I told them I saw you walking last night
and because I didn’t need to mention
your fear of heights I told them
you stood at the edge of the pier
and because I didn’t need to mention
your fear of water I told them I watched you
hire a fishing boat and head out to sea,
and because I didn’t need to mention

your lack of religion I told them
you were like god looking down on us,

pulling all the strings.

in memory of Michael J Bennett

I come when the edge of darkness returns you to me.
The water is swollen above the weir before it breaks
into a gush of white foam. The heron stands poised
fixing the moment. I remember your hands, the tension
in your forearms forcing them steady as you held them up
in a square for the view you never came back to paint.
I look into your scene, the arc of the bridge, lamposts,
the curved row of houses lining the hill, winter trees

all reveal themselves to me now as a complex web
of thin black lines like an X-ray held to the light,

the challenge of perspective that ruled your life.

I stand on the broad bank to watch it flow –
a deep, muddy incursion swirling at its mouth,
depositing a layer of dredged up silt
to cover up its sins along the way.
It descended from the high ground
through bright cities and lit farms
to turn its sinewed back quite suddenly
on the soft insidious lowlands of the south.

And then, with nowhere left to go,
I turned to the spur that punctuates the sea.

The swerving lighthouse held me in its arms.

A response to Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Dream of Winter’ 

He offers me his picture: the dusk lake full of flitting
shadows and winter riddles. In mine, a couple idle,
breathing in the light’s last drip. Their hand-in-hand stroll
slips under the water’s dark meniscus. Untarred, they linger
in silence, not yet feeling how their time has split
like an overripe peach dropped from beyond tree-height.
No snow here, no mouths gulping at rippled surfaces,
no silver flash of flickering fishtails disappearing. Not

when I dream this moment. I edge his photo’s deserted scene
closer to my hopes, then watch. Still, his lake’s lens

fills with night; pipistrelles empty out their song.

They natter about last year’s miserable weather
over cider, sunlight glinting on the bucket of water.
Then, silence as she ducks for a Flower of the Town.
He’s after the Yorkshire Beauty, first picked
in a shoemaker’s garden in the Dales. They splutter
as their crowns touch briefly. In the end,
she gets the Beauty, catches the stalk in her teeth
and lifts it slowly. She shakes the drips, tries not to laugh.

He watches her pare it neatly with her pocket knife,
take the first sweet bites. She relishes the star at its heart.

He settles for a Ribston Pippin, pockets it for later.

lift your head         your eye on the skyline –
cathedral          beacon             cathedral
begin at the left
keep your strokes small and precise
stipple sometimes                marking time
until you are                the fro of the ferry
add Albert Dock   landing stage   three graces
the Liver clock striking seven

work quickly               each stroke a cipher
where we are

drawn to the ferry’s deck-rail

It’s the last drops of sun that catch fire, flowing between sea line
and a fat roll of storm – incoming and weighed down with hail.
On the beach the tide turns gently, laying the sea’s weeds in the slack
water where mermaids leave their purses on the strandline.
Farne and Longstone islands appear as silhouettes of U-boats forever
surfacing in the swell. Their lights regard the rock-boiled water,
scanning the shallows and the profounds, the drying rocks and reefs:
Knivestone, Whirl, Glororum Shad – beaming regret to wrecks lost inside the kelp.

What the lighthouses have withstood in silence, the gulls rail against, singing
of that sorrow, buried in us so deep, that no blade will ever cut it out.

But give the wind time, and it intends to scour the world clean.

I drive north     as long as the light
and the land last    alone I walk
the seaweed line    testing my strength
against the pull    of moon and tide
I take pictures    of no-one, perched
on a wet rock    riddle shingle
through fingers    for the stone I’ll know
is a gift    like this book, borrowed

so I may say    oystercatcher
to the wading birds    I’ll breathe in

till my ribs crack   like razor-shells

Some days nothing to see but mist
through buckthorn and goat willow
still the river’s there
migration route of geese and fish
traffic of gods and men
wave after wave to the sea where all roads lead
and the Unit of Tigris Boatmen weave
along the estuary

keeping peace where the Wall runs out
a line held

at the frayed edge of the world.

Dear reader, what we are recording
is a diaspora, not an empire.
We go deep as well as wide; sing
songs of our ancestors, divided
no more into damned and saved.
The calendar of our flesh crimsons
our reiver names, forges a chain.
River’s a mirror, the land inside us.

Our plot of earth is a borrowed book
begun in sunshine, finished in hail.

Blood.   Breath.   How light cascades.