A hundred years of the dead;
The new stones, pale as the morning’s bread
And those further back, that crowd below
A deep green shudder of the trees-
Family whose faces we never knew,
The old ones, in pieces, beneath the yew.

They linger alike at the edge of the shore
Where the world of figures and fights
washes to sand;
Where bad dreams are not things we wake from,
Perhaps,
And the second hand can never rush
The morning to your side.

So, they reside:
And I part the blades that shroud a stone
Thinking, for a second, I’d seen your name.

To be allowed to drive forever, through the burns
Of August, pregnant with a dreaming,
Set upon another life.
To drive and not climb from the car, with every
Window wound back into its shell, to not
Think ever of heaven, and never to tell
Pedestrians of the driving.
To be in transit: to be a wing, awake
In smaller shelves of air; to live
As though each moment were its own movie
    Screen
And never to regret the faces standing still,
The roadside eyes, the strangers fleeting;
Each foretells a story.
To touch potential that reminds
And shout "Never mind!" as one drives.
To bring beneath the hot blue
A mode of being mindful
Of the lachrimae rerum, and to feel
The sorrow and the thrill of speed.
To never feel the need of feet,
And to watch
Clouds through tinted glass and country turn to run
As you blink against the sun and throw
Your glasses from the car.
To find a country lane, and race
So close to bracken that the dew
Can wash your face, and then slow,
By the heated science fiction of a petrol station
In the grip of yellow weather.
To press the horn and be at last born
Into the endlessness of sky.
To cherish evening as time when seeing nothing
    Dies;
To exceed day and to say
"Hello," to women at the roadside.
To see the world as something flying,
Something outshining the hazy study walking
    Teaches.
To know you drive beyond the reaches
And to give it everything you've got
As you lean into the wheel and feel
A sainthood in your suntan,
A miracle in the mileage.
To ignore maps, and head for places
Beyond the slightest traces of your former life,
Abandoning self in the process of speed
And accept adventures and sudden brakes
Because you feel the car
outwaiting patience by the road,
And you are owed some living, **** it!
To never check the rear-view mirror
and to slow down as the sun collapses
Worn out on the hills,
Because you never will exhaust
The depths and wonders of this prayer.
To never care about direction, and to drive
Into the night
With headlights blessing every pebble;
To smell the fuel and feel the wheel and
Drive throughout forever.

I finished work and waited for her
With a cigarette, watching an African try to sell sunglasses
to sleeping Irish tourists;
The light was a million needles against my neck
And my beer damp work trousers were
patterned by pale sand blown from the beach.

She walked towards me from the shore;
Her rusty hair writhed in the sea’s laconic breeze,
And I heard blood beneath the waves, and the mountains,
Falling blue to the white waters, seemed to pant beneath
The sun’s arms,
And I felt I could fall too,
Like the sun,
Like the word,
Like the mountain’s peaks.

She paused and watched me, her arms filled with bags
From Suma, and her gaze empty
As a breath designed to hold a name.

Cap Salou cracked like crystal against the air -
I sat beneath a rustling palm
On a stone wall warm as fresh bread;
And thought I heard her laugh.

It was an ordinary day, and I don’t know why
I remember her stood beneath that sky and no other;
As though that moment could stand for all:
A heart without use, blown like the grains
Of dust and sand between us,
Her eyes hidden by distance, growing dim:
White sand, red hair, green eyes,
And laughter.

That long drive through the cold,
Climbing from your car, and trudging over
gravel towards the empty pub
In the centre of a darkness of the sky
and land, with a forest in back.

Sitting close to fire, anonymous in black glass,
Light reflecting in your eyes from flames I could not see,
Your green eyes like stone kissed by fire,
In which I saw an entire being,
The working of a new way,
salvation like music, a blue to set against the night,
A sky of light, and meaning against the darkness
And blood thirst of fate.
I held your hand, even though you had refused,
Because you knew, somewhere, that it would
Never happen, and my thoughts, no matter how
Strewn with stars, would never hold the sense of life passing
Before my eyes, the idea of time that your eyes, your presence,
The thing I had built around you, could destroy.

And you were what I had searched for ,
You were the world passing from my eyes,
You were the summer burned dark in the sea,
You were the spirit telling me I was closer,
Than I had ever been, to love,
And I stood, and we were alone in the Falcon.

And how I had dreamed of a place and time
Like that,
Of being instantly in the dream
Like notes of music
Drifting into symphony,
And we drank one drink,
And left, and it was cold outside.

That was how it could have been.
We could have always had that sense of living outside,
Of speed against the land,
Of being forever and forever with one another
In a changed world;
Where even the barmaid’s ginger hair,
The heat at my back,
The smell of forest,
The relief of the chef at not having to cook,
Seems like the word.

The word of goodness,
of purpose springing from
The stages of the sands.
That we could not hold,
Needing, as we did, to breathe.

The hollow flame of the air
Burns cold, and the clouds
Are frosts across God's
Post-mortem gaze;

All these days pass thus,
Waiting and waiting for
Something that may never
Arrive, some action
To break

This empty suit of armour
That used to be my life.

And it's awful to think the things I carry
Will be, on the other side, forgotten.
The failure of the word to hold memories
Drifting into separate distances
Of the dark
Like a broken ice sheet on a black river
Warming.

Yet I still try, out of fear
That a year will stumble over
January's step,
And bring with it the final death
Of a certain smoke-stamped afternoon,
Or a crooked smile, or a gaze
That once held love like a grail.

A word, a poem,
A noise that fits the locked door
Of eternities beyond the weight
Of dirt and blood.

One day the right key will come
Into my possession,
And the door will open wide.

Because I am guilty
I tried to feed the wild red cat
Living somewhere in the yard at work.

What must it be like

To be born in the skull of such a place
To look through that universe
Of ripped plastic, broken wooden pallets,

Spilled grease and glass splinters.
To burn into life below
The steel wall of the boiler room

And the steady silver of the sky,
To pounce, hunt, and hurt
Beneath the punches of delivery trucks,

And the war cries of commerce.
I suppose I pitied him, although my days
Pass there also,

Because we created that
Desolation, and called it a
Life

and he had no choice.