| Uprooting (for M. D.)
It was early spring in your garden, Sunday,
Again a world where a woman in sunlight
Directs the performance of tasks. I uproot
A dead mallow tree to leave a crater
In the black earth, a new space, the moment
Suddenly remote from the rooms where the past
Pleads to be freed from wrong. It couldn't last.
These nights when missing you becomes insistent,
I take my bearings listening to the birds
Anticipating summer. Seasons change.
Living in the Past
'One arc synoptic of all tides below'
(for Sean O'Brien)
Silver to the tongue, to the heart gold,
And to the eyes the view across the Tyne
From North Shields at night. Mars was loitering
Low over Newcastle. Its lights becoming
Indistinct with distance were a music
Lavishly backing the river's narrowing.
It takes a room that is not home, the beeps
At 1 a.m. as the World Service kicks in,
To realize that where nothing continues
A friendship over twenty years is as near
As values come to having permanence --
Here's to your tongue, its silver, your heart, its gold.
Sorrow, salting the hung-up meat, corrodes
And jams the fixings so the walls won't move,
Always that ocean stretching the nostrils
That are filled with the space inside the air.
I lean on a hotel windowsill, know
There is no advantage in piety.
This is simply a matter of distance.
Every view is better for being taken
From further along. Where Newcastle dives
To the Tyne, mid-July at 7 p.m.
Opens on smells of seaweed, oysters, rank
With life in a light that makes the salt glisten.
Incident in the Ministry
Naked and bleeding, he was pinned down
Some distance up the extremely long corridor,
Where women scrubbed later removing the stains
That had darkened on the dismal carpet.
Later, civility and service remained
At their desks, familiar with silence
And secrecy, the great stone raised
In their midst slowly withdrawing.
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