Here are a few poems from my work-in-progress currently entitled Making a Shape in the Air. Acknowledgements are due to Leaf and Envoi in which some of these poems first appeared.
October
It is not you
that is keeping me awake
at this time of morning
on a Tuesday in October,
months afterwards.
So it must be the pure silence,
the milk float still in its dairy,
rain falling on the roofs
of an other town,
the low orange glow of the street,
a cat asleep
in a corner of the couch.
Or it might be the smooth new sheets
on my bed, so soft
they whisper.
But it’s not you
that is keeping me awake. No,
I haven’t thought about you in months.
It is the warm air that fills this room
hoisting me up
in its strong wicker basket.
Lucky
In my afternoon daydream
I am walking around a lake,
picking up smooth stones
from the cool edge and skimming
them over the flat surface.
I am even throwing a stick
for some black and white dog
who reminds me a lot of Lucky,
the dog I used to walk
through the tall grass of childhood.
A bluebottle has started to buzz
at the window but that doesn't stop
me from picking up another stone
while I wait for my handsome mongrel
to obediently fetch the stick.
Not even the beeping oven timer
can stop me now as I remove
the thin, wet branch from his jaws
before throwing it high over the trees
to drop on the green grass.
Not even the high-pitched shrill
of the smoke alarm can pull me
from my quiet afternoon stroll.
I am far too busy giving this dog
an imaginary pat on the head,
far too busy giving him
a name to wear on his collar.
Shell
'The average garden snail has a top speed of 0.03 mph.'
It took him a good ten minutes
to cross the first patio slab
and so he was obviously not in any rush
to reach the small patch of lawn
that lies outside the kitchen window.
You know –
I thought as I watched him heading
towards the tall grass –
if you were going your top speed
you could have been there by now,
and I would not be watching from this chair
your steady, soothing progress,
but making that phone call to my father,
whose own father died exactly ten years ago today.
I would just be dialling his number
as you settled in your shell.
Illuminee
I thought it a strange habit
as I watched you carefully
remove a match from its box,
strike it away from your body,
then shake out the flame and breathe in
the musk of phosphorus and wood.
And I found it increasingly unlike you,
the more matches you extinguished
and inhaled deep in November dark,
a look of quiet admiration visible with each flare
for the little bonfire of satisfaction
you held between thumb and finger.
I wanted to tell you that the chemicals
might affect your brain somehow
and the matches you were using were my last
but you looked so content as I shut the door,
grey smoke snaking upwards,
a marble glaze on your eyes.
The Perfect Conditions
All I require is an afternoon
and a book of love poetry,
preferably an anthology.
But should you have any means
to supply me with a slant of sunlight
and a few soft voices of birds
then I am sure I would be fully satisfied.
While I'm here, if there's any way
of filling my glass with water
melted from the icecap of Snowdon,
or better still, Ben Nevis,
and my plate with several fruits and cheeses,
I should be able to write into late evening
where the sunlight you gave me would drift away
and the stars - there would have to be stars -
would hang bright and clear in the sky.
Then you would see my work in its purest form
carved into the bark of an oak tree
with a knife so sharp it can score the commas,
separate the air that lifts me up
into a sky like the blueprint of night.
You
I wonder if there will be room
in an encyclopaedia for you
and while we’re at it, me.
Room between the leather
covers for a few lines,
maybe three, and perhaps
a small black and white photograph,
and a poem,
one that everyone will like.
I wouldn’t want anyone to shift
out of their place,
but maybe if a word or two
were shaved from an old king,
or if a few rocks rolled off
a small island into the Pacific
then perhaps that poem might finish
with the image of a hundred thousand
migrating birds in flight –
a hundred thousand pointed beaks,
breaking through the clouds.
And after those, if we still have room,
the image of a single hummingbird,
his heart and wings drumming
a thousand tiny beats a minute,
and the glass surface of a pond below
on which his flickering blue reflection
is doing its best to keep up.