After sunset

A head torch does no good in this - the rain, pooled

in footprints, reflects the gloam more brightly than my bulb,

and it’s footsteps I must follow now, the last half mile

before the coming tide and slipping light embarrass me.

Nor can I chart the harbour’s sounds clearly enough:

the road’s hum meets and mingles in the air with the soft alarm

of beating wings, the flocks settling and starting up,

looking for their piece of night. The voices spin together

like two kestrels clashing in mid air then pirouetting

down towards the marsh. And then I see that glow on the horizon,

so much brighter than these few houselights tinkling the waves:

the town’s crown flares above the trees. Though it is not burning

the clouds have caught its flames in a black sky.

This beacon draws me back against myself,

back towards the day as all else swirls to night.

Is this because I share with it a fellowship? We are both

infiltrators, stepping out to where we’re tolerated, and not loved,

and that allowance only because, for clouds as much as

shelducks and redshanks, there is no dialogue, no talking back;

yet just as neither of us should be where we are, so much less

do we care to take our places in the dark.

And then there is that other thing I know,

that if I’d never left the city, if indeed we all went back,

we unnecessary twitchers in the mud, and rent ourselves

from wigeons’ calls and migratory visitors

there’d be no footsteps here for me to follow,

and no footsteps fencing rings around their ghetto in the dusk.

Receipt

The dish water is inked a thin maroon

from coffee and rabbit’s blood, the colour

of a winter tree at sunset. The butcher told me

it had been wild, not farmed. I took this from him

with my change and I was pleased.

Tonight the deer are away again,

through the window as the mist unspools

and I think as always at this time

of the headless carcase on the lane.

I wonder if they’ve left me on their own

or whether they were killed as I know happens

here for sport, though not by licence and not

in daylight. Some nights if you can’t sleep

you hear the cars in the field. Part of me hopes

that this is how it went, that the body

was one of many, and they haven’t gone

to other gardens, others’ lanes,

to bring blessings on the homes of my neighbours

like the shadowy little gods of evening that they are.

Holiday

How long do you think it would take

to get used to this? This after waking late,

ten minutes past eight, into the third hour of the day.

The light that hung in dust and sprays of roses

shamed us into memory of the old man, his brushed

steps and the crack he’d eased through at dawn

so as not to wake us, up to tend the new born goats,

suckered into being and now proclaiming

the awful brightness of the day to the valley walls.

We had no excuse to rise so late. On a farm

with one electric light there is no place for carousing,

and anyway we’d left dinner quick - if only to escape

the silence, the shadowed sight of a hunched and

toothless man in a face-off with a bowl of rice,

Hugo’s slow translation of how each brick

was carried here by horse, the woman watching

and not eating. People learn to lend their lives

to what’s in front of them, I said, brushing

ten hours’ sleep from my eyes, before we rode

on hired horses away from paradise to fish.

When Odysseus fell off his horse (v.2)

When Odysseus fell off his horse

in the courtyard dust, nobody laughed.

As waves of miniature tsunami tickled

the sides of the water trough, not a stir

in the stable boy, tying and untying

nooses in the shed. Nor did the waiting-girl,

whose aberrant back he’d lashed once more

that morning, work up a smirk

when he tripped on dizzy feet and landed

face first in the shit. In fact, nothing moved

at all. The air hovered still as a bubble

as he got up and dusted down his thighs.

Then one noise - a slow and careful tearing,

a scalpel slit in the sphere of time, and then

a sucking, a taking-in of truth to the hot dark forge

of his throat. Here his life was melted down

and recast into tales for others spaces, other halls,

where he told his waiting audience of how

he galloped Polydorus’ strong backed stallion

to fetch the raging boar and have it home

for dinner. And you, the listener,

don’t see any hint of this sly industry;

lulled, then hooked, you don’t catch a thing

but his mouth, his grin and his tongue

carving up a tale with the sharpness

of a fishwife’s blade, as she guts bass

and tosses the dark innards to the dogs and gulls

whose rabid beaks always look like laughter.

Lines

You thought that it was best

to watch it die and so we went

slowly because otherwise the gauchos

would laugh at us (they laughed

anyway) running up to see a death

so by the time we arrived it was

in between. It jangled on its chain

like how wool on a barbed wire fence

dances in the wind except that this

was making its own motion

                                    

and then they cut its throat and it moved

about the same before they started

skinning it was it dead you asked of course

I said how should I know I said it was

just twitching nerves like when you kill

a fish but either way how much is there

to all this I didn’t say that out loud

though I could see in the others it was clearer

in the corral next to it the sheep were shaking

the sheep were watching all this shaking.