In The Poetry

In Britain when you make a phone call and hesitate before dialling a recorded voice comes on and says, ‘Please hang up and try again.’

The Excuse

Please hang up… I try again
“My father’s sudden death has shocked us all”
Even me, and I’ve just made it up,
Like the puncture, the cheque in the post,
Or my realistic cough. [...]

The Brother

Dropping a canape in my beaujolais
At some reception, opening or launch,
I recall briefly the brother I never had
Presiding at less worldly rituals:
The only man at my wedding not wearing a tie;
Avuncular, swaddling my nephew over the font;
Thumbing cool oil on our mother’s forehead
In the darkened room, the bells and frankincense…
While the prodigal sweats in [...]

Shibboleth

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.
Another couldn’t strip the cellophane
From a GI’s pack of cigarettes.
By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We’d become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,
Staring into [...]

In Britain when you make a phone call and hesitate before dialling a recorded voice comes on and says, ‘Please hang up and try again.’

The Excuse

Please hang up… I try again
“My father’s sudden death has shocked us all”
Even me, and I’ve just made it up,
Like the puncture, the cheque in the post,
Or my realistic cough. [...]

The Brother

Dropping a canape in my beaujolais
At some reception, opening or launch,
I recall briefly the brother I never had
Presiding at less worldly rituals:
The only man at my wedding not wearing a tie;
Avuncular, swaddling my nephew over the font;
Thumbing cool oil on our mother’s forehead
In the darkened room, the bells and frankincense…
While the prodigal sweats in [...]

Haunts

Don’t be afraid, old son, it’s only me,
though not as I’ve appeared before,
on the battlements of your signature,
or margin of a book you can’t throw out,
or darkened shop front where your face
first shocks itself into a mask of mine,
but here, alive, one Christmas long ago
when you were three, upstairs, asleep,
and haunting me because I conjured [...]

A Repertoire

‘Play us one we’ve never heard before’
we’d ask this old guy in our neighbourhood.
He’d rosin up a good three or four
seconds, stalling, but he always could.
This was the Bronx in 1971,
when every night the sky was pink with arson.
He ran a bar beneath the el, the Blarney Stone,
and there one Easter day he sat [...]

Machines

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer’s twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell’s chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch [...]