Category Archives: The Shoreline of Falling

Curve and Swoop

The air is cooler now, the summer gone,
the old estate begins to store its shadows
and the pond is quiet among the trees.

Do curve and swoop remain
when the swifts have flown?

The arcs of cardiograph and church’s door
are in the meteor’s final flare,
yet the eye looks back across the dusk

and far beyond: the trajectory’s
still there, reaching back to the moment
the pebble’s wandering began.

The walls of the old house have vanished now,
but the rooms, which were the spaces in between,
remain, floating high above me in the evening air.

I think of those who lived their lives up there,
their griefs and fireside laughter, arguments and loves:
now a sunset in the distance and a scented breeze.

I feel their presence in the autumn woods,
the way the fallen drops are there
in the stillness of a fountain pool.

And as I wonder how they yet persist,
I feel cool fingers brush my face,
their flesh the stuff of curve and swoop.
Bees

Homewards, I pass our local monastery,
small windows pour light onto the dark:
monks in contemplation in their cells.
As I reach my home and turn the key,
the town winks out behind my back.

I love the winter power-cuts, when I dream of bees
and the summer days I sunbathe in the garden,
nostalgic then for winter ghosts and hearth-fires,
and all around the drone among the flowers:
a gathering in before the days begin to cool.

In the kitchen, I strike matches; candles blaze.
Then spread thick slices with the glinting bronze
dripped from autumn’s cloistered honeycombs,
whose wax like solid silence lifts the light:
a dozen summers on the candles’ lips.
Giuseppe

My Uncle Giuseppe told me
that in Sicily in World War Two,
in the courtyard behind the aquarium,
where the bougainvillea grows so well,
the only captive mermaid in the world
was butchered on the dry and dusty ground
by a doctor, a fishmonger, and certain others.

She, it, had never learned to speak
because she was simple, or so they’d said,
but the priest who held one of her hands
while her throat was cut,
said she was only a fish, and fish can’t speak.
But she screamed like a woman in terrible fear.

And when they took a ripe golden roe
from her side, the doctor said
this was proof she was just a fish
and anyway an egg is not a child,
but refused when some was offered to him.

Then they put her head and her hands
in a box for burial
and someone tried to take her wedding ring,
but the others stopped him,
and the ring stayed put.

The rest they cooked and fed to the troops.
They said a large fish had been found on the beach.

Starvation forgives men many things,
my uncle, the aquarium keeper, said,
but couldn’t look me in the eye,
for which I thank God.

Miss Johnson

Miss Johnson sat on the palms of my hands,
inside a membrane that I peeled away.
She was a bit like a plucked hen,
her head was the size of a plum
and she wore her wattles like a hat.

There was nothing of the fairy about her,
she was vulnerable, but had no delicacy.
I gave her the little room under the stairs,
where she slept on a cushion in an old wicker basket
and used a lace hankie to cover herself.

She was fond of müsli and grapes
with croutons fried in bacon fat,
and she drank her milk from an eggcup.
Once, I disturbed her toilet under a buddleia
and felt ashamed. She liked to watch television,
especially old John Wayne films, which made her laugh,
even when John was being serious.

She stayed with me for more than a year,
then went off one day with a salesman
and I never saw her again.
Sometimes I use her eggcup at breakfast
and remember the times we shared.
I hope she’s all right.
First Love

When I was a boy cycling home from school
on evenings in late summer when the drizzle fell,
I would stop and walk naked in an ancient wood I had to pass —
warm pools and sopping leaves beneath my feet,
scents of wet earth and early fungus on the air—
until I reached a certain tree-trunk lying on its side,
barkless and smooth as bone, luscious with dark slime.

Such excitements I had there, gripping the tree with my legs,
tight with blood, sliding slowly, my mind conjuring
the creature that dwelt within; her smiles and textures:
tangles of fine roots stinking of leaf-mould,
dark fruit heavy in the hands,
a sticky trumpet flower, its stamen a thick curl,
bright pollen crusting on my groin.

Later, my body washed in the soft rain, I dressed
and cycled furiously home to mum, for hot tea and brown eggs,
that I opened like the summer with my spoon.
Lay my Corpse

Lay my corpse, lax and lilied, beneath a willow,
so its roots can lap and suck at me
and draw me up its stem like spring
pouring green onto the pooling brilliance of the grass.
Or fix that I be fed to swans, or maybe geese,
and flying far from winter’s deathy chill,
upon the gusting muscles of the air,
alight at last in deepest Africa:
the strange-familiar origin of things,
where bright among the pawpaws, figs and lemons,
wings are neither grey nor white
but many coloured, like the child of rain and sunlight,
and where the conversations of the laughing dead
sway like all the weeping willows of the world.
Rosa

The scent of crushed geranium leaves
always made me feel old ghosts watched close by.
Such memories! Or one with many parts:
nostalgia in her armpits, bruised nipples, filthy
bare feet on the bleached rungs climbing
down from the tree, with swollen plums
like evening in the basket at her hip.

How much of it was really like that?
What later loves have reordered memory?
Pain strips cloud from those chilly suns,
lengthens the thigh, touches it
with a darker, sweeter-scented bronze.

This bad old life is flickering, fading, light
as the scent of leaves broken under her dissolute heel.
How many old men keep her walking there still,
singing in that summer when we loved her so? Paradise
shut in a universe of shrivelled, dying flesh.

What will become of her when we are dust
and only live in other’s minds?
Our memories will have shaped
what they saw of us and will recall.
So perhaps, unseen, she’ll still be there,
shaping what we’ll be then with a gentle touch,
as she touched the words of the song she sang
with the length of the silence in between.
The Uncles

I used a pin of mistletoe
to unbubble a group of seated men,
who smelled of pipes and musky tweed
and tied small bones with the hair of dolls.

‘These are the bones of yourself as a bird
and we are your cupboard uncles.
We will guide you down the ways of life,
taking the roles of all your loves
and show you joy and the hard in red
to make you forget your sins in cloud.
Now, my dear, it’s two o´clock,
time for nuts and scented oil.’

But I saw that they had the gaze of owls
and midnight crouched in their horny smiles,
so I fled to the house by a shadeless route
and stamped in every sky-filled pool,
surrounding myself with suns in drops.

Now ravens walk on the distant lawns
and discharge their calls in the moving air,
and still I see in the looking-glass
the unfortunate whistling face.