I’m thinking about how I shave my face because yesterday

I shaved my father’s for the first time. This sun’s going to rise

a little farther right now every day. Soon I will return

to my normal life in another city and the year will decay

in an orderly fashion. He gestured me to cut

off the mustache. I wouldn’t. Everybody I said, every

damn body should have a mustache. Life is trouble.

Later I strode out looking for the car: one who can

walks from the hospital. This mirror,

I can’t get it right. The edge of my eye

comes and goes, watering. After a while I know

the days will turn back and walk north. I try to do

what I’m told. My sneeze rings louder in my father’s house,

I pace his carpets on naked feet, one of his cigarettes

in my hand. All the machines there hum and glow,

warming up, ready with readouts.

Outside his window, here, a mockingbird

runs on for minutes without repeating, stops

to consider her options, runs it exactly through once more.

She does the wren, the crow, the creaking door.

The sun gives up and lets go of the horizon.

I turn the light off and the razor on,

get back to work on a face I know

even in shadow.

I once loved a boy with an iron hand.

He kissed me and he said:

Come for a walk on the old black path -

You can sit on my iron bed.

When I sat on his iron counterpane

He kneeled down before me and said:

Kathleen slip off your sensible shoes

And lie in my iron bed.

I’ll bring you whisky and silver,

A bird in an iron cage.

I’ll read you this poem and let you look

At the other side of the page.

It’s true I loved my iron man

From the depths of his iron bed.

I loved him and my life ran out

And I was left for dead.

I learned how his poem continued

On the far side of the page -

The hero could never distinguish

Tenderness from rage,

And locked me in the iron bed

From dawn till dead of night,

Mending children’s jerseys

While my coal-black hair turned white.

I gave him thirteen children

And ten were dead at birth.

Professor now you tell me how

To estimate my worth.

It’s true I loved my iron man

From the depths of his iron bed.

I loved him and my life ran out

And I was left for dead.

Lovers, all the drifting continents, are one

in the imagined world, Pangaea.

There, the hip of Africa

beats against the coast of Brazil.

Birds rain over the shared plains

of Eurasia and North America.

Mother, father. How long ago it seems.

Two hundred million years at least

since I left that fertile valley.

And still the sea floor is spreading,

setting my loved countries adrift.

Mapmaker, palm reader, I turn to you

and the ancients who seeing between

islands of stars, linked

like silversmiths

Andromeda, her Perseus.

What if   it were possible to vanquish

All this shame with a wash of   varnish

Instead of wishing the stain would vanish?

What if   you gave it a glossy finish?

What if   there were a way to burnish

All this foolishness, all the anguish?

What if   you gave yourself   leave to ravish

All these ravages with famished relish?

What if   this were your way to flourish?

What if   the self   you love to punish —

Knavish, peevish, wolfish, sheepish —

Were all slicked up in something lavish?

Why so squeamish? Why make a fetish

Out of everything you must relinquish?

Why not embellish what you can’t abolish?

What would be left if   you couldn’t brandish

All the slavishness you’ve failed to banish?

What would you be without this gibberish?

What if   the true worth of the varnish

Were to replenish your resolve to vanquish

Every vain wish before you vanish?

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

       The night above the dingle starry,

               Time let me hail and climb

       Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

               Trail with daisies and barley

       Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

       In the sun that is young once only,

               Time let me play and be   

       Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

               And the sabbath rang slowly

       In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

       And playing, lovely and watery

               And fire green as grass.

       And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

       Flying with the ricks, and the horses

               Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

       Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

               The sky gathered again

       And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

       Out of the whinnying green stable

               On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

       In the sun born over and over,

               I ran my heedless ways,

       My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

       Before the children green and golden

               Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

       In the moon that is always rising,

               Nor that riding to sleep

       I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

               Time held me green and dying

       Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

I became a human bee at twelve.

when they gave me my small wand,

my flask of pollen,

and I walked with the other bees

out to the orchards.

I worked first in apples,

climbed the ladder

into the childless arms of a tree

and busied myself, dipping and

tickling, 

duping and tackling, tracing

the petal’s guidelines

down to the stigma.

Human, humming, 

I knew my lessons by heart:

The ovary would become the fruit,

the ovule the seed,

fertilised by my golden touch,

my Midas dust.

I moved to pears,

head and shoulders

lost in blossom; dawn till dusk,

my delicate blessing.

All must be docile, kind. unfraught

for one fruit -

pomegranate, peach 

nectarine, plum, the rhymeless 

orange.

And if an opening bud

was out of range,

I’d jump from my ladder onto a

branch

and reach.

So that was my working life as a bee,

till my eyesight blurred,

my hand was a trembling bird

in the leaves,

the bones of my fingers thinner than

wands.

And when they retired me,

I had my wine from the silent vines,

and I’d known love,

and I’d saved some money  -

but I could not fly and I made no

honey.

‘If you could just keep going in a straight line’ –

Said my father, innocent of Einstein,

As we walked home one night of winter stars –

‘You’d come at last to somewhere where there was

Nothing at all. I mean, there has to be

A last star, and what then?’ This troubled me.

That night in bed I travelled in my mind

Through stars that whirled like snowflakes in the wind

Until I found, beyond one last faint glow,

A blank, like morning fog outside my window.

I woke and cried, but when my father came

To ask what ailed me, was it some old dream,

Sobbed ‘Nothing!’, so was left to sleep again

Like the blind Cyclops in his cave of pain.

Later I learned: my father had it wrong:

All lines bend back at last, however long.

There is no end to the great blizzard of light

I’d like to tell him now, and so I might

Had he not journeyed on, to somewhere far

Beyond all words of mine, and any star.

Then I heard your breathing quicken,

whisper past my ear like the first

inquisitive gust of a storm on the roof,

and saw darkness press through the curtains,

mass there like burdened clouds, and felt

your fingers open in sleep on my shoulders,

settle close as the first snow lining the ground,

and a dream flicker across your eyelids,

swift as the switch of dry leaves in the wind,

and slowly your sleep deepened, gathered,

filled the room, calm as the great feathery flakes

that spin and land, weightless, one on the other,

and your arm loosened around me, suddenly,

as a branch will yield and shed its shelf of snow,

and your head drooped, filled the curve of my neck,

just as a drift might shift, and all night

your fingers brushed my skin, steadily changing

everything, like the levelled white we saw

in the morning, the lawn expectant as an empty page.

A step taken, and all the world’s before me.

The night so clear

stars hang in the low branches,

small fires riding through the waves of a thin atmosphere,

islands parting tides as meteors burn the air.

Oysters powder to chalk in my hands.

A flying fox swims by and an early

memory unfolds: rocks

on the shoreline milling the star-fire.

its fragments fall into place, the heavens

revealing themselves

as my roots trail

deep nets between channel and

shoal, gathering in

the Milky Way, Gemini - 

I look all about, I search all around me.

There’s a gale in my hair as the mountains move in.

I drift over lakes, through surf breaks

and valleys, entangled of trees - 

unseemly? On the edge or place inverted

from Ocean starts another place,

its own place - 

a step back and my love’s before me

the memory ash - we face each other alone now,

we turn in the rushing tide again and again to each other,

here between swamp-flower and star

to let love go forth to the world’s end

to set our lives at the centre

though the tide turns the river back on itself

and at its mouth, Ocean.

The weight of a man on a woman

is like falling into the river without drowning.

Above, the world is burning and fighting.

Lost worlds flow through others.

But down here beneath water’s skin,

river floor, sand, everything

is floating, rocking.

Water falls through our hands as we fall through it.

And when a woman and a man come up from water

they stand at the elemental edge of difference.

Mirrored on water’s skin,

they are fired clay, water evaporating into air.

They are where water turns away from land

and goes back to enter a larger sea.

A man and a woman are like those rivers,

entering a larger sea

greater than the sum of all its parts.

It seemed the kind of life we wanted.

Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.

Sunlight in every room.

The two of us walking by the sea naked.

Some evenings, however, we found ourselves

Unsure of what comes next.

Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,

With birds circling over our heads,

The dark pines strangely still,

Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

We were back on our terrace sipping wine.

Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?

Clouds of almost human appearance

Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely

With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.

The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.

You lighting a candle, carrying it naked

Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.

The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

Somewhere beyond the railheads

Of reason, south or north,

Lies a magnetic mountain

Riveting sky to earth.

Kestrel who yearly changes

His tenement of space

At the last hovering

May signify that place.

Iron in the soul,

Spirit steeled in fire,

Needle trembling on truth –

These shall draw me there.

The planets hold their course,

Blindly the bee comes home,

And I shall need no sextant

To prove I’m getting warm.

Near that miraculous mountain

Compass and clock must fail,

For space stands on its head there

And time chases its tail.

There’s iron for the asking

Will keep all winds at bay,

Girders to take the leaden

Strain of a sagging sky.

O there’s a mine of metal

Enough to make me rich

And build right over chaos

A cantilever bridge.

This is a reachable coast:

the cliff, though it unscrolls

the modest curve of a buttress 

is no young Atlas, 

and doesn’t presume to try 

to shoulder up the sky;

and the sky itself, 

translucent as a harebell, 

pales, but will not disclose 

the point at which it wavers 

into an immortelle 

of gases, stars.

The pillboxes, rust-brown, 

ask to be picnicked on;

no patriotic gull 

wooingly calls 

the farmboys to enlist.

These desultory ghosts

that feed the air again 

must be their grandchildren 

who never went to the Somme, 

Dunkirk or Spain, 

but locked the silos full 

of missile-grain.

Visions, like meadow-blues, 

are dust in the hand, 

seeds where the grass thins 

to light, and the cliff 

perishes, chalk and sand:

this is a coast of bones.

What remains is a view:

the cliff upswept from the beach 

and the drying threads of the mere, 

lifting whitely two 

crumbling wings – on which 

other wings briefly appear.

Mist can be a form of mercy,

all precision gone, all detail lost.

Cataracted hawks hunt woods

for motion-blur, then stoop

into the slipstream of their prey.

I pray for days like these,

when cars are lit cortèges.

As for oceans, fog is respite

from the ache of holding surface

as a clear line named horizon.

Forensic summer gone, now we

live in close-up: flaked face of brick

frostbitten, verdigris and icicles

on statues. A world drawn tight.

Look up: stars are gone. It’s just us.

It mounts at sea, a concave wall

     Down-ribbed with shine,

And pushes forward, building tall

     Its steep incline.

Then from their hiding rise to sight

     Black shapes on boards

Bearing before the fringe of white

     It mottles towards.

Their pale feet curl, they poise their weight

     With a learn’d skill.

It is the wave they imitate

     Keeps them so still.

The marbling bodies have become

     Half wave, half men,

Grafted it seems by feet of foam

     Some seconds, then,

Late as they can, they slice the face

     In timed procession:

Balance is triumph in this place,

     Triumph possession.

The mindless heave of which they rode

     A fluid shelf

Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed,

     Loses itself.

Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals

     Loosen and tingle;

And by the board the bare foot feels

     The suck of shingle.

They paddle in the shallows still;

     Two splash each other;

Then all swim out to wait until

     The right waves gather.