the sea
watching the green and purple creatures
flashing in and out of the waves
about our ankles. Seabirds, were they?
Or air-fishes, a flying shoal
of sea-parrots, finned and feathered?
Even they were less of a marvel,
pretty things, than that you’d returned
after a year and such distraction
to walk with me on the splashy strand.
At the Creative Writing Course
Slightly frightened of the bullocks
as we walk into their mud towards them
she arms herself by naming them for me:
‘Friesian, Aberdeen, Devon, South Devon…’
A mixed herd. I was nervous too,
but no longer. ‘Devon, Friesian, Aberdeen…’
the light young voice chants at them
faster as the long heavy heads
lift and lurch towards us. And pause,
turn away to let us pass. I am learning
to show confidence before large cattle.
She is learning to be a poet.
Endings
The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers
They serve revolving saucer eyes,
dishes of stars; they wait upon
huge lenses hung aloft to frame
the slow procession of the skies.
They calculate, adjust, record,
watch transits, measure distances.
They carry pocket telescopes
to spy through when they walk abroad.
Spectra possess their eyes; they face
upwards, alert for meteorites,
cherishing little glassy worlds:
receptacles for outer space.
But she, exile, expelled, ex-queen,
swishes among the men of science
waiting for cloudy skies, for nights
when constellations can’t be seen.
She wears the rings he let her keep;
she walks as she was taught to walk
for his approval, years ago.
His bitter features taunt her sleep.
And so when these have laid aside
their telescopes, when lids are closed
between machine and sky, she seeks
terrestrial bodies to bestride.
She plucks this one or that among
the astronomers, and is become
his canopy, his occultation;
she sucks at earlobe, penis, tongue
mouthing the tubes of flesh; her hair
crackles, her eyes are comet-sparks.
She brings the distant briefly close
above his dreamy abstract stare
Off the Track
Our busy springtime has corrupted
into a green indolence of summer,
static, swollen, invisibly devoured.
Too many leaves have grown between us.
Almost without choosing I have turned
from wherever we were towards this thicket
It is not the refuge I had hoped for.
Walking away from you I walk
into a trailing mist of caterpillars:
they swing at my face, tinily suspended,
half-blinding; and my hands are smudged
with a syrup of crushed aphids.
You must be miles away by now
in open country, climbing steadily,
head down, looking for larks’ eggs.
Beaux Yeux
Arranging for my due ration of terror
involves me in such lunacies
as recently demanding to be shown
the broad blue ovals of your eyes.
Yes: quite as alarming as you’d promised,
those lapidary iris discs
level in your dark small face.
Still, for an hour or two I held them
until you laughed, replaced your tinted glasses,
switched accents once again
and went away, looking faintly uncertain
in the sunlight (but in charge, no doubt of it)
and leaving me this round baby sparrow
modelled in feather-coloured clay,
a small snug handful; hardly apt
unless in being cooler than a pebble.
Send-off
Half an hour before my flight was called
he walked across the airport bar towards me
carrying what was left of our future
together: two drinks on a tray.
In Focus
Inside my closed eyelids, printed out
from some dying braincell as I awakened,
was this close-up of granular earthy dust,
fragments of chaff and grit, a triangular
splinter of glass, a rusty metal washer
on rough concrete under a wooden step.
Not a memory. But the caption told me
I was at Grange Farm, seven years old,
in the back yard, kneeling outside the shed
with some obscure seven-year-old’s motive,
seeing as once, I must believe, I saw:
sharply; concentrating as once I did.
Glad to be there again I relaxed the focus
(eyes still shut); let the whole scene open out
to the pump and