What he saw: fish laid out on stalls
at the marketplace, arrowhead pattern of scales
repeated in the nets that caught them,
shadows sliced on the gnomon’s tongue
for time’s sake. What he did not see
was the earth from space, like a child’s blue
and white marble tossed into black.
Yet, like fish drowned in air

to sustain a different breath, he knew sky
loops beyond night in boundless re-beginning

or, in other words, he saw without sight.

Preston Bus Station 1964
Grain warehouses   East Float   Birkenhead
A fine-grained photograph in black and white
Two whippets’   slink     slag   steel  clinker   cotton and coal    sinter
YTS   spare time    the time-honoured need to retrain
          Two Bootle girls in curlers up to the nines for the best part of half the night
An overlooked pint of Tetley (flat on a bar) somewhere south of Leeds
The sound of Clitheroe rolling in the mouth     on the tongue

The turn   the club
A van not quite anywhere on the M62     uncoupling  its doors

The wild slow release of birds

He stands out among the cockney glottal stops,
dropping soft consonants. He’s intimate
with every word, tip of tongue caressing teeth.
Let me trace the subtle geography of his mouth.
I’m heading north. Innocent. Voice unformed.
He’s many years an exile, vowels worn
by Thames and Cam, refusing to return.
Yet I press my ear to his chest

and hear the Tyne flood every breath,
hear dockers, fishwives, kittiwakes call

our startled hearts: two salmon leaping.

Do lowering skies oppress us?
No. Like jewels laid on dark velvet,
Our lives sparkle with colours
Made brighter by the backdrop.
We combat endless cold and damp
With coats and smiles and friendly chat,
While dark, ascerbic humour
Dries the puddles on our streets.

But when the rare sun rends the cloud
We scrabble to hide our untrained eyes

With Gucci glasses; Aah, familiar dullness.

Sunday, and your voice drops from the satellite,
freighted with vowels, soft, sanded oak’s grain.
‘Darlo’. Speech well-worn like the cobbles in your road.
‘Love, shall you be going to that?’. Travelled language,
easy, open and close, like the back yard gate.
Burr of dialect, absorbed different worlds.
Factory and settlement. Migration from hill and salt.
Our conversations clear as a whistle, well-worn as coins.

I see the neat square of daylight in your window.
Hear the rattling valley when you speak.

Then, I am of moorland. Marra. Held firm in the wind’s hollow.

You clean the prefab in your all-round pinny,
wind a yellow tartan scarf around prickly curlers,
tuck in the fraying ends. I stand at the path’s edge
watch you scrub the step with a whetted stone, blood
in your meaty fists, strength in your back and thighs.
After, you tip Typhoo leaves into a warmed pot,
your gaze at the horizon beyond the window, beyond
the steaming water, the fluster of cups on saucers.

Aunt Sal brings the gossip. I am gripped, eyes fixed
on your lips, I mirror shapes you silently mouth,

work out the secret words it’s not my place to hear.

My vowel sounds are sanctioned by the south:
I offer words like damaged goods,
fear they’ll be amusing or misunderstood.
From finis terre to end of Englishness,
traverse the geography of time and life.
Upend the map, make the jigsaw fit
a different way, unsettle home. Like roots
uprooted, edges are inheritance –

the Tyne a frontier on my skin, the wind, the craic,
the singing tongue familiar-foreign – North

is where I found my source, inside.

Again the slack journey into the valley, shades of church and salad
Grit in the eye where a sleeve catches, surprised, unlearning the city’s texture,
that callus levered up, like the hat of an egg. I hate to give in to this vein, smiling,
yes, to new friends, I am a country girl, conditioned to early rising, fat milk,
the smell of shit, the slip of a jellied lamb held tight in the arms, and
(why not) Auntie’s hotpot on a Sunday, she a great old girl who wouldn’t give
an inch, that’s the way we’re made. I can still remember her brown linoleum
and she died in the house she was born in, we consider that a fine way to go.

While all around the cool, sombre hills hallooe the lie,
that yours is a rain-soaked voice, a grass-fed heart.

That poor seed sown in this earth flourishes, nonetheless

They lumber north, the slow beasts
sombre grey, making us sullen,
their rumps block out the light –
as day falls away they are making for subfusc
(it is always subfusc in the north) before
stars come out: you’ll find us on station platforms
sitting in dismantled libraries, swirling pale cups
in half-empty tearooms, shutting a skylight

look up, it’s later than you think, they warn
in the language of the last blackbird

as it falls silent

The Ouseburn gave wuh up fuh rainbows.
Well, yuh wud.
A while wuh stud to watch
wor puah auld Paula Liz
sink. Iridescence leak.
A legacy o’ blud that wee broon vein
knahs well enough.
Mourned an’ al,

half-heard, half-meant murmurs.
Best wuh cud.

As al gud sympathisers shud.