HUMAN SOUNDINGS
 
Coming of Age
 
My father died when I was twenty-one.
Most of my growing up had been done.
I loved him like a father would his son.
 
Of course, the life I gave him was sporting.
Old tennis-partner, I would let you win.
You who despised the drop-shot and topspin.
 
I could have killed the game with serve and smash.
But lobs and baseline rallies, made to last,
kept the ball live between us on the ash.
 
I knew that you were dying from your play.
And I was growing strong. I kept at bay
the urge to take advantage. Now today
 
twenty years later I’m once more your son
missing the drink you bought me when you won.
  
Cry
 
I see the sorrow of my ways
in the eyes of others. Most days
I hear the cry of a lost soul
in my ears, and it leaves me cold.
An echo from the anteroom
of the unborn, or the tomb.
And then the silence, loud and clear,
descends on me and I feel fear.
 
The Albesia in Season
 
When my flowering tree comes into its own
the birds sing in it for a day and a night.
O folie bergère of pink and white blossom,
fluffy boa feathers. Honey is their delight.
 
Mountain swallows. No one sees them alight.
Little pecking birds that drink to clear their throats,
carousing the air with many coloured notes.
When the source has been sucked dry, the birds take flight
 
and the blossoms begin to fall. A dead cat bloats  
with maggots under the tree. Three days ago
it slept in the grass, a pile of old coats.
It must have crawled there to die. Marco Polo
 
brought the corm of an Albesia back home.
A gift to Venice from his friend Kubla Khan.
But in the marshlands the plant could not be grown.
So, it put down its roots in North Catalan,
 
where the green fronded branches have the wingspan,
and the trunk the torsion, with its knotted grain,
to bend, and not to break, in the tramontane
(ants feed off the bark in this arid terrain).
 
The ideal wood for carving beasts and birds.
Flea markets in the Far East are aflood with them.
The gift of the Albesia had been offered
by Kubla Khan to fashion royal coffins.
 
But no Venetian doge would be buried in less
than a sarcophage of flesh-absorbing limestone.
Wood was only what burned peasants to ashes.
A dead loss, thought Marco Polo, who’d have known
 
in Kubla Khan’s Cambaluc, a princess
was dug up after two thousand years, flesh and bone
perfectly preserved in a wooden compress.
Maybe the Albesia will be my own.
 
Existential Hymn
 
If you know where you stand,
the floorboards take care of themselves.
 
If you know where you sit,
you are able to face the south.
 
If you know where to look,
you don’t have to tidy the shelves.
 
If you know where you walk,
you can always find a way out.
 
If you’re going too far,
further will complete the circle.
 
If you know that you sleep,
you can be sure worst fears won’t come true.
 
If you aren’t able to keep
an eye on yourself no one else will.
 
If you know where you are
and who, well, then what’s the problem.
 
The Absorption of a Deep Conversation
For Tammy l
 
The conversation you don't remember.
The conversation I don't remember.
You remember the bridge. I remember the bridge.
You remember the water. I remember the water.
It was deep. The conversation, like the water
under the bridge, was deep, too deep to remember.
The sun shone on the water that was too deep.
 
You remember it was midday. I remember it was midday.
You remember the alp behind. I remember the alp behind.
The alp behind the town. The alp we descended.
That morning. You in a van. Me on a bike. It was steep.
Too steep to remember anything except that it was steep.
And the sun shone on the water that was too deep
for memory, like the conversation under the bridge.
 
You remember the reflection of the town in the water.
I remember the reflection of the town in the water.
The usual church steeple and balustrades, and people
disappearing off for lunch, leaving just the town
in the water, and you and me, deep in a conversation,
too deep to remember, like the descent, other than
it was steep. And it was an alp. And the sun shone.
 
I remember our reflection on the water.
You remember our reflection on the water.
You were an alp beside me, and I was a deep descent.
There was nobody to see us, deep in conversation,
looking at our reflection and how incongruous we were.
The water rippled with laughter. The conversation remains
unfathomable, absorbed into the deep waters under the bridge.
 
The Nicotine Cat
 
Somebody forgot the mothballs.
But now winter is over he fills
the lap of monsieur on the veranda
under the rotten fruited naphtha tree,
whose umbrella leaves keep out the rain,
absorbing the pipe-smoke
until his blotched white coat
turns saffron.
 
By night I don’t know
what corn-of-cob he gets up to.
But the feral screams on the hill
are surely his doing.
By day in a sunny spot out of the wind
he is free to do nothing
with every appearance
of gravitas and frivolity.
 
I know nothing about cats.
But that doesn’t mean
that cats know nothing about me.