This poem was first published in PN Review. It will appear in my next collection, Long-Haul Travellers, to be published by Seren in Autumn 2008
Golden Boy
25 November 2005
A white day
to go: November slipping
away underfoot,
rusting
or jaundiced, brittle with frost.
Your face,
fine-boned
even now, not drowned in flesh,
but turned to gold,
skin beaten out
to the thinnest leaf,
a god's mask,
if gods could die
or come to grief. That sheen,
as if death
refined you,
burned off the slag, left only
the right metal,
unalloyed,
the flash of talent, the joy
speeding and weaving
to its goal,
baffling all challenge, laughing
at its gift.
We grow up:
put away childish things, stop
hoping for fame
or genius,
same as the rest. But just
now and then,
a man rises
above everyday, a man
like us,
and we fly
a little way on his uplift.
What if
he comes down
in the end to ruin?
It is the brief
instant aloft,
the leaving earth, that lives,
as when a boy,
falling,
still glowed from having once
touched the sun.
This poem is from my latest collection The Movement of Bodies, Seren 2005
The Bereavement of the Lion-Keeper
for Sheraq OmarWho stayed, long after his pay stopped,
in the zoo with no visitors,
just keepers and captives, moth-eaten,
growing old together.
Who begged for meat in the market-place
as times grew hungrier,
and cut it up small to feed him,
since his teeth were gone.
Who could stroke his head, who knew
how it felt to plunge fingers
into rough glowing fur, who has heard
the deepest purr in the world.
Who curled close to him, wrapped in his warmth,
his pungent scent, as the bombs fell,
who has seen him asleep so often,
but never like this.
Who knew that elderly lions
were not immortal, that it was bound
to happen, that he died peacefully,
in the course of nature,
but who knows no way to let go
of love, to walk out of sunlight,
to be an old man in a city
without a lion.
The Beautiful Lie
He was about four, I think... it was so long ago.
In a garden; he'd done some damage
behind a bright screen of sweet-peas
- snapped a stalk, a stake, I don't recall,
but the grandmother came and saw, and asked him
"Did you do that?"
Now, if she'd said why did you do that,
he'd never have denied it. She showed him
he had a choice. I could see in his face
the new sense, the possible. That word and deed
need not match, that you could say the world
different, to suit you.
When he said "No", I swear it was as moving
as the first time a baby's fist clenches
on a finger, as momentous as the first
taste of fruit. I could feel his eyes looking
through a new window, at a world whose form
and colour weren't fixed
but fluid, that poured like a snake, trembled
around the edges like northern lights, shape-shifted
at the spell of a voice. I could sense him filling
like a glass, hear the unreal sea in his ears.
This is how to make songs, create men, paint pictures,
tell a story.
I think I made up the screen of sweet-peas.
Maybe they were beans, maybe there was no screen:
it just felt as if there should be, somehow.
And he was my - no, I don't need to tell that.
I know I made up the screen. And I recall very well
what he had done
This poem was first published in the TLS. It was the title poem of my collection The Beautiful Lie, Seren 2002.
Translation
What he sees: the peninsula,
his childhood's map open
before him, and it is night.
He pauses on the hill.
Lights come on in homesteads
all over the headland; he knows
each cluster, the constellations
of Braehoulland, Solheim, Easthouse.
What else he sees: the spaces.
Across empty tracts of black
he traces the patterns
of all the missing stars
that now prickle only
at the back of his eyes,
their names no longer
known to the postman.
What he can do: translate
darkened windows, lost friends
into music. Grief reaches upwards
and falls back, in an air
that holds on to each sound,
desperately, until
a little row of stopped notes
dropping, one by one, into the dark.
This poem was first published in The New Shetlander