Books

I like to bend them to my will—
turn their spines inverse like gymnasts,
crack their skin ’til it’s crazed and veined
like an old lady’s palm. I deface the pages:
marginalia scattered and stark as a rash,
corners folded, fingered thin and soft
as a cotton fiver, circled
with the cold, grey footprints of tea.

I like them lived in as a marriage bed,
loose enough to open of their own accord
and shock me with a lucky-dip of verse.
The chatter-spit of ancient binding:
pages coming out in chunks like teeth.
They wait for me on bookstore shelves,
asleep, stiff as exclamation marks—
and my fingers itch to break in every one.

(previously published in Umbrella and nominated for a Best of the Net 2010 Award)

LXVIII

how clear shadow is
clearer than lined hand
than veined leaf
than handbones
held to shade eyes

commentary:

stolen expressions
of existence
there’s one whose name is lost
Tharsuinn the crosswise hill
& Auchengaich
Chaorach hill of the fank
Maol an Fheidh bleak hill of the deer
the dappled hill
Creag Madaidh little crag of the fox
& the lookout hill of the sheiling
here’s the stony hill
the high cracked hill
the red hill & the black hill crowding
litter of the shoreline
Coulport
& Faslane the homestead of sorrows

His video of a poem from it, ‘Homage to Julian Metcalf’, is classic stuff:

And here’s a poem from the book simply written down:

Tenebrio

Tenebrio, the fabled Panther, Reynard, local kids,
a dangerous prowler — or just the usual drunk on the skids —
slipping in and out of your names and costumes nightly,
you come around here, rifling bins, screaming your vixen cry,
playing your games, leaving a guano of gum in the bus shelter.
………..The mystery caller that made the dogs bark, the lateness of the hour,
………..the sweet spliff fumes that rise through the air,
………..backlit orange, behind the privet — you’re gone, never were,
………..remain in the bushes as a pair of evil stars,
when some gracious shivering husband stirs
and comes with a torch and pulled-tight dressing gown to see.
Plodding back, he hushes his wife but is awake instantly
when the floodlight’s triggered by your shadow’s tail,
and is taking Nytol when he hears the clatter of disturbed metal.
………..The next day there’s just a smudge of feathers and two
………..twigs lying crossed in the path. Next door’s window
………..has been tampered with: the tracks lead to a high fence and stop.
All those night-time incidents: you move in rumours, stalk and drop,
accost and flash at the elderly and the young
and fade like the Cheshire Cat, leaving a fleshless dong
and a funny turn or tearful scream for mummy.
………..You are a ninja dissembling into the bough of a tree,
………..and now stand huge and awful by the wardrobe shelves,
………..fixed in a rictus of mockery and wrong intent till that too dissolves,
and you depart, drifting across a city of bad sleep and prints on window-sills,
finding sport among its bedroom hells
and day-forsaken alleyways, lurking behind the silence:
………..something and nothing, all the false alarms that diffuse
………..through foolish laughter, all the violence that goes
………..unreported or is shelved for lack of evidence.

(first published in The London Magazine, 2007)

Milko

Bottles chimed like a clock on the doorstep.
By the ebbs and surges of daily pints
you knew who’d grown, who’d aged, who’d upped and left.
Your float’s low hum was the routine soundtrack
to Ready brek, wonky ties and dull dawns.

Undercut by another out-of-town,
you’ll be my generation’s pie-n-mash,
a tale suffered by countless grandchildren
while something else is also dying out
and patiently rehearsing for your role.

Lazarus

He talked in feathery question-marks,
you never got the point of. Nice line
in parlour tricks: I died for real.
I like to think I’m fairly ordinary
but it’s like death follows me round.

I tend to do a lot of thinking
but can’t remember much more:
everything is in his voice:
“Come forth!” he boomed
in best stage voice. I stumbled out,

they tell me. Now half the town points:
“Can you tell us a little more
about yourself?” Dogs, parents
of children who died: Mister Miracle
they call me, from one step behind.

How much he must have loved me.
This light is essential to me
because it hurts. I stank of myrhh
tripped over bandages. Don’t look at me,
I can’t bring them back. How much

the dark keeps creeping underfoot –
though when I’m feeling optimistic
he must have needed me to live –
I’m back there wrapped in quiet,
and every night I wake in sweat.

My 100-year-old ghost

sits up with me when the power cuts,

tells about the trout at Unkee’s Lake,
the wood house burned on the hill.

He says he was intimate
with every leaf of grass.

Wore one hat for Griswold,
another for his own field,

the possibilities of the century laid out;
an endless string of fishing pools.

But they never got ahead of my ghost -
he took them like cows, one at a time,

never lusted for the color of trout
in a pool a mile away.

He knew from the smoke in the sky
Mrs. Johnson was starting supper,

and, in March when the candles appeared,
he knew Bobby’s boy had died.

My ghost only ever had one bar
where the keeper didn’t water his drinks,

nor did he feel the need to hide his moth cap,
his potato clothes, or scrub himself birth pink.

My ghost tells me there was a time
you’d look out and not find a Dairy Queen.

You could sit on your porch a whole life
and never think about China.

Sometimes I see my ghost
bringing cut sunflowers to his wife

and it seems so simple.
Then, sometimes, it is dark

he’s just in from work and Griswold says
they ain’t going to raise his pay.

And even back then the power went out,
long nights when they had no kerosene.

And my ghost tries to sell me on simpler times:
the grass soft, endless

lampless nights,
pools of crickets singing.

I

Ruth at sunrise, grooming horses.
The bit, bridle, curry-comb of love
was her business.

Simeon skulked around indoors,
consulted Qabalah, threw sticks,
anything to improve sex.

Clouds were locomotive smoke,
camels or torn pillows,
the imperfect

science of moodswing or a god
in evidence everywhere, the veil
obscuring male from female.

Ruth gathered apples. The Elohim
stamped in their stalls.

He moves from spreadsheets to mean streets,
the rubble prairies of his town,
overflowing bins and tumbleweed.
The drinks in here are watered down
but cheap. He knocks one back and slackens
off his bootlace tie, draws smiley faces
in the sawdust with his foot. A blackened
scowl is thrown to thrill the ladies.

The cowgirls form in grids, the sway
of tasseled skirts and clod of boots
always a continent adrift. His joy
is in the dance, the squarest root,
each bar a perfect subroutine,
a formula, a certainty of codes
which repeat and then refine
themselves, smoothing out like tides.

Lit by phosphorescent smirr of night,
dad’s old crombie glints with drizzle.
He is Alan Ladd in suit of lights,
his stetson and his smoking pistol
in a Tesco bag. A tombstone
in his guts, he rides the only stagecoach
in the west, afraid this town
ain’t big enough for both of him.

To a Poet

I won’t be thanked for this, but I thought of you
that evening I was woken by the rat;

its scuttle – stop – and scuttle, mirroring
your cautious step; and then, its endless clawing
at the floorboards like your sailor life
spent carving out your calendar of shipwreck.

But more than this it was its human hands,
how it gnawed small pieces off the darkness.

(originally published in Snakeskin)

Master of the Universe

3pm, he comes in. Every day,
like clockwork. Our mechanical man.
He does not talk. His mouth is bolt-shut,
his face a section mould cast.
Scars cross cavities and opaque eyes
crease to squint at me,
pleating his face like hot bronze.
The manager shows me what he drinks.
A pint of 80/- ; heavy, rich, the comfort of gravity.

An object at rest tends to stay at rest
and an object in uniform motion tends
to stay in uniform motion unless
acted upon by a net external force.

At his second pint,
he eases the mat out from under his glass
to spin carousel circles in his hands.
Resting the mat on the edge of the bar,
he flips it up with his fingertips,
nails scraping against varnished wood,
and catches it midair, like a trick.

An applied force on an object equals the
rate of change of its momentum, with time.

Some days, he misjudges, misses the catch and
his hand comes slamming down.
His pint topples, and glass skitters across the floor,
sends beer tiding down the counter.
The other regulars don’t even try with him anymore.
I clear away the soaking glass,
mop down the bar
and pour him another.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.