Poems

From ‘West’

BOULEVARD

Nothing like the brotherhood
Of a midnight piss among friends;
Our aureate streams slowing to a dribble
Between the iron railings.

Then, on Friday nights, overlooking
Prefab houses with their dingy kitchens
Lined with worn cloths,
We took temporary ownership
Of the garrison; its roaming cats.

Now, re-scaled by work and wife
And hypochondria, tending swinging children,
We gaze at yet more foundations
For luxury flats with perhaps
A lingering longing for the old.

FOLKLORE

We left the heaving, unchaste club at two
And roamed the city’s cobbled streets.
Turning down a steep hill, close to la Mezquita,
A file of men lugging a mock float,
Their blessed Virgin just a pile of bricks.
Shuffling up the moonlit lane
With military discipline, their whispered drill
Filling the Córdoba night.

The local ashen-faced sceptic 
Stopped with us to watch,
His mocking posture inviting debate or comment.
“A circus…” I ventured.
“No, just folklore,” he corrected and walked off
Looking at his worn shoes. 

KATIE

Miniature mother to the dismembered dozen,
Fickle, fleet urchin, 
Immune to the odd bump
But fragile too, 
Brought down for days by a cold 
Or injured by a sharp word or look. 

What early thoughts fill your mind
Of a world where everyone must sleep
At your behest? 

Of forbidden foods
And the dog’s renegade claim to titbits,
Of corners, cubbyholes
The enchanted spaces of the young?

Your linguistic experiments
Bring snatches of song
And echoes of verbal tics 
Unknown even to us.

Disheveled daughter,
Can we predict your nature
From a complex genetic sum of parts?

How can your flourishing
Be bound up in you now when
The world and 
A single day contain so much
Unearned triumph and decline?

Always behind you, I pick up
A doll; its purple hair 
Plucked out by your small fingers.

From ‘Machotes’

MACHOTES

With their little battery-powered radios
Locked on Cadena Ser, bandy-legged,
Varicose, a workout without plan
Or energy - five minutes on treadmill,
Clapped out, a few tugs of the lat pull down
Machine, panting, striving, stretching
(Bicycle? Nope, seat hurts the prostate!)
And odd things you’ve never seen:
Wobbly squats, a dumbbell flung
Recklessly behind the shoulder blade.
They’re gone in half an hour
But traces of this geriatric
Exertion linger all day in
The changing room -
Where hang their rancid shorts
And vests - its aroma 
Of meadows sown with sweaty ball-sacks,
Stewed vegetables, expired desire
And, behind the waves of sour breath,
Damp towels and gamy trainers,
Another, fainter note,
Redolent, to my mind,
Of menopausal cunny,
With the suggestion of spoilt mackerel.

New poems

AFTER FLIGHT

after a childhood among birds  so enamoured was I of their calls  every sinuous string of notes parsed  recalled at will  from the abundant variation of the blackbird to the plosives of the bee-eater as it rose in many-coloured gangs from blanched valleys  all identified  catalogued  read about   compared  whistled at dinner by candlelight  a family debate on how to best transliterate and then the sight of them too  graceful in the thick of the humdrum  like the pied wagtail strutting the edges of a road  pecking  the tap of its tail setting the pace of an October afternoon before rain  the bird as a season  as boundary between worlds  I’d be alert too to how a turn in the gorse must signal a Sardinian warbler  after much clandestine twig hopping one red eye ring flaring  those cinematic events  raptors ushering in with a wingbeat all the clustered melancholy of late summer  a sky of swifts jotted down  a faraway upwards swirl that turned out to be a hundred storks making hot air visible  and then their tight and unobtrusive intermingling with us  the nest of a black-eared wheatear in a back garden drainage pipe  my window offering weeks of drama  flies caught on the wing  the tiny chirps  a failure  and what am I to tell my daughter about a world without birds for just this morning  years out of practice  what might have been a buzzard passed above us high so we had to imagine the whoosh its wings would have made 

WILLIS’S ROAD

(after Edward Thomas)

Yes. I remember Willis’s Road -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the Honda Civic drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The engine purred. Someone lit a fag.
No one left and no one came
On the bare asphalt. What I saw
Was Willis’s - only the name

And gulls, dog turds, weeds,
Crumbling walls and gutters dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high levanter in the sky.

And for that minute a vrada spoke
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the shorvos
Of Tankerville and Calpe awoke.