As it might be, a sea-mist.
A lighthouse, with nothing to say but in saying it
finding its beam is broadly contemporary.
As it might be, a chance perspective: small boats
imperially holding six feet off from shore – or,
empirically, a distance of two metres.
The same sea-mist, meaning differently from before.
The houses’ white-outs within the white-out
all together now, but separate –
or so someone might say, lightly, walking down
into it along the long lines of telegraph poles,
skirting a field of gulls that dip in and out
its furrows like a flock of waves under mist,
listening in on the infinite present of the world
all alone: the chatter and sough of it over
rock-fall at the foot of the cliff as it was and ever
shall be when these words speak to nothing,
when they are hieroglyph, when there is no one left
to say how in that time, the time of pestilence,
people looked for signs. And how the boats, the mist,
the coast and lighthouse were nothing, but.
*
Out of the Picture (after Morwenna Thistlethwaite)
Whatever happens is happening to someone else:
the pain in the room I couldn’t rightly say was mine,
so too the three neat children and their doll’s house.
The grey cat is here on my behalf to witness
how the table’s set geometrically for tea
or chess, how the deep blue cloth shadows
the dusk-blue of the sky and the window
holds something in reserve behind its glass.
So this is what life looks like, just a little
at a distance: a bowl of oranges shored against
the double yellow of the road, a couple
on the verge whose shoulders’ slant signals
part-communication – and a third, absorbed
as we too’d look absorbed if anyone thought
to record the sun’s light study of our waiting rooms
where now and again things click into place
as cup to saucer, pawn to king’s castle – or come
apart as in this watercolour of a TV dark
under the blooming life of a geranium, and two
small figures on the screen, running for their own.
*
Charm to whom it may concern
May your hands meet handles where no doors are –
smooth, round, perfectly fulfilling.
Safe in your concrete shell, may you hear boards creak
the lost length of a corridor.
May a piano play between floors as you sleep.
May you know the pyracantha by pricking of your thumbs.
May you be visited by children.
Turning into the hill’s beech-mast, leaf-drift, silver birch,
may you see the house: black slate and white walls
under the sign of its double gable.
May you know it for home.
May you be blind-sided for love of it.
May you meet my father in shorts and an orange shirt
planting out the rockery on your first-floor landing.
May you meet my grandmother taking cuttings in the hall.
May her secateurs pass through your fingers.
May you be puzzled by the sough of wind through trees
you’ve uprooted.
May you see a swing swinging in and out the vacuum
framed by what you believe to be your walls.
May you know what you’ve done.
May you never know what’s yours.
May the Bramley’s crown stick in the throat of your stairs.
May your foundations be unaccountable.
May you step out, one day, into iris and lavender to hear
(as if on a kite-string tuned to the wrong frequency): We’ve put the cot and bureau in David’s bedroom.
Where is it the steps go down to the lawn? There?
No, it’s here.
Contents List
9 Waking
10 Inscape
11 The Drowning at Porthcurno
13 Off-spring
14 The Amortals
24 Distance Lane
25 Foundling
26 Lifelines
35 Isolation
36 Grace
37 Out of the Picture
38 Negative Space
39 Snow and Privet
40 Moving the House
41 Little Silver
44 Charm
45 Tall Story
46 Homily
47 The Silence
48 From London far
49 Anchorage
50 Passage
51 Fugue
54 Life Sentence
55 Definition of Huer
56 Stet
57 Sometimes I forget you are dead because
58 Gone Fishing
60 Reading Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis on the Day of the Dead
61 Smokey Considers Hilton’s Cat
62 Cot Song
64 Ghost Rhyme
65 Abstraction
68 New Year’s Day
69 New Atlantis
70 Tailpiece
