Three poems

Let’s play cards,’ he said, crumpled by the pane.

Seminary light caulks the room. He smokes,

tamping a fag out in his final egg.

‘You know Tam and Beryl?’ Here we both nod.

It is eight and evening learns its bruises.

‘How did we ever save that fog?’ No new

hours arrive, our day piles in its corner.

The dark horses sing and books pour their dust

into my thinning man. I light a fire

and sing, or half sing, about green wild lanes,

about a knock from the girl, a dead boar,

a white hart in some luscious August field.

How do we make old endings depend here?

The air tastes of wheat. The door is fathoms

deep and the world has not despaired. Hold on,

keep on dear mouths, for the clocks are full

and our shoes are dry and we may yet take

old stars from heaven’s plate, new stars from hell’s.

I want to get back to when life mattered,’

is how Jimi started. ‘How you fail is really

when the grace kicks in.’

                                        I watch him bend

between pot plants, teasing ochre bedding

from the grey stacks, twisting in his rusted trowel

through lumps of clay. ‘I hate to dwell on this.

It’s over when you notice it; one day you’re

in the middle, and then the middle ends.’

‘Getting old,’ I laugh.

                              ‘Yeah. Well, I ain’t old yet.’

Jimi bends away and tucks his shirt tails

back into his pants. His corduroys are loose

on thick green suspenders. I see his hands are grey

and filthy with another hour of working.

‘I ought to have expected it.’ ‘What’s that?’ I say.

‘The ash of hope. Dis-inspiration’s what I mean,

a calling ain’t the same as making up a life.’

‘Do you regret it? Wasting all them years lying

to yourself?’

                    ‘It ain’t lying if you do the work.

You gotta waste your days somehow, ain’t you?’

He flashes me a glance beneath those heavy

brows and smiles. We laugh a little then.

‘It mostly doesn’t matter what you do,

or how hard you do it. When your grandmother

was alive, God bless her, we would drive out

fast from here, make out in the woods, rinse off

in the east river back of Ron Shaughnessy’s place,

and later, count some stars; we never knew

their names I think I learned a lot back then,

about those common joys, what I like to call

the situationals. The things we don’t just live among,

but in, the life inside the things we see.

This being in it is the most important thing

for us. Heck, time don’t matter much. That happens

anyways. How much of it, how little, you know,

that stuff is all distraction. There’s a tiny space

inside the world for you to sort of occupy.

But there’s a lot of framing too. You gotta see past

all the framing to the essence of your task.

That sort of work don’t get much notice.

You won’t get no mentions or no bylines

in the dailies, nothing like that. It ain’t about

them fashions for the complex points or them

fashions for the simplest line of thinking

anyone can muster. Saying something easy

ain’t a virtue – no how, no way. But saying

what is hard in one way fully graspable,

but not fully comprehensible, that’s tough,

and it won’t win you friends, no plaudits neither,

or money down at Ron’s for a shot of whiskey.’

Jimi stops to rub his back, he turns to look at me.

‘Them situationals is what you’ve got to work on.

The rest of it is dirt.’

                                 Then he gets back to things,

pressing in the trowel, picking out the dead leaves

from the seeds that seem to matter.

Mother said, ‘Learn to love a small life,’

between these weak rivers, ruptured fields

where grey sheep fill the view of St Mary’s.

A life that hands you down its silty

pea field with that fence no one can mend,

and livestock that won’t cost too much.

The virtues of a small life, mother insisted,

ought to involve a diligent tidy marriage

you never managed to supply yourself

and short fat neighbours aplenty,

of whom there are none,

a loyal sheepdog called Thaxton

you never bought from Kenning’s Farm,

and family jinx set down on a hundred sheets

in red boxes you never purchased.

It didn’t happen, the small life,

but love it still, you do, as Mother wanted.

Now you sit on a blind porch at midnight

with a tiny roll-up that flakes and falls

in your brandy, in the tin cup Mother left,

so full of flies you cannot drink it.