only stumble

And then fall

Into the jumbled present;

And the waves tumble,

And sprawl.

The past is the ocean

Coming in at hide tide,

Slowly stealing years –

Her island’s inevitable erosion:

Headlands crumble and slide,

Coastline disappears.

She lifts her eyes from the picture

To the horizon’s distant glow;

Ssh, ssh the waves whisper

As the water runs over her toes.

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.