In the Hereafter


Forget eternity, give me just one day.
The big white house above a scoop of sea,
whin spilling gold down glen behind it.
They’ve all turned up… Some, fresh from a dawn swim
are mooching round the garden, its great trees,
gazebo, flowerbeds where no petal drops;
but most, back late last night from the pub
 where the fiddler brought down the rafters, are inside
sipping coffees. There are no hangovers.
 Dogs barking, cock-crows from a distant field,
the high whirr of a coastguard helicopter
confirm all’s true, with the sun’s heat
in fissured stones of this wall I lean upon.

Letting things be. So they play chess, or r tennis
(swift as my thought, the courts appear),
devour the afternoon light with passionate talk.
A kindling, astonishingly become
the blaze life dreams of, nothing out of place
but, as it should be perpetually surprising.

When evening brings all indoors, there’s the party.
For you, my friends from scattered years and places,
not least those I lost track of through neglects,
sad fallings-out, or time’s attrition.
Effaced among the throng, my satisfaction
is seeing how, at what for most’s first meeting,
you like each other. As the moon sails out
from a hill, I slip away, to leave you talking:
books, love, jokes, blood fired, our music playing.



After That Winter


With the equinox, a spring of sorts,
snow-melt and the river flowing fuller,
after the worst of bitter winters, when
the Spirits had neglected to protect them,
no elk herd came to spear, when the last chld
died just three of them were left from thirty,
the two men gut-sick and the grieving mother.
They reasoned it out, and left their place, and headed
towards where daily the sun reached its zenith,
veering only to keep nearby to water.
On the twelfth day they chanced on an encampment,
strange tongues weighed their wary overtures,
then let them stay and work. Until the cold
came back, then wanted just to keep the woman.
They left the place.
                    And walked, as you could then,
so much of water being locked-up in ice
they’d never strayed enough to grasp the scale of,
across a low plain, aiming at the sun.
Weaker than sabre-tooth, they used their wits,
fashioning flints, and snares of twig and thong,
and never quite taken in by those they encountered
heard at last rumours of a fabled warm land,
its glut to hunt and pluck: ‘Beyond those mountains.’
Stopping them in their tracks with mighty ice-fangs.
Against all reason. She was with child again,
they found a place. Enough to be going on with.

For twenty thousand years. Until, the miles-deep
ridged mass gargling boulders in its melt-mush
having conceded passage, over the Alps
spread villas, vineyards. Leaping where now sea was
to march straight roads right up to where they’d started.
Blank to its reason’s outcomes: pushbutton slaughter,
myself here conjuring Mozart from a disc.
Cradled with Pax Romana and our fetid
puff of cataclysmic global warming
in a brief intermission, before Earth’s next
orbital wobble brings the glaciers back.



The Busteriad


1.
Enthroned in his cab atop the huge yellow Compactor
(bulldozers might be its kittens), chomping a burger,
Buster is monarch of all he surveys:
a refuse tip to horizon where Lincolnshire
flinches. He gropes rolls of gut for his mobile,
downloads Great Beckham Freekick Goals, then starts
the spiked wheels churning. In the rancid mulch he thwacks
are Shakespeare’s Works, old double-beds, dead kittens.
Buster has been around a long time.

2.
Buster was hiding undeer a bush when Falstaff
flopped feigning, and the Douglas ramped off
for other quarry. Bellies up, they squinnied
at the Prince and Hotspur exchanging dunts,
till the latter fell. ‘Spare me such grinning honour,’
mused Falstaff over the corpse. ‘Back of the net!’
yodelled Buster, always a patriot.

3.
The first million years were the worst. Watching stalactites grow
in a cave. Buster, never in shape for the chase,
was thrashed with a mastodon bone for being useless.
Glaciers bulged and withdrew, gouging landscape,
and no-one invented shops or the caring professions.
What would he like for his birthday? He daubed it beside
their wall hunt-voodoo: a Ferrari.
‘If God,’ said his mother, ‘meant us to move like that
we’d be born with wheels, not legs.’

4.
Pissing in the fireless grate of a drasty inn
Buster rued pilgrimage. ‘Shoures soote’ forsooth!
He was drenched, saddle-sore, bored numb with their tales.
The prissy Prioress, that pimply Pardoner
Who’d sold him rats’ bones as holy relics.
A thump sent him sprawling: ‘Your turn!’ boomed the Host.
‘These three Irish plumbers met a Paki...’ The toff
who’d talked him into the trip didn’t lift his quill-pen.

5.
Buster knew nothing of art, but he knew what he liked.
Not acres of dimpling boys on the Sistine ceiling.
Nor carting the Maestro’s supplies up, pisspots down.
Nor their food... When he quit the Italian job
he left an eye-level graffito, Mad Cow,
frothed lips ballooning, Eat Our British Burgers!

6.
Buster sat out the Armada. Shipboard stockfish
had left him no stomach for it. Not to speak of
the sight of their sails, those long-range cannon.
Kindling fireships you’d never know how the weather
might blow. He tossed his cap high on North Foreland
when it wellied the Spaniards out of the park.
Then Sir Walter sailed home with a pallid tuber:
after that it was chips with everything.

7.
When Buster came round from the drubbing his mother gave him
for eating the goose that laid golden eggs, she sent him
to market. He came home with beans.
She chucked them. One sprouted right through the clouds...
You know the rest: when she kick-started him up
his weight brought it down. They were sent to the workhouse.

8.
Then there was the wife. Why do women have legs?
‘So they can walk from the bedroom to the kitchen,’
leered Buster. But this one, you never knew where she was.
Or who with. Bringing back watches, gowns, periwigs.
‘Red-card the trull, ref!’ The Beak sent her off - to Virginia.
But just as he settled, feet up and six-pack handy,
a key in the door, she reeled in ginned and bedizened,
his trouble-and-strife: Moll bloody Flanders.

9.
Buster was fifteen, hardly yet quite bald,
when they sent him out to build Empire.
‘Sun, sex and sherbets, son.’ He had bad memories
from the Crusades: too fat to aim bows
so given a pike against mailed Saracen horsemen.
As well halt tanks. This time he was cannier,
when Zulus darkened the skyline, he shot his foot off.
Got shipped home to a desk-job in Recruitment.

10.
‘Blood, sweat, tears, and toil.’ ‘No thanks,’ said Buster,
switching the wireless off. Our darkest hour?
Boom-time for the black market.
‘Nylons, lady?’ Clouds have silver linings.

11..
Space? It takes the weight off your feet.
Buster won six golds at the Moon Olympics,
but declined orbit missions, telling his mates
in the Rat and Trumpet, You can't pour pints out there.’

12.
Dante has Buster sunk to the ears in his element:
filth, with the gluttons in Hell’s third circle.
It could be worse: the boiling-blood-bath for Violence
(too much like work), and as for those like straws
within nethermost ice, you can’t fault Buster on Treason.
‘Did we win the World Cup this year?’ The poet ignores him,
tags on behind Virgil, the voice of Reason.
‘Right, but there's plenty more of me where I come from!’



The Slipper


The earliest tales had shown her the wronged child
triumphant, evil punished, sleights from hearth
to palace, wakenings. These enchantments filled

like sails of a tall ship her setting-forth.
Crossing frontiers brought more quest in view.
Such castles as still hulked across the track

proved empty ruins the rain whisted through.
Cleared of fierce beasts, the forest was pruned back.
Yet, out of reach now, the ogres crouched at screens

reprogrammong the terrain: a blighted street
closed round her, where in purring limousines
wolves grew sleek devouring easy meat.

No fairy godmother: the crone who took
the cakes she offered spat at her and cursed.
Geese laid no golden eggs; no flower spoke.

What metamorphosis did occur reversed
the books’: Prince Charming bearing bouquets, prized her,
but, settled for, turned Beast. You’ve made your bed,

lie on it, those she counted friends advised her.
Yet still there lurked, in pages she now read
to her child, the banished vision. Till a scald

of tears woke her one night, she crept tiptoe
to the junk room: there, just as the dream had told,
her long-lost slipper lay. Restored by no

royal claimant who would once have blurred
its gift: I am trust, by risking which, it glittered,
only, if only for few, comes quest’s reward.

She tried it on, took first steps. It still fitted.