Author Archives: adminPF

The Fish

My grandfather on my mother’s side
was a great fisherman.
Though I didn’t share his passion,
I would go and sit beside him by the river,
my float drifting, hook unbaited,
catching nothing, reading Homer,
while he seemed to swirl beside me: a djinn
inside a flashing silver weave
of fin and ruby blood, in love
with every living moment of the day.

I was far away when he died
and missed the funeral, but later, by his grave,
I watched my grandmother
stand alone against a darkening sky,
and knew that unseen down below
he was part of the curving world
that supported her as she stood there,
and also when she walked away.

Six months later, I saw him once:
a fish from the neck down,
lazily swimming between the reeds,
wrapped up in his own thoughts.
He didn’t see me
and I was able to watch him feeding on insects
for several precious minutes.
Then, with a dull gold flick of his tail
and a smile on his face,
he went from my life forever.
The Iron House

She opened the door and the dead
child stood lisping on the porch, its hands
unable to grip the bell, its voice too weak to call.

The day before St Mårten’s, she carefully peeled away
the crisp white paper from the plump flesh
of the best goose her money could buy,
and cooked a feast, which she put in a hamper
with linen, silver and rich red wine.
Then she walked through the woods to the iron house,
with the hamper steaming on her back.
Above she heard the slow propeller of the island geese
as they went in search of the lost summer.

No one liked the iron house: a corrugated metal shed,
storehouse for the island’s winter waste. Each spring
when the flies appeared, grim men came from Värmdö
and scooped it like an egg, and it remained an empty shell
until the coming of the ice, until the flies were dead again.

The door seemed so hard to open, she was afraid
it was jammed, but it sprung open suddenly
and a stench of rotting whined in her head,
as light like grease slid in beside her.
A mob of grubby refuse bags
leaned against the dirty walls,
still and open-mouthed.

She spread the cloth on the concrete floor,
laid out the meal, poured the wine, then slammed the place
back into a cube of dark, and locked it with the bolt.

This was where they’d found one of the girls the previous year,
her limbs burst by frost, foetal and dry behind the bolted door.
The other child was never seen again.

She hurried homeward through the trees, the light
was failing fast: darkness had leaked out of the iron house
and spread into the sky. Reaching her cottage,
she lit the lamps and put the kettle on the stove,
but as she drew the curtains, she felt a surge of vertigo,
as if her home had made a quarter turn and she might fall
through the window in the floor.

Her breath was the only sound in the world,
till something walked down the cottage door.
Amber

Insects dream in their vaults of amber
around her parchment neck.
The atmosphere has preserved her
for nearly three hundred years.

She lies on her shelf as one asleep,
lonely in her ancient lace.
I think of lilies growing on dark waters,
petals closed for night;

see myself as a pallid stranger,
intruding suddenly at her side,
in her chamber under the earth
of a monastery garden shrill with birds,

set in a curve of summer day.
The dreamer is inside
the dream, but the dream
is inside the dreamer.
Fiddler’s Croft

We stood in silence in his croft,
as he swayed upon a three-legg'd stool,
in the whiskey-hues of hearth-light
and from his fiddle tore an air,
so low and wistful and so lost,
as to deepen every down-turned eye
and stir the sorrows in the rain.

And Old Nan mumbling on her bench,
who once could blow on knots and sink a ship,
or make a hermit fall in love,
cracked a vacant ruined grin,
unlocked the silver in her throat
and sang the moonlight on a river.

And we the gathered island dead,
all crammed together in the flicker
among the rafters and the drying fish,
between the sacks and well-worn tools,
did not move or moan or give a cry,
to see how song can make a world
from the trash of memory that remains.

Now with the fading of the night,
we're gone like frost-thorns from the pane
and Nan and John are left alone.

In truth there is no heaven yet above,
but hours like these are living things
that minister softly to our needs:
for we ourselves are unheard songs,
that lying out here in the dark,
await the singer who will come
and sing us on his golden tongue.

Auntie

When mummy died, daddy married auntie.
She said she'd loved him from the very first
and since she'd known her sister inside out,
would make a fine new mum for us.
She'd even been there at the accident,
when mum was looking down at her new shoes
and didn't see the truck in time.

Once when auntie was cooking dinner,
she told us how pretty mum had been,
how men had always had an eye for her,
though she dressed too much in flirty stuff.
Then auntie took a package from the fridge,
and said that mum had made herself a shroud
when she was young, in preparation for her death.

Then she pulled away the white wrappings
and exposed the pale thighs and young breasts,
and filled the bird with sticky cherry.
Came in very handy that did, she said,
bending down with the roasting tin.
We put her in it for her cremation,
she really looked her best just then, she grinned,
as the oven door clicked shut.
On Hearing that the Bees are Dying Out

That last summer I helped Billy
clear out his dead gran's meagre house.
And there amid the leavings of her life,
found rows of richness on a shelf,

all glowing in their stoppered glass,
like memories of summers gone:
lavender water, otto of rose,
scents of lily and blossom of peach,

mimosa essence and daffodil,
all once garnered mote by mote,
from blooms that coloured fields and hills.
Billy said she'd hoped to meet a man,

to replace his grandpa who had died so young,
she said she'd wear this stuff for him,
as they danced as one beneath the moon;
but no man came, and she died alone.

We shouldn't throw all this away I said,
it's like a hope for distant days, for something good,
so many flowers grew that this might be——
Plenty more where that came from he said,

and broke apart the ancient seals,
then held the bottles high above the sink
and let love's sweetness run away,
into the dark among forgotten things.
Ghostwood

The wild-wood seemed empty when we were young,
a doorstep Eden to my friend and me,
as we cycled dusty paths and rabbit tracks

through halls of mottled gold and whispering green.
Our stones torpedoed the old mill pond, where dragonflies
were mother-ships to wasps and water-boatmen.

Or we'd creep through ruined houses thick with black webs:
the warm remains of recent fires in the hearths,
bottles strewn by soiled blankets on the floor.

While the woods conjured fungus or primrose,
ghosts arrived in the sudden silences of birds
and in the goose-flesh touch of unseen eyes

that watched from mote-filled prisons of the sun.
But one afternoon, as teatime neared
and we pushed our bikes homeward up a hill,

a man stepped out of the trees and said:
I'll let you into the greatest secret: and out sprang
a thing with a neck like a forearm,

ghost-white from having been kept in the dark,
as he zipped apart his groin's black fruit.
Then he walked along beside us murmuring

how he'd seen us breaking windows with stones
and holding hands, but would never tell.
And all the while that living length nodded closer

and its hooded eye regarded us:
You can touch it if you want.
Then he stood and watched us walk away,

and gravely Peter turned to me and said:
I don't want to play here any more,
and I agreed; there were other places we could go.

But later I returned,
cycling urgently for miles down the summer dusk,
to be folded into that astounding dark.

The Child

We fell in love when we were eight,
our child was born when we were nine:
a tiny thing with gnarled black teeth,
a rough grey beard and rosy cheeks.

It grew up to keep a hive of imps,
behind the shack where it lived alone;
it said their honey made for healthy skin
and bottled it in jars from bins,
and stacked it up in racks of gold.

Then it heard about the gorgons
who, shunned and ugly, cry for love
with every mouth of their writhing heads
and never know its gentle touch,
as they ever-spin in loneliness.

And every night it combed its beard
and carefully washed its lovely skin
and brushed its tar-black teeth, and felt
ashamed to know such suffering
and turn away like any coward,
while it piled up facial honey.

One market day it sold it all
and even tried to sell the imps.
It bought a rose in a purple pot,
a box of chocolates called Romance
and a wedding ring of real gold,
then headed for the station.

We used to laugh that if the gorgon
ever got to see it coming,
with its hopeless smile, its rose bush and its chocs,
she’d hide until it went away.
We’d imagine it asking for directions
and shake our heads in mock despair.

But that was many years ago
and now a silence stands here all the time,
like something died and the fault was ours,
and every day we have to pass
that awful shack and the burned-out hive.

What use is a stinking gorgon anyway?
It is us our baby loves, not some thing.
Please tell us, do you have some news?
We’re frightened and we want it home;
but only if it comes alone.

A Plate of Holes

It’s nothing, just a plate of holes,
standing on a disc of lace,
their yellows, greens and russet reds,
their scents of breezes and the sun:
they wait there quiet as unborn souls,
unheard music, tears unshed.

And I sit still before the plate
and think of how I miss you love:
those times before I laid you down,
before the world was full of holes.

Remember all the plans we had,
the promises I made to you:
those pearls still lie below the sea
and dream forever in their shells.
The Shadow Garden

The tink and hoo of the singing birds
draws you to a park of shining glass domes.
There between the ancient lawns
and the distant archipelagos of cloud,

is a pouring upward of the trees
that hides the secret summonings of birds.
And when their songs cut loose your sight
and light the silver candles in your head,

you’ll tiptoe down a shadow path
to the garden beneath an old tin lid,
where in a haven of murmuring green,
where no rivers flow or oceans swell,

a pale queen suckles a milk-white lamb,
her nipple like a rose in its hairy mouth,
while seething back and forth in a bobbing tide,
choirs of robins scream like drops of blood.