‘In the Slack Land’ & Other Poems

Behind the church, gravestones

are broken and the ground has fallen in.

Walking through the bracken, down

to the river, I tell them, it was dead

back then. I am half-proud to have

lived the cobbles of the riverbed

that were furred and slick with

grey slime. The dead water came

from the mill. The smell was like

wet paper and soap. It is clean

now, ribbons of weed move in the current.

There are minnows and frogspawn.

Green holds in the air around us, and

the smell of soil. I tear up the slope’s turf

to make a blanket from the sod.

We used it to roof of our dens,

layering it on green branches we cut

with saws borrowed from our dads.

This was how we played in the Slack Land.

My daughter tries. I see how my son’s eyes

are bright. My voice quickens into thin lines,

tough like leather bootlaces. I am good

at walking here, on this old ground.

I do not slip on the rumps of waxy

forest grass. I pick a long bullrush and

split it. Show my daughter the stem filled

with white sponge. The path to the weir

is blocked off. The boy died. He was

in my year. The water is hypnotic: it will

draw you down. A kind of spell. He fell

onto the wet stone, his broken body

carried off to the still pools under the bridge.

We hear the water fall, like voices

that shout without pausing. The same year

a girl I kissed at a party caught a cramp and

drowned in the cold water of the quarry lake,

on the hottest day of summer. I go back

to the landscapes of childhood to show how

the story of our world is caught in things.

In a walled garden, under a round maple tree, sits

a cat moving its tail in silent calligraphy.

The stiff branches of the tree are black like wire.

The white cat walks away over white stones.

Can anyone go into the night like a cat and not be

haunted by all the phantoms of the day?

To sleep in hedges and walk the line of thin fences,

to find opportunities in the songs of foxes.

And come back, narrow head pushing fingers

for food, fur up and wrinkled.

What are the ghosts in a cat, and the twisted branches

of a tree, or the bark of a fox in the dark morning?

For my niece

You might think that there is no need for chance

to begin things. That the steady turn of the universe

simply spins things out: one action

leading to the next. Like butterflies that

flicker and twist in the breeze. You might look in

a mirror, or rob a bank. You might wave

at somebody to have them wave back. Where

is the best place to find chance, and have it

happen? Where is the best place to smile? What

about filling your pockets with coins or pebbles

so that you rattle when you walk? The soft rituals.

The pad and the pencil. The catastrophic

molt of penguins. There is a siren, out

from the edge of the city: a fire engine

carrying chance, to somewhere else. You sit,

dropping matches in a cup. Legs crossed

in an old skirt, looking down the straight

street waiting for the next thing to happen.