An afternoon of dark flowers.
Werner told me,
                            there were bad men in flight.
Then we sat in a broken circle,
                            as if the air was forbidden
                            with stopped time,
                            the room choked with dust.

( for Seamus Heaney)

as if the pale stones
share the warmth
between two sides
sea and field cut
early light and fallen morning
the path weathered and slow.

curl up like black paper
burning like a moth,
a glove turned inside out;

trapped too under a house,
a circle hidden and musty;
fragile under steps,

let us escape the carrying,
legions of white coats,
corridors as long as life.

Early darkness; as oil we drip
Through the heart's engine,
In black; lemon- faced we
               shadow the next.

We hesitate with tears and
Stutter over earth; arms linked,
              distant and cool

To scare a circle of crows
And a falling steeple; music and
Words that break the shocked ring,
             for that is all.

dog-eyed shape of ash,
                 an owl leaving
                 the cool firs;

shadow of shadow;
                floorboards creaking,
                a curtain's slight dance;

black and white as my own;
                standing in frills in a snap
                in front of a Ford Prefect
                with Dad before the war.

(The cabin;by the stern windows;
Ahab sitting alone,and gazing out.)

fathoms under the salt planks
your walfish waits in tide and ebb
and you are distilled too,

into something like love,
the personal chase of two waves
waiting in the sea, trapped,

his white brow throws a squall,
eight bells, there are holes in the sky;
not yet, not now, next

the subservience of sunflowers
posed and heavy with dried yellow
spreads over fields of faded growth;

the sun stages the horizon
of sparse trees and hedgerows,
beyond the hope of lost gold.

Anklecut but running;
cornchildren at break,
dust and more dust.

Flight the cutting
of a lost sanctuary,
legless with shock

at life turned upside.
Stubble the blunt cut,
the wait of the expectant
loam, under the farrow.

mucho akimbo, all elbows and knees
sudden as summer rain, white as paper
he falls through doors and windows;

then,

closed like a shop on Sunday,
shutter-eyed, still as a nightbrook,
a dry wheel under clouds; silent.

a filtered light strained and old
that hangs over us man crawlers
we are loaded with slow blood
we jaw-jaw over evening circles ;

empty as a watering can in august
up and up the garden, down down
we hammer the green into squares
as we think we may, foolish with dust

the sea the skin of a wet dog,
black the beach; a ruined church,
the coastal lights a string of lesser ways;
we are as empty as a dropped shell
pulled across the ebb, a ripple of salt..

and as the night gets deeper
a dragon breathes like the tide:
no mistake, the dark needs its hours

you step like a puzzled *****,
                you sniff at damp bark
                and beds of leaves,

clothed in burnt sticks and smoke,
               your eyes are slanting snow
               wary of ice and shadow;

this falls between us;
               you wait under trees
               or at frozen gates

on evenings when I late home,
              carrying the basket of stones
              you laid at my door

nearing time

a ring of stars told me the future is
the sea that you try to grasp with
your broken hands and the past will
not be changed it is stained with rust
and flotsam as your inside ebbs like
the mossed ruin in the dunes as salted
grass fails to grow as the wind shakes
the waves you are alone and alone

mean winds press the heather
this lost island sinking in silver
holds huts of sighs

and a fence of tide, wild horses
stray careless between stone and growth

let me be your windbreak, a slight warmth
there is nobody beyond my sight

Flywheels enamel
with heartblood,
aortal ticks hesitate

before the dull bang
of a fallen fist,
the fat knuckle

of the next hit.
Tick tick the
small ones,

the eaters of dust,
stone-eyed they
fall apart like lost time,

the weights that
regulate all
are unbalanced.

lost under my house,
one chair less, a hole,
black teeth chew

at a space in my lungs,
less light through milkglass
means a shifting at table

that sinks bits of night
that hide in corners like steps;
a dull ghost is creeping

in times of moving air.

A bird has
changed its body,
downgraded to

a requiem of light bones,
a lost map of flight,
a throw of crashed feathers.

Black as old water,
empty as a gutted fish,
still as a prayer,

skinless as the
crashed sky,
eyeless with dismay.

the speedphone in your head
sparky and light trailed,
as a dancer with closed steps
you open doors in the night;

sometimes a ghost, a lost thought,
your pages are torn and mixed, you're
burnt as a nut, a failed paperchase
of loose  clues, brillant and wild
running with the comets to dawn

black *****, minstrel faced,
                       leaves broken with ice,
                       veined like a frosted puppet;

something known is leaving;
                      the cold makes me
                      stamp in acted rage;

I can't stand the weight, I can't stand the weight.

we drove late afternoon
                 over the ***** Rhein,
                 the sky fake with orange,

to Bonn : to a house of cool empty rooms,
                 white with words, dark with chords,
                 to an elegant Hammerflügel ;

for my father the end of a journey,
                 but the start of the sublime

we drove late afternoon
                 over the ***** Rhein,
                 the sky fake with orange,

to Bonn, to a house of cool, emplty rooms,
                white with words, dark with chords,
                to an elegant Hammerflügel;

for my father the end of a journey,
               but the start of the sublime.

rags of cloud top the wind
a dirt of wind turns your face,
arranged,
a pace of cloud dirts your face
the top of wind rags your pace;
the lines, now, for you

your face a pace of rain
the wind a race of dirt

skidding around corners on a single leg
you escape fat-cat sleep and hide under carpets
behind doors you are hinted at

so when a door hanging like an anchor
sways in the slight breeze of suggestion
my face turns outwards and drags me

to the window; there are lights behind the trees
maybe refugees of love with hot breath
perhaps morning breakers in stiff clothes
but certainly not the water inside my eyes

If you are sad
And full of grump
Then think of a world
Without Donald Trump

einen sommer lang
i heard you growing
but now you carry words
in your pockets

a child is a poem
you read the next day

Gather the crowberries for the windfeast.

Adorning our cheeks with ochre
                       we gather together
                       a throne of old rowan.

The staggards behind us ;
                       warm breath at our napes.
                       We are as careful as a circle.

So a keening for the wild flightsman,
                       the hewer of stone, blood-iron hearted,
                       now dead as a distant star
                       that points the way of smoke, of fire.

But for a moment the wind resides.

a lost girl arranges in her room
                 her dress, with stillness,
                 she pushes her tongue
                 against small kitten teeth

outside the lift groans and bangs,
                lights burn shapes
                of flats and stairs;

this is a place to circle in,
                to return to,
                never to leave,

she is sediment, a line of ash,
                a failed escapee .

the darkness pumps steps
down smoke streets, burning
light features the

cow-eyed, the clamped jaws
and forced laughter of those
with bent souls,

we are past all words, thought
is trapped in brown amber,
the night creeps round each corner

a chaser of the moon
a hunter of the stars
weightless as a night owl
silent as the dark is long
a builder of boats and planes
clever and wordless within himself..

so when time faults and darkness looms
and sleep evades us in the cold hours
you are here, you are there
so wait for us...you are not lost

Red ringed arms of leather
fail under the hot ring,
wax and feathers

weaken under the low-draft.
You're a shot bird, a soft hit
falling akimbo down to

the green wash, to the salty
glass of impact, a slip through clouds
for a mouth full of tide.

angular,
behind black,
a suggestion of brick;

the spire moon
shadows the roots
under stars,

slight warmth
of sandstone
and ticking birds,

small movements
between gravestones
and curled brass

a dark box
of stone waiting
for the edge of light

An apple split
by my own thumbs,
a removal man.

You are an ebb
distant, a rustle of waves,
an upflight of birds,
migrant in ice.

When you cross the road
to your car, twenty years
and more fall from me,
this is a closure in dull light.
Winter's tale.

When the night
                 rubs out the horizon
                 and all this black
                 has more the quality of shade

and all the copsed trees
                cluster round sleeping fields
                and buried life waits and looks,

a door in a heap of lived-in-stones opens
               neon turns the cowshed
               into some kind of church.

This is the drained time,
              the false dawn
              that makes the morning man start.

Chinese toothed, slack chinned,
concerned at the inrunning cold
you flood the snowed path with light

like a stage. Your singular silence
incomprehensible for the coated shape
one known, now a smile of wire.

The years, like snow,clean the slate.

you are a prisoner in
walls and floors, you drop
unaided from ceilings

the windows in your eyes
are cool and thoughtful

at night you slightly
push doors, or slide
over scented beams,

the wax on cupboards
neatly traces your weightless hands
but you give me no relief
when I am down

each borderline mirror,
broken fragments,
an open eye,

each missed edge,
every cut of missed intent
calls for hands of glass

sharp for loss, for splinters,,
broken pictures and edges that
form a skin of red hills

that shapes and bleeds, and
cries a trail of doors and loss;
and all of this and less

tells a story

free as
a pod of dolphins
beyond burnt skin
and dancer's steps

out of wire
and glued words
you cut through tides

wet, curved hills,
sleet behind my eyes,
watery moss

in unreal green;
all this ***** like love
at my heavy steps,

then the stolen voices
of playing children;
kites that text the sky,

all this part of a story;
a day empty as a fool.

the tension in
stressed blackwood
skinned wing

of a sparrow
the clean knife
of a december wind

all this
all this
steps on gravel
the night's last

the ants sing in traps
of fallen brown and all
these crazy winds dance
a blind ballet of coded
circles so rain constant
washes us in a dark baptism
when I clutch your hand
I feel small bones under
your skin, light as a bird,
made warm by the running
days, the last summer

The tyrannic moan of the refuse truck;
the granite of the rook's caw,

the windows suffer under sleet.

The street is lighted yellow ;
for the survivors, the last ones.

Your breath is soft beside me,
each pause fills the darkness.

Dream I am better than I am,
the night's follower, the undecided.

the wind turns my apple tree
into a victim, a lover banging
on a closed door of gnarled wood

a dance makes this ringing evening
singular, the leaves agree to fall
in the dull faith of  moving air,

they tell us about birth and departure,
about leaving together, about  stories
of ending as the sun arcs and protests

autumn rain is akin to black tea
the burnt yellow of old growth watered

a train shakes the fields, an old carpet snapping
birds shoot holes in the turbulent sky ;
the world is split like an apple,
your head inside a bell

when it is over it is not over,
the air hums with steel,
too many eyes are in the undergrowth.
evening's calm as brittle as toffee;
shocked from coal and smoke,
a heartbreath along rails

Suddenly, lights from a car outside.
Ghosts on a wooden floor,
created by a window and snow.
This is the way you leave the world.

At twentythirtyfour
On the eleventhofseptember
     a neuropathological tracer

Jumped from the box,
Lost poem; a title over rain
    men waving tins at a tractor,

And the later sleeping wihout
Rest; rooms full of waves,
    the ineluctable modality of water.

All through Saturday morning
(the wrong time to walk)
frost hardened my steps.

I had no chance to call up
the forgiveness lost in endings
but rather followed any direction

like a cautious fox in steps.

The pines around trap ghosts
they gather round this curious accident

of me alone, slow on foot.

as stopped as the silence after
a crash, you work through
the snow, the pines serious

and watching, you stumble disjointed,
unhealed. The clockwork slows
and suffers the pain of cold water,

for your eyes are shaded in
the ice-light, blue and unforgiving
as the wind gets harsher

the torn owl of autumn
hides behind a glass of rain
thin strips of the moon

hang like a tired curtain

behind the black hedge
voices seem serious and muted

we need to be empty to escape

seen through like a map
                        of the underground,
                        a perfect web of blue and red

we are easily observed,
                        heads filled with empty plains
                        or bellies of pig lust

so let me, at least, serve you
                       as a bottle of milk warming on
                       a doorstep as pigeons wake

or as a bomb-site mirror
                       forgotten and brick eyed with dust,
                       breezed by a newspaper in flight;

unnoticed, I fail to reflect the truth,
                       a stranger passing a glass door,
                       myself alone, a face of age.

unholy earth, dark with stein,
unformed loam at birth;
a worded child of mud;

fingernail skinned blacklack eyes
peek out of a ball of wet slam,
a groundling that waves like a black branch

across the sleeping fields,
see a shadow under the cold grass,
near in sight under a crust of frost.