In Case the Distances Do Not Meet

Somewhere I have left my bicycle, between a memory of blue and the hidden shades of childhood dreams. There was always a song there and the adult language and the Bible to tip you over and language muttering between closed doors and the flood of windows. Priests flood the memory and teachers who wished they were inventors and the names of the fabulous dead who made love between meaning and discovery and what was hidden behind alphabets and poetry and secret gardens and the discipline of turn ups and Sunday best and spit and polish and boys who went to wars as if that was what they were born for. Somewhere I have left my bicycle between nettles and the polite laughter of uncles and the sighs of fathers and the days when it snowed for a week and one went out into the garden to meet Scott in his tent of death and read the last diary entry and looked into the minds of those who were still waiting for nightingales and cliff top winds and the keys to gates of secret forests.

Letter to Alice Sebold

And when you get to heaven there must be

others there who you don’t quite remember,

who could be works of fiction because the

dead are so inventive and never quite let go,

and these beings are also there in the head

and heart and spirit, and there will also be

music and sequences of light and views of

things that are now ruins on earth but which

arrive here in minds and memories so that

you can keep visiting, restoring, reviving,

and some of these things that were simple

now become poetry. Isn’t this so, isn’t this

the heaven we get and the other things just

at the edge, the things that can only arrive

when you forgive, the figures that God has

let in but they are beyond your knowledge,

they are waiting to become your eternal idea

as if there is more and more to come, as if

you kept entering an evening of your sixth

year and you open the bedroom door and

downstairs they are all looking up at you

in their hundreds and thousands but each

one real and knowing you and telling you

and each one of them before they do their

lies and terrors and screw up their beauty?

Isn’t this so as they begin to move towards

your space in heaven and you realise that

there is something else you have to lay to

rest between the light and the poetry and

the things that once made up your life?

This Poem Has Not Been Written Yet

                                                                                         - Hart Crane

It’s about expectation. Not what the words might say as statements but their arrangements, the journey between vocabulary and meanings and the spur behind the writing ordeal, halted by another person’s words which may be real or imagined, the collapsing surface like a series of skies or dazzling horizons, so that between these leaps of light and recognition a new situation surprises us, the edge attracts, the impulse to be beyond discovery. And beyond, you tell yourself, beyond there has to be the poem that has never been written, a view of a damaged land where there there are shards of recognition still or where the trust has been kept, the impulse to enter the odyssey itself and hear the words before they are written, before they are words even, the poetry coming closer.

We Set Out

We set out by ourselves having written letters of forgiveness,

having buried the anger beneath other people’s songs:

          forgive us running away

          forgive us the frog crucified on the desk.

We set out to the cities we have invented and the beaches

not visited since childhood even if we hardly recognise them:

          pebble silver    gull strut    wind words    other.

We set out to reconcile our notions of God and the bones that He whispers

within the riddles within the texts within the answers that have no questions:

          the pew ends carved with curious copulations and moon faced men

          and the silence of the light that delivers a green man or another dragon.

We set out with clean underwear and  A BRIEF GUIDE TO EVERYTHING 

and  a small umbrella to disturb the stars and encounter

what my grandfather called the gathering of pain and grace:

          with what words beneath these meanings, with what feathers

          the idea of flight, with what music the improvisations of self.

And then we do this no longer; it is past our time; we transform

in the arms of earth and winds:

          a text with a name and date, the way a joke was told, perhaps a poem or two;

          a ring or a tie.

And the words do not do, won’t budge or bend to reconcile what was said and what was meant:

          a view across rose terraces in Malvern and the summerhouse voices in August ,

          the moon in our garden.

And the words do not do, won’t.

          Pebble out.

          The smell of grass or sand.