A GARLAND FOR NATIONAL POETRY DAY 2014

My Once and Only Garden

It’s no longer mine
But I pass it
Nearly every morning.
It’s untended,
Overgrown, autumned,
The camellia needs a prune,
The irises have gone;
The garden needs
A good seeing to.
A sad garden to pass
Nearly every morning.



The Chestnut Avenue

I came back to fallen chestnut
Shells, conkers, everywhere,
But the leaves are still
Thinking about falling.
No wind you see.
On other trees I pass,
The lime,the white-beam,
There’s a crinkly brownness
Scattered across the path.
So dry, no wind,
September sun.
The chestnut avenue
Has some way to go.
Wind, rain, frost perhaps
And the leaves will fall.


******* a Boat

There’s this girl,
A young woman really,
On a boat.
Not living on it yet
But plans are afoot,
Along with essential repairs.
It’s not ‘Offshore’
Like Penelope Fitzgerald’s
Boat on the Thames.
But in a quiet and placid mooring
On the River Lea instead.
I thought of sending her this book,
But it’s all about liminality,
People somewhere in between,
People who don’t belong on land or sea
. . . And the boat (eventually) sinks.


Still Waiting

We sat on the seat
Under a bower of roses
In the herb garden
And she talked in that singing
Way of talking that she does;
Such a tessitura she commands
Between the high and the low
With a falling off portamento
Glide - from the high to the low.
Her hair stills falls
Across serious freckles, auburn hair,
Gold with a touch of red
Like her mother’s only softer,
Like mine once was, and my mother’s too.
She has a slighter frame though,
and is still waiting, waiting
For a real life, a woman’s life.


Cyclamen Restored

I went away and left it
On a saucer, watered,
In a north light
Near a window sill.
Its pink flowers were *****
And nodded a little
When I moved about the room.

On my return it had drooped,
Its leaves yellowed.
There were tiny pink petals
Scattered on the floor.
I put the plant in the sink
For half an hour.
It revived,
And the next day
Seemed quite restored.


Driving South

Driving south through
Dalton, Shoreditch,
Hackney and Hoxteth,
The Hasidic community
Garnished the Sunday street.
Driving down the A10
South towards the city:
The Gleaming Gerkin,
the Walkie Talkie,
and further still,
a Misty Shard.

As a child, the buildings here
Were so much slighter
And a grimy black;
The highest then, the spires
Of Wren’s city churches.

Sundays to sing at ‘Temple’,
With lunch at the BBC,
Driving south from New Barnet
In my Great Uncle’s Morris,
Great Aunt Violet dozing in the back.


Gallery

Small but beautifully right
For her London show,
Good to see her surrounded
By tide marks from the shore,
Those neutral surfaces,
Colours of sand and stone,
Rust (of course) from the beaches
Treasured trove, metal
Waiting to become wet
And stain those marks with colour.


Ascemic Sewing

Having no semantic content
These ‘words’ appear on the back
Of a chequered cloth of leaves
Backed all black
Stitched white,
A script of a garden
Receding into
Trans-linguistical memory.


September Dreaming

Facing the morning
Above a barrier of trees,
Oaked, foxed, hardly birded,
I would  wonder while she slept
About the richness of her dreams,
Dreams she had spoken of
(Yesterday, and out of the blue)
And, for the first time, in all
These precious but frustrating
years we’d slept together,
shared together.
I had always thought her dreamless;
Too fast asleep to experience
Envisioned images,
Sounds and sensations.


Think of a Poem

She told me in a text about
Think of a Poem
On National Poetry Day
Just a week away.
That’s easy, I thought,
There’s always that poem
Safe and sure in my memory store
Once spoken nervously,
under a rose garden walk,
but there, there
for evermore . . .

Who says it’s by my desire
This separation, this living so far from you. . .


Missing Music

Today I read a poem
Called The Lute: a Rhapsody.
‘From the days of my youth
I have loved music,
So have practised it ever since,’
Says Xi Kung.

In his exquisite language
He then describes its mysterious virtues,
And all the materials from which it’s made.

How I miss my lute, its music,
And the voice that once sang to its song.


Drawing

I wonder if she’s drawn today,
And what? I wonder.
John Berger says:
Drawing goes on every day.
It is that rare thing
That gives you a chance
Of a very close identification
With something, or somebody
Who is not you.
I wonder if she’s drawn today,
And what? I wonder.

A cracked record pirouettes upon its cherry oaked coffin,
Listen closely to the requiem for my ravine.

Can you taste the a’s, the b’s, the c’s,
The spearmint flavor of cool jazz prancing      along       your      tongue.

A eulogy for the mind.
Our memory is not like it used to be.

Light driven through unshattered glass.
Reflecting amongst particles, a burnt hay fulgence.

Before this home, the welcome mat was upside down. An encasement. A confinement.
A rigid sweater, crafted of jagged straw and course hair clung to my skin.

I could never leave. The smell of chemical potpourri coming from that pyrex plate,
leaving the nostrils flaring in metallic bliss.         The taste of frosting.

Same faces entering, different ones departing. Friend on the couch fearing ****,
Me in bed fearing robbery.

A visitor in my room. Masked. Too dark to see.   He apparates from view while I shriek in silence. Alley cats in life threatening quarrel in a deaf man’s yard.

He comes again unwelcomed, I dare this time to challenge.
The drugs are done.    

Heroes are seldomly forgotten.

I expel smoke into the atmosphere
and think of all my ghosts this year.
I fumble the deck in search of fives
but still find the Jester half alive.
I stumble through old alleys
we used to go to, in search of songs.
But I do nothing right but fill valleys
with all of the right wrongs.
I absorb oaked *** into my veins
and felt hot tears in the rain.
All those moments — lost in time
the second you were no longer mine.