The Ghost

Cloth

The Sea

This crook of land shoulders me, a great protector

of hills plush with luminescent ferns, hardy shrubs,

and lined by ancient sheep paths. And beneath me

a lip of rock, prehistoric forms looking to a horizon.



The infinite sheet before me is glaucous and white,

ever-moving as lunar light, the oily spread of years

crashing against the coast, endless and unceasing.

It is a tide marking off a life, the din of time passing.



As I sit upon this wooden bench, salted and rotten,

overlooked by the stunted lighthouse at Bull Point,

I find all decision is buffeted, the sea a great anvil

hammering out a future not ready to be quenched.



It is an unsatisfactory mirror, its broken reflections

require every viewer to piece together their own

answers. Here is mine; hold the pen, write with it,

for yours must be the unhappy life of the intellect.



When there is no other employment then a life is

as restless as the sea, rocking between two shores,

and each word written is a wave striking another,

blue and fleeting, always erased by a tide incoming.

Summer Garden

The smallest of pleasures can be found here,

within the high redbrick walls which square

a miniature kingdom, a secret garden hidden

within a tessellation of neighbouring gardens.



There is no quiet quite like it, suffuse as it is

with the twittering of unnamed English birds,

the droning of lawnmowers and light aircraft,

the staccato laughs of children playing war.



This peace is suburban, as the breeze brings

the odours of late spring flowers, tinged by

the compost’s sweetly rotten wafts festering

in the heat of the first hot days of summer.



I can smell the withering vegetable peelings,

the weeds and limp cuttings, the mouldering

cardboard, the eggs shells and used teabags.

It is the redolence of decay under all things.



Sitting on veneered furniture, the gravel lawn

neat and manicured, I read and bathe in a sun

unusually hot for this time of year. Nothing of

the outside world can impinge upon existence.



Before me the neighbour’s apple tree is twisted,

bent by the labours of its fruit, and the terraced

houses behind it are in rows as mirror images,

ad infinitum as they curve towards the horizon.



Our neighbours look down avariciously from

the second floor windows like Rapunzel gazing

at the witch’s grove. And I, the witch, shrivel in

their sight, pretend to ignore their prying eyes.



I have spent a lifetime in gardens such as these,

buffeted by the safety of this realm unpeopled,

shying from the bullying insistence of a world

whose abeyance is by a false, temporary guard.

Gnostic

What strikes between the pen and page,

between neurons firing action potentials,

those vast electrical charges that gauge

the measure between words, and offers us

the insight allowing for imagistic totems.



What spark within causes the questions

marking this long, laborious human quest

from time’s beginning? A spark of flint

once bringing into light the first fires of

primitive man, who howled at the moon?



Who planted this vast spark, which some

call spirit, this gust of life’s quick breath,

starting up the first heart, the chicken

or perhaps the egg? In the dark hour of

our brief history, how did it come to be?



Does this spark, between pen and page,

also cause the myriad stars to glitter in

the black firmament, on which all of our

origins are anchored? Does this account

for a poet’s fascination with their light?



Does this spark also account for his lack

of belonging in this world, who looks at

stars for answers and thus feels no place

within a prison, material, lush and green,

seductive, but a curse of all that is finite?



Could this spark lead to the knowledge

of a self known wholly and completely,

in a pledge of inquisition by the scalpel

of his own pen, to see his form in a mirror

of poems written within its celestial light?



I see only that I must be receptive to it,

to perhaps allay my fears of a sea quiet,

black, and eternal waiting for me in death,

a hard light of stars put into infant limbs,

causing me to write my own immortality.

The Debt

It is in music that I miss you most,

in which your two year absence is

most keenly felt, a bright sharpness.



So dense the solid ghost who enters

my presence, a man made man again,

but only in music, only in that realm.



I remember my child’s hands upon

your old vinyl records – your masters –

covers in green, red, brown, and blue.



The oval portraits of Mozart, Strauss,

of Haydn and Beethoven, such serious

expressions on their faces, how you



Often played those crackling concertos

and symphonies so that their grooves

indelibly marked this boy’s cochlea.



Thus marked you left your greatest gift,

and also made this vast underworld

in which I might visit with you again.



Years later, lying in hospital, the time

long before you died, you came to me.

There, in the Sheldonian, drunk on



Champagne, the thin evening sunlight

straining through those high windows,

the anguish of the Philomusica’s strings



Opening Tchaikovsky’s adagio lament

of the Pathétique, those swooping cries,

that in some way foretold your death,



As the orchestra strained its last breath,

just as you would on another white bed.

Even then I seemed to be preparing for it.



Almost two spent years since you died

I found you again in the Musikverein

in Vienna, the greatest of concert halls.



It was you who introduced me to those

New Year broadcasts, the joyous pomp

of the Blue Danube and Radetsky March –



You would have loved to have seen it,

the majesty of its grand, gilded ceilings

and delicate, pear-shaped chandeliers.



Listening to Schumann I knew you were

somehow close, in raptures, fulfilling

your dreams that never came to pass.

Charlatan

The woman poses

as a favourite aunt,

as a nurse matron,



As kindness itself –

her smile anointing

the predicted scars.



She possesses none

of the usual

trappings; the glass ball,



Small, stunted candles,

worn tarot pack, or

phrenologist’s head.



Just her oracle

card deck, her angels.

She gives a reading –



Brings into being

an apparition

of a man composed



From clues, from guesses,

from quick slippages,

a jigsaw puzzle.



He has been with me,

she suggests, as I

come to terms with his



Death. I thought I had.

Perhaps her real gift

is not pale foresight,



Or divination.

Instead she knows when

someone is lying.

 

The Dogs of Sodom

This way death lies –

the road a track of dust

on which it writhes,



An odd contortionist,

hind legs about its neck.

What devilry is this?



It licks its thighs,

the fleshy, glittering eye,

engorges its faeces.



It is sodomised

on a stake –

as it copulates the self.



Such depravity,

such evil infection here,

in this scavenger



Of men’s parts,

as human flesh is pared

to the bone.



It knows only itself,

the condition

of a long troubled sin



It considers the echelon

of pleasure no one

but inhabitants of Sodom



Might accomplish.

Its back wears a dust caul,

its limbs in prosthesis,

 

The pitiable animal.

There in the semen is

the inevitable extinction.

Suburbia

“Nothing, like something, happens everywhere”.

Philip Larkin, I Remember, I Remember



The small boy’s cry pierces the manicured quiet,

a ceaseless, high pitched squeal of unconcealed joy,

playing as he does along the low slung brick wall.



He knows nothing of monotony – such repetition

is a gift to children in order to learn, to imitate

the adults taken by this gross business of living.



He has started early – the wooden Wendy house

models itself on the vast set of bricks and mortar

neighbouring it which is to be his basic destiny.



The slow breeze carries with it the distant screams

of other children’s new found pleasures, as the sun

hangs with lethargy in the sky, spilling gold lazily.



Here are the neat, plotted kingdoms of England –

carved out of agricultural land and long dead

forests, which our former countrymen founded.



Their chariots in gravel drives glint in neat rows

outside redbrick terraces, semidetached houses,

bungalows mirroring each other on narrow streets.



They flank this low hill, each home a life’s work –

a testament to not living, as each generation tears

down the dedicated work of the one before it.



Despite this, nothing changes – the old town sleeps,

worn out by industry, veins emptied of their coal,

the Victorian age left in ruins like a bad hangover.



Only the inhabitants grow older, once children

themselves, they are the guardians of this place,

parents with their small offspring to look after.



Something here deadens the senses – the smoke

of a million barbecues making rancid the air, or

the dull rhythm of the train passing, marking time,



Or the yoke of a life that seems simply inevitable.

The blackened sandstone brick of St. Nicholas

casts its long, deathly shadow over the cul-de-sac.

River Mersey

We wait patiently on the landing stage

as it gently rocks with the river’s tide,

dwarfed by Liverpool’s three graces –

white, effacing facades of a past that is

obstinate in the face of regeneration.



The ferry unleashes its steel tongue

by which we embark, find a bench on

the ferry’s bow. The river is a brown

vein through the city – it runs also

through me, is my entire genealogy.



As we quickly sail to the sea’s mouth,

the cold salty air fierce against the sun,

I remember whole lifetimes now gone,

each one somehow bound to this wide

expanse as a great line in a family tree.



My grandfather, a boy of just sixteen,

had attempted to row across it late at

night when he missed the last boat –

to return his father’s coat before he

found out his son had borrowed it.



But such was a lack of boyish strength,

he could not quite navigate its width,

and had to be rescued halfway across.

My mother recounts the tale for me

in case I had not quite remembered it.



Along the waterfront my uncle cycled

everyday to work, no doubt marvelled

at the river, the promise of escape from

his dull occupation, a tributary towards

other shores, other countries, other lives.



I recall the many trips with my father,

when we children curious of big ships,

taking us with my surly grandmother

to the Pier Head to pick up the steamer

for her long voyage to the Isle of Man.



And recall the time in New Brighton –

an English sea resort since forgotten,

walking in the sun along the great prom,

to the New Palace Amusement Arcade,

an indoor fairground, to our amazement.



Then, much later my time as a student

living on my own for the first time –

walking along this waterfront alone

by the Albert Dock, perhaps in a first

attempt to gather ghosts of my past.



But so much of this life is part of a past

closed off like an iron door, and I lean

against the ferry’s rail, a fatherless son,

my grandparents long gone, as history

ebbs behind me in the wake of the ferry.



Our trips ends and thus we disembark

back to the city, humming that old tune,

Ferry Across the Mersey. I contain this

sadness looking back, wondering what

this ageless river could ever know of me.