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CHRISTMAS MORNING 

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The plainsong of the stars quiets 

and comes down to us, fresh from the cold. 

The morning grows clear and pale. 

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I can feel the neighbours dreaming in their houses. 

Outside, an unbroken bank of snow 

collapses under the feet of a woman walking. 

 

There is an angel at every door,  

and the woman looks down at her hands 

to see starlight, a rumour on her skin, 

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and she, alone beneath the sky, breathing. 

  

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PASSAGE 

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Sometimes when I’m in the woods 

I come across a father and son,  

no trail in the mud around them, 

stood under a shelf of coppery rock. 

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They listen to the thunderous watercourse 

on the other side, amplified by the shape,  

like a conch shell  

collecting the voices of nymphs. 

 

Always they listen, stock still, 

in the cloister against the damp wall 

as the water-table seeps through 

the thousand-year-old break. 

 

I joined them today,  

watched as the glazed barrier ran  

with rusted browns and pinks,  

relenting to the persuasion 

of the stream behind. Only then  

did the wall of rock begin to crack — 

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GRIEF, SICILY 

 

 

A gecko sprints across the stonework, 

disappears down the hallway. 

I hover with a fat glass in my hand. 

 

Wrist steady. Taught. I’m so careful, and still,  

the tail is caught under the lip of glass,  

sliced clean through, severed from the body  

 

but still thrashing on the floor 

with the electricity of a nervous system. 

I pause for a moment and think of how 

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the spirit clings on, making itself known — 

marking the place where it once belonged. 

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HOAG’S OBJECT 

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As she walks up the driveway 

with his arm around the small of her back,  

  

she imagines that her body is slotted into the socket of his.  

And think on this, the green palm of the leaf  

 

with its glass marbles of water for sipping — 

first perfectly formed, then running along the midvein.  

 

A much-beloved book, cradling hours of attention  

in its leather skin. Or the hands that held you, 

 

after you slipped and lost your footing.  

Do not mind these earthly voices in your ears. 

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Children like you are little cups, 

filled up with the half-formed hopes of the rest of us.  

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I WAS READING POETRY AT THE TOP OF THE HOUSE 

 

 

At that height, I could see all the way to the graveyard,  

and there, through the measures of air 

between yew and silver birch, 

 

a solitary figure — one muscular dig after another, 

bending at the waist to make one last door down 

into the basement of the earth,  

 

mindful not to let the spirits pass 

as they climbed, slow and steady as steam in the rain 

with their lingering hearts, like a dream that carries on. 

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FAULT LINE 

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The green of the elephant plant

was deep, and drenched — 

it sparkled drops of sap along its leaves,  

 

the medicinal liquid gathered at the tip.

I reached out to meet its offering, 

a place once glimpsed but never seen, 

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a cell of water balanced upon a fault line: 

suspended for a moment before falling, 

and so bright that all other light  

 

is miserable in comparison.  

The bone of the earth shifted beneath us,  

and in strange enchantment,  

 

we watched 

as the water fell. 

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CULLEN SKINK 

 

 

I stand by the stump of a tree as you walk  

to the loch, the light breaking through  

like some great importance. 

 

You stand in the cold water to your chin,  

thinking of the fish we will eat — 

their broken saltlicked spines, 

 

skins stripped from their inner workings; 

the rough gulp of the eye discarded, 

bloodline cleaned out with a knife. 

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I wait as you work,  

translating the light from the structures of the sun  

into tiny accuracies of pleasure.  

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SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD 

 

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Afterwards, I rubbed my hands  

across my middle, as if to re-colonise myself. 

This is the peak, I thought, 

 

the highest-reaching note — 

a comforting bloom of gladness. 

And now, it is as if  

 

the light has come to me,  

dropped down my optic nerve 

into all the raw materials of my body 

 

as I stand here,  

trying to summon something  

from the ruined valves of my heart. 

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SHADOW SELF 

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After James Sheard 

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The nightlong sound of the spheres is all I know of her. 

There — I watch the shadow sliding behind a door — 

 

something seen but still unseen, like movement 

under the surface of a pond, trailing after the flame of a koi  

 

as it chases the light of its own tail, a remnant  

from the underworld breaking through into this one 

 

when I am busy paying attention to something else. 

Only the lifting edge of evening understands this,  

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the Otherness seeping in;  

a dark life inside me like a beaded curtain of rain. 

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PALAU GÜELL 

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After Philip Larkin 

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Evening draws itself close — 

gathers and pools in the corners,  

dampens all the lamps. 

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Rich and velvet dark, perhaps, 

but when it leaks out into the room 

and touches the nape of my neck, 

 

I feel everything left behind by the gods. 

And where have they gone? What calls 

from the other world? 

 

What happens  

when they do not govern this one?