The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea Read Free

kind of death
the gods have got in mind for us.
    We’ll never know. Accept it.
This winter pummeling the ocean
on the pumice rocks of Tuscany
may be our last.
    Or not. Be sensible and pour the wine.
This life’s too short for longing
and the clock spins as we speak.
Days come and go. Hold on to this one.

The River-Car
    The way it’s parked, nose-down between the wet rocks
in the leaf-light of the gorge, water pouring
through the windscreen and the tires blown;
as if the naiads put their fairy horses
out to grass and cruised the night in silver Escorts.
    Or as if three boys from Hebden Bridge
grew bored and stole a car and drove it halfway
to the moors, grew bored again, then rolled it
from the muddy track and watched it hammer
through the trees until it came to rest
    a hundred yards below. And as the echo
died away, the car they drove in dreams
kept floating downstream and the boys they’d never be
rode every bend of starlit water to the ocean.

Galatea
    That first ripple in the marble.
Her hand on his wrist like a tame bird.
Her eyes opening. The big skylight,
the white-washed walls, the brace of chisels.
    A baby’s mind inside a woman’s body,
playing
Peep-Bo
with a nurse, then bathed
and toweled dry and taken to his bedroom
as a sweetmeat when the guests have gone.

Christmas Night, 1930
    The party’s over. Downstairs the monsters
of cigar-smoke and society-talk
coil and uncoil among the tissue paper
and the tangerine peel.
    This was your room once. The crib.
The mirror. Your painting of a flower.
Only the initials on the shaving kit
connect you to the man that you’ve become.
    In the kitchen your mother’s ghost
soaps the greasy plates and hauls
the turkey carcass to the pantry
so that she can scrub the table clean.
    In the black square of the window
it hovers again. Dog or deer.
The animal that terrified you once.
But you can hear what it’s saying now.
    So take the curtains. Take the bowl
with blue stripes and the white cloth
on the dresser. Take the silence.
This is all you’ll ever need.
    Step across the sill and walk
into a night where the trees
are on fire and the stone church
dances on the dark.

Lullaby
    for Edith (1908–2003)
and her great-grandson, Zack (2003–)
    Starlight, star bright
Lie in this cradle of night
and sleep tight
    Sea shell, sea swell
Ring the church bell
for all is well
    Sundown, sunrise
Nothing dies
so close your eyes

The Twilight Zone
    I’m in a tailback near Basingstoke,
pondering the sad-dog brakelights
of the V-reg Nissan up ahead,
thinking how we never got
the jet-packs or the protein pills
and how they’d be as unremarkable
as radios or Teflon. I’m thinking
of the way time runs just fast enough
to keep us entertained, but not so fast
we spend the whole day dumbstruck
by the fact that we can clone a sheep
or eat a mango in the Wirral.
    Late October 1978.
We’re smoking in The Friar’s Grill
and playing with the cool, rotating cover
of my newly purchased Led Zep III
when, apropos of nothing, Nigel says
that Mr. Rothermere’s dead.
And sure enough, we find out later
that he died as we were talking,
falling down the stairwell of the school
we’d left five years before.
    When we hear the news
we feel like hunters from the lowlands
of the Congo hearing Elvis Presley
on a Walkman, petrified
to think what devilry could squeeze
him into such a small box.
    Which is when the sad-dog brakelights
of the Nissan just ahead go out,
the tailback dissolves, I put the Golf
in gear and boldly go to Basingstoke.

The Short Fuse
    Horace
Odes 1:16
    More gorgeous daughter of a gorgeous mother,
burn my poems if they injured you,
or hurl them out into the Adriatic.
Nothing churns the human heart like anger:
    not Apollo when inspiring the priestess
in the shrine at Delphi,
neither Cybele nor drunken Bacchus
nor his cymbal-banging followers.
    And nothing, not the sword of Noricum,
not the ship-devouring sea, not wildfire,
not the terrifying storm of Jupiter himself
descending, holds it