Circles – poems from decades of neglect

Watford Gap 

He set out against a sluice of speed

to travel the veins

that motorways tame,

and carried the can

that a motoring man

might, in straits, be thought to need:

hardshouldering laws

and hunched by his course

he turned his back

on the empty tank

which roadmaps called the North.

near Watford Gap, a place of sorts,

where roadways are outclassed by rail

a figure came out

of a contrary route –

silver his mouth,

the spoon of the South,

and blind as the sleepers that marked his trail.

The hunchback gave way

in thunder and spray,

sapped from the vein

to capillaried lanes

and borne away by a pantograph wind,

as lost and as numb as the land.

1985

M8

After the introspection of Spaghetti Junction

and the A74’s spent spiritual sprawl,

there’s a comfortable route which knows its purpose;

it spans the country with the reassurance of a hand rail,

leaps international airports with the ease of flight.

Here’s no continental epic of personal discovery:

coast to coast means motion on a human scale

that flicks between fields and factories, slips in

among people’s lives like a suburban train.

There goes the A720 and there the 801,

brand name numbers with more integrity than perfumes,

cars and jeans; and this is Livingstone, I presume.

I’m surely not the first visitor to Edinburgh

to ask where I can find a drink this time of night.

On the campus living is pared down

to an essence of luxury, lacking nothing

but a kettle, a teaspoon and an engineer.

The machine for auto-pasta

and bangers is outa order;

the one for crisps resists,

and you need 50ps

to release frothy chocolate and teas.

I’ve made a clean sweep of the place twice tonight.

and every cupboard is empty except

except for a black plastic bag and a broom.

(When young I had a thirst to be

away at university

to find the person who was me;

now decayed and decades later

I have trouble to locate a

single sodding cup of tea.)

Each building is so thin in the dark

it could crush us with its emptiness

(watch out that no one drops

the engineering blocks;

and what are the odds that that is

the actual Department

of Actuarial Mathematics?)

In the loneliness of academia

biologists unwrap

the mystery of human awareness

synapse by synapse,

as oblivious of us as

cells are of them.

Physicists predict

seabed currents

and the weight

and population of the universe:

but what if we are the sole

intelligence in space –

isn’t this the sparest,

scariest place of all?

Tonight each private footstep’s incomplete,

A whole city’s disappointments are exposed;

The last one to leave won’t need to be discreet,

Making friends with nobody but the roads.

1993 

Palindrome
(for Dave, Justine and Sue)

That day we found the roofless house beside

the yawning River Robe as it wound down

slowly back to town, that was not the first.

A guardian crow stumped and flapped about

the crumbling chimney stack, making its signs,

and ivy wrote its lines inside the walls,

brushing flecks of light and shade on flaking stone.

Our voices danced in an ancient courtyard

whose songs again rang on down unseen stairs,

the past clinging to us like an echo.

    The writer classifies his Irish dreams:

    one is for the wild swans at Coole, whose metre

    beats like crashing wings; one is Daedalus

    and Dublin days on streets that run in streams;

    and two tramps in a barren land, waiting

    with a bicycle for any kind of change.

    The singer sighs to find a nightime when

    her music is an instrument of change,

    when, amid the chink of glasses, drinking stills:

    her voice will prize the patrons’ cheers and tears;

    they’ll ache with knowing simply what she sings

    and love her always as they love the beer.

    The artist draws back from the ones she loves

    and blames the light for things she does not see;

    if only when the lake mists seap across

    the sun, melting mountains into islands,

    she too could flare into translucent fire,

    cascade in colours that would fill her world.

Later in mountains we encountered

indescribable beauty: plainly, we

may one day bring our dreams back here again.

1994

Forever

In the poetry of common speech

I walked down the street.

It was straight, except at bends and corners

and so wide

that I feared it would go one forever.

Later I thought it was short.

At the back of the tobacconists a dog

wearing a bowler hat was easily

absurd;

but when the Zen

Buddhist asked for a light

I was less sure.

And the giant golden ball

blocking the Boulevard de Concorde

in both directions was real to me at least.

I witnessed a daring assault on the Bristol and West

when two masqued investors

escaped with the promise of free cash tomorrow

and a leaflet about discounts for first time buyers,

I was there for the ram raiders at Currys

who drove between the car-proof bollards

to batter the door with a shopping trolley

and market forces.

It seemed for a while I was part of it all.

I saw someone I didn’t much want to

speak to, and grudgingly said hello;

and then made friends with a woman in her seventies

whose umbrella was jammed half way down,

and we smiled with slight exaggeration

and the genuine joy of helped and helper

in a town which seems not to care much

about that sort of thing.

For a while my route followed the canal,

but, paranoid that I am,

I believed it was following me.

I imagined I’d lived in a small glass house next door

to a stone mason. He never threw so much as a glance

in my direction; and I resented being overlooked.

I fell in love with someone unattainable

every time I passed a florist;

we were always walking in slightly

different directions or at different speeds;

sometimes she was driving a red mini

or sitting near the front of a bus,

so we rarely ran into one another, as it were.

The best bit was remembering later

how long I had yearned for her,

or the motion of her skirt against her legs

as I overtook her in High Street;

somehow this was the nearest

I ever got to the ineffable.

I knew too well I would not meet a women

I’d loved when she was a skinny virgin

(and I was, well, a skinny virgin too).

She lives in an English university town,

or Russia, and probably never thinks of me at all;

but if she did, she wouldn’t find me among

these dull suburban streets,

or on the barren steps to the desolate flats

where she lived for a while.

Regret, like drink, wrecks lives, I thought,

so when I paused at the Rose and Crown

my limit was two wishes with a dash of hope

in a pair of rose tinted glasses.

I wanted to remember the whole journey

as a single continuous story,

but it ran

episodic

in streets

with long missing passages between them,

straight and dull enough to lose attention,

hedges brushing closely on either side.

I called in at the barbers in Gordon Road;

“Are you growing your hair?”

the passers by had demanded;

“no,” I replied, “that’s God you’re thinking of;

I just let him use my head.”

This was all so much like life itself

or the passing of seasons:

a passive experience of change,

watching it grow, and holding back

till the last possible moment;

then living with dire consequences

till the next inevitable hair cut.

It was easy to choose the route at intersections

though doubts about their rightness

lasted with me through to the next decision.

Cemetery Junction was a cross roads once,

but a roundabout today.

I expected intuition here, but all exits

were blocked by its symbolism

and a combination of traffic volume

and roadworks; the only way through

was over the railings and down among

the neat rows of respectful headstones.

I looked at my watch and found

it was Judgement Day;

the earth opened up all around

revealing grave after grave

filled with nothing but stones.

A departing group of mourners

were fiercely condemning the vicar

for judging them too harshly.

It never got dark the whole trip,

so it never got light again either;

but clouds of newsprint swept in

from the West, and it rained the kind of rain

that doesn’t touch you if you keep on going.

I wasn’t aware of arriving, and never got anywhere

except the places and people I’d passed by.

Some of us grew tired towards the end

and caught a bus and the flu the rest of the way;

and, in the poetry of common speech,

I couldn’t explain where I had been going

or why the end lacked a twist.

If this was Heaven it wasn’t worth the trip;

if this was Hell it wasn’t worth the anticipation;

if this was a conclusion it was all too easy to miss.

1996 

Shadows

Children playing by the old canal,

so many smiles that Forever’s the time

they call the rest of their lives.

They might have been me.

Young lovers laughing in the park

secure as the night, and dark and still,

they know one another so well

That was a place to be.

Couple on a seat casting long shadows

on the lawn; their silence keeps dull secrets

of lives and love left incomplete.

I hardly noticed them before.

1997