Sometimes poetry doesn’t happen. One needs more space to work things out, to play around with what you’ve got until you know it well, have felt its worth, weighed it up and reckoned it.

You go somewhere a little known. The location is not a complete surprise, but time and circumstance newly fashion its affect. Is it really eight years since last you were here? Then it was late autumn, now it’s summer’s end.

It’s sad my driving worries you. You drive with me, in a state of constant anticipation, making sure the speed is legal, the line of car to the road is straight. Often, your left hand reaches involuntarily for the door-handle restraint. The more I try to be steady, the worse it seems to become. But today I hand you the keys before you can ask: so that we may start this journey well. Since early morning the sun has shone, and as we head north the clouds assume great floating forms, magisterial, ermine-cloaked.

I like to watch you when you drive. I think it’s the pleasing proportion of your seated self, the body and limbs often motionless in their purposeful position. I look at your profile, the flow of your hair hiding your ears, the cleft and point of your chin, your nose I love to stroke with my nose, the wide mouth whose lips don’t fit my lips when we kiss, and this morning a warm glow on your left cheek.

We have become so careful you and I, with what we say and the way we say it. Politeness, attention to detail, purposeful decision-making, we both make allowances, keeping the conversation airborne, the tone steady, the content ‘of interest’.

After ninety miles it’s good to get out the car, good to get out in a village now bypassed by the main road, a quiet place. A church rises above the village and like a former coaching inn next to its gates faces down a wide street of 18C houses. Scattered variously there are a few unusual shops – wooden toys and metalled stoves. Here we prepare for the next stage of this journeying. On bicycles we’ll take minor roads to the coast.

At the top, after a steep climb out of the village, there it is: the sea. Since childhood that sighting moment has remained special. There’s a lifting of the spirit. The day remains fine, but a cool wind from the land is soon at our backs (you take care not to be cold and wear a scarf around your neck and ears). After just a few miles, we turn gratefully onto a very minor road where cycling becomes a pleasure. Passing vehicles are occasional and we are not continually pressed hard to the kerbside by speeding traffic. We could ride companionably side-by-side, but we don’t.

There is time to look about, to take in the dip and fold of fields and hedges, the punctuating farms and their ribbons of road. A fine manor house rises out of a forest of trees climbing in coniferous ranks to a limestone escarpment. On the breast of a hill we come upon a tapering stone tower that assumes the point from which the rolling landscape’s perspective flows. There’s a combine at the edge of a field and later its grain ‘tender’ heavy-laden meets us on a narrow bend. At a former mill a weir, where the greenest of green shade over water is too vivid not to photograph. Passing a row of cottages an elderly couple, sitting on their front porch, smile at our friendly wave. Above, swallows dart and spin.

A main road interrupts this idyll, and after a long straight ride with the sea a distant backdrop, we arrive at a coastal village overwhelmed by its recumbent castle. Lunch is eaten in a quiet corner of an ancient churchyard. Crows gather on the stubble in an adjacent field. We sit on a bench in the sunshine, though a cloudy afternoon beckons in the west. Later inside the church, where one of the northern saints is laid to rest, an unsteady light plays variously across the stone statues of the sanctuary.

Distance and a head wind begin to strain the calm confidence of the morning. Perhaps we have come too far and expect too much of ourselves? It is cheering though to beat the rain back to the car six miles hence.

Ten miles further up the coast the tide has retreated across a horizon-reaching expanse of sand and mud; it leaves a narrow causeway to an island beyond. It is a long way to its disappointing village full of car-borne visitors, attendant dogs and tired children. There, a little apart from these tourists, we sit to look out upon a further but tiny island where another northern saint found solitude. Wading into the cold sea he would face the setting sun as it fell into the folds of distant hills: to pray until dawn.

You are so tired when we reach the hotel. You are so tired. Our en suite room holds an enormous bed and a large long bath. From its window just a slice of sea can be seen in a gap between houses. I insist, for your sake, on immediate food and soon the strain on your pale, day-worn face begins to disappear and some colour returns as you eat. I catch your eyes smiling – for a brief moment. Oh, your green eyes, my undoing, so full of a sadness I have never fathomed. How often my memory returns to another room where one afternoon, newly married, we were the dearest lovers. In its strange half-light I caressed your long nakedness over and over, my hands and body visiting every part of you – and your dear face full of peace and joy.  

As dusk falls we walk down the village’s only street to view the sand and sea. Then to bed and hardly a page turned before you seek the sleep you need. I soak gratefully in the large bath. After engaging in a ‘difficult’ book for a few minutes, I soon turn off my light. But I am restless and the bed is hard. So I begin to reassemble the day moment-by-moment, later to dream strangely and sporadically until dawn breaks.

There is a sequence of small events, signs; that as they occur point us in the direction of the mid-winter festival. This morning: the first snow; iced rain, not the soft down-like floaty stuff, but hard crystal-shaped foot-crunching shards. Yesterday, it was on with the wooly hat, the padded waistcoat and a more than just sprightly walk in a park of leafless trees. Everywhere, a damp coldness.
 
Sitting companionably after the meal, a fire spitting in the hearth had brought a glow to her cheeks. She was replete with glowness, her speech dancing too and fro after the family phone calls of a Sunday night. Outside, the sound of wind against the house.
 
Settling herself against him, feet tucked under his reclining body, she tells him about her niece, a birthday girl just two last week. This little one was touchingly innocent of what happens on a birthday. She knew it was coming, next week, soon, then tomorrow. Imagine her the night before: just think you'll wake up and be two! And that's what this birthday business is? She wakes and there is something special in the air, her sister smile-full, bouncy with expectation. Her parents’ voices are louder than usual, there are bigger hugs and longer kisses.  Birthday, birthday, birthday. Her grandparents arrive. More hugs. THEN her father appears with a cake! It's only just after breakfast, but the large people are having coffee and there's her juice cup and a cake! Birthday, birthday, birthday shouts her sister. For me, a cake for me? My cake? Daddy lights the candles! Oh, oh, oh. This is . . .  and something wrapped in pretty paper is being handed to me. Her sister, being wonderfully sisterly shows her how to remove the wrapping. A book! Read it to me now, now, please. It's my birthday, now.
 
This is a sign he thinks later when in bed she folds herself to him, arranges his arms and hands to hold her into sleep, still glowing a little. This is surely a sign. A child's discovery of the birth day. The joy it brings, the way it lights up our lives. And never again will her father see quite that measure of surprise and delight in his daughter's face. Next year she'll be full of expectation, know all about birthdays  . . and be three.

The cat lies on the table. She is keeping her own council, a philosophical feline. It is mid afternoon, an hour before the possibility of tea and cake. Already the room is retreating from the lamp's light into a dusky gloom. Outside the winter garden lies still, damp and cold and still.

Rain comes. A winter rain, almost snow, spreads itself across the window.  Ice-full it is a drum with tiny particles rolling across a taut skin of glass. The cat stirs, turns on his side exposing a tummy of white fur. An old cat this, a silent presence now, hardly a purr on a waiting lap.

Books. Piles of books. A book open to reveal pencilled annotations. Several arrangements of papers paper-clipped together, colourfully highlighted. There's a scholarly journal 'borrowed' with a concert programme marking a ‘required’ read. Telemann and Bach infiltrate an investigation of Jewishness in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.

A framed photograph stands companionably amongst today's letters and the coloured cards of Christmas to come. There's a red-haired girl, a portrait against old roses., a child in a school-blue dress, freckled with green eyes she is smiling carefully, as though not convinced taking this photo is a good thing.

As darkness encroaches, the stories in this space circle the lamp like moths. They rise from the table, detach themselves from the walls (like bats) and float in their own form. Catching leaves, wish-making in a September wood; the fierce tide pouring across the Lindisfarne causeway; small children picnicking by a cricket field. The recent thrill of Jerusalem. Taverner's Mass –

Oh Western Wind,
when will thou blow,
the small rain down can rain?
Christ! If my love were in my arms,
and I in my bed again!

Here in this small suburban room there comes together a past; a life reverberates in a temporary peace, a truce in the long campaign of family, ageing, ****** discomfort, obligation, regret (always regret), passion unspent, books unread, poems still to write. And this waiting for a clear answer yet to come, a promise yet to be fulfilled? All is contained here as the alarm clock's digits move towards 16.30 and it is time for tea and cake. Time to rise from the table and feed the cat.

awakened by the purr
of the little blue cat,
seeking warmth,
on this crisp spring morning

we, the little blue cat and I
take our breakfast outside
walking across the dew damp grass
to sit at the old wooden table

he, steps high, waggling his feet
me, i step deeply into the grass
enjoying the verdant, green smell
that rises,
enjoying the brief  commune with
nature
enjoying the return to childhood

we sit, companionably, eating
he leftover roast chicken,
me, purlioned cocoa puffs,
my son's saturday treat,
that he will surely never miss

as we sit, the sounds of the world waking
drift past us.
windows opening, the snort and cough
of an early rising smoker, cars starting
the birds chat and chirk, and the plop
of the fish as the break the surface of the pond.
the garbage trucks stop and start trek up the street.

and now in the house, the radio, and kettle begin
a shower turned on, a bass voice sings, not well
but with joy.

now the day has truly begun...
one last mouthful of half remembered childhood
and then back to the daily grind
as the sun makes it's way past the low lying clouds

the blucat, chooses to stay, out watching the birds.

Winter sun shines wanly in the church ground
Long shadows grace the wooded park.
The newly cut lawns sparkle emerald green in the late morning light
And the steeple bell tolls, calling the faithful to worship on this Sunday in late May.

An old man sits on the bench nearby and quietly mutters to himself.
The church goers ignore him as they congregate together discussing the inanities that pass for conversation prior to worship, he is invisible to them as they companionably file through the portal of the church doors, exchanging pleasantries with the welcoming, smiling priest.

Oblivious, in his disheveled way, the old man quietly mutters  his words to himself. His wrinkled, white bearded face totally preoccupied with his thoughts about where his years have gone.

Just yesterday I ran that race
In bare feet for the mile,
My school mates cheered me on
And I recall I won in style.
And last week at the dole queue
When stale bread was handed out,
I swear I only took my share
Despite the Copper's shout!
The when I held my baby girl
In ****** swaddling clothes,
I saw exhaustion take my wife
Her face a pallid rose.
And in the pits the burning heat
The coal dust and the gas,
Filled the lungs of most of us
With a bitter, black morass.
Though Charlie Donoghue's cold ale
Was nectar to me then,
And a sharper axe was never swung
Or how, or why, or when.
I'm always short on Thursdays
It's a hungry time of week,
And the street kids pinch my park bench
So I've got no where to sleep.
Oh the beauty of that first kiss
With the lass across the road,
Versus brutal hiding's dished out
By that bully, ******* , toad.
Sunshine at riverbank
When there's nothing much to do
And the sparkles on the water
And the cold of morning dew.
Money in your pocket
The feeling's Oh so grand,
When you can shout your mate a beer or two
And he runs to shake your hand.
There's a dull ache in my hip now
And it never goes away,
And when asked to elaborate
The smart *** Doctor wouldn't say.
Best of all were the apricots
On Fergie's green old tree,
And we kids would run and pinch the fruit
And gorge it all for free.
Oh the joy on my darlings face
In that wedding on the hill,
When tomorrow promised everything
And the very world stood still.
And I recall the starlings wheeling
In a sky of brilliant blue
As they flocked in tune with Autumn,
When the leaves were red in hue.
But I can't remember details now
The days are getting dim,
So it's hardly worth the effort
To try and share this all with him........

Marshalg
On the bench in the wan winter sunshine.
29 may 2011

Her voice swallowed me
Taking in all of me
Encapsulated , over taken
Shocked
Her voice had always rang true when she talked
She sung, and it rang, rung, round her truth
That I found, she was beautiful
Carrying her sweet song, like she carried everybody else
Full-heartedly, companionably
Completely, she can see me
And I laugh because she clearly can’t hear herself
See her…. self, because she likes
That I don’t hide, that I’m blind to delicate
Say it like it is
And that is why
I don’t lie
She is beautiful.

November is sweet, sunshine through bare trees, dry brown
      and fungus-free leaves companionably visiting among the
      dead
as I did yesterday our town's small graveyard military dads
      who recently died lie under polished stones embossed
      with actual photos of themselves and their wives
      flowers and plastic totems within a miniature picket fence
      overflowing with the emotions love and grieving of the
      living
beside or not far from simple wafer-thin old moss-covered
      stones on which I could not read the names.
Such peace I realized which may be found around any rock or
      tree has escaped me while I pursue my particular
      happiness and our particular war,
and such a blessing awaits me, too.

In he came, sat and smiled and warmly shook my hand.
Brought a pint of single malt from the dales of old England,
Sat, we did, on wooden chairs, fashioned in the way
Of craftsmen, then, from times of yore, when craftsmen had their day.
Spoke, we did, companionably. Spoke of simple things,
Of fire sides now dead and gone where Gypsy music rings.
Recalling all the good men who turned the wheels of toil
And fashioned work of quality and kept the engines oiled.
We supped the draught of warming malt with crinkles to the eye
And turned the glass of crystal cut in hands worn, undisguised,
Hands that once hauled heavy stone, hands that helped a smile,
Hands that stroked her silky face, just once in awhile.
Words now softly spoken with laughter now and then
But all the while the deep respect of deference to a friend.
A toast to all those dead and gone, then a final grip of steel,
With the knowledge that this finality's quiet moment, could be real.
We took our leave regretfully, we took our leave with grace,
For the sanction of those moments shared left warmth upon the face.

[email protected]
26 August 2023

“There’s nothing you wish for that won’t be yours
        if you stay alive.”  --Beowulf

Winter has arrived and the wind cuts through
the parking lot under the el in the Bronx,
streets stretch out in their directions, events
in their mere chronology have no relation.
Old friends face certain dissolution
with perplexity, comity and humor,
look with gay eyes on their future
in a forest or a city, someplace.
Snow outside, despair inside. Homelessness.
Raccoon tracks cross the soul. Prostatectomy.
Winter mix. Don’t relax. The difficult
dangerous season when weak creatures die
and the strong barely survive. Leave me alone
with autumn, an autumn like last autumn.
Don’t stand around my bed, I won’t be in it.

Jack’s in jail. His panic attacks are like
an AI on automatic pilot
who wants to live, just like the rest of us
under the eye of eternity or
running in new snow, loving that feeling.
Some people go dancing in fishnet stockings.
Effortless mastery, success without practice.
Fractals without chemistry. Do the small
things first, clean the house and bless the guests.
Sick of Krshna, sick of salad, sick of self.
Sick of meditation. As I lay dying
the full moon’s rising. My existence
is indivisible from the wry Creator’s.
I like the old Rhymer, his smile resplendent.
It’s Death, not the Jewish king, in your rose garden.

I ply my arts all day alone. All I have
is all I do not know. The past isn’t dead
it never even happened. Learn the changes
then forget them. Keep on learning and re-
learning them. Down the steep and icy trail
through hail and storm. Take into eternity
my hail and farewell. We’re living in the
Anthropocene. Indestructible garbage.
Bulldozed landscape. Big Brother, dead father.
***** of the tiger.  Getting thought to twitch
the prosthetic. Mischievous, malevolent,
militant thistles. Or just plain polite
Americans, afraid to get shot.
Bump bump bump down the igneous rocks of life,
take the boulders two at a time down.

Old-timers bagging groceries, low social
security for the security guard.
Situps, pushups, fix yr brakes, fix yr leaks.
I know what’s gonna happen before it happens.
Polar bear mugs wino exhausted by that earlier,
irritating, constant need to survive.
Surrounded by history, neither seen nor heard
from again. And a deaf mute in a pear tree.
If it’s human, nothing’s wasted. Pasted
into a big wet kiss or posted
on the internet. Stolen from the pockets
of the dead, burgled from living memory.
Most art is dispensable, ***** and *****,
vaginal lubrication, prostate enlargement,
the unknown, anonymous man named me.

I’ve been wrong before and I may be wrong now.
Things fall apart. Or maybe not. Maybe
it’ll all hold together 10,000 years more
after all we’ve observed a galaxy born
13 billion years ago, a faint red blur,
and microbe partnerships on the ocean floor.
The good life’s all around us smiling
girls on bicycles, dogs on leashes,
equality is mandatory.
Sweet solitude and privacy, quiet
sitting spot, write a little, read a lot.
Tip generously, gratuitously,
like good luck. Haircut, cabride, dinnerout,
to eat a continent is not so strange.
Does Jack even exist? I doubt it but

the class of transformations that could happen
spontaneously in the absence of knowledge
is negligibly small compared with the class
that could be effected artificially by
intelligent beings, aliens in the bleachers.
Japanese knotweed also known as kudzu.
The Chinese navy also known as t’ai chi.
Water shortages. War and wildfire.
What you’re scared of and what you love. Contracts
and deliverables. Hate speech, fate.
Humor or ardor, I can’t decide.
Dad’s steel-toed boots. Leaves, flowers, fruits.
Things are said, mistakes are made. I’m driving
pontificating on geopolitics
when an archangel flies into the windshield!

Lost my timepiece, lost my metronome.
Well, music is a manufactured crisis.
Caloric restrictions, control your addictions,
desire to be famous, propensity for violence.
The profusion of species contents me.
Wilderness comes back strong as cactuses,
chestnuts, coral. No more missile crises.
Eat less, an empty belly’s holy.
Horselum, bridelum, ridelum,
into the fray! World order—not my problem.
Only meditation can save your soul,
should there be such a thing. There are actual people
half woman half man running past me
and dream people in movies half language
half light. Or they lie under polished stones
embossed with actual photos of themselves.

Learning who you actually are is difficult
as sitting still 10 minutes w/o a thought or want.
To get lucky you gotta be careful first.
Knowledge of death without dying =
early retirement. Counting your blessings,
a healthy activity. No solution
to death’s finality, and such a blessing
awaits me, too. If you’re suicidal
they call the cops. The audience is full of glee.
Watres pypyng hoot. Chinese characters. Quantum guesses.
Most failures, and most successes, are in our future.
I embrace wild roots and run through streets
with arm around my girl. Inmate #427443.
Poetry and surgery—they go together
like a horse and buggy. Cheerful as a flock
of chickadees. Looking for a lost horse,
I hear Appalachian Spring!

Look one way, from another come the heart’s
missed beats. Much better to look slowly,
labor for the success and happiness
of others, even the old and frayed.
Look it up. There is no death, just perfect rest.
Look more closely. It will be gone in a few days!
First entertain, then enlighten if you can.
Is it stress? Yes. Tired of death? It’s what it is.
Let’s play sports, have ***, live a wonderful life,
give generously. If you see a hawk on a bough
at field’s edge beyond the corner you should have
turned, maybe it’s a sign to go on, alone.
No body, no soul. No mirror, no black hole.
No mission, no hero. No applause, no noise.
No experience, no nonsense. If words can
be arranged in any order can they be
of any use in foreign policy?

Disappointed, didn’t get what was wanted.
Forget me not, is that all I want?
A catbird account, a mockingbird account
and an owl account. Then, and only then,
nothing’s missing and nothing’s left over.
Jail or zen mountain monastery
hiphop artist hypnotist bebop trumpeter
unknown soldier black bear bad bladder
ice cold beer poker player wry Creator.
If not one way, then another. Otherwise
give me your 5-10 best hiphop artists. Can
they take the sting out of life like bluegrass, jazz?
Mimics, woodpeckers, sing-songers, hawks,
chippers and trillers, whistlers, name-sayers,
thrushes, owls and a dove, high pitchers,
wood warblers and a word-warbling wren.
Unusual vocalizations.

We have hope that everyone alive is
essential, consequential. The commonplace
and everyday is sanctified. Nothing else
special need be done but stay alive.
Don’t lose passport, don’t be late to airport.
Insects are pollinators, insects are us.
Romance without finance is a nuisance.
November, however, is sweet, sunshine
through bare trees, dry brown leaves companionably
visiting among the dead. When middle school lets out
at the periapsis of Earth’s orbit
that’s the face of joy. Each leaf out and Jack
in his boxers. If you run over a chipmunk,
a groundhog or a skunk, say a short prayer.
One can’t help being here, queynt.

I live in a state so blue there’s nothing I can do
to change man’s trajectory and if I could
what angle of re-entry or ascent
would I choose? Grace is what we get
no matter what. Come the tired end of day
Jack thinks why not waste time watching tv
but the next day he has a hangover
like Ernest Hemingway or **** Jagger.
Your soul is immortal. It exists outside
of time. It has no beginning and no end.
If you cannot accept this, forget it all,
do not even begin. It all goes into
the same church service and comes out babbling
for God to appear. The shorter the service
the better, less passion, more resistance. Joy
may outlast the holocaust. Get it while it lasts.

The material world is reality, my friend.
Reality is not always what we’re after.
I like Jack’s confidence, that working the problem
will result in better outcomes than guessing.
Confidence is the feeling you have
before you understand the situation.
A hawk hunting or just floating waiting
for inspiration, a heron rowing east,
an owl’s quiet hoot even simpler than
the pentatonic bamboo flute.
What’s not to like? Ice cream, yogurt, profit, tofu.
Mosquitoes this summer are relentless,
heat and humidity, merciless.
Ice will ice those little *******.
Killing time before it kills me. Ha ha.

Whatever forever. Poetry is plumbing
your unhappiness habit until you reach joy.
As I think of things to do I do them.
Thing by thing I get things done. I think
that’s how my father and his father did things, too.
“Away up high in the Sierry Petes
where the yeller pines grow tall, Ol’ Sandy Bob
an’ Buster Jig had a rodeer camp last fall.”
It is the older man’s responsibility
to protect, not as a hard-charging archangel,
Jack’s joints couldn’t stand it, or hero
but as a rational participant,
cool, caring and completely zeroed in.
Culture or religion is an answer to
the problem of what to do and why do it
when your cancer makes poetry from
losing the argument with yourself.

To die spiritually in the hot sun
and the body go on climbing, haunted,
hunted, nature’s intelligent partner.
People are the element I live in, or else.
Call for the elevator. Wait for the el.
Snow on the Sonoran, each saguaro
wearing a white yarmulke. Creosote
smell as snow melts, ocotillo buds out.
Man needs help from every creature born.
The blackbird contains death but it’s bigger than death.
It’s more like God but an ironical god.
Smaller and funnier than God, impossible
to regard directly, gotta look sideways,
aim binoculars left, right, up, down—
missing every time. There’s nothing you wish for
that won’t be yours if you stay alive.

He walked to the gate while the soft summer wind stirred the oak,
and the sun reflectively smiled in the ruts on the road,
to greet his brother Ted who’d languidly move across
so that Vic could companionably lean and look at their cattle
grazing under the Breckland pine, and reflect.

He drove his tractor and tended his fields,
enjoying the changing seasons but moaned about fen blows,
and unexpected showers which slowed the combine,
good naturedly grumbling with other farmers
about the price of fat cattle, the return on wheat,
and how many potatoes are in a packet of crisps,
when at Bury market on a Wednesday.

He’d sit to the left of the door of the Cricket Club
contentedly watching Lakenheath bat,
and readily smiled when they’d hit a six,
bringing his big brown hands together
to join in the ripple of applause.

He’d bring his prince of a Yorkshire to where
his grandchildren drooled ready for turkey
with all the trimmings, and fresh vegetables,
hearing the microwave hum, cooking the pudding
whose brandy sauce bit, before heading the evening games,
candidly laying a domino, announcing to all concerned
"Another fifteen."

He’d talk about the little black pony he drove as a youth
over top Maiden Cross Hill to Brandon,
with a cart full of produce, hating the finicky woman
who always made him eager for home.

He hoed his little bit of garden, and happily cut a lettuce for his tea,
another to pop round a neighbours' with a hand full of beans,
and a third to lay with the sack of spuds waiting for his children.

He watched the Weakest Link, and commented
on the stupidity of students, and foolish woman
wishing to spend a thousand on a handbag, and reckoned that:

“If there were more men like brother George,
who was straight and true, the world would be a better place.”

He laid in bed in the moonlight, listening
to golden oldies of yesteryear, and Victor Palmer,
the father of five, my dear Father, a gentle giant of a man,
a man of the soil, dreamed of his garden…