THE HARE AND THE STONE
And suddenly she is a hare, eyes bursting
with fear. Her husband snaps her neck. Fingers
smell of tea towels and dust. Their son gobbles
at her nipples, his father’s eyes unfocused.
She dreads the key in the lock. Sometimes,
she wakes to find him thrusting at her crotch.
She is a hare, paralysed on a cold,
edgeless ground…Even through windows stuck fast
with paint, dust whispers, gathering on lips.
If, like a surgeon, she were to cut him,
she would lay bare a pebble, smooth as glass,
nudging his heart. It is his ambition
sometimes to be a stone.
AMBITION
…autumn from the train…empty parks washed
in melancholy greens…slow smoke of leaves…
a Wendy House toppled…motorists,
on an underpass, stopped for the blue flash
of a passing emergency…doctor
and priest jostling beside the newly born
mess of humanity, head ballooning
with water, back cleaved, a tangle of entrails
and heart booming like presses: the measure
of our compassion…hospitals, chapels,
mills aspiring to grey horizons…
from the train, things in themselves – fallen
leaves, a tumbled playhouse…
THE MATTER OF THE HEART
A cardio-vascular consultant
told me I had subtle abnormalities
of the heart: a tendency, possibly,
to soften too readily, be swayed
too easily, feed on fantasy, harden
like the Pharaoh’s; be of kings, of lead, of oak,
of darkness; bleed for my country, belong
to Daddy; be a lonely hunter;
be displayed on my sleeve; be in my mouth,
in the Highlands, left in ‘Frisco, buried
at Wounded Knee; like Luther’s, who feared his
was like a ship upon a stormy sea
driven by winds from heaven’s four corners.
THE HEART’S TESTIMONY
I am a gumshoe tailing mortality,
a shammus staking out history,
death’s sleuth. The past has bequeathed itself,
its deceiving legacy of meanings.
Here is the evidence, thronging the cramped,
provincial streets – the line of a wall,
family remembrance, an ancient name.
Before terraces and villas, before
canal and railway, under pavements
and metalled roads, beneath fields is lost heathland,
a forsaken brook. There are only stones
and ghosts and the heart’s testimony – childhood,
ambition, emptiness.
FIDO
Once, when she was very small, a dream woke me.
Dawn, iron cages, a tiger and the eager,
little zoo keeper reaching out to pat it…
She slept soundly, her menagerie too:
balding princess, purblind bear, Mummy –
though not Daddy now nor, in the garden, Fido.
Oozing kapok, hair eroded by
loving, his one eye tarnished but keen like
small expectations, he kept faith by the swing.
Love’s unreason maintained such shabbiness –
and left him out all night. Barefooted,
I fetched him in by the handle. How love’s
confusion aches the heart!