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  he’d test the blade with his thumb …

  still not happy. Or not quite: not yet.

  UNFINISHED

  Your memoirs end, as on a little frown:

  And then there was the war.

  One-and-a-half pages of yellow feint-

  ruled foolscap, curled in the typewriter

  from the day your bed was moved downstairs.

  ‘I can’t get up to the study,’ you’d maintain

  to my periodic urging, the fighter

  in you winged. Or: ‘Too much of a chore.

  Anyway, I can’t imagine anyone

  could possibly be interested in my affairs!’

  Well, I was. So I carried the machine down

  to where all your life lay now, set up a space

  among the medicines on the table …

  and it made no difference. I offered

  to record you, but you shook your head,

  claiming tiredness: ‘I am incapable.’

  Now I grope for what you said, over

  the years, not even sure of which RAF base

  it was in Lincolnshire so many were blown

  from your life: at twenty you saw the dead

  grow from friends in the nighttime canteen’s calm:

  the one who’d always feared Berlin, until

  the Berlin sortie came and you know the rest;

  or the chaps limping in from a dicey op

  who flamed up before your gaze, trying to land.

  I’ve plenty of this, and I do my best,

  now you’re gone; but beyond the hedge-hopped

  fields and the skimmed wires I see metal,

  burning: and no one’s stepping out, unharmed,

  with a filled pad of foolscap in his hand.

  REMEMBERING MY FATHER

  Pan Am, 1947–79

  New York for you was always the boss:

  home of the daft telex, the cross-

  eyed command filtering through

  to hassles on the tarmac, those delays in fog.

  You’d nip over for a day, too brief for jet lag,

  complain how the baggage-handlers at JFK

  were infiltrated, were in the Mafia’s pocket.

  Only later would I learn not to take it

  all as gospel, in the same way

  you’d smile knowingly at ‘The World’s

  Most Experienced Airline’, or the centrefold

  daring of that ‘Clipper’ calendar for ’72

  I hung in my bedroom, where I lusted

  most of all for topless August

  like a pilot choosing from his crew.

  And now our taxi-driver, a retired

  Midtown doorman recovering from (or fired

  because of) a stroke and ‘too much booze’,

  tells us how it’s ‘all the Mob, the food here …’

  pointing out each curbside pizzeria

  as we hurtle down the Boulevard through

  Howard Beach – which, yes, sits right next

  to the sprawling empire of jets

  whose perpetual departures mimic the white egret

  and creamy ibis we’ve watched each day

  from our rented house in Jamaica Bay …

  and I miss you again in a hush-kitted roar of regret.

  FULL MOON IN SUMMER

  Sight the moon through your fixed fist

  and she’ll slip away,

  if slower than a fish –

  like the monthly list

  of things to do,

  too long to be done.

  And she’s certainly

  all glare tonight, gusted

  into strobe-light by trees.

  Our bedroom swarms

  with her white sound,

  the stars are dazed from sight.

  We close our shutters but

  she creeps around, ablaze with vacancy,

  not letting us sleep. The night

  sky’s cloudless, and she can’t

  go shadowing her own face

  from the light; but thinking

  how months flash like cards

  I reckon she might as well linger

  on my life’s flicker

  with her motionless scree

  of impact scars: a hypothetic,

  destinal sun.

  TELLING YOU ABOUT KRIBI

  You like the photo of me, long-haired and gauche,

  reading Ted Hughes in my swimming trunks on the rocks

  in Cameroon, the mangrove beyond the clean black

  sands a grey blur, the odd fisherman’s pirogue

  like a dropped leaf, my throne’s volcanic stack

  pocked where the lava once bubbled to the ocean

  that seemed to sneak its way past Fernando Po

  to find this lovely bay and expressly bury

  its breakers in a gentle swell at my feet, their strung

  glory under a crown of spume long spent. The very

  idea of it, back then: of not being young!

  My bare back says it all: nothing goes slower

  than life when warm air’s measuring your spine

  and most of the stage is in front (if chance should smile).

  I tell you that Exxon’s got its tankers there now –

  the arse end of six hundred and fifty miles

  (the nodding pumpjacks among Chad’s bony cows)

  of forest-slicing pipeline, ruthless to the final

  drop. The sacred grounds are a reek of garage,

  farms interloped by oil, fish dead in the sea …

  The promised schools and clinics were the usual fibs:

  the money’s also leaked. We lack the agility

  of the spirits; we should be dancing there in Kribi –

  hammering on calabashes, masked, in a trance of rage.

  THE GIFT

  for Anastasia

  Like Paddington, this little bear

  propped on the old beam up to your

  now mostly empty bedroom, has a pedigree,

  remember? We were all playing

  ‘Give Us a Wave’ in the dunes of Sweden

  (the bright clapboard houses so straight-laced

  among the birch and aspen), when a gull,

  circling overhead, dropped the catch

  it had plucked from the waves: fur-naked

  (bar a scarf of ribbon) and waxlike

  from salt, its tiny surprise still filled

  your hand, back then, when you were five.

  POSY

  in memoriam A-C

  We buy the flowers together, my daughter and I.

  ‘Who are they for, mademoiselle?’

  For a girl killed at dawn on Armistice Day,

  leaving a club with a drunk at the wheel.

  Magnesium-bright, ensoleillée

  in her white wellingtons, the future

  was hers, breath after breath to that infinitude

  an eighteen-year-old assumes is her right.

  The Mini Cooper demolished a wall.

  My daughter bears the posy home

  by the same route they’d walk from school,

  the two of them: Anne-Charlotte,

  she’s written on the tag, after the printed

  MADEMOISELLE. She says, once home, how weird

  it was; the flowers grew heavier and heavier, until

  ‘I felt I was carrying her, instead.’

  FLAUBERT’S DRAFTS

  Second thoughts, third thoughts, fourth thoughts,

  the underbrush of lost causes, the barred ideas,

  the hanging-about in the margins, the rejects

  that never found their place, areas like frowns

  or ploughed-up fieldwork on slants

  where only the in-between scraps survived:

  if only our lives offered such remedies –

  the aching climb to the summit of perfection

  able to go back upon itself, keeping the peak

  in view, the nibbled vane of the quill
>
  swerving and dipping over its own landscape

  that alters according to the climber’s will.

  Instead we’re left with regret, solid as hewn

  wood, and the well-intentioned cleft we tread

  from the blank plain: our one, uncorrectable line.

  NEIGHBOUR

  i.m. Claude M.

  You have to tiptoe over a slope

  of terracotta tiles; act the ballerina.

  A dead weight when he fell,

  and no EU-ordered rope,

  only that broken marker-string

  (on what is termed the ‘verge’),

  he caught his foot in. No one,

  of course, heard a thing.

  Discovered in the foetal position

  like a warrior in his stone-lined cist,

  the only grave goods were the brick

  walls beside him, all but finished: his mission

  before retirement, with room for his dad.

  That long dream of living there

  he’d described to me once (stood together

  on the brute concrete foundation pad)

  as more precious than gold. A kind of birth.

  Now it’s all done – wired, painted –

  it’s hired to the hunters, who feast and laugh.

  Hard to know what a house is worth.

  DRY STONE WALLING

  You know that sudden need: to repair, to make

  amends. Restoration where the hard white sky

  has bitten chunks out, where a lone sag of barbed wire

  serves as sentinel – its miniature scalps taken

  off would-be escapees. You watch your fingers

  like hawks, for stones can roll: a knuckle no match

  for their unaccustomed weight, that strange mineral flash

  of life, the will that spars with your wedding ring

  through the heavy glove: granite, leather, gold.

  Your knees in mud. This time for definite, for good,

  solid from the bottom, stayed by a heaviness of head

  and poise. Though nothing stays where you want it, soldered

  only by calculation; its sheer weight.

  Wobble and tilt – those bids for freedom. The weather

  runs at everything: you’re trying again where your father

  clicked and clacked like a clock all the way to the gate.

  SUBTRACTION

  Cap Bon, Tunisia, 2003

  El Haouaria, where they hollowed out

  Carthage, is now a vaulted omega of absence,

  its caves striated by slaves whose daylight bout

  was a dim, powder-fashioned shaft,

  who lived, breathed and doubtless died sandstone,

  its colossal blocks floated up the coast on rafts

  to count as bits of Punic monuments

  that were swept away by a Roman broom

  (by order of the Senate), with salt spread

  for good measure, so not even scrog could bloom.

  Beneath the silence you can hear the moans.

  To think this might have been us, instead

  of our own life’s latitude! El Haouaria,

  a honeycomb of vowels we get wrong

  like most visitors (preferring ‘that quarry

  on Cap Bon’), is where it all belongs:

  the temples, the arenas, the entire city.

  Like Lego, it will not go back into the box,

  but here is its negative: each axe-chip fits

  its equivalent bump, the subterranean dark locks

  onto its reverse, heliotropic and built

  high – the Manhattan of its day. One moment it’s there:

  the next it’s gone. Like us, I whisper … it being unfair

  to say this in front of the kids, who’re yet to be filled.

  IN YORK MINSTER

  The glass in York Minster is 90% naturally coloured, without added colourants.

  Tempered to this miracle from forest ash

  (‘and yet nys glas nat lyk asshen of fern’),

  they must have cleared whole coombs

  and cols of their bracken, its stubborn

  rust scraped off for the fiery womb:

  the quantity of potassium needed was vast.

  Two hundred kilos of wood per one of glass!

  For colourlessness, coppiced beech

  on lime-rich soil; for green panes, beech on clay.

  Between the leads they fused what we cannot reach

  from entire forests, it seems, to field the play

  of sunlight – as did the trees over their floors of mast.

  THE SWIMMING POOL

  Kinshasa, 1968

  Our gardener would rake its gloom

  like a patch of ground, stirring it

  to a distressed, even darker core

  of the almost-living and the nearly drowned:

  scooped with a net for the rusty bucket,

  he’d pour them out in the no-man’s-land

  before the proper bush: each night’s haul

  a sprawl of drunken guests, bristling

  with feelers and sodden legs, still

  in a rush to be free: capsized hulls with oars,

  tiny nests of torment. Frogs swooped

  between the slippery hair of the concrete sides

  and the blind, sedimented depths

  they’d jack-knife into. This was the door

  out of the air’s stickiness, the scratch of lawn:

  our clumsy paradise. We’d swim with care

  among the fresh spoil steeped at eye-level,

  become huge and forlorn: thorax still beating

  and beating on a simple heart; mouth-parts

  searching for air like a man’s last words;

  a moth’s hopeless wingspread. Where

  could I start? I handed out names to faces;

  buried the drowned like birds.

  HALF CENTURY

  The years are always something we think of

  as vaguely surprising, guests that come and go

  who might have been expected to hang around,

  entertaining our disappointments, letting us forget.

  We count them every so often like marks against us,

  or a row of sacks bulging with what we can’t

  yet throw away and wonder (after a certain age)

  how we’ll ever manage without them.

  The truth is, they don’t stay. Fifty

  seems too much, you say, but remember

  they have gone: what’s left is not to be weighed

  but savoured, like love. We want

  to keep them back for some unfocussed good,

  one minute worrying about being too young,

  guessing what the rules, invented

  in our absence, demand of us; and then we see

  that all along the game was being cooked up

  at every instant to give us that impression

  when really no one’s in charge and there’s nothing

  but a vague skein like silk or torchlight

  connecting this to that – the present spiced only because

  the past’s no longer suffused, the future not yet

  seasoned. So we’ll drink to us, not to time’s tribunal,

  and braid each year with hugs like an old friend.

  ON A PHOTO OF A WAINWRIGHT’S SHOP

  On the day of its sale, before being dismantled and the site redeveloped: Hungerford, 1951

  This was where they made

  each thill of dung cart, or jackwain’s tailboard;

  where what turnips knocked from their sacks

  got shaved, the bolts locking the top rave,

  the summers joined to the shutlocks to hold hops;

  or where the strouters first firmed the wagon’s side

  as the unmacadamed roads made of the nave

  every labourer’s shuddering fulcrum – until in for the kill

  came the oiled pistons, the heedless Ford, />
  and all this was obliterated as so many facts

  are in history, and one by one the wainwrights died

  along with those they called the liners, who travelled

  like the sawyers from shop to shop, their only canvas

  the naked, chamfered wood of spoke and board,

  turning that practical good into something

  no one needed: Berkshire the yellow of a chanterelle,

  Wiltshire a harebell’s blue to the iron tyre.

  Here is where the old world got upgraded

  and our nescience unfolded, that day

  the doors closed on the dark and the sign said SOLD.

  REPRIEVE

  Driving down from the Alps we were reassured:

  a late, hard frost, its hoar taking its keen scalpel

  to the forests; the birch bled to the last bud,

  the spruce and firs flayed, twinkling yet scrupulous;

  even on the lower slopes, starched to a pause,

  the pines stood, formal and glazed as footmen.

  Flick anything here and it would ping (I joked)

  like crystal: thankfully normal, a sign that all

  is on seasonal course in our broken weather glass;

  that age can be reversed; that whoever’s top

  of the table has suddenly turned to the servant

  and said: ‘Send my man down to them. It’s

  time we had a miracle. More wine, Faust?’

  And God never does facetious (or so that vicar said).

  IN BED

  I’ve heard it maintained that a roadless country lacks conviction,

  like a life without a sense of direction, a plan.

  But surely a single life can spread like a fan,

  be an entire Mongolian plain, not a waste of dereliction?

  Maybe that is a little confusing, given we travel

  in one basic direction, from A to wherever we’re led

  to in the alphabet: which is always the sleep of Z.

  Yet must we, like Holland, be mapped – or else unravel?

  Sheep-tracks served on St Kilda. Winds would lock

  them in for weeks. No roads, no wars. The land

  in perfect fusion; for roads mean right hand, left hand,

  verge and division. The island’s only way was rock

  and grass, every edge of it opening onto ocean.

  Let us say it was like your body, over which