For six years, on a high shelf in an upstairs bedroom,
she was the only one who did not change.
Down here, in the oxygen economy, we came and went,
our carbon still mixed with water, breathing, moistening,
drying – yes, even our youngest, there, etching in breath
on the glass, now a smiley or down-in-the-mouth-now
moon-face dripping. He took time, the eldest, withering
without her, needing ointments for his thinned
and flaking skin – the sores on his shin did the weeping,
the chemical bonds coming loose, letting parts of him go…
As patient as she’d learned to be in life, she
waited, dressed and contained – in leather-textured
cardboard round a screw-top urn. Six years till the day
they could meet in all simplicity, at last, entirely
conversant with each other. Ash into ash
lifts from my broadcast scatter, and into a wet wind
for winnowing, chalkier flakes dropping free
into wire-rooted ling, small gorse, bell heather,
rabbit scuts; the finer grains fetched up (we
flinch, then stay, yes, why not let them dust us)
lifting towards Sheepstor, North Hessary Tor,
Great Mis Tor and the deeper moor beyond
whatever skyline he and she had ever reached.
The rain clouds come up over Cornwall like the grey
Atlantic. Generations. Wave on wave on wave.
(for JKG and MJAG, 10.06.12)
*
The Shapes They Make
our two bodies, together…
and surprise us, waking
facing, in the knees-up,
chin-to-knuckle crouch
an archaeologist would recognise –
today, with hand to hand
raised, right to right,
half way between a high-five
and a handshake
like the glancing clasp of team-mates
or good rivals even, at the net,
the moment after,
the momentum still in their two bodies,
heel of hand on heel of hand, or
spent, past speaking and bent to their knees
like runners gulping air
or, emerging
on a narrow ledge at last,
at least, still roped together:
mountaineers…
*
Blue Dot
About to slip back to bed, from the known-
by-heart dark, barely waking, from barely an edge between things,
me and things, you and me – there might be only one sleep
where we bob to the surface now and then
with the flotsam of separate dreams.
So far, the body’s habit… but I’ve lingered for the chill
to give me back my surface, where I end, where I begin,
my faint blueprint on black. To feel the difference.
Any moment now – if, when – and I’ll be distinct
beside you… like those mornings one of us
is up, dressed, cool and crisp-edged to the world, one
still in their skin, in that soluble state. To touch
then, or… not yet, like the moment just before
it strolled back, the Apollo Orbiter, came whistling
round the corner of the moon, from a sky quite without us
to earthrise. Where we live. In this chink
between fever and chill. The one possible zone.
Now you shift, and say my name. I’m home.
Hold tight, love, as we feel ourselves
diminish, to that blue
dot, caught in Voyager’s last glance before
it powered down its camera. Stepped off the edge.
Became the rumours of itself. It won’t look back again.
Contents List
9 Paul Klee: the late style
11 This body,
12 Thirty Feet Under
13 Mould Music
17 A Love Song of Carbon
18 I Remember I Remember
20 Heartland
22 Storm Surge
24 Coming of Age
25 A Briefer History of Time
27 Limited Edition
28 Mattins
30 Fission
32 I Am Those Clothes
33 Pinches
35 Theses Written on Mud
38 Epstein’s Adam
39 In the Small Town
40 The Rag Well, Madron
42 The Players
44 Ways to Play
45 Hordes
46 Coprolite
47 Waits
48 A Pump in Africa
49 Towards a General Theory of String
51 Senex
52 Fire Balloon Heart
53 The Shapes They Make
55 Love in the Scanner
56 Epithalamium, with Squirrels
58 The Way It Arrives
59 Watermark
61 Small Songs of Carbon
63 Coming to Slow
65 A Walk Across a Field
67 Several Shades of Ellipsis
71 Blue Dot
72 Brownian Motion
73 Whereas
74 Translucence
75 Thirteen Ways to Fold the Darkness
Related Reviews
‘Gross does appear to have come into his own, with fresh wind in his sails… Now in his sixties… he is working at quite a throttle and with a full-throated clarity that sounds, suddenly, like no one else around.’ – Conor O’Callaghan, Poetry London
‘Later is a magnificent extended elegy, formally adventurous, poised between narrative and metaphysics, themes and variation.’ – Carol Rumens, Poetry Review
‘This is a collection which consistently grips, involves and challenges; it confirms Philip Gross as one of our most consistently interesting and skilful poets.’ – Tony Brown, New Welsh Review
‘The writing is sinewy, urgent and resourceful. This poet is a master of form, deploying his visual and aural patterns for emphasis, as if the page were a musical score. The absolute poise of the lines carve a way through the knotted difficulty of the raw material.’ – Michael Symmons Roberts & Moniza Alvi, PBS Bulletin, on Deep Field