Fen
Ravens come: not in what we hear or read
but taste within
ourself unseen; mother smell, new baked bread,
a lorn of lemon cakes, too hot for thin
fingers resting on wire in sunlight.
How fat we should be were nostalgia real
and how toothlessly sweet. It bites as sharp
as the rasp of them that grip now so tight
and snarl at any who dare sin to feel
their past, your past; raven bargain's: smart
like spit...
Oh how I loved those Sunday walks
down lanes so lazy they made no bend,
when we would as a family talk
and say 'hello' to strangers and to friends.
Like spit we taste the past upon our tongue
and on our lips,
almost as an insult of that we long
to be. How seductive a story is
when the hero is someone facing hope
full in the face without our faults. Always
somewhere to go. Today birch shimmers
like children talking, the leaves catch the sun
and in the evenness of nothing says
watch the raven's eye, see how it glimmers
like spit....
At the level crossing gate when passing trains
made us wait, I reveled in the thunderous shake,
as I waved in the wake of skimming faces
and fought my sister to raise the latch.
There were always magpies on the tar-papered roof
of the crossing keepers lean-to. Watching the line.
Watching for the carrion swept aside by the London train.
The birds were fat, and fierce enough to fight the rats
that riddled the sandy bank, that ran into the flat
infinity of fields and sky, that almost made the track
into a ladder. They paced their perch like grenadiers,
shimmered blue in the half-hopped turn, then eel black
and milk, as they cocked their head to watch again.
On the table by the filigree gate, lay carrots bunched
by rubber bands, with silk haired roots like puppet strings
and round their crown a purple taint, potatoes bearing
soily eyes, cabbages still wet with dew, and parchment
skinned yellow onions hardened by the late spring frost.
I would wish the birds good morning, and count them
hoping for a boy, and eye the sweating gooseberries
veined within their poly-bags. Always on a Wednesday
we made this occasional trip, sometimes on bicycles
but mostly on foot, to this whitewashed house on the edge
of the world. So plain it was, four windows and a door,
with a rose bush by the lean-to, and lavender in the borders.
But what kept my fingers crossed, in the eye-spy of the walk,
was that the whiskery woman who tended to the gates,
for tractors and the doctors car, would come out
to take the money, and from her apron pockets feed me
liquorice.
.............
Third Party
Please ignore my age, my receding hair,
beneath these teeth I'm debonair;
take my hand and I'll take you there
on a dirty weekend in Brighton
Across this partition my love has grown
whilst settling insurance claims by phone:
if not Brighton - Nice or Rome
would be the place for us.
You really are the sweetest thing
I'll rent an MG, wear threads and bling
and if the hotel has Karaoke I will not sing
Sweet Caroline - a song I know you hate.
Oh please Miss Munt ,Oh please Miss Munt
I will not to rhyme your name with pudendum
I know I am a terrible runt
but I promise to change my underpants.
Your centre parting, the top of your head,
your glimpsed camisole lace, my lust has fed.
You, in your headset, I dream of in bed
whilst sleeping with my wife.
......
Return
They used to hang bodies over the black-water creek;
picked bodies of picked men, their entrails pulled
by the birds in greedy jerks. The dead glass eyes watching
over and out to the waves and the clouds:
or with a twist of wind, or the collapse of a gull tugged neck,
those same dead eyes might turn back, to the landward
from which they came, a week or so before.
We step across to the sand, as through a rent veil
which locks out the sound of the marsh, and the traffic.
These riddled sands, caught between the turning tide
in expanse, hold only ourselves and the wind.
We do not look back, but sometimes down
to the dry, to the empty, to the occasional shell still sealed.
We do not look back, too tempted by the coldness of the sea.
On each ripple dies a star, combed clean as morning.
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