"Catrin"
I can remember you, child,
As I stood in a hot, white
Room at the window watching
The people and cars taking
Turn at the traffic lights.
I can remember you, our first
Fierce confrontation, the tight
Red rope of love which we both
Fought over. It was a square
Environmental blank, disinfected
Of paintings or toys. I wrote
All over the walls with my
Words, coloured the clean squares
With the wild, tender circles
Of our struggle to become
Separate. We want, we shouted,
To be two, to be ourselves.
Neither won nor lost the struggle
In the glass tank clouded with feelings
Which changed us both. Still I am fighting
You off, as you stand there
With your straight, strong, long
Brown hair and your rosy,
Defiant glare, bringing up
From the heart’s pool that old rope,
Tightening about my life,
Trailing love and conflict,
As you ask may you skate
In the dark, for one more hour.
"Lunchtime Lecture"
(Excerpt)
And this, from the second or third millennium
B.C., a female, aged about twenty-two.
A white, fine skull, full up with darkness
As a shell with sea, drowned in the centuries.
Small, perfect. The cranium would fit the palm
Of a man's hand. Some plague or violence
Destroyed her, and her whiteness lay safe in a shroud
Of silence, undisturbed, unrained on, dark
For four thousand years.
"Heron at Port Talbot"
(Excerpt)
Snow falls on the cooling towers
delicately settling on cranes.
Machinery's old bones whiten; death
settles with its rusts, its erosions.
Warning of winds off the sea
the motorway dips to the dock's edge.
My hands tighten on the wheel against
the white steel of the wind.
"Neighbours"
(Excerpt)
That spring was late. We watched the sky
and studied charts for shouldering isobars.
Birds were late to pair. Crows drank from the lamb's eye.
Over Finland small birds fell: song-thrushes
steering north, smudged signatures on light,
migrating warblers, nightingales.
"Musician"
(Excerpt)
His carpet splattered like a Jackson Pollock
with clothes, books, instruments, the NME,
he strummed all day, read Beethoven sonatas.
He could hear it, he said, 'like words.'
That bitterest winter, he took up the piano, obsessed,
playing Bartok in the early hours. Snow fell,
veil after veil till we lost the car in the drive.
I slept under two duvets and my grandmother's fur,
and woke, suffocating, in the luminous nights
to hear the Hungarian Dances across moonlit snow.
