I

    Sunday Morning


    Since I've stopped praying
    I've got so much more done:
    the fridge is cleaner, I read more fiction,
    the telephone is less often off the hook.
    Since I've done away with God
    I've done the bathroom up
    and tried a dozen different recipes.

    Since I've stopped considering the nature
    of the soul, the infinite, all that,
    I've found the joy of gardening;
    I garden without concern
    for the intricate glory of the Hollyhock.
    The news is always on, the multitudes
    keep dying, and what's one less prayer
    circling the stratosphere?

    He'll find me, if he chooses,
    he'll lift me like a woolly two-year-old,
    secure me to the fold. Meanwhile
    I'm eating chocolates in bed,
    the words of the psalms dissolving like an old dream,
    I'm right here with a magazine,
    – Shock New Pictures, All Your TV Favourites –
    the church bells making a distant din,
    the duvet warm and comforting,
    the tumble dryer just spinning, and spinning.


    Oversleeping


    And there are the clothes you dropped, the arms of a green shirt
    raised in surrender, the slough of nylon
        and a dress of apricot wool.

    Sit up and see the sheets fine-wired with pubic hair and eyelashes,
    skin cells scattered like flakes of prehistory.

    Your clothes have been going out of fashion,
    quickly like the turning of a pear, slowly like a bone bleaching.
          No matter,

    reclaim the leather boots you loved so much,
    zip them right up to the knee and walk;

    you are Jairus' daughter, passing through
    the convalescent house, its shelves of misremembered books,
          its shivers of dust.

    What else is there to do but open windows, let the outside tumble in
    like washing from a glorious machine?

    The day is half over, but still blue. Step out and balance
    on the ledge. Below a brown bird darts
       over the garages
    and is gone,
    another yanks a worm from its clay bed and flies with it –
         fly worm, fly!

    The pillow-creases in your cheek smooth to make you young again.
    Your leg hair stands to gold attention. Courage now, step out,

    feel the plummet, then the catch and you're up,
    swimming in cold, eyes streaming.

    There is the park where you broke your wrist, there is the church
    where you first met God and the playground of children

    whose children are running through cities now, as the river
    runs, a silver speck, coursing underneath

    the disappearing viaduct, running through the valley, past
    fields where horses gather, trapped in their nature.

    The houses reposition themselves
    and there are your arms, the arms that used to be useless,
        parting pale belts of cloud.


    April


    Spring again
    But from where no telling
    Sweet as the spring
    That went before

    Same old story
    But still compelling
    Blossom reminding
    What blossom is for

    Question the trees
    But they're not telling
    How they obey
    An impossible law

    Question the mind
    But it's not telling
    How it gives back
    What was gone for sure

    Something stirs
    In a blacked-out dwelling
    Forces the lock
    Of a double-locked door

    That face again!
    But from where no telling
    Sweet as the face
    That was lost before


    The New Mothers


    They have mastered the buggy –
    they understand the awkward catch,
    what force of pressure makes it give.
    They wheel with confidence, more
    confidence, they wheel through afternoons
    of amnesiac light, through mornings
    loud with rain and evenings when
    the sky is soothed to pink, thinking of
    the secrets recently unshelled, the ones
    their mothers kept so long, the bloody
    songs of sealed rooms which day by day
    grow faint and fainter still.
    They pass by women being wheeled,
    women sinking in their chairs who once
    (can it be true?) sat small and snug
    in carriage prams. Swelling women
    pass by too, manoeuvring their mounds
    they seem as far removed as first-year girls
    to sixth-formers. And of course
    they pass their kind, in cafes, parks –
    half smiles, shy, as if they saw the nipples weep
    inside each other's clothes. Another cup of tea;
    they pause and redirect their gaze away,
    beyond the complicated child they've made,
    beyond the blurred pedestrians to girls
    in skinny jeans, remembering how (again
    impossibly) they were those girls,
    the Matryoshka trick that had them
    for a minute spotlit, arms raised
    to glorify the tiny hours, sweat glittering
    their foreheads – white light, noise –
    and years away, unreachable through dancefloor mist,
    babies with wet mouths feeding in the dark.


    The Visitations


    Sometimes God comes as a tiger,
    And sometimes as a rose –
    He opens for you secretly,
    Perfuming your nose.

    Sometimes he is a telephone,
    Sometimes he is a key,
    Sometimes he comes with hoola hoops,
    Sometimes a dictionary.

    Sometimes he comes as creosote
    And leaves a nasty stain,
    Sometimes he comes as anyone
    Whose motives you can't name.

    Sometimes he comes as sunlight –
    Watch him tick across the wall.
    And sometimes as a boxing glove.
    And sometimes not at all.


    On the Island of San Michele


    We never thought to find the dead stacked up
    in marble high-rises,

    nor these photographs –
    a handsome man in his forties
    laughing into another year.

    Six weeks –
    too soon to count you among the living;
    one in five is lost, they say,
    some say one in four.

    September and the sky is freshly painted. Cyprus
    scents the air.

    Stravinsky and Diaghilev are here, graves strewn
    with offerings, not only flowers, but bread rings,
    fancy candies melting in the heat.

    Ezra Pound eludes us.

    A fellow tourist lifts his shades, points out Joseph Brodsky
    at whose grave is fixed a letterbox.
    Too soon, and yet among the dead we play
    the naming game:

    Benedicte? Simone?

    The hundred-year-old little girls
    stare poker-faced beneath their bows.

    A lizard drips from a headstone.
    My arms begin to burn.

    Alicia?
    Giving up the search for Pound, I lay my hand
    on your plot instead: you buried alive
    in your swirl of limbo.

    Nobone. Wetstar.

    I am waiting to row out on the nausea that must be coming –
    like seasickness they say.
    From the quayside, Venice is a dot.

    We buy unfamiliar chocolate from a snack machine
    and I think of Petals
    on a wet, black bough,

    forming
    and falling
    and forming. And I ask you to live.


    The Reluctant Natives


    Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk
    Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart
    or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk

    always of somewhere else, (tacked to kitchen walls
    a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland). See us crouch in
    living rooms as daylight palls,

    an old draft trespassing beneath the door, the trick
    of day too quickly turning night, the radio's
    relentless classic serial, that Sunday evening tick

    of now becoming then. Hear us planning new
    retreats, rephrasing sentences it takes
    a lifetime to pronounce – How nice to meet you

    in Hungarian, or I'm from Hull in faulty Greek –
    curtains drawn against the rain, against
    the pale countrymen to whom we rarely speak.

What I Did in My Summer Holidays

Never ask for an ice-cream confidently or menacingly or using any other adverb. And if you're in pain, show me where it hurts and how. Love is an abstract noun. Dialogue gives the effect of real speech but with all the boring rubbish taken out. Every thought you've ever had has been thought better and by someone else. Does anyone have any questions? We talked last week about the stanza, you might think of stanzas as little rooms: what are you going to do in yours? Are you going to just lie there watching light reinvent itself? The second line doesn't scan. Yes, flair is better. For homework, sit in a soft chair and describe the exact experience, no, don't do that, write down a conversation you hear on a bus; go out in the rain and open your mouth; make a list of everything in your bathroom cabinet. Try not to break your line on an article. The first person you have to please is yourself, but if nobody else is pleased you have a problem. Fill out the form and give it back to me: te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum. Notice that beautiful line where the widow's hands are likened to the wings of a dead bird. Less is more, but sometimes less is less. What do librarians get paid? I've never seen that particular noun used as a verb. But it's too late now to get to grips with the Dewey Decimal System. Did anyone else have a problem with the turnip metaphor?

    Self-Portrait with Washing-up Glove


    When the man with electrocuted eyes
    leans towards me in the street and whispers
    Stop trying to kill me,
    I'm appalled but unsurprised:
    it's what I've been telling my new neighbourhood all day –
    its jumpy traffic lights
    and muscled staffs, that pub where the end of the world

    can't come soon enough. July: someone
    in another postcode will be thwacking tennis balls. Here
    the gobbed-on paving slabs wobble in the heat
    and as evening falls Mister Chicken's
    neon tux grows washing powder white. I turn right
    into the never-ending street until the giant weed plant
    waves to me like fallen royalty.

    The hallway hamster smell remains, but some
    of the worst is over: that splayed
    biro shell has been picked from the sink, the chest
    emptied of alien knickers, and gone is the bee on its back
    rocking in a drawer by itself, legs crunched up
    like a dog begging.
    As I remove the freezer shelf, my neighbour
    hollers at her child. A scattering of frozen peas
    are stuck to something pink.

    Oh God, we should amend our lives,
    all of us who sleep in rented beds and deafen
    at the mention of a pension plan;
    all of us who've lived our best days
    in the imagination's potting shed.

    The oven is black inside
    and I snap on a marigold, flexing my fist
    like someone who might land a half-decent punch.

    The Unborn


    mooch about and waste time
    starting things they'll never
    finish. The next world
    is nothing to them but shadows,
    some don't have patience
    for any of that crap at all –

    What, grass, they say, waving
    their wobbly arms, You mean
    you actually believe in grass?


    Heartsongs


    The feathery hearts of the ill-at-ease
        Murmuring – startled – eager to please

    The choux-light hearts of the oh-so-holy
        Filled with cream from a distant dairy

    The twiggy hearts of the always-left
        Breaking stick by stick like nests

    The wire grilled hearts of the ne'er-do-well
        How to get near them? Who can tell

    The battered satin hearts of the sad
        Little empty evening bags

    The heave-ho hearts of the undeterred –
        Rowing, rowing, never a word


    Madonna of the Pomegranate


    Botticelli c. 1487

    Surrounding her, the sorrowing angels
    turn in all directions
    as if they know and dare not tell.

    Once, I spent weeks
    following the folds of her gown,
    trying for a way to replicate
    her curved mouth
    and those averted irises,

    but even though the sketch was fair
    I came no nearer to the figures
    bound inside the circle –

    that adult-looking Christ child weighing down
    his mother's arms,
    the sweet fruit it so saddened her to hold.


    In Service


    Five days in this new position
    and my duties so inexpertly
    performed. You eye me
    with no smile as I pat dry
    your auburn hair. Your feet
    I've rubbed with olive oil,
    offered part-remembered songs,
    knelt to nibble short your nails –
    they unpeel soft as candle wax.

    Attended to, you turn away
    and I retire. Night drifts into day.
    Your cry again. And so the work
    of love is never done;
    I gather up my skirts and run.


    Hotel Pool


    Twelve? Thirteen? She arrives
    in advance of her parents,

    fat as I was thin, wrapped in a towel,
    pattering to safety –

    a bench where she sits obscured
    before abandoning herself

    to the indecency
    of a walk towards water.

    (Though who's to see? To care?
    The retirees? Me with my puckered stomach?)

    My eyes meet hers,
    hers dart away like fish;

    this is not the place to say
    You'll be all right,

    the body must become itself,
    nothing to do but swim out, follow.


    When Six O'clock Comes and Another Day has Passed


    the baby who can not speak, speaks to me.
    When the sun has risen and set over the same dishes
    and the predicted weather is white cloud,
    the baby steadies her head which is the head of a drunk's
    and holds me with her blue eyes,
    eyes which have so recently surfed through womb swell,
    and all at once we stop half-heartedly row, rowing
    our boat and see each other clear
    in the television's orange glow. She regards me,
    the baby who does not know a television from a table lamp,
    the baby, who is so heavy with other people's hopes
    she has no body to call her own,
    the baby who is forever being shifted, rearranged,
    whose hands must be unfurled and wiped with cotton wool,
    whose scalp must be combed of cradle cap,
    the baby who has exactly no memories
    softens her face in the early evening light and says I understand.


    In a Church


    No, no time for this
    the outside clamours to be heard,
    the books, you see,
    the books.
    In here it's dark, the sun
    has slid away.
    There are necessities.
    The cars are travelling at speed, without me, fast;
    the days, my days, must be pinned down
    accounted for and coloured in,
    I need to go,
    I need to go my way.

    To which the soul said, stay.


    Elegy for the Living


    We wash up side by side
    to find each other

    in the speakable world,
    and, lulled into sense,

    inhabit our landscape;
    the curve

    of that chair draped
    with your shirt;

    my glass of water
    seeded overnight with air.

    After this bed
    there'll be another,

    so we'll roll
    and keep rolling

    until one of us
    will roll alone and try to roll

    the other back – a trick
    no one's yet pulled off –

    and it'll be
    as if I dreamed you, dear,

    as if I dreamed this bed,
    our touching limbs,

    this room, the tree outside alive
    with new wet light.

    Not now. Not yet.


    Experience


    The widow will weep for her beau, my dear
    While the spring grass continues to grow, my dear

    Life's lengthy or short but it ends when it ends
    We arrive and we go and that's so, my dear.

    The elected must govern, the masses must vote
    Every man has his price (quid pro quo, my dear)

    But God seldom bargains and never in Lent
    For he's too busy fighting the foe, my dear.

    The moon eats her heart out again and again
    Though the rivers just go with the flow, my dear.

    An earthworm divides well, a country does not
    And sometimes a yes becomes no, my dear.

    Our wishes all fall down the well with a splash
    There are decades of echoes but oh, my dear.

    Give up what is lost if you can't fish it back
    Just keep walking. And that's all I know, my dear.

II

    Life Coach Variations


    The Life Coach Compiles a CV

    Before he coached Life, he coached tennis
    while also selling shoes.
    He knows the inner game.
    He understands the importance of a good fit.


    The Life Coach Tends his Herb Garden

    Lemon thyme thrives when watered sparingly.
    Mint runs free.
    But the basil is spindly and turning yellow,
    which troubles him;
    he has a hunch it will never prosper
    but does what he can.


    The Life Coach Bumps into his Ex-Wife

    She's in a rush, he isn't.
    He kisses her continentally
    remembering to ask after her partner, Ray,
    a thick-legged civil engineer.
    In his raincoat pocket he squeezes
    the peel from a tangerine.
    All afternoon its pith bothers his fingers.


    The Life Coach in Florida

    Wintering. He snorkels;
    sun burns his neck, frazzling
    the curled white hairs on his shoulders.
    An old friend waits on the beach.
    For lunch there'll be fresh tuna,
    scorched outside, inside practically raw.
    He wonders if this is the life.


    The Life Coach Visits a Relic

    He queues to examine the saint's ankle
    bone because he believes in curiosity.
    But when he reaches the front
    the bone is inside a box and the box is behind glass.

    An elderly woman beside him is grasping a flower.
    He leaves her to it. She kneels
    and presses her palm flat to the glass,
    touching whatever is or is not.