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heart

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

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!