‘There are those who plan to die
blameless, open-handed, an unwritten letter.
We can’t aspire to that.
We lack the pure compulsion and the nerve.

The orchard’s harvested; the stoves are lit
to burn all winter; the house is steeped
in a musty odour of fruit.
Think how it is
to own nothing, to carry nothing
from one place to the next…
Unburdened, my body grows
featureless. I could disappear in water,
be perfectly matched to grassland.
Every tree
is stripped and life goes on underground;
even the telephone’s in hibernation.

I shall be here, of course,
seeing the season out from my fireside chair,
sometimes bringing apples down from the loft
or walking to church. If 1 should stray,
how would you ever find me?-
a pallid silhouette
on a clear road, like any refugee.’

Then everything closed down, the ‘full systems malfunction’
we’d been told to expect; a blip in the light of the world
was more what it was: a trip-switch on creation.

Some took to their beds some played wild
music, as if the thing might be kept off
by the sheer burst of it; some spiked jugs of juice
and called their children in; some yammered; some threw dice,
the bounce of the bones like a chuckle or a cough.

Then everything closed down, the ‘full systems malfunction’
we’d been told to expect; a blip in the light of the world
was more what it was: a trip-switch on creation.

Some took to their beds some played wild
music, as if the thing might be kept off
by the sheer burst of it; some spiked jugs of juice
and called their children in; some yammered; some threw dice,
the bounce of the bones like a chuckle or a cough.

I am tucked up here out of sight. I am tucked up here
in the bell-tower of Our Lady of Retribution: my own space
well-stocked and arranged just so. This tower was raised in the year
blank-blank, the year of the crow, the year of our disgrace.
I am tucked up here in the shadow of the cross
with my ear-muffs, with my quilt and palliasse,
kneeling up but looking down, like a man at prayer.

A woman carrying water crosses the square.
She is running slowly, running not to spill. Then a child, out into clear
view, going a long diagonal and running like a hare,
jink-jink. I am tucked up here, a sure thing, with my sausage and beer
and a field-stove to keep my fingers supple. Days pass.
I’m more than content in my snuggery, my lair;
I have somewhere to lay my head and somewhere to piss
and, for comic disputation, the birds of the air.

With the scope pulled up to my eye, the world is close
and particular: this grandad, hugging the shade, each hair
on his head, the wet of his eye, the pre-war
coin on his fob-chain, the weave of his coat . . . Over there
by my friend the Marlboro Man is where
I would sit with my morning coffee: Arno’s place,
its pinball machine, its jukebox, the girl with Madonna’s face
until she showed her teeth; I would tilt my chair
to the wall and take the sun. They go in fear. They go in fear
of me. And where they go they go by my good grace.

I am tucked up here with plenty left in store.
The night-sky floods then clears, flagging a single star,
and the city settles to silence under my peace.
The woman, the child, the grandad, are nothing … or nothing more
than what history can ignore, or love erase.

I perch on a ‘Bauhaus-style’ chrome and raffia
stool as you drop your knife and pause to consider
this fish and its fistula,

this fish with its deep deformity, its head like a cosh,
its raw flank and blood-brown eyes,
its lips of lopsided blubber,

this fish we are having for supper.
You laid out cold cash
to have them deliver this fish, close-packed in ice,

a glacier coelacanth preserved against all the odds,
as if some throw of the dice, some coin
turning a thousand years to come down heads,

had brought to the marble slab in our kitchen
of all kitchens this fish, sporting
its jowly truncheon-lump of sorbo rubber

and the great wet ulcer opening beneath its backbone.
As you start again, flensing good from bad, you let spill
a viscous flub of gut that slips

from your wrist to the marble, where it spells
out the hierogram most often linked
with the once in a lifetime, miraculous

descent of the goddess, her gills
crisp enough to cut as you trade kiss for kiss.
Flesh of her flesh, I’ll eat it if you will.

That slim isthmus where one sea beats on the southern shore,
another sea at the northern, is called by.sailors and strangers Finisterre
or, sometimes, Terra Nada. It was there,
on that cold strip of rock and broom and bright rag-weed that four
hundred were run to ground,
motherless sons, widowers, the orphans of orphans, their gear
tossed on the tide or lost to the offshore wind.

So much for gyromancy, so much for prayer.

We went there next morning, the weather holding clear,
and made a ring, the faint-hearted hand-in-glove with the blind.
It wasn’t long before one of the women claimed to hear
a difference in the gulls’ cries, something raw,
full-throated, a note so thick with fear
it took her breath and brought her to her knees. The air
was full of it then – everyone heard it clear,
or said they did, and stood in awe
to be there as the legend rose and formed,
the skirl of the dead in our ears, their silt still on the sand.