Three poems / Chicks / The Robin

Three poems

You watch a woman walking

on a street with small

tight steps that give nothing

away

and get nowhere

she is trying

to get somewhere but

she won’t

not like that

Where does it go?

Where does that

pavement

go, that she is walking

on, walking on with her

small

steps.

There are new flowers

that have pushed through

the soil with

small shoots, as if from

nowhere they have got up

and out

Things go in the ground

they go down in the mud and mush

old time makes new time. 

Things are green

Soon there will be frogs

You laugh out loud

The world is young yet.  

Chicks

I watched the mother fly from the nest

stuttering under her young’s weight

she got no further than

the length of a lying man

before she had to dump the

headless mess of half grown feathers.

The first’s head was clipped off

by a dinosaur’s snapping beak black

and white jabbering up to the sky

forced down its gnashing gullet.

Soon another came out

I didn’t see it carried, but I found it

not far from the first now buried

with a small clay coloured slug

oozing on its eye

the pin pricked pink of its bare belly

cold and firm in the mud. 

 

A pet cat came and sniffed

The third seems unharmed

and will become stronger now

for this intrusion.

The Robin

The robin watches me while I dig

he watches me with his shiny black eye

side on not blinking

waiting keen and quiet

for me to turn up worms

and the small things that live

in the soil and scutter  

and twitch in his sharp beak

I being a large mammal

who shifts and

shunts the earth around

once, I slice open

a perfect hole, one part

of a tunnel now collapsed on

the heap of what I have dug

the earth is dry and grainy and slips down itself  

Dad comes to look at the trench

and to level it

he kneels and with one hand

paws through the loose earth like

he is swirling hot water

around a bath

I watch him move the earth

I will not lay the wall until he says it is time.

Give thanks for rain

Give thanks for rain

What a day for puddle driving!

Give thanks for rain, watch the water

explode with a great splooshing crunch

as the tyre shoots it up, out and all around.

Whoosh!

My name is Adam

And I like driving through puddles!

A phone call from a quiet table / Worm digging

A phone call from a quiet table

He rings me from their house

where they are sitting round the table with

the chair by the window where

the sun comes in empty.

The wood of the table is smooth

and there are patches of quiet

round it, the dust floats in the light

where quiet conversation jars and

snags suddenly on the hanging and

sudden silence

sitting in the empty chair

The air is mottled with quiet

as is a hill beneath a clouded sky

as is light through a window after rain.

I can hear his voice on the phone.

He is a loud man by nature, like his brother.

The other day he called me outside

to show me a hawk being

mobbed by crows.

The hawk was flying

too close to their tree and panicked

they cluttered round him.

We are both in the house during the day.

We don’t talk much, but

we look at the birds together.

He tells me we have run out of cheese,

which we have. He has phoned to tell me

to buy more cheese.

I understand.

I went to let him know when a fox ran across the field.

Silent, flat backed, black feet

he ran in the bright sun.

March 2012

Worm digging

Long light,
the dun bird digs for worms

She roots around in the grass

bringing them up in her beak

Some she puts back
to pick another

Sometimes she stops, and
listens

Twice,
she looks at me before

she takes her worms and flies.

In the tree he sings
It is dusk

It is dusk, he sings.

7th April 2012

You start to notice

You start to notice

You start to notice the puddles of water

on the bathroom floor look like
figures with outstretched arms

as if in triumph, or calling for help

it has run between the cracks in the tiles.

In the grain of wood you see faces

in the clouds cities with streets and gleaming towers

arches hanging

and you try to think about that.

You think about angels, growing old

and about boxes and boxes of unfilled notebooks,

bursting with never arrived ideas

page after page

of waiting and weakening white, while

the world screams and throbs around you.

You clear your throat and try to remember the names of the birds

and the plants, you realise

you have come to measure the year by them

and you try to think about that

you think maybe you have reached something.

The days are becoming warmer.

You imagine them all in a line.

You think about chasms, about

valleys of cloud between slate with water

running through their middle, water

finding its way over the small earth

creepy crawly, creeks make canyons.

That seems to be something at least.

  

Black strings / Troll

Black strings

Up in the mountains

they dug a hole in the rock

they filled it with a tube

The machine they made made black holes

It was fired on a Wednesday.

It was fired, I think

One of them rolled the hole

into a tube

his eye looked through.

Today I saw a sparrowhawk

crunching the gravel of the garage roof

her feet clenched the world

beneath her

pinching the sky to

a needle’s pointed eye

the flat

sheet

of sky

wrapped round her

denting with her wings beats.

Her eye was yellow

Her chest strung with black stripes.

She let me watch her awhile

and vanished.

Black strings reveal

the naked singularity

of all things.

January 2012

Troll

Speechless there was a shape hunching

dripping in the arch

what are you I said it replied I am only

visiting

grinned and shadowed

shoulders shivered in the bones

Confined I saw a buzzard over fir trees

and a heron came and landed in a

high up branch that swayed with his weight

I saw his eye

his grey belly

and the burbled stream beneath the stone

Crossing the bridge into a few more hours

I pulled myself about my neck

shoulders scrunched around the spot where

it watched me as I went

cold head and keen gaze

following fish from above. 

Jura, Winter 2008

First frost, late

First frost, late

The winter when it

comes brings frozen flames

and glow borrowed from the needle

strewn floor

The sloes have gone

bruised, lost,

chalky skin darkening at a rubbing thumb

and before them the blackberries

and the hairy hips and the hawthorn

It will be months now

before I can find things in hedges

The other day there were mushrooms

but they weren’t quite right

Nothing happens

Trees still have

their leaves and the air

its fug

But the frost crunches in the morning

and the sky is huge and slate grey

or else bright

bright blue

at night there are

some stars

What is nice / To the distant shore

What is nice

I took the wood off the compost heap.

It was too big so I cut it up with the good saw.

It was wet,

some bits frozen a few

rings in

So I split some of the smaller bits and

laid them on the hot coals, glowing orange

and translucent

so that they would burn and

the bigger logs could dry on top.

With the waiting logs I made a pile,

watched them whistle and spit, snap

like home,

where my hair and my

skin smell of smoke.

He had drunk too much to walk straight.

It doesn’t matter

all his life he has walked me straight.

The axe sparked where it hit the stone ground.

What is nice is when you don’t have to understand. 

Winter 2010

To the distant shore

To the distant shore there was a light flooding it came on ships with bright green sails
I saw you up in the mountains where the wild pigs snuffle and
ruck up the dawn’s damp mud
and the streams swell with rain water

I had been in those places before
they swum up like slow grey fish from the back of my brain, rippling the surface so gently I
could barely tell, but could see the colour ring out like a drunk radio wave
It flickered my eyelid
To see the clouds shadows on the scrub mountains
To see the shafts that break through them, and mirror the emeralds in the grass.
The smoke from those houses dwindled upwards from the bottom of the valley to the top,
fingers raised to the sky, which raised back, shrugged off by the mountains like a scarf, so
that there was a gap between them, which gave the mountains a dark glow,
thudding like a headache on the skyline.

I was in the oven of the earth, trembling as a plague for lack of sleep

I can see the lines they are sediment on a hill's side
They are the hillside, millions of years
"this one is the dream of the rocks” 
Teach me the times I have missed 
staggering through blank faces and screwed tight nighttimes, desperate with silence

One day I will make you a thing it will bring tears to the eyes of the world and swell like a tumour in the brain of time.

It was an old country, the roads wouldn’t take you anywhere
no matter how many times you tried
they just led round in smaller and wider loops.