Night Photograph
Monk on a Tractor
1 The monks on Caldey make perfume and chocolate.
2 They watch each other grow old
3 and draft adverts for new recruits.
4 From April to September, they are surrounded.
5 The pleasure boat brings holidaymakers
6 who tidy their faces as they go through the gate,
7 unprepared for a monk on a tractor
8 and another hanging underwear on a line.
9 The sea that swings between the monastery
10 and my father's house abandons jellyfish,
11 a used hypodermic, stones and shells that, days later,
12 give no clue as to why they were picked up.
13 The wrong wind brings the wrong things home:
14 raw sewage and, late last summer,
15 the body of a man who was teaching himself to dive.
16 Once, a stag swam round the headland.
17 No one knows where it came from
18 or who it was that saw it.
Boris Goes Fishing
for Bill Swainson
1 In my classroom Russia you commented on the weather,
2 said goodbye to Mother and goodbye to Father,
3 while I struggled with the tenses
4 that would let you spend the day by the lake.
5 Your journey was uneventful. You did not
6 get lost in a forest, follow strange music
7 and wander off a path that never saw daylight
8 to be seduced by a snow queen and rescued by wolves.
9 I couldn't even send you to Samarkand
10 to save a princess from being boiled in oil.
11 You were allowed a blue sky and a friendly dog,
12 when what you really wanted was a tidal wave
13 that would empty the Baltic into your basket.
14 The day passed quietly. You caught three fish
15 and I managed to get the dog to fall into the water.
16 At home that evening, Father commented on the weather
17 while Mother cooked the fish. They could have been
18 sturgeon travelled north from the Caspian Sea,
19 pregnant with caviar, flavoured with bison's grass
20 and served in a blaze of vodka, but I did not
21 go into detail. Boris, you were a nice boy,
22 but my hand was more used to carving a desk
23 than filling a notebook with cramped Cyrillics.
24 I was fourteen and knew the Russia of storybooks;
25 I didn't want to make space for the wild grammar,
26 soft adjectives, accusatives and instrumentals
27 that would take you there. Instead, you went
28 to bed at eight o'clock. Mother tucked you up and
29 commented on the weather. I could not pronounce ‘revolution’,
30 so I shut you in a drawer and went dancing.
Sex, Politics and Religion
1 Her features unfold as she lowers her head
2 back against the basin. I play for time,
3 getting the temperature of the water just right.
4 I have almost grown used to touching old hair
5 and have learnt to respect a customer's face,
6 clamping my free hand against the forehead
7 and forcing the spray tight against the scalp.
8 I must keep my eyes on my fingers
9 and must not stare at her feathery cheeks
10 or the rolling chin that falls away to reveal
11 her puckered throat and the seamless hole
12 through which she now has to breathe.
13 If I understood the words burped into shape
14 by her new oesophageal voice, I might
15 ask about cancer and what would happen
16 if my hand slipped and the harsh foam
17 dribbled comfortably down a network of gullies,
18 or if a fly ... I have to get a look.
19 The opening is neat and dark,
20 framed by skin of an unbearable softness.
21 She has shut her eyes and is smiling
22 as I massage hard and keep my mind
23 on the three things I was told by my mother
24 that a hairdresser should never discuss.
Years Later
1 I meet my brother in a bar
2 and he shows me a piece of outer space:
3 six degrees by six degrees,
4 a fragment stuffed with galaxies.
5 He explains how you get pairs of stars
6 that pull each other into orbit,
7 for ever unable to touch or part.
8 When he's gone I remember
9 you, eighteen and speechless,
10 and how in the attic of your parents' house
11 you would take off my clothes,
12 run a finger as light as a scalpel
13 across my stomach, then do nothing.
14 Years later, I wake in the night
15 still framing the words. And I like
16 the idea of those stars.
Night Parrot
1 The feathers were taken from the front wheel of a juggernaut.
2 All the colours of a winter morning, hinged with pink and bone.
3 The driver sensed that here was something he had stolen
4 and had to hide in a box at the back of an empty cupboard
5 in the attic of an almost empty house. The night parrot.
6 He had heard some story, a reason not to enter the forest after dark.
7 And it came true, this curse he couldn't quite remember,
8 for whatever he now held left him empty-handed,
9 and he could not sleep for the weight of what it felt like,
10 the air filled with the impossibility of its cries.
In Such Darkness
1 The man just buried was your age
2 so it's hard to know if there's anything to say
3 as you take your tea and cake outside
4 away from the kitchen where, all afternoon,
5 a family has been politely turned over.
6 Evening brings coolness to an empty room
7 where you lie down and wait for your wife
8 to pass by the door and turn on the light
9 but tonight she finds that the power is gone.
10 We have lost the comfort of shadows
11 and surround a table, finding safety in food
12 and a history of chance and expectation
13 which says that I will break bone china
14 and you will keep an old man's silence.
15 Instead, like the candle between us, you burn:
16 worn down, intense, repetitious.
17 No one can stand the meaning of your words
18 in such darkness. This is the end ...
19 Thirty years younger, she stamps it out:
20 I know, I know, any day now ...
21 On the doorstep, happy to let it go,
22 we stand around and watch you fight
23 with the catch of your umbrella.
24 It will not release, you push the wrong way,
25 the handle slips, whatever it is
26 it takes for ever. It starts to make sense,
27 that she saturates her voice with calm,
28 yet will not let you finish a sentence.
29 I open my mouth but the power is gone.
30 Someone gets the torches and we each take one.
In the Time of Elizabeth R.
1 The bishop and his bastard son have been reunited.
2 Strange faith, Elizabeth, the bread and the blood.
3 The boy was pi
cked up crossing the city to buy water
4 on a passport forged by the crippled tailor of Dedham.
5 The tailor got three days in the village cage.
6 I saw the bishop kneel in the cathedral, the crowd
7 fell silent, forgetful of pickpockets and disbelief.
8 His skin is not good. He will not speak his words
9 but has them read for him. The church has been swept clean
10 but incense and mystery persist—a layer of dust
11 on the sunlit magic of crystals and herbs.
12 You grow pale at the head of a long walnut dining-table
13 polished by a serving boy on his knees.
14 All day, he inches back and forth
15 in prescribed and supervised motion.
16 An untouchable finish. No gold knife, no chafing dish,
17 no loyal finger, leaves a mark.
18 We bring you affirmation
19 while new worlds curve the earth beneath your feet
20 and messages come with the inscrutable fruit
21 of uncharted lands: the natives eat them
22 with roast wild fowl ... we must build roads ... send guns ...
23 Look down into that impervious reflection.
24 There is yet a fixed and perfect heaven.
25 Traitors' heads? I've got the pictures.
River History
1 Even then the river carried cargo,
2 Saxon corn shipped to storehouses on the Rhine.
3 Taxes were paid in pepper and cloth by the Easterlings,
4 the German merchants trading from the Steelyard
5 demolished in the fire of 1666.
6 Wharves burned like touchpaper, packed
7 with resin, sulphur, pitch.
8 The daily catch between London and Deptford
9 was salmon, eel, smelt and plaice
10 but the Port Authority preferred to dine
11 at the Tavern on the best turtle soup in the City
12 as they argued the height of the wall to be built
13 against the Mudlarks, Plunderers and Peterboatmen,
14 intent on their nightly specialized percentage:
15 cloves from Zanzibar, mother-of-pearl,
16 tortoiseshell, South American iodine,
17 West Indian rum, the heavy iron bottles
18 of Spanish quicksilver, and, from Ivory House,
19 the occasional mammoth tusk unfrozen in Siberia.
20 The Empire expanded, cess-pits were banned,
21 water grew thick with steamships and sewage
22 and the docks pushed east out into the marshes,
23 breaking the horizon with a forest of cranes
24 that unloaded meat, cloth, tobacco and grain
25 from countries my school atlas still colours pink.
26 At the Crutched Friars Deposit Office records were kept
27 of ships in berth, noted daily
28 by a row of clerks crouched under gaslight
29 and seven-foot ceilings. Records were kept
30 of each member of the Union, the fight to be paid
31 a tanner an hour and not have to climb each day
32 on another's back and shout to be chosen.
33 There was always the army.
34 The Luftwaffe bombed Surrey Commercial Docks
35 for fifty-seven nights and the timber blazed
36 for more days than most people kept counting.
37 Even when every magnetic mine
38 had been located and cleared, there were dangers.
39 Centuries of waste had silted the river
40 till the water ran black over Teddington weir
41 and a bag of rubbish thrown from London Bridge
42 took six weeks to ride a dying current
43 out to the estuary. No swimming, no fish,
44 and those who fell in had to be sluiced out.
45 No ships, no work. The industry found itself
46 caught in the net of passing time,
47 watching mile after mile of dockland fill
48 with silence and absence. Land changed hands
49 in an estate agent's office, short-lease premises
50 with ‘Upstream’ and ‘Downstream’ carved above the doors.
51 Now the tidal traffic is a slow weekday flow of cars
52 channeled into streets built before cars were thought of.
53 They inch round corners, nudge against kerbs,
54 then settle tight packed against the pavement.
55 On Butler's Wharf, the only machinery
56 now in daily use is the tow-away truck:
57 cruising yellow lines, it pauses to hoist
58 the solid engineering of a badly parked BMW
59 into the air with illogical ease.
60 In Coriander Building, an agency
61 maintains the plants, the colour scheme is neutral
62 but the smell of new paint has yet to sink in,
63 like the spice that still seasons the air after rain.
64 A film crew arrives, on a costly location shoot
65 for Jack the Ripper. It's a crowded night.
66 Intent on atmosphere, they've cluttered the alleys
67 with urchins, trollops and guttersnipes
68 who drift to the waterfront when they're not working
69 and gaze across at the biggest, emptiest office block in Europe
70 and its undefendable, passing light.
From Scattered Blue
for Lesley Davies
1 I drive back along the river
2 like I always do, not noticing.
3 Then something in the light tears open
4 the smoke from the power-station chimney,
5 each twist and fold, the construction
6 of its slow muscular eventual rise
7 and there, right at the edge of it,
8 a continual breaking up into sky.
9 And that's another thing, the sky.
10 How the mist captures what's left of sunset,
11 the sodium orange and granite pink
12 distilled from scattered blue.
13 The choreography of air-traffic control
14 and the cranes nested downstream are part of it,
15 like the bridge and its sugar coat
16 of broken fairylight. The time of year
17 when every bird is a brushstroke and the trees
18 are revealed in a lack of colour. It reminds me
19 of how we used to talk; how we want sometimes
20 to do more than just live it.
The Astronomer’s Watch
1 Five months in the desert.
2 The first rain for centuries.
3 Local weather fills the telescope lens.
4 Nothing to do but photograph flowers
5 that take advantage of these freak conditions
6 to grow and die. Buried colour—
7 intense and ancient, unsettled depths
8 like the red and gold that bloom from a comet
9 in the heat of passing the sun.
10 I saw this in a brief transmission
11 from a space probe, irreparably damaged
12 by getting too close: the first and last pictures
13 of the heart of a ball of gas, ice and dust
14 named after the first two people to sight it
15 twenty years apart. I sleep whenever
16 I walk past the bed, feel tired and fall on to it.
17 The other day I came across my watch.
18 It surprised me.
The Recital of Lost Cities
1 It started with the polar ice caps.
2 A slight increase in temperature and the quiet
3 was shattered. The Australian Antarctic
4 wandered all over the Norwegian Dependency
5 as mountainous fragments lurched free
6 with a groan like sh
ip's mahogany.
7 And then there was the continental shift:
8 everywhere you went, America was coming closer.
9 Hot weather brought plague and revolution.
10 Nations disappeared or renamed themselves
11 as borders moved, in, out, in, out,
12 with tidal persistence and threat.
13 Cartographers dealt in picture postcards.
14 The printing plates for the last atlas
15 were archived unused. Their irrelevant contours
16 gathered dust, locked in a vault
17 to save the public from the past
18 and the danger of wrong directions.
19 The sea rose by inches, unravelled the coastline,
20 eased across the lowlands and licked at the hills
21 where people gathered to remember names:
22 Calcutta, Tokyo, San Francisco,
23 Venice, Amsterdam, Baku,
24 Alexandria, Santo Domingo ...
Yosemite
1 She climbed a tree
2 and sang to the bears
3 while he bounced his name
4 across the valley.
5 He could make no sense
6 of the lunatic peaks
7 thrown together
8 in a conflict of geology
9 and closed his eyes
10 until it was evening
11 and shadows unfolded
12 a transient symmetry
13 that gave him comfort.
14 Then it grew dark
15 and she started humming
16 the one about a picnic.
Spaghetti Western
1 Eight months' dust and no electrics.
2 I rehydrate the lizard in the sink,
3 angle it into a sieve and out of sight.
4 After dark, we enthuse about candles;
5 milk curdles in the warmth of the fridge.