Hung

By night I climb the scaffold.

Step, step, metallic uncertainty,

the slip-threat hanging, torch swaying,

an angler-fish bait hovering in the thickened air.

Its pool hits grass and rough-stoned walls.

Its pool hits slate, each square a sheaf pressed hard by time,

layering the roof, book-like, each a story in itself.

By night I settle my back on planks elevated

to greatness, a lifeboat up high,

mortar dust skimming my clothes.

Cold pins me down, bone-deep, empty.

I settle and stare, plunging deep to the world above,

the night sky a pool, a clarity hanging still,

a vertigo waiting to happen. Each star

a point of magnitude too great, too small,

to be believed. Each star caught, still,

a point in a scatter of billions, billions

of miles between us, too profound

to be likened to mundane things.

Ice-cold, they seem, remote and frozen

but each a maelstrom in itself, watching,

glitter-eyed, white-hot.

I think that making love in this

cold thin air, high up, pressed by stars,

pressed by scaffold boards powdered with mortar,

would be an explosive thing. It would

be a tumbling on the edge, quick, cold,

vital, once-in-a-lifetime. Impossible.

National Savings and Investments

You saved

Monte-Carlo tickets in a leather case,

the reminder of Princess Grace, and

your hurried, graceful attire.

You saved old man’s beard

as a memory of the time in summer

when afternoon turns to evening

and he kissed your hair from behind

and tucked fallen leaves behind your ear.

You saved the four-leaved clover

you found as a girl and

tucked away in a papier-mâché egg,

in those days when whimsies were made of paper

(and you saved the luck that it brought).

You saved

your grandmother’s tea-set,

and your father’s quicksilver sketches.

You saved the privation of your upbringing

in your bones and in your way

of squeezing the last from every foil tube

and neatly rolling the end, snail-shelled and tight.

You saved the memory of heat rising,

tarmac-scented, from damp Cardiff streets,

and saved the light where sky touches sea

in the irides of your eyes. Even near the end,

the light shone back. Even near the end,

all these things were saved, in you.

Night Migration

Walking through the darkness,

a cotton ghost,

a blind-bird stick figure,

arms raised like the hopeful come for healing.

No light to guide you. No light at all.

The night is a softness that sucks in sound.

The night is a translucent cloth that allows in air

but not certainty. Not faith.

The carpet beneath your feet,

moth-furred beneath your shuffling toes.

The wall sudden. Hard against shoulder, hip, thigh.

The paper’s pattern turned to something cold.

The plaster unyielding behind thin skin,

the plaster all you feel, cold all the way down,

and the skin meaningless.

Your skin meaningless. The thud of your heart

and the slow, short intakes of breath

and the bones beneath your skin

all that you are.

Until you reach the ark of light.

Until you reach an island, and fall,

safe in my sleeping arms.

A Manual for Growing Poppies

Who would have thought mud

could be so heavy?

Every step an accretion,

a bracket fungus bracketing boot leather

in hollow homage to Mercury’s wings.

Every step a drag.

Poppies will grow here, they say.

Poppies will grow,

lovers of bones flaked clean of their skin.

Fertiliser, we become.

Icarus is in the skies, falling in flames.

Icarus and lead, kissing,

out of their elements both.

Icarus falling in flames,

bringing heat to the lowly,

seeding the ground with metal.

Poppies will grow in the churned up soil.

Poppies will grow,

strong in our decanted blood.

Poppies cleave to disturbed soil.

The almanac is open at the seventy-second page.

The seeds should be sprinkled on freshly dug soil.

This is an expensive excavation.

This should not be.

Ack-ack traces the constellations.

Ack-ack lights wires between the stars,

and Icarus plunges in shame,

shedding limbs like feathers to fertilise the earth,

the smell of earth and blood and kerosene to keep us alive,

the fires to dry the mud a little, the fires to cremate the dead.

Poppies will grow here.

The living six foot deep

the dead sprinkled like seeds on freshly dug soil.

Poppies will grow here, they say.

Poppies will grow.

The Plate

Even peas were a deadly enemy.

How could that be?

You crushed them, one by one,

Bugs under your fingernail,

Threats to be obliterated,

One by one,

Like the counting of an abacus

Like the ticking off of boxes,

Like the annihilation of an enemy race.

A slow calorie count,

Of calories unconsumed.

At Heart, We Are Chemical

We spin,

each nucleotide a handshake,

an irresistible cohesion.

We are made of lovers, clinging tight.

Bindweed. Smaller than bindweed,

more close, more compact.

If you were a universe, he said,

Each of my planets would circle your stars.

If I were a universe, my heart would be bigger.

I would be able to encompass hate without a twitch.

If I were to dissect myself,

and lay out my soul in a periodic table,

each square tablet would be a letter from home.

Each square tablet would hold a solar system

of electrons waltzing about their nucleus,

like lovers unbearably held apart.

A Mormon love, perhaps.

If you were stardust, dull as sand (he said)

I would love you just the same.

On Listening to Dawkins in the Early Morning

You sleep.

(we call it a sickness
      Encephalitis lethargica
      Narcolepsy
      Stupidity
      Blindness)

You fumble through life,
reaching out and touching familiarities.
Reaching out and grasping the expected smoothness of an egg
and cracking it into a bowl –
    a convenient meal
    not a slow and delicate perfection of life held in your hands,
    not a perfect mathematical curve evolved to protect its contents,
    not the nascent realisation of amorphous amoeba
       to
    hard-eyed lizard
       to
    feathered thing that flies.

Wonder of wonders – you have created a scrambled egg
(well fed, we sigh)


You sleep through life.

(we call it a sickness
      Myalgic Encephalomyelitis      
      Trypanosomiasis
      Lethargy
      Ignorance)

Your anaesthetic glances are free of perception.
Your world is nothing but a slow waking
      and a drifting off again
      and our supercilious gaze
      glides in smugness over your satisfied life.
You glimpse faces through a half-closed mind,
Seeing mouth and nose and
  eyes as familiar as clockwork
No rods and cones eked from slow evolution
      from slow accident, from a gradual
      falling into place
      and working,
      and working better
Until the moment came that we
                                  (that our ancestral forms, we correct ourselves)
      could see.


We see  (brackets are not needed for this wondrous truth)

(we call it a perfection of vision,
      Bipolar disorder
      Clinical depression
      Genius
      Awareness)

The Victorians sit weighty on our shoulders
      and Hardy's startled fossil eyes stare at us
      as our fingers slip from the cliff face.
And Darwin watches in silent appreciation
      of what we have won and what we have lost
      (his daughter at his shoulder, his daughter at his shoulder)
      One kind of faith slipped into an envelope
      and lost in a bureau drawer
            (a newspaper clipping we hope one day to remember)
      and another kind of faith laid down for us to cling to –
      so that instead of seeing scrambled eggs and limpid eyes,
      we could feel our connection to the deep, dark days,
      and feed our dissatisfied minds.