Read a selection of my love poems
I would know your step
the set of your shoulders
the way you hold your head
if you walked across the horizon
three miles distant
wherever they have horizons
steppes or deserts
I would know your step
I would know your voice
if you stood in a choir of voices
in the world’s biggest choral anthem
some unimaginable allelujah
in the biggest cathedral
on the horizon of a steppe or desert
I would know your voice
I would know your hair
in a curiosity shop of copper
in a chest of chestnuts
in a goldsmith’s workshop
your red gold hair
in a cathedral of copper & gold
on the horizon of a steppe or desert
I would know your hair
I would know the sounds
you make in sleep
the noise of your dreams
if you were the chorus
of a great cathedral
or the copper in a wire
the curiosity of goldsmiths
on the horizon of a steppe or desert
I would know the sound
From The Yellow House (2017)
All the world is waiting
for something to happen
some day it will
it will be an accident
we wait for the silence to stop
you scuffing the snow
me searching for sandwiches
nobody wants to declare
perhaps come out on the wrong side
we have seen the mountains
always wary of humanity
drag down like fallout
I am suffocating here you cried
oh you have eyebrows
as delicate as fishbones
winter picked them clean
From The Yellow House (2017)
In darkness we are inflamed
in darkness
we are inflamed
begin with touch
be led be led
eyes closed heart open
pressed to this
ship our bed
a noisy gale
salt on the skin
turn by turn
our calls & cries
all hands
pressed to this
ship our bed
in darkness
we are inflamed
first with whispers
hands & tongues
begin with hands
pressed to this
ship our bed
From The Yellow House (2017)
Going to bed with the snowman
I have gone to bed
with the snowman,
in the dead of night.
I have seen the lights
gleaming briefly off & on
a radiance that could not
be accounted for
by the humour
of the moment,
or his perishing crystals.
That nothing is forever
is known. & people
live too long these days.
But this I can swear:
there was a cold kind of loving
when I lived with the snowman.
From Mathematics & Other Poems (1997)
How I learned about love
i
my great-grandfather
was a Scotsman
a sea-captain
& he roamed the seas
but he met a girl
in a dockside
lodging house
& that was the end
of the sea for him
he washed up on our shores
a bible reader
a presbyterian
he wore a top hat
& button boots
a stranger in the parish
& his rough scots
& his Hogmanay
& love was his anchor
ii
when my father fell in love
his mother threw him out
she said my mother
would never be anything
but an ornament
for the window
the son disinherited
& all that
thirty good acres
& rights to conacre
gone for a woman
he never regretted it
I think of them
swinging away
to an old waltz
not touching the floor
they were such
perfect dancers
& love was their harvest
iii
my father died & my
mother followed him
into the ground
three months almost
to the day
it was he who stayed her
she never believed in god
or at least in priests
she starved herself
she died when she was
already almost gone
such a tiny shift in space
between being & not
it was love that held her
& love that led her away
From The Yellow House (2017)
Illiterate heart
from the Neapolitan of Totò
you schooled
my illiterate heart
to read
to write
above all one word
love
& nothing more
From The Yellow House (2017)
Garden near Cognac
You are halving an apple & the sun
catches the blade as it tightens onto your thumb.
A sweet spit marks the equator.
You have come through the sunflowers;
there is pollen on the down of your arm.
We arrived here with de Maupassant
& Mauriac in mind – a kind of hesitant
pilgrimage. We read nothing & sleep
in the warm days. Your cherry skin is moist
& shining. It appears we have apostatised.
Remember love, how years ago we drove
up through the Comeraghs in snow.
When we passed the last bush there was no colour,
not even the grey black of a stone.
That rigorous landscape shaped our lives.
A river divided the valley below
like a knife-mark in white skin.
Snow dusted off the exposed ridges.
There was no room for sentiment,
a momentary lapse of concentration
could have been the death of us,
the old Volkswagen careering down the shale
into the snow. We came to rest at last
near Eas na Machan. Through the windows
we could hear the frozen falls ticking.
That was the country of cold people,
Donncha Rua was buried within sight.
We parted stiff clothing & seamed our skins
clean as a knifeblade on appleskin.
In those cold mountains it was an act of faith.
Here in the welling silent summer
in a garden near Cognac love-making
is not so dangerous. There is no sheer fall,
& our bodies lie as finely separated
as the slit in the shallow skin of your apple.
From Mathematics & Other poems (1997)
Alice falling
Frost is moving on the roof
daylight opening the box
the ticking of morning.
I measure change
in the interval
between the appearance of a drop
and the end of the fall.
Alice is falling
and as she falls she picks things up
she cannot drop them.
Forever is the time
between your sleeping and your waking
before the eyelid opens
I kiss your sleep-softened silence
and we fall together.
From Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me (2004)