Surprised by love, in labour in a dream,

I remembered that I was a poet

Bearing down love again, enough to seem

Almost real. It was already too late

For life and yet too early for love, why

Was my last child born waiting as a day

Waits before its end and sensed only by

My mind or your own vanishing away

As love alone that cannot be returned.

How have I missed you, never having known

Your bonding or your birth, absence I learned

To live with nursing silence to atone.

I give myself to the world, memory

New with time, with its own identity.

I stand before a house and the blue plaque

Of Yeats which drew you without warning or

Omen to that last February dark.

The incongruity of its closed door,

And the street leading off into Primrose

Hill, spanned almost by a tree's winter girth,

All around the streets circle and enclose

As I struggle with myself, my life's worth

No more than far trees branching from distance

Resolved in a cold without wind or rain,

An emptiness distinct as neon once

Certain, an existence only to drain

Away, while the air heavy with snow's pall

Darkens over the earth and will not fall.

Where the high adjacent aviary

Strands its storm over London, caged birds fly

Against the netted turrets endlessly

Encircling an illusion of the sky.

At times I have known this park, nearly out

of my mind with fear, an impossible

Pleading with horizon from fear's redoubt

Always to remain imperceptible.

I wander, like Tsvetayeva, bereft

Of children, and hear in her last tumult

A sound of letting go, 'like a log left

Behind', time held back in a catapult,

'My country has failed to take care of me',

Night, the colour of the aviary.

And suddenly the Sibyl of Cumae

Caged among a throng in the market place,

To answer to the young 'I want to die'.

Where the spirit is the syntax and case

Ending of a poem, death is a shadow

Awaiting its hour, what was a question

Has now become a reality no

Answer could reveal. From that confusion

When even the spirit fails to exist,

Poetry is time's equilibrium,

Through filaments of light, memory missed

Or abandoned, there is a life to come.

You alone sustain and your moon's black hour

Lets fall a snow's indelible shower.

It was nearly two years before you were

Able to return to the home of your

Youth as a brother reconciled after

A long estrangement, but anything more

Unlike the return of the prodigal

Son could not have been imagined. Nothing

Was left to prevent the improbable

Evening and still a closed daylight changing

Into its last endless February

Night. And the darkened stars were not in their

Places unlooked for after memory

Mushroomed fluorescent from the empty air,

Horizon was just a fugitive star,

Only the stars remain familiar

The vestiges of their incandescence

Are everything I have known, light without

Shadow, inconsequential in a sense

Of time, a grey unlit arena out

Of which the known and the unknown must be

Found. While April abandoned, derelict

And irrelevant with austerity

Makes night as day under Nature's edict,

Unable to assuage the agony

When poetry or life without meaning

Threatens life itself in a jeopardy

Of words found and lost to their echoing.

As the scuttled stars a primary cry

Beyond earth's echo lasts and will not die.

Always left over, the end like a thief

Came in the night, unreal and ignoble

And in the disarray left behind, brief

As the flight of a Passover angel

My first born son went away. Brother rose

Against brother with almost nothing left

To say and a blind rivalry that chose,

Leaving nothing behind. And yet bereft,

A mother searches in vain a former

Order holding everything in its place,

Searches to remain, only to see her

Children as days that end without trace.

'He was lost and is found', the last echo

Of the prodigal son I used to know.

I have an experience within me

As of great stones being moved into place,

To have known that much of infinity,

Though everything else has failed, is to face

All that I cannot understand, and yet

What are these stones when the only answer

Is the Giant's Causeway tumbling down. Let

The dark sea's utmost currents close over

Me if I should have harmed any of my

Children, but you placed a millstone around

My neck from the moment they were born, why?

Because I brought them forth and through them found

Myself and then from your weight was set free

To stand before the old man of the sea.

For years I walked shallows clear with you while

Your weight bore me downwards from the first time

I read of you to my last stumbling mile,

Your silence always a prophetic mime

Of all the blame you laid on me and my

Endless, unforgivable fault, children

That grew alongside of you. Must I try

That long road and the unforgotten sun

Bright torture, all the grey vanished trawling

Moons of almost thirty years, to know how

To begin even as great stones moving

Unbroken sea, historical and now,

Releasing rhythm an awakened dream

And below the surface of things that seem.

The right word has taken so long to find

That its effort hardly seems to have been

Worthwhile, something is always left behind

Remaining perpetually unseen.

What am I when the outlandish restless

Day effaces as an ordinary

London window yet leaving a redress

Within time's design, the anatomy

Of a single line. The way words oppress

And to no end with just the physical

Word on a page as a silent witness,

And the mind's echo completes a circle

And a struggle of labour against time,

For the end, for the words no longer mine.

A shadow through a window, yet you were

Always there, the background of each leaving,

My head held high always as the nearer

Shadow when I returned. There is nothing

Now but an unfamiliar window

And we are the shadows on the other

Side, the sounds of city traffic that blow

Like wind across glass in the distilled air.

Nothing is certain anymore and all

Around me time's permanence has begun

To fall apart, each day impossible

Dreams awaken their own oblivion.,

Yet through glass unreal in candle flicker,

Time unbroken circled at your Shiva.

‘When art is derived from pain it is worth

Nothing' and I can only answer then

With my own pain and the time of its birth

And final as the knowledge of Eden.

I am myself as nothing walking through

Regents Park, May evening light is oblique,

Lake birds preen and remain at their ease, few

Or simultaneous. Nearby the mosque

Turns from domed high gold leaf into night grey

London distance, I struggle to answer

Another's pain but cannot find my way.

To imagine, we must learn to suffer

For each other, at the heart of language

Beauty is a sword time cannot assuage.

I shall not write about beauty only,

Because its truth is not what I have known,

Reluctantly and quietly beauty

Comes unknowingly and to truth alone.

If poetry is merely the sound of

Itself yet history within language

Unfolding, then is the meter of love

An incandescent rhythm as the age

I sing of, and without love, of what am

I composed when chance and impossible

Reckoning are stars beyond depth or span,

And pain but a jettisoned syllable,

And art no more than beauty can attain,

For a life that after has lived in vain.

The problem of pain, and it will not go

Away, it exists beside Keat's Grecian

Urn, with beauty's truth put aside as though

Unreal, beauty is not oblivion,

But even as a century reaches

Its end, the mind's pain has nothing to hold

On to, and left alone with fear, searches

The spirit's arsenal for truth untold,

Or the way beyond your death in Fitzroy

Road, where I stand lost and rehearse your end

To stay alive. The words are without joy,

An overgrown garden I cannot tend,

Endless, wordless, as the leftover pain,

For a love that after has lived in vain.

I drew a fire at Fordwych House which burned

From my mind to a pale sky, consuming

In its wake, after and before, and turned

Now into the end a shadow smoking,

Dissolving deep within the splintered wall

Of a high endless orange controlling

Flame, overturning, irretrievable,

And huge once with youth's unbroken meaning.

I cannot finish what I have begun,

There is no one left to tell me who I

Am, the simple words, what have they become,

And the end as the haze of a pale sky.

I no longer know the poet in me,

Charred words smoke the holes of eternity.

My throat is filled with its own emptiness

And a silence cries out from this fire where

The end is endless and flames coalesce

And spark the far evaporated air

Seared within as blue dark over London,

The smoking residuum of what I

Am and everything I might have done,

The undone and the day's unanswered why.

Where are the stars in the carbon of my

Burning, the empty sockets gape where they

Have been and what is there left to steer by

But a numberless blue vanishing day,

Breaking pulsing neon orange as a

Smoke drifts upward, its low shawled nirvana.

There is no road out of this inferno,

Neither backwards nor before. Days that meet

In their beginning, beyond tomorrow

Or yesterday, encircle with a heat

Impassable, permanent as blue sky

Unchanging or a sun I cannot turn

Away from, black, and as the beauty

I once read and the brightest day. Here I learn

To forget, to remember yet once more

That last reach of language, the spirit's tongue,

Its silence and all I am alive for

Levelling above me, transfixed among

Fast airless flame, softly falling charcoal

Ignites the unlit levels of my soul.

Time after is no more a part of me

Than far flame melting into a white haze.

All that went before is my destiny

And always an endlessly spreading maze,

The lost directions and inadvertent

Pathways a reverberating echo

From conduits of choice and chance in constant

Fusion of futility and shadow.

What road did I come by and where do I

Go from here, as a planet left behind,

‘Out of this world’, an overwhelming why

Every day fans a fire in my mind.

Without the stars I cannot find my way,

Their empty sockets gape for a new day.

And all my days are tomorrows, nothing

Exists in its present tense. How can I

Answer anyone when everything

I have known rests and decays in the why

Or hold of the heart's scaffolding, and fast

Locked as rust that cannot be dismantled,

Where the props of half a century last

Longer than slow dissolution untold

Within, where the spirit is bound about

With chains of its own making and the hell

Of experience alone, yet cries out

For heaven unheard and impossible.

The rods are clamped over feeling and flame,

Only the words and their knowledge remain.

I had nothing to go on but my own

Fearful heart, what use is that to me now?

It was not enough, nor for the unknown

Half guessed at or dreamed of and yet somehow

Always there just beyond the fear, outside

My reach and a life that has come apart.

And although there was nowhere left to hide

I failed to find a refuge from the heart,

Its first familiar unending why

Rending into sojourn and horizon,

Echoing the spirit left to defy

Just beyond the flame. The answer driven,

Fuelled by the wind in mockery after,

Even to the heft of its last whisper.

It was not enough nor could it ever

Have been, nothing can apprehend such loss

And the failure of the spirit after.

All that remains is to take from the dross

Something worthwhile or just the memory

Of joy, something of a life that might have

Been, yet something left over to tell me

Who I am. Everything is fugitive

And spills and runs, and is as mercury,

To the ground, the furrowed field overflows

With rain, my shadow disappears, any

Semblance is what the surfacing wind throws,

For the fields of home lie under the rain

In dreams and I cannot walk there again.

There is no road out of this inferno,

Here the flames lap at the edge of being

As pages in an open book, the slow

Words curl black a cursive script scorched peeling

Back from language into another tongue.

While the city drifts through smoke in a haze

Anchorless, its topmost heights lean among

Featureless flame, the corners of stunned days

Are sudden blue reflections over sealed

Far windows, braced against a trawling grey

Urban light, where smoke seared the white concealed

Shadows as darkness on the surface lay.

The indecipherable pages burn

And their wordless shadows in the wind turn.

I could think of nothing, there was nothing

Left, nothing but a countdown to the end,

‘They said they're going to give her something,

We've got to phone in an hour, at the end’.

I have to go away, I have to go

Back, but there is nowhere anywhere here,

Everywhere the wind and its echo

And the end of an hour hurrying near.

Wind torn houses were shadows in a street,

Debris blown over cobble-stone narrow

And confined, where pathways of the wind meet

In a night maze as paralysed shadow.

Gable-ends from the back to backs of old

Leeds reared sloped angles of rain to the cold.

Out of the depths of an October storm

Where random gas light flickering alone,

Flowing through night's configurated form

And the reflected confluence of stone,

Etching the darkness with a single flame

While its white disseminated halo

Lay broken and turned into wind and rain.

The hazed driven diagonal shadow

Smoking over every stone and crevice

In a black elemental honeycomb,

Fuelled from within to a moon white surface,

And night contracted as an opened womb

And about to give birth. I took my prize

From the dark where light darts until it dies.

It was not enough, I have to go back,

The words within can never put it right

Though the rain there is a lasting wind, black

And unstill in crevices filled with light

Opening, enclosed round every stone,

Every surface moving sheer under

Foot. There night and day converged as wind blown,

Walls high banked holding back the sea, over

Their own horizon broken into massed

Delirium round me, reflecting flame

And gas light as though inanimate vast

Time flowed in the carbon rhythm of rain.

Before and after, as an undertow,

A surface smoke from a burning shadow.

There was nothing to hold on to, the force

Of night was upon me, its raging gale

Engulfing directing even the course

Of time. At every turn piercing hail

Rolled across cobbles, fragmented, downward,

Slanting into shallows perpetual

Surface where light convulsed under the sword

Edge and colourless impenetrable

Rain, encircled on all sides and propelled

By a wind without remorse, its smoke rose

As steam from every stone, a black rain held

Back and veering through a swathe of shadows.

In the ginnel where steam erupts and sighs

I hold your hand there as the moment dies.

I had to go away, it was the form

Of things, no one was allowed to stay, no

One. When I was told outside in the storm

It was too late to go back, there was no

Where to go back to and nowhere to go.

And outside, your parting words that had seemed

Unfamiliar were left in the rain,

Far beyond anything that could be dreamed,

There in the panic and wind they became

Your whole life. This world would remain something

You left behind, this world lay before me

At my feet. Your last hour was hurrying

To its end, pathways of the wind empty

Meet in a maze of paralysed shadow.

There was no way out and no way through and

The only road was the one we had come

By, where you were just the span of your hand

Away. How shall I find myself among

These shadows to turn about and go back

Without you, or the doors that were to close

Against us when steep stone sides rose up black

Before us. The distance an echo throws

As it hollows in the fugitive space

Behind us, an inconsequential veer

Of sound, a reverberating surface

Along open city streets, its source near

And endless and enough to magnify

A delirium, a pursuer's cry.

I wanted to stand still and for the first

Time not feel I had to run against time

As though each night had always been rehearsed,

Every dream awake left as the end rhyme

Or as the lost echo of another.

An empty inaudible arena

Within the monochrome sodium glare

Of a dream's history, shadows in a

Negative that flare into the colour

Of dreams without sunlight, nights without end,

When we followed the city streets to where

There was no turning back. On a darkened

Stage the unlit shadows dissolve away

In the auditorium of a day.

Death had always been there on the night road,

A presence as of someone else, a third

Person between us there with no abode

Keeping fast a silence I had not heard.

Sometimes going before then following

After but never as a pursuer,

More as someone in the shadows working

With the quiet manner of a waiter.

But I had been in a sleep-walk all my

Life, awaking to the reality

Of an hour, houses in a street awry

In the wind, death, reticent, uneasy,

As though at a banquet with every right

Quietly directing the darkest light.

And with no one else to turn to she turned

To you because her children were still young.

She had to raise us while she slowly learned

Your ways, you were the seated guest among

Her chores and the sojourner at the back

Of all her days, content every day

Just to sit there waiting, you were the black

Pall and the haze that on the surface lay.

It was not so much a slow suicide

As much as the one sure absolute way

Out, and with no money for food beside

What she earned, the only thing she would say

Was that ‘bread is the staff of life’. Nothing

Was said about you at her back waiting.

On the cobbled stones of a city night

Where do I begin, left with one last hour

Of her ruin how shall I know what might

Have been or what she would have said in her

Last conversation? She was left alone

To face it on her own as she had done

So many times before, and with no one

To turn to but her last companion

And the silence of his hands upon her.

Through a howling wind you came to the door

In the guise of a fugitive like her,

Seeking shelter for the journey before

You and a refuge from the storm within.

And the door opened and death was let in.

__________________

It began in The Hollies, in a home

For the children of those suffering from

TB. And in the hospital alone,

As a casual morning face among

Friends, my mother laid there and dissembled,

Hiding from all her colleagues, the cancer

At her breast. While she held the assembled

Nights of her life and those to come after,

The days leftover and their utmost end,

The insistent faces of her children

Yet weaving round about through a darkened

Cavalcade, with time held back and broken

As the broken mooring of an orb web

Is blown on the current of its own ebb.

My mother wrapped her silence around her

With a certainty that would never end.

She seemed always just ahead or after

And alone on a road as it widened

Backwards far into the reflected arc

Of life itself. Sometimes stars, in the near

Far shadows of a mirror in the dark,

Charred the horizon and curved a last sear

From an unrealized unreachable

Time, where fifties neon pulsed and flickered,

Darkness fragmented, indivisible,

Trapped as space between its blue, green and red,

The lost names blazing and pulsating, from

And towards, in the rain and the rhythm.

We were slanted as road shadows that ran

Along the surface of the station’s white

Wall darkening with a distant night span

Of neon, an impenetrable night

Rain blowing against its whitened stucco

Was turned into stone and a storm laden

Light in April. On the skyline the low

Inscribed factory neon blazed open

And enclosed leaving its darkness behind,

Only its oscillation had any

Meaning, any certainty, and my mind

Traced the letters in that transitory

Space between, pulsing from their charred ruin,

The lit extinguished names end and begin.

Why was the white wall a memory I

Had of my mother? Yet we are walking

Beside it and within reach of its high

White stone, rain is softer now and blurring

Across illuminated names in York

Road, and round us from every direction

The wind is against us. We do not talk

Because of it and I watch the neon

Signs palpitating softly through the rain,

Each time their light went out and the darkness

Was left behind, the letters would remain

Visible as shadows of her distress.

‘Walk close to the wall the wind will not blow

Cold there’, and the night was neon’s shadow.

The pattern at night was always the same.

This was a walk we had done so many

Times before, when deserted streets became

Unfamiliar yet nearer, and we

Were as shadows watching and listening

And moving as though in another world.

Where gas light approaching and receding

Over darkened windows, from glass was hurled

On to reflected walls and vacated

Rooms with the random of a betrayer,

Before the clamouring crowd just ahead

Or behind, protecting her pursuer.

A fugitive endlessly fleeing through

The city, through the nights my mother knew.

A paralysing fear toward midnight

Would then descend on us while we waited

For my father to return, and what might

Happen was the source of her repeated

Endlessly drawn out wondering. Nothing

Could prepare her for its outcome, each night

Nothing would halt or prevent the ending,

And we never let him out of our sight,

So that my mother could escape if she

Had to, and we hung on his every word

From the half-open door she had to flee

Through when the raving stopped or went unheard

In the silence of his lunge towards her,

The stealth of his delirium after.

For as long as I could remember, my

Mother walked at night unable to go

Home. Sometimes she would knock on doors and cry

For help, unable to ease her sorrow,

And all the times she walked in Torre Hill

She must have known that nothing would alter,

The streets would be the same at night until

Her children were grown up. And time after

Was not in her thinking, there was only

The time before and the time of the hour

Of shadows when her spirit fled and she

Slowly began to die and to cower

From the fact that it made no difference

To what he knew of her life’s existence.

For years I used to dream that you were still

Alive, that your death was surely something

We were told just to survive on until

We saw you again., I kept on dreaming

The same dream and when they ended you were

About to die. I could not understand

The years apart and you could not answer

Anything, you were going to die, and

In a dream and in the end all over

Again, you told me how you had to go

Away and how you lived your life after.

How much I missed the years I did not know

Her and all that time she was there and I

Kept on asking her and answering why.

You are there with me by the white wall, we

Are trying in vain to breathe together

In the wind, in an early memory,

And the quiet city is the colour

And the fluctuating neon surface

Of reflecting reverberating rain

And a wind that sears your tears. And I trace

The darkened letters after they remain

Because I do not know how to help you,

When the light comes back you are still afraid,

Its vacillating rhythm pumping through

The long arterial night, each inlaid

Vowel is etched in its own black furrow

And momentarily repeated shadow.

I walked to the crossroad from the Oakwood

Clock almost thirty three years after your

Death and our last journey anywhere. Would

That it could have been other than before

But nothing had changed, it was still the same,

I was on the outside walking alone

Through the same endless suburban terrain,

And somehow I missed the door and its torn

Note that you left behind. And while I stood

At the crossroad the same panic came back,

Every road led nowhere, which one should

I take, which wrong turning was a way back.

Then as now there was nothing left to say,

I was stranded and I had lost my way.

There was no address and you were led there

For nothing, but you left a half of her

Note behind to become something to share

With her, a future to remain after

You had been. Within days you are leaving

Your life behind and you stare for the last

Time at my father, your mouth opening

On a silent scream echoing a fast

Locked silent world where you sit just before

Him listening, knowing the money

Will not be there, that the quarrel of your

Departure was the fare for your journey.

At the crossroad, following the wind’s track,

At the last moment you would not look back.

You kept your silence for two years after

The Hollies because you had to keep your

Job as a nurse at all costs in order

To feed your children, and there was no more

Money coming in that was not spent on

Alcohol and the progressive stages

Of my father’s mania. Damage done

That could not be undone, that assuages

Nothing by virtue of his unknowing,

He knew you were dying in pain slowly

For two more years, and he went on drinking

While you cleared the tables that surgery

Left you alive for, and your sacrifice

Was unerring, nothing else could suffice.

It is not enough how I long to leave

It there, but the past calls out beseeching

Me not to be afraid, how shall I weave

The shortened unfinished days tapering

In their endless night, out of the lost weft

And the unknown anonymous life she

Would have had. So many are the nights left

Untold, pushed into an ordinary

Agony or a day’s fleeting legend

In the lives of those who refuse to see,

For the darkness is endless and the end

Is night’s fugitive passing destiny.

‘Lily Lily I feel out of this worrld’,

The falling snow caught in his hair and curled.

There was nothing unusual about

The quarrel, it was like all that had gone

Before, my mother found herself without

The money for her fare and with no one

Else to ask but him. And it was morning

And my father had a bad hangover

From the night before, he sat there waiting

To go to work, waiting just to see her

Run away, but she remained there before

Him as though transfixed in supplication

And as though time was standing at the door

And her journey had already begun.

And to plead for her fare she spoke as once

In profound and lacerating silence.

How much did she know as she sat there in

The light of a soft September morning

And waited for her journey to begin

Knowing only that she would be leaving,

Never to return or to see again

The long arena of her suffering.

And after, nothing was ever the same,

It was not her departure that morning

So much as the wild fixed grief of her face,

A blackened rain slanting across slow time,

A face not of this world, its last grimace

As if my mother was no longer mine.

As she stared straight ahead at my father

It seemed as though time itself was over.

Here fare amounted to nothing, but while

He was rowing in the endlessly drawn

Out pattern of years, he knew that the trial

Of words was about to end, almost worn

Out as a black groove widens back before

The laceration of recorded sound.

And his words echoed back through the years or

Outward ran as mercury to the ground,

Something was broken, nothing would mend,

But his words would last as long as they could.

Love was never like this, and to the end

Of his last syllable, mutely I stood

Before her paralysed and listening.

I who could have said so much, said nothing.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door

And slowly out of nowhere a taxi

Stopped and beckoned you to get in before

The quarrel had become an unearthly

Confusion and the interrupted sound

But its own echo. No one seemed able

To help you and while we scrambled around

For a language that seemed insubstantial

You forgot to care who saw you, and for

The first time in your life you just went on

Quietly weeping for all the world, or

Simply yourself. A September sun

Lit up the street and the morning’s attack,

At the last moment you would not look back.