It was the House of the Rising Sun. That summer.
’64. We turned our backs on town,
at Rickney Farm the Pevensey levels radiated
water to the sea – such opportunities for boys.

A barn, and hay, and no adult to be found.
Jones tuned his sister’s radio to Caroline. I’d never
heard such moonshine sound, so far from Sunday
dinners, Billy Cotton, Ray’s a Laugh.

At first, we built our fortresses for tanks and planes,
then, though I couldn’t swim, cruised down
wide ditches in the farm canoe. The Panasonic
in its leather case came too – and played the future

underneath the canvas waterline. On such cruises
of discovery did we find the subjects of these dreams –
three girls. Like us, fourteen, and sent. I held
the bow, and David, grinning, got them in.

Old hands in love, we showed them how to paddle,
our landing place the cattle used, the stinking
milk-eyed pike we’d dredged from weeds and thrown
onto the bank. They laughed. We knew sophisticated things.

My mother read the letter from one later on
and showed me, scandalised. We all should meet,
it said, on Sunday afternoon – the pictures
in their town. It was another world

to come, and seeing it my mother raged.
The letter disappeared. Impossible to reach,
We never went and David never knew.
Soon after that the winter came, a birthday,

and I nearly got my way. A radio
to find those pirate feelings on. All they could
afford, it never worked, except to find
the Home on, on a Sunday afternoon.

Eastbourne
August 1993

Jean in the corridor. I flatter her to see
she’s just the same – a disbelief in self
that makes her think she’s good at nothing.

Today she takes me on one side and asks me
when I need to know about her coming to
my wedding. “I have to have some surgery

and they won’t know till then. I may need
radiography.” A pause long enough
to hold the word that has such weight

no tongue can lift it when its time has come.
A desparate conversation of the eyes.
Funny how we smile. Things pass

into suspension. We walk through doors. The air
warms, it’s summer. Nature teems,
grows, greens, is good. A superabundance

of life believing there’s no knife or winter
to cut it back. “Just turn up on the day,”
I think but do not say the “please”.

“Well, I don’t know. Sometimes, afterwards
You don’t feel so well.” “That’s true,” I say.
But air and words between are like a mask.

We reach the door. The turning point.
“This’ll teach me to look so closely
at myself in showers.” She looks regretful.

A dust of oxide on a precious metal.
“It’s just as well you did,” I say.
Later we see each other through

so many windows as I teach my group.
She’s getting organised for something and she smiles.
How close it is, that smile, and far away.

Tarporley 1990

Blue Moon, I saw you standing alone,
Without a hope in your heart.
Without a love of your own.

A father singing. The train hushes the world.
His daughter, sitting on his knee, knows it’s for her.
She laughs, her apple face polished with happiness.
“Emma” she calls. Her word – holding child
and parent still while farms fidget past.

The mother, placed beside a son whose book
of puzzles, jokes and crosswords keeps him silently
himself, looks out at the ephemeralities. A blaze
of poster colour sweeps aside the green.
“Yellow” calls the little girl, exultantly,
and holds a hand to touch the glass that takes
this miracle along. “Mustard,” says her mother, and adds
another to the debt her daughter owes her in her heart.

No one thinks to tell her that it’s Rape. A bridge
goes past. The girl’s hand falls. The boy
fills in another word. The father sings Blue Moon.

British Rail, 1989

[1]

Rockstar drunkard coping with easy gravity.
An unsteady child, his footprints litter the ground
like biscuits. First to this dustbowl beach he’s brought
his postcard flag, and wrinkled lilo suit.
The emptied eye of his face stares back,
collects the vacant space beyond. Shadows
stream from his feet holding us to his place
in history. Beyond the earthlit circle of his day
the cliches gather moonlight in the darkness.

[2]

The photograph my mother took of me in front
of my grey rusty Ford that cost her Seventy
Pounds cannot be found. The Instamatic
I bought her for her birthday would have taken it.
It too is lost. I stood beside the driver’s door,
the first of many times, and looked as if
another day would come. A smile or grin
would part fill the frame. The car would do
the rest. Her pride and love would not
have noticed any itchings to be gone.

[3]

Armstrong, Aldrin and the other one were up there
snapping at the very time. First steps
upon the moon, or miles in my first car.
Mankind will not forget. Exciting times
for human enterprise and care they were.

 Chester 1988

for Andrew Pastor

Where other Councils would have placed a pier
or bandstand, Lyme keeps its town museum. Here
the past shelters from life’s unseasoned airs,
and graces, with its gothic roof and spires,
a shingle beach, The Cob, and boats that crowd
together in a harbour. Beyond, in closed-in cloud,
the careless tide picks fossils from each day
and turns them, with the humbler stuff, back to decay
and minerals and restless silt. Not so within:
a tweeded woman sitting with The Guardian
admits for 40p we unabrasive folk
whose harmless gaze alone will feast and pluck
at whorls and fragments of the protozoic slime
[and all the other local things that whim
and curiosity have rescued from the past
to fill the labelled cases under glass].

In spectacled insouciance, the lady
turns a page. So much gentility displayed. He
would be forgiven who thought these yesterdays
too crinolined to set a distant world ablaze.
We stroll past testaments to nearby craft
– The Cob [and tides] inlaid in wood; the deft
display of needlepoint; the church window
rescued from a field. “Like rummaging in a bureau
drawer” says Andrew who smiles and disappears.
A History man, he has an eye for what it wears.

I follow on, up towered stairs that tell
in photographs, of days cut off by fall
of snow, and find I’m looking at a small surprise:
the Focus of the Age had twice forgot its fears
of being too provincial, and had sent armies out.
Poor Monmouth was the first – Lyme has no doubt
his “character” lacked “firmness and nobility”.
He came ashore and was defeated. Posterity
allows his name to rule the beach his landing
fell on, if not a reputation standing.
Here are the slivers of his hanged men’s bones –
Judge Jeffreys did for them. He drank the town’s
hospitable wine and had his victim’s bellies split –
here’s the bill for board and booze, and next to it
the blackened disembowelling knife that showed
the innocent their shame and guilt. Three hundred
died, and under glass remain three artefacts.

From battle number two a heap of shot depicts
a bitter siege in 1644.
Not much to leave behind the English Civil War.
The size of gallstones these little things were brought
in having turned up on a tennis court
in 1938. How close and comforting
that sounds! No time of local gore or bloodletting –
unless you count the Great War Battleship
that sank, torpedoed. Downstairs, you mind, they keep
the boot that bailed and saved its owner’s lifeboat.
It looked like battered metal – almost too remote
to bring surviving death as close as words.
Well, maybe things speak louder than their deeds.

The lady with the paper calls us down.
“It’s lunchtime and we’re closing,” curls around
the narrow iron galleries. We go down stairs
as slowly as we dare. At the door she wears
a smile. “Do come back this afternoon.”
The noise of shouts and screams comes squalling in.
“That’s not the kind of person we like to see in Lyme,”
she says, and, sighing, locks the door on time.

October 1990