Selected poems
Coventry carol
for Roger Hillman
A banksia flower spike
wobbling on a spindle
holes cut in wood
to let out sound,
organ pipes or little beaks,
animal mouths
open and close like speaking wounds
as song unwinds
The body is weeping:
milk and tears and blood
make no sound,
numb mothers in a line:
tongues of stone
*
Hardly known at school,
lightly, sure-footed,
she crossed into the light
My daughter wept
her young face
shocked by hot tears
We can't explain so
many or stop them
jumping under
or out of —
blessed are the meek
for they find the violent Absolute ...
Games where you can't
die or (only scroll
down)
are virtually
remembered forever —
Blessed are the pure in spirit
for they shall act authentically,
blessed are those who weep by the wall ...
Years go, in Withington
Cemetery, late for a service,
searching a cloverleaf asphalt path:
in each little clearing
six or seven young shocked burning —
distraught mascara —
no one over twenty ...
*
This week we're teaching lullabies.
I can't find the right tune
for Mother Courage's song to Kattrin;
all day it sings inside me,
bye bye lully lullay
Fleurs du Mal
(or Mrs Horner shows concern about the fruit)
In vestigial darkness you might glimpse
men purposeful as spiders
going through abandoned streets.
Or hear, spliced into a dream,
two car doors slam, the car take off,
and no word said.
Far off glass breaks, gears shift
up, and you're caught
in the grittiest real,
the glitch between day and night,
with tear ducts frozen and newspapers poised
to deliver the latest acts.
While in their room
the kids are given to sleep,
flopped like sausages or clowns,
all smooth skin and long eyelashes.
Here in this setting for absent selves,
the question's not of love but simply care.
How could these get from here
to there?
Early traumas last, the experts say —
apparently they know whose cuts hurt most —
but memory can resemble an old wound
that presages damp days or like a sharp
new line make one gasp again.
What violence do they endure who
with nightmare slowness flee a wolfish past?
And are theirs unexamined lives who have
attained the modern armour-plated dream?
Some, capable of anything,
must have cauterized their memory,
sealed off all pain but, with that, pleasure too.
No echoes trouble them, or shining quiet,
or fear of slippage of the half-recalled
breath warming their smaller hands
that had no use for printless gloves,
a fingertip lifting a strand of hair off the face
whose planes of stone now bar all touch.
We grow dull with forgetting until it's too late:
we're in love with the blankness that damns us,
that watches with indifference while we die.
Unless, unbidden, memory unfurls,
slowly at first, its hidden loops
of story, objects, voices, floating free —
suspended, bending, bunching, stretched,
like the shapes ink makes released in