End of treatment
After the long, dark winter,
the many samples taken out of you
and poured away, the last appointment
at the centre, the hard facts,
we take to the coast in pouring rain
for a difficult walk on sliding shale,
dodging pebbles that bounce back at us
when we try to fling them as far as the water
and you comment on the
womb-like quality of rock pools,
their dark wetness, their walls
lined with the red mess of anemones
that retract inside themselves when touched;
tight-nubbed clots that shrink
into crevices, shutting out predators,
blood-coloured and yet bloodless.
in The North issue 37,
Smith/Doorstop Books, 2005
Berlin Lichterfelde
Behind us, the eastern outskirts.
Beyond us, the fence where the border was
and the evening stretching empty
into the heart of the country.
These hard frosts would sometimes last all day.
I used to count lights in the tower blocks
of that Stalinist housing complex.
There were deer, before the new highway.
That couple walking their dogs
are in the area where the mines were.
Imagine watch-towers along this track.
They’d get out of their patrol cars to chat and urinate,
machine guns pulling on their shoulders.
Imagine hearing the order, seeing another man
run for the border like that dog off its lead
running for the trees. Imagine obeying it.
West Lake, Hangzhou
The day before my flight we cycle
to your favourite spot on borrowed bikes,
beyond that ridge of hills, out past the Temple
of the Soul’s Retreat, the Silk Museum,
the Dragon’s Cave, another pagoda,
and we stop at last in a flap of skirts
on the ornamental elbow of a bridge
where the lake is said to be clearest –
though it’s not what you promised: not like glass,
not green tea but cold coffee filmed over,
cigarette ends passing under like boats. So we
cycle on to Autumn Moon On Calm Lake
where the magnolias are said to be idyllic,
me behind, loving your blouse of cherry trees
and orioles; your hat, flipped off, dancing
on elastic; your hair done up with a plastic lotus.
This is how I’ll remember you –
these slim-hipped willows, this picnic
at Three Pools Mirroring The Moon,
these long legs of bamboos, these leaves
fingering my neck, that woman in white
resting her paddles like a butterfly, that punt
splintering off from the jetty as we say goodbye,
how it slips into the skin of the lake.
Northbound train
Reading about loss, I look up
as Holy Island goes by us
on the flat palm of the sea.
The conductor clips my ticket
during a difficult paragraph,
the hard fact of a death.
A steward serves tea and biscuits
as we pass through Berwick.
The immensity, the smallness of it,
plot or scattered ashes.
Kircaldy. November closing over us,
sky turning yellow. The sea lies leaden
as we skirt Montrose’s basin.
Northwards looks dark like oblivion
but an end is also a beginning:
there is talk of future happiness.
Aberdeen. A passage about lighthouses –
how their beams are never broken –
and incredibly we pass a lighthouse,
and its light seems miraculous.
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