come dancing through a door to take me down,
her eyes unreading and her mouth all pins.
Page Of First Old Book He Read
I don’t know who he is but by his skin
so freckly-pink
when mine’s so worn and fragile
he’s new to this, so new he brings me in
and meets me with his nostrils.
While those two are his eyes his eyes are wells
so brown and deep
a drop will drop forever
look, this is the dawn of somewhere else,
his little mouth is opening
an O of sunrise, as if every day
there is to come
might catch him knowing nothing.
Light will climb with him, time have its say
when the small voice is ready
and only then, now all the air is breath
until it’s quiet.
Soon his eyes, aligning,
bob along my furrows, tread the earth,
the ginger head in tow now,
the soft indignant brow becoming clear.
I’ve bided here
so long I’ve quite forgotten
what he encounters, what he’s learning there –
three memories stay with me:
his grin away and back again as if
he’d found somewhere
we both belonged – slow turning
I took for love – and, when time called enough,
light narrowing so gently.
Thirty Years
for Derek Walcott
I’m off the phone with Boston and it seems
I’m going there, I’ll tell them in a moment.
I’ll tell my folks about it, though your name’s
unknown to them and new to me. I open
the door to where they’re talking
in our living room in summer
in the nineteen-eighties. – Now it’s afternoon.
That Everyman of light is turning helpless
hour by hour, retiring to a den.
Now the call to you, sir, now it’s fruitless.
My speckled hand is falling
towards the blank account-book
to leaf through in the leavings of a Sunday.
Nothing written yet and the clock points.
My reading lamp reflects on the black window
itself alone: no lawn or neighbour’s fence,
no trees or distant bedroom
glow to tilt the mind.
My empty page is a suburban silence,
earnest, available, where nothing goes
at night, here too there are so many islands,
mon professeur, and silence I suppose
was pretty much the sound
I made in our one-to-ones.
Watching as you scanned some early effort.
Retracting it too late as clouds were looked to.
Clouds are looked to now, wish I’d been better,
a better friend, you breathing, me about to,
my heart accelerating
towards your breaking judgment.
Your empty page was ocean, is still ocean,
lapping the ribs of this. If it’s a blank page
anything like mine it sees no reason
to think you won’t be back, mistakes the hush
for inhalation, waits
ecstatically for more.
But it isn’t coming in, the light, the heat.
The handle’s not about to turn this scene
to us lot sitting where we used to sit,
our ballpoints circling what we think you mean,
our notebooks gaping wide
on a cold and frosty morning.
Perpetually they wait between the waves,
clear pages yet to come: each one assumes
the turn is coming soon, each one believes
itself the first, like me in that bright room
in Boston, seen clean through,
man alone with mentor,
turned, what days are for. But nothing turns
now, and nothing breaks. Your own blank page
was ocean, is still ocean going on,
and mine is nothing dining on the edge
of everything. You’re there,
the fixed important jaw,
at the end of a long table, you who were,
pestered by some spectral fans too shy
to say they’ve heard your joke – I haven’t, sir,
let’s hear it. Look there’s nothing of the kind
there at all, but all
I do in verse these days
is scry the empty page for signs enough.
Love and delight rear up in cliffs and caverns,
forms from Hubble light my heart and home-life,
but on the page? The pure white scrolling heavens,
sod-all else for story
hereabouts. So help me,
for I knew you for a spell and now you’re not,
and my worn hand’s still guided like it was
when I was slick. There is a breath in earshot
which isn’t always mine, the wince is yours
when the line-break’s wrong, the groan
when I reckon something’s finished.
I reckon something’s finished, that’s my only
reckoning as evening yawns and stretches.
If Everyman was here he wasn’t lonely,
for a visitor came by and she stayed ages,
and when they went a book went,
songs in all its spaces,
a time accounted for. – It’s Sunday evening
in a rose-lit living-room, the open arms
of two old chairs, grey cushions, a clock ticking.
I’m off the phone with Boston and it seems
I’m going there, I told them,
I’m flying in late August,
and there I’ll learn my light from dark, my right
delighted scribbling hand from my poor left
there listening one, and how they meet
between the lines, before the weeping crest,
beyond the raging fall –
or words to that effect –
then I’ll come home a fool with a filled book.
Thirty years. The living and the gone
may meet here too, they’re here now if you look,
sir, in their shy accord, their one-to-one
that sounds the sound of heartbeats
pattering through silence.
Small Talk With Time
You ask me what I do
and I say I’ve no time for you,
you make small talk with me,
you make it with eternity.
You ask me am I rude
to everyone and I say Dude
you got that straight. You say
you met your perfect match today
you’d like to be together
today, tomorrow, and forever . . .
Then you seem to see
how strange it is you’re telling me,
you ask me what I do
and I say I’ve no time for you,
you make small talk with me,
you make it with eternity.
The Heyday
Where is there time for this in a second?
Maybe a spell for a bead of sweat
to be sweat, was it yours is it mine has it happened
yet? Not yet?
Where is there time for this in a minute?
Nobody’s fooled by a minute-hand. Look –
it moves if you look away from it, then it
moves if you look.
Where’s there a window for this in an hour?
There’s barely a window for windows, except
to let the sun see where we slept, though we barely
slept where we slept.
Dig me a hole for this in a day-time,
spend Double-Chemistry penning a song –
what is the sun but the bell for playtime
banging on?
Where in the world is the week that’s better
than hanging with you? It’s not in my iPhone,
not in the Cloud or that Dear John letter
you sent dear John.
A month? They can rake the moon from a stream
if they think I have time for an Ode to Love
when
