Limbo Flight

for Michael Morley

I learnt the news by email on a mobile phone –
and now I’m in the air, and far above the words
your ex-wife said in church, you may be gone.
Jevington’s the Ward you’re on – the place

my mother went before they said her mind
was out to grass, so somewhere in the EDG you too
are paused between being here and not.
A bed, a label round your wrist, and tubes

running everything, in and out like breath.
The scent of clinical disinterest and dressings,
and people waiting to be gone.
So who can save you now? Timothy Winters?

Gavin Maxwell? HG Wells? Can Rhyme
or Reason keep that lamp alight?
Recall the grey Novembers in Room 1 with us –
Ridouts banished, and Readers silently in view.

And all those comments in your envied hand,
beneath our own, that blessed, or struggled
to be kind – poised, artful, middle class
– to sum or stem the chaos scratched from every

Osmiroid you made us buy and use.
Each small remembered thing must call
you from oblivion, so let that knowledge
go to battle on your part – give you protection

from the Will you told us Hardy had believed
held everything to its Immanent ends.
Ignore the ice, the smeering worm that slimes
the glass. Keep close all memories that structure

up that life, your past – even the Nazi bomb
that killed your mum when safe in hospital,
the student minds that struggled to outfool you
over Lear, the plays that gathered glory

in the brightness of your stage. You gave
us leave to speak, to act, and chance to write
with no restraint – unlike so many tinpot
sirs, you let us in, became our friend,

and shared thoughts, laughter, and your life.
I’m close to God at 20,000 feet so hear
this almost prayer. Like flight of planes defies
the life of gravity, I pray you can delay

the pull of what must come when all our engines
stop. Let this be the lesson, then. In us you live.
Live on some place we may together go.
And write this final line yourself, when well.

Library Access

Journey into Space

It is the reading room, locality is everything.
The shelves stack up with Northumbrian essentials –
no quoin or corner unincluded, no coal-faced,
coped-with tragedy. Deeds, decisions, votes
and attitudes; careful cuttings; local plants,
vanished yards and ships, and bound editions
of the Tyne Tees TV Times. Minutes
thinned from hours, or letters into words,
events that gripped then fell away like wasted
grain. Lost dreadnoughts, councils, mothers, every
mother’s son – the yesterdays that go unnoticed
here all gather space and wait. For what?
These past times, people and their papers,
might vanish into air – scanned in, compressed,
become alive in an electric dark that everyone
can share – or continue to degrade to dust,
an irritation in the throat, the reddened eye:
the stuff, the dreams, all cleared or wiped away.

The Secret Agents

A thin silence comes from all parts of the planet,
The agents in the reading room have settled to their tasks.
Laptops reflect their lenses, anonymously.
They sit, digesting consequential lines of code,
the only voice, the library lift, whose empty words
soliloquise the way below. Although surrounded,
their needs are not an open book – it’s their
screens that net the things they seem to seek
– an article with thrilling patterns of blood gasses,
some dead-end jobs; a script; a boxing
film with subtitles in Greek: but secretly, beneath
the hiss of circulating air, the chirp of mice,
the bossy chat of nagging keys on boards,
a dozen essays, letters, poems, maybe
get composed. A parka-ed man, grey beard,
awaits the lift’s return, and looks around
at faces that recompose their blank unyielding
stares. The aircon clears away the dust –
the faint decay of paper, and the death of cells.

Newcastle City Library
January 2013

Those Cats

The cats lie, eyes-closed, on the sofa where he died.
The rise and fall of fur. Three sets of ears pitched
cautiously in my direction. Where I sit, he sat, worn out,
eyes fixed on three bright bars of straight, unmoving heat.

They’ve taken him. Still here, the life he left from,
the things he never seemed to see – the empty
hearth, its burned-through grate remaining
unreplaced; the cotton dishcloths drying.

Above, on the enamelled mantel, his little joke –
the china collie dog my mother bought him,
head down, facing out the clipped-out snap
of sheep, wrapped round an old and empty tin;

some matches and a scrap of card with pencilled stock on.
All this beneath the noiseless clock, the simple
calendar from Scot’s Gap, the royal samplers Jane,
his elder sister, made and which she hardly dared

put on the wall for fear of what he’d say.
Now, both are gone. The tongue that troubled her
fills the farmhouse kitchen with its silence.
Monday Mart day. Nothing left to sell.

The cats take their untroubled ease, as if sleep
was their sole pleasure. From his he’d wake and stare
the fire out, stroking them with fingers strong as roots
and thickened with the honour of his work.

The electric bars give out their heat, heat he
sat in front of as he died, boots on, and cap,
waiting for what we’ll never know – a rest?
more warmth? a stockman’s knock upon the door?

Alone he died, alone my mother found him,
eyes closed and sitting up; called him,
felt his cooling brow, and knew its time.
The doctor laid him flat beneath a blanket,

lifted him like a child, a body age had lightened,
and, as they talked, his cats claimed last possession,
lying in their accustomed comfort on his feet.
Look at those cats, she’d said, and shook her head.

Ogle Hill Head

OS Sheet 78 [1961]

Envisage every layer that a map contains –
the naked earth, its contours combed with pleasure
round each hill; the rivers, runs of coastline,
and each cliff; the early settlements like puckered skin;
the castles, mansions crumbling in their gothic script;
towns, conglomerates that grow their random streets
in filaments of grey; the railways, roads and motorways
that try to give the whole some sense of running
to a plan – each element a mark of god, or sign
that need or greed has kept the landscape in its grasp,
or touch of someone’s hand upon a page.

An up-to-date O.S. holds everything
we have or were. Discovers what’s around us
and each hedge – no seeming secret place
that can’t be found or guessed at, or privacy
for distant monarchs in their glens. In time,
an older map will tell you what you’ve lost.
That mine that once sprawled heaps and railheads
by those brick-walled yards has gone, and in its place
a landscaped park, a quick estate, a superstore.

On my map flows a past with all its routes
intact, keeps now alive with guesses at each turn.
Turn right, along a road that isn’t there,
but is, to a future that has happened and is not.

Ellingham
August 1993