From a hand-written file of the 1980s key 2018
for information purposes only and background
to the later couplets designed for online view
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Rooms
After heavy rain the guttering drips
incessant as a forming stalactite
onto the sediment-strewn, marked skylight
thrown plasticised rubbish pressing like lips
to the grilled glass.
In the city there are
some unknown rooms shut in final silence,
where time is passed with unsung patience
far from a world glimpsed through a door ajar,
far back rooms broken into by loud rain
trumpeting the elements on stained glass.
Hours, as if counting out, move and pass
to oblivion, shortening the pain
lodging in these rooms, concentrated here
beyond condemnation, an outstretched hand.
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The Terraces
As if every sun-facing window
once blank then burnt like a polished mirror
on those with their panes part interior
to other rooms, and the tenuous glow
from every street-lamp had been burnished
and turned up like an emphatic warning-
the sunset like orange sheet lightning, the evening
an empty room suddenly furnished.
Rows of low houses with their warm cats curled
eye each other in a different world.
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The Setting
The short afternoon in a long autumn
draws in on the damp hill and the forest;
the timber cutters are at their faintest
through the steep clinging mist, wide as sea-room.
Cars, today, crawl autumn's wadded tarmac,
softening travel to the almost dead
at which their floored, wandering spirits tread;
in warm sanatoria trolleys squeak.
What is there in the dark to exorcise
the accruals gathering in the dusk?
The fallen acorn's mouldering, swamped husk
turns to mush: and we stand; and dramatize
our tense presence there in the undergrowth,
the murk and the fall, perishable truth.
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Desert Landing
Muffled, urgent, then fading commands clamp
the quivering dawn of wan departure
as the sun in splendour torches the ramp
to a lengthy sea, the jumping glimmer
of an incipient voyager
to that fine residuary, the desert
of want and the greater heat thronging the calm sand;
if, ever, a rare sea conveying freight
the rising and the visionary rasp aground-
as, scouring every salt fissure of light
in a journey winding to shaft inland,
bitter fresh water runs, just imagined-
cognizant, yet savage, in the cooler
drinking eclecticism of despair.
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Abstract
As in travel film of a distant range
lit on motorway in your smudged windscreen,
verges dirt-strewn merge to pasture then strange
granite luxuriant with a softer green.
Flat on the flashing summer motorway
the far range beyond our taut grasping reach
perspective loses a dependency
there, fast into a tree-lined closing stretch.
The end of the unending road turns in the road.
Shadows passing underground abstract far present
horizons that widen as they shine, slowed
in tracts of light that dun pools circumvent.
The present is an abstract of the past
without a future, fluttering seraphs.
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Turtle Doves (Above A Courtyard)
The grouping and complacent turtledoves
populate, some circling, a universe
small as the largest filling with lost droves
of migrant suns, and total love rehearse
from time to inconsequential time
perhaps. Off a dove-trodden castle wall
at the end of the courtyard, to a grime
and bird-smoked cottage roof, and back, they call-
the richest music of their hemisphere,
frisked by squirrels at a startling tangent
to the subsidiary atmosphere
of two lovers clasping in greater content
as if the strength of a warmer stasis
would protect their love from later crisis.
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The Long Week-End
The days away from work like a retreat
into the heart of the country, and peace,
the camera shutter back for the crease
of new clothes, the present, and the discreet
love of now, abandonment and the past
folded away in yesterday's thin book,
unable to match today's coloured look
to roses, and recollect the storm's blast.
Stepping out into the hot sand-blasted square,
we looked for our firm building of silence,
the tenure on the future, love's pittance,
but the sky kept vacant possession of the stair
and the doors and the windows drew shut to fraught air
with cloud, and strangers who will always stare.
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