In the salted corner of the square,
A small glass door opened to watery air;
I glanced down there throughout siesta,
Anxious at the root of a dry tongue
For wine squeezed from the ochre hills
Behind Cambrils, she sold in empty
Water bottles, a Euro for a litre.
I hurried down through the Casa Gallau,
Quickly as my sunburn would allow;
Dove into light as though onto hot sand,
Around cars that sounded like fire fights,
Squinting in the peppered, robust sun
And in - the old woman waiting, “Adeu!”
Then back upstairs, but slower now:
To watch TV in Catalan; to face
A frying pan balcony;
to get drunk and think of rain.

Cloud of gold and night
And hurt, swarming around an
Oily dumpster filled with sacks
Of torn receipts
And polystyrene fish-stink boxes;
Yellowing bags bloodied from
The butcher's counter.
Plastic sacks the gulls have sliced
Open with grease beaks and lard white skulls
(The optimal greed of bird)

But it is the wasp's tornado of
Stingers
And beautifully armoured torsos,
The heat of them and the buzz wing
Drone below the clang
Of the scrap yard next door;
The hum of something you could call anger
In a woman or a man,

But which is nothing more than wing
Against heat, it is that which strikes me,
That meaningless will to go on.

We took the weight off below the pine
On the cool wood of a bench curled
around its rough trunk.
Red dust drifted from the road in clouds,
Like spectres from a battlefield,
And the air above had blanched
In a shrill high noon intensity.
Sweat escaped my face
Like weeping-
The rules of the race had changed
And we two could run no more.

All around was the sound of a child
Crying and calling in Catalan
To its copper-eyed mother
as she smoked a cigarette.
We did not speak.
Between a creak in the branches
And the aromas of flowers and feet;
we had nothing left,
Not even the sunlight.

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.

The barmaid in El Capi explained
How to get to the Roman Villa:
Across the tracks, past hotels
like broken teeth
nibbling ***** yellow air;
Along the loose beach to the far side
Of a river’s still but singing mouth, where
A riot of frogs clicked in the reeds
Beneath a trampling green heat.

We dragged down there one Saturday,
Belly’s empty of all but beer.
You wore damp grey denim and were afraid
To be seen beside the señoras;
Your pallor lurked behind blushed hair
Brushed forward across your face,
And you complained because
You could not breathe and I
Was looking at women on the way.

But you would not remember this day
Now if I were to ask, nor any
Day - so why do I?
When we stood and listened to frogs
that, like you, seek heat
To lay upon a cold heart.

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.

Ball of bone and feather in the dew,
I surprised you when I pushed the door
For first smoke of the day;

The glass air, cracked beneath your wing
As you hopped onto a wet fence to sing.

And I, without the least music,
Breathed poison against
the morning’s blue wall.

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.

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.

Fall

Crows dropped from the sky
as though they were cinders
falling from the hot breath
of some dark fire;

The wind was pepper and grit
ripped from the coalyard
and the rust of an old truck.

The
remonstrance of dead things
filled the day so much
that I grieved
a little
for the sun's doomed grace;

and hated the way
an arrow sharp and tin-tasting
season
made me think of you.

These songs
Were loud last when you were fast
In my days like water in its bed:
Molten light, wood smoke banks, promise that
horizons stand, a far off blue-salt heaven.
I do not know if I owe thanks
For the ache of this recall,
rushing in tides
Across the cracked mud and dross of
Channels that have for years been dry
And which the next hot noon will drain.
I do not know, but I shall refrain
From turning.

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.

Caught in the wet gale torn between the hill's teeth like a final breath,
Corduroy cold against sky and skin,
And the ashes of a fire you thought would always
Burn, left now in the damp and no stars
No anything but the vague sense of something
Running after you like a dog you want to leave behind;
But forgetting always the loss
The light fading on stone
The eyes you no longer remember and the voice you no longer hear
Except as an echo of your own
Caught in the coral cave of dreams that come after
Too much drink and worry and work and too many
Years.
Walking through dust wet with frost, cars slicing by,
And this is all there is, this fading.
This fading.

To all the skies beyond the feeling "what became of me, of us?"
To all the heartbreak syrup of the glory, begotten in the days
gone by in empires and sand, in all the hearts and minds of hurt.
To all the starts again and white wings beyond and above the water.
To all the heavens, we have mislaid, and to love that has knelt down by the black water
of the world and cannot stand again.
To paying for what we have done in the golden, broken, oil-slick air.
To all we never forget, mister, in the mystery of the burning up sky breaking into stars
like
falling dreams, like the children we never see, like all we said we would be
and the things we would not do, and the yelling "What went wrong?"
To all the dead coming back like Lazarus blue-tongued in back rooms of the soul,
rolling rocks from the grey sun-lost tombs of the Fathers.
To all those coming back from nowhere.
To all those who promise to ring and never do,
and all that time spent staring at useless cell phones
as the days pass on
and as the hours mark into nights, plain nights, like palettes that hold no paint.
To everything you ever said.
To the fact that you were the one - and all that matters nothing now, and the world
this beaten feeling, this snapped drum skin, has nothing now to offer one returning,
walking out through doors of the mind,
imagining stars and lives where none is to be found.
To everything.
To all the stupid things remembered,
this is a hymn, to the night we watched a thunderstorm in ochre clouds
above the distant lands;
to the silence of that first night in the country, which was so terrifying
like the greater silence you spend life against.

To navy eyes, I never see now as clean,
I cannot picture,
I am losing, as all things are taken from us.
This is a hymn to the one thing I cannot forget:
we were for each other,
but that is no solace in the red display of death-lights over smoking moors
and I wish you knew me again, as we were together once,
a gambler lost in whisky stains and new names lost hard against the sea
and frozen strengths,
lost in dreams and highways ahead, leading on, winding on
into the end of stories.

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.

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.