Poetry and Prose

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Poetry

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The AIDS Memorial

(for Clifford and Andrew)

Will you write our story? Do you want me to? You have to he said
no one but you can write it
Patti Smith (Just Kids)

Two bronze men in verdigris
unfurl from each other,
as if a red ribbon’s twist
crosses below their thighs,
their armless torsos, buffeted chests,
risen throats naked to the sky.

I circle this turmoil
within the sea’s sight:
two flown men caught.
Can I cast this net to haul you back?
Twenty years and nine years dead,
should I leave you in peace
or leave myself twice bereft?

Twenty years—
staccato as breathing, harsh
as recalling with no one to listen.
It’s ancient history. We’ve got it licked.
No one dies here; all those dazzling fairies
dated as neat moustaches and Bronski Beat.

Clifford
where’s the triumph in such recollection?
Didn’t we finish this conversation
a lifetime ago? It started with your name.

We sat, two diffident eleven-year-olds
at joined desks. Bitten pencils,
dog-eared books, chewed-up spat-out paper globs
whizzed around us, missing their mark
in the chaos when the teacher left our class.
What makes two boys catch each other’s message?
I wanted to hear whatever you said next.

Arty teenagers, where’s the tape we made
of The Waste Land? Me singing,
you plink-plonking your secondhand red piano.
Arias and diminuendos
bloom before they dwindle into air.

You’re on the brink
of Art College, telling me you’re gay.
I never guessed: often a lag behind,
sometimes missing your point.

Then I’m married, preoccupied.
You sway in a chair bought to lull
our first baby, saying into silence
“I’ve got AIDS”, correct yourself: “HIV.”

You and Andrew built your lives
as if glass might carry the sky.
Your brush, a thistle or fuchsia,
stippled each canvas.

Snail-shells and pylons,
cooling towers, peacocks and gasworks,
lily-pads, light-bulbs and half-moons
blaze from your farewell, celebrate
today across my walls. I rise to them
every morning. They sing your name.

Occasionally in dreams you’re well again,
your skinny diminuendo etched through me.
Once I lifted my toddler son
to your hospital window, where you waved
at each other. He had chickenpox, you shingles,
although I can’t remember how we were
protecting you, or thought we were.

The last time we spoke
I kissed your knuckles when you thanked me,
as though you’d become a prince.
The feather-breath you finished
before Andrew said “He’s gone”
led me weeping to the sheet
between your head and stopped shoulder.

These surging verdigris men
swirl from each other,
while Andrew twists roses through your wreath
My Funny Valentine and I recite Hopkins
at your funeral, stilled to a crowded hush.
My breath hovered until My own heart
let me more have pity on. The son I lifted
to your window has forgotten you.
I relinquish ash blown towards the tide.

Andrew
where’s the rescue from such memories?
They smack like waves, relentless
in the plunge, this blur of blue
agapanthus with creamy Russian vine.

Two bereft friends cling to each other,
as the drunks beside this memorial
slur stories to fill their hours.
When thirty balloon-strings
loosen through our fingers, a mother shouts
her son’s name at the clouds, over and over,
as if one repeated word might voice her loss.

Thank you for making that T-Shirt:
I’M POSITIVE…LIFE IS WONDERFUL
in black capitals across your chest,
for shoppers and browsers to read
your body’s message. You taught me
to pluck happiness like a harebell
from the nettles. Teach me now.

Thank you for saying “Why not
leave the party early?” as if
foreseeing the brief violet
of your death.

You fell in the market
among lettuces and gooseberries,
sugar-cane, okra and barrow-boy yells.
Halfway through your organised day,
buying CDs, walking back to your flat,
a shut heart, the pavement’s pillow.

I enter the ward twenty years ago,
find you quietly lying together,
this glade of calm, my breath an intrusion.
Forgive me. I should re-write my arrival,
win you an hour’s blessing in his arms.

After such friends, how to continue?
It’s ancient history, forever circling
two verdigris men who strive
beyond grass like silver birches.

Tonight your names
join a list at the service.
Couples and singles cup their flames
by this floodlit memorial.
Once I’m numb from too much snow
I’ll kneel before the sea’s crashed gardenias.

Failure, My Horse

You have to wake up in the middle of the night and hear it…chomping
in the field below, like some loyal horse – My failure, my very own failure
James Fenton (A Lesson from Michelangelo)

Failure, my horse,
bridles at fences.
In steeplechases

he prefers to contemplate daisies
or the finely brushed pony-tail
of any rump in front.

He knows precisely where to graze,
gazing at elms,
twitching bluebottles from his ears.

He allows a fox to slink
five yards past his flank
over dark fields

sniffing for chickens.
He admires such energy,
but raising one fetlock

before the other
requires art.
To print a hoof exactly,

shaking shadows from the moon
with a shudder of mane,
marks tonight’s achievement.

I am horse he thinks,
or stands beyond thinking.
Being horse is sufficient.

Tomorrow
he’ll rub his spine
on a satisfying branch,

while chickens peck
elsewhere
and the fox dozes.

The Wood Near Brampton Ash

Paw shadowing paw, how this pad and that
slunk through mud last night.

I can sniff out a snail,
parting dark grass to watch its triumph.

Bluebells droop their dusky memories.
I run here sometimes, mist overcoming my shins.

Rain’s a messenger. Sun snips each leaf-bud,
making them flames I swerve between.

Badgers and bats have left me to this breath:
a grey feather aches before my mouth.

Kneel again to the snail,
not for prayer, but for patient attention.

Widow Clare

'Within a few years Patty even became known as 'Widow Clare', so sure were the local gossips that her husband was 'put away' for good and would never be seen again.'
Edward Storey (A Right to Song, the life of John Clare)

Words went out with the candle at night.
We’re a wedding of skin:
the smell of him dug in my fingernails,
his cough at my shoulder again
if I shut my eyes.

He’s written into me, this man I picked
bruised as an apple from wet grass.
He was my fire in a sooty corner
while the children slept.
I try making do with drizzle now I’ve tasted rain.

I blame words, worming inside his forehead
loosening his tongue: unspeakable things
scaring the children, until I gave him up
to the doctors. It takes a slow breath to say
it’s twenty years since I’ve seen him.

I used to hope he’d walk home after winter,
stroke the new lines above my eyebrow
without looking for another woman behind my back.
He’d give his name to the air beside my name,
as if he knows where I stand at last and who I am.

What more do you want to hear?
how he held a buttercup at my throat,
made me believe its tiny halo
caught the sun under my chin
that first morning.

Unpacking the Books from Blue Wallpaper

They’re in alphabetical order.
What better democracy?
A birdsong of Clares, rainbow of Dotys,
sextet of Gunns – paper companions
establish me through unfamiliar rooms.

I wedge my handful of pamphlets,
my own narrow volumes,
between Hacker and Hamilton. My name
tiptoes down three spines.

Will I fit here, picked from a shelf,
skimmed or discarded?
I’ve been told there’s no competition
but hardly believe it.

A swarm of Plaths, the searchlights of Rich,
voices from a sharper conversation
I step into and aim to translate.
Who spells another language I’m greedy to hear?

Drunk on someone else’s lines
I forget my new address, open books
to discover my absence, speak a phrase
for burnished pages, a word that means alone.

Lifting My Sons from Warpaint Angel

They’ve had wet beds five nights running. It’s time
to lift them both again before I sleep.
I whisper their names to wake them. They come
into my arms as if they trust their lives to me, droop
their dozy weight against my shoulder.
Each boy yawns at the toilet and pees. When I turn
to carry the youngest back I catch us in the mirror:
a father holding his son.
This glimpse of how I wanted it to be.
If I could become a father who gives love
and keeps his temper, not suddenly
lunging from quiet into screams. If I could have
known my father thirty years ago. When
I cry he’ll be there, lifting me again.

Diagnosis from The Rule of Earth

From the foot of your hospital bed the doctor
described your heart: its infection; its leaky valve,
surgery in a few months to solve
the problem. We needed some air
and discovered a garden with a slow fan of water
drowning geraniums. You said “How instructive
this is!” We kept quiet a while to give
ourselves a breather, next year
already mapped out for us: a line
of stitches down your chest, taking it easy,
a slow recovery. Is this the heart’s infection,
this need to keep less than a beat away
from each other whatever might happen?
I watched wet leaves. You watched the water sway.

Duet from The Smug Bridegroom

My mother and Ella Fitzgerald sing
a duet. This memory out of nowhere.
She’s got time for the radio. It’s Sunday morning.
While she irons another sleeve or collar
her voice dips and lifts below Ella’s effortless
skylark. It’s Moonlight in Vermont: a place
she’s never seen, though she lulls each note with her guess
at beauty. Clarinet and strings, that grace
and longing behind their harmony. I play with panthers
and zebras across the carpet. What are these women
teaching me by their tune? Maybe stars
belong to lovers, even
if they never catch them. Maybe someone
stole their moonlight, so they sing for its return.