In The Poetry

This next poem is a series of five sonnets called ‘My Mammogram’.

My Mammogram

I.

In the shower, at the shaving mirror or beach,
For years I’d led… the unexamined life?
When all along and so easily within reach
(Closer even than the nonexistent wife)

Lay the trouble – naturally enough
Lurking in a useless, overlooked
Mass of fat and old newspaper stuff
About matters [...]

Back home, it’s sure to be raining. Let’s look into the garden.

During Rain

Between
slats of the garden
bench, and strung
to their undersides
ride clinging
raindrops, white
with transmitted
light as the bench
with paint: ranged
irregularly
seven staves of them
shine out
against the space
behind: untroubled
by the least breeze they
seem not to move
but one
by one as if
suddenly ripening
tug themselves free
and splash
down to be
replaced by an [...]

People often ask me where I’m from, even in my own country – I seem to have a whole collection of strange anecdotes of people doing that. I’m going to sit down in a pub on a chair in London and this woman went “You cannae sit in that chair. It’s my chair.” And me [...]

The Thermal Stair

I called today, Peter, and you were away.
I look out over Botallack and over Ding
Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea.

Find me a thermal to speak and soar to you from
Over Lanyon Quoit and the circling stones standing
High on the moor over Gurnard’s Head where some

Time three foxglove summers ago, you came.
The [...]

A Barred Owl

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also [...]

Then one morning you’re tying your shoelaces
And there they are, two more-than-cracks in your favourite shoe
Which couldn’t have been there the day before; or are you past
Observing details so close to home? And, yes,
For leather suddenly to give out without warning is unsettling
(Though, on reflection this is how things happen; for how terrifying
To base your [...]

Of all the prison poems I’ve written I think this is my favourite little one. We were asked to scrub the walls of the prison to clean the place up and we saw on one wall graffiti and several prisoners refused to touch it, to scrub it out, because it was good. It was [...]

The Lover (after Propertius)

Poor mortals, with your horoscopes and blood-tests -
what hope is there for you? Even if the plane
lands you safely, why should you not return
to your home in flames or ruins, your wife absconded,
the children blind and dying in their cots?
Even sitting quiet in a locked room
the perils are infinite and unforeseeable.
Only [...]

Oatmeal

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if
somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion [...]