THE SURFER KING

 

This is my last request of those I love:

I’m wiped out now – carry me to the cove,

not on my surfboard, but a wicker chair,

then point me at the sea and leave me there.

 

I’ll sit and count each fabled seventh wave

then gather beach glass washed from mermaids’ graves

with which I’ll open up my arteries

and let my weary blood flow to the sea.

 

Poseidon falling from Atlantic highs

come take my heart for a halibut’s eye.

Let my rib cage form a sieve of baleen

to skim all plastic, leave the oceans clean.

 

Take my demented brain for isinglass.

Repurpose me. This is my wish. My last.

 

 

THE OLD BOATYARD

 

He measured out the working day in tea breaks,

his rambling dock piled high with tools and motors;

a flock of anchors stacked against the wall;

jerry cans of two-stroke, engine oil;

 

discarded prop-shafts, boss caps and, to one side,

rusting under tarps beneath the windows,

their panes obscured by webs and smuts of grease…

the deconstructed heart of some old cruiser.

 

Work could always wait until the tea

had brewed – the biscuits dunked – then he would dig

his boots and spanner out and disappear

inside a hull, to jump start the machine.

 

Now there’s a prefab; a steel & glass cabin.

Some new bloke with a clipboard and a rota.

 

 

MY RIVER

 

A river flowed into my township last night.

It wasn’t Alice Oswald’s Dart, or Wordsworth’s Thames,

or Raymond Carver’s river that he loved

the way some men love horses or glamorous women.

And it wasn’t John Milton’s stream at the foot of Paradise

with Satan cloaked in rising mist.

Nor was it T.S. Eliot’s river

flowing under the crowds flowing over the bridge,

or Johnson’s Fleet Ditch full of unspeakable turds.

It wasn’t Carl Sandburg’s Desplaines

with its party of happy Hungarians

drinking wine and playing accordions,

or Dylan Thomas’s river, in October,

counting off his years towards heaven.

Nor was it Anthony Wilson’s river,

down at the mouth of the Exe

with all its sucking cledge and ooze and sluice,

or Auden’s brimming river singing songs

of love and loss one evening

as it rolled indifferently through the city,

or even Joyce’s Liffey running

a way a lone a last a loved a long the…

It was none of these. Neither Neruda’s,

nor Shakespeare’s with its willows aslant,

nor Keats’s with its choir of mourning gnats

borne aloft among the sallows.   No…

It was just a river. A river

that had run here, seemingly forever,

through the valley, over the mudflats

round the curving oxbow of the harbor

and out of my life

 

 

DAFFODILS

 

There were guards on the bridge spanning the Oder –

one side Slubice, the other East Germany.

They smiled at my mother and called to her

to have a cigarette, pass a little time.

She laughed, gently declined and we walked on

along the bank to where the daffodils grew wild.

My mother let go of my hand so she could pick

and I could run.  As I ran I would brush

the swaying blooms with my small palms.

I’ve never felt so free again.

                                                Back on the bridge

a guard whistled. Beside us the steady river

wound away my mother’s cares.

                                                         Now every spring

I come to England to work in the fields picking daffodils.

I wear gloves and mostly don’t recall

how those bobbing yellow heads blessed my hands.

Mostly I bend and pick, determined and quick,

moving from row to row.

But sometimes I drink and think then

of that border town and the Oder,

quietly unwinding, grey and slow,

the whistling guard,

      the small daffodils of home.