Poem
God, the lonely father,
shuffles through the
corridors of heaven,
haunted by angels –
memories of desire,
the source of nostalgia.
A creeping association might doldrum
your bullet points and action items
resembling life grid passing then gone
change my number leave me alone
give no ear to charms ...
Pale ankles in the mountains, divergences
on a quarry. We are witness to it
land and witness to it
some fact of further summer
or things a truck driver might say ...
Just before I left sleep behind
I borrowed a series of chords
so I could swerve my way through
the days I saw yawning in front
of me like graves freshly dug ...
Early on, my mind was in reverse.
I read a book the name I thought was From
White Cabin to Log House, and ever after
I knew ambition must go to cancrizans.
So much activity outside
where sunlight spills across the snow
like cream –
Not since I was four or five at most
and in the first of many striped tee-shirts
have I been this close to the flavour of safety.
I’m walking into town again, the child of hills.
You bought me fish and chips for lunch, my own
adult portion because I asked for it, in Evans’s
tiled restaurant, the Alhambra of takeaways.
Waiting on a reeking strange
railway station –
then the dead-quiet but crowded
night ferry.
Rain bubble-wrapping the windows. Rain
falling as though someone ran a blade down the spines
of fish setting those tiny backbones free. Rain
with its squinting glance, rain