A neat contrivance of rods and cams

creates the illusion a hustler seeks.

His window dressing perfects the hoax –

the turban and robes a thespian’s flourish…

This season Mechanics is all the rage

in fairground shows and court, where

an empress cheats but can’t outsmart

some gadget’s lack of class.

It takes a certain kind of flair to plot

the chequered board. A ...

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for Paul

The Waldorf Astoria was Grandad’s hotel –

the place he had helped to build but never

got to stay in. From his room in the Bronx,

did he hop on the El to leave his mark

on Manhattan’s skyline?  It’s too late now

to check the details, as I try at least

to plot his absent years back from the splash

of its opening to the Wall Street Crash.

Working out...

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Any place we drove to it seemed that Dad

could always show us the roundabouts, roads,

or paving he had once had a hand in,

back in the days he had worked much harder.

When he’d made his money and packed work in

he lost his sense of what to do with time,

moped around, got grumpy, and sent me out

to the ‘offie’ to refill his flagon.

A ‘man’s man’ my mother said, who...

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Your father could hold a congregation

in the palms of his hands raised to heaven;

and when he spoke of Daniel

at prayer in the lion’s den his words

were a song. His wayward daughter,

with your gift like his God-given,

were you a sinner or sinned against

the first time you weakened?  

It takes you years to find an answer

and years to find a voice

beyond polished a...

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The stiff white tablecloths

they had laid out in the banqueting room

were as bright as fields of snow.

The array of knives, forks and spoons,

buffed and aligned to perfection

and which, for some

might have seemed a puzzle

were, for the chosen, a promise

of good things to come.

Fetched from afar

and packed in ice,

the makings of the feast,

unt...

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A small time hustler, a princeling,

he is on the make and mooching

down along the hedgerows.

His head in the cloud

of each moment’s business,

the world is lying at his feet.

On a whim, his thoughts

a-scamper, he sets off

on a pointless dash

from nowhere to nowhere;

then remembers flight.

Climbing raucously

above the stubble,

his song’s in ...

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after Jules Supervielle

Do not be surprised,

but close your eyes

till they become

opaque as stone.

And let the heart be,

for should it stop

it flutters still

on its secret slope.

Your hands will lie

at rest beside you

in their barge of ice,

your forehead bare

as the empty space

dividing armies.

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ilare uccello calunniato

Caught in the moment,

there is no way of knowing

who might have blinked first –

the old man or his visitant,

the bright, crested

ambivalent bird. A few

scattered objects

implying a workspace,

the room is otherwise

unfocused beyond

the reciprocal stare

of two survivors.

The eyes of one are stoical,

but lit by a sense

th...

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after Philippe Jaccottet

In the high air the swifts are circling.

Higher still the invisible stars

are circling too. Let day withdraw

to the earth's limits, those fires

will reappear above a stretch

of dark sand.

                     And so we inhabit  

a world of distances, of movement,

where the heart is drawn

from the tree to the bird, from birds

to distant...

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after Rilke

Making our way laboriously through lists

of things to do, complexities that ensnare us,

we are like the shambling swan –

until, dying, we lose all purchase

on terra firma, slipping away like the swan,

as he settles, at first uncertainly,

into the water that buoys him,

and flows on blithely in endless ripples,

while he, so still and self-assured

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Plague birds, exquisite and focused,

who scavenged Shakepeare’s unspeakable

streets, they have drifted back

from the borderlands of extinction

on tense, splayed wings. 

Circling soundlessly

in the rinsed clarity of spring light

they have staked their claim

to limitless acres above

the Chilterns’ wooded heights.

And was it months, or even a year,

my own dr...

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At no age at all you've started to feel

how a life gets mired in memories,

the way each backward glance

is like a noose that tightens.

Across flat versts of muddled terrain

your distant city glimmers –

reduced to a few bright rooms

where you were first indulged

and then became accomplished.

Working through grammars

and the language of flowers,

your music ...

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For those who live amongst the hills

the words for stranger, guest or foe

have long been equivalent –

their sense eroded

to an acquiescent mumble.

Whichever way the head is moved

– up and down or side to side

with enigmatic smiles –

It’s always yes or no.

The open palm’s a plea or proffer.

Their body language a mystery

to those who merely see

what they...

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after Auguste Rodin

Connoisseurs of the smart move,

appraising the prices of commodities

and men, they stepped up against

their instincts, their futures anchored

in marriageable daughters,

the grit and astuteness of sons.

Their acquisitive eyes had once

been lit by the weight in tapestries

from Bruges or Ghent, the patience

entwined in filigree work or lace.

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From the north of France to Mayo’s a stretch,

but in the way that often one thing leads

to another I got there reading Proust –

or, if I’m honest, by failing again

to read him beyond his hero’s bedtime.

Buttoned up, fretful, a delicate child,

he had never dammed a stream with sods

or pulled up a ladder into the hay

where he had his lair and listened to rain

clatteri...

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A blasphemous horde of poachers and drinkers

the big money had spawned, they dug their way

through rocks and sodden clay. Camped out like tinkers,

only the brass was missed when they picked up sticks,

following the line to another day

of mindless graft, squalor, suspicious looks.

From those whose curtained lives they did not share,

they earned scant praise for laying down the ...

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for my mother

Mislaid for years, I had never seen it

– the certificate they gave you the day

you finished school. Thirteen and biddable,

I doubt you had been much bother at all,

picking up quite easily the basics

prescribed for the life that lay before you.

Beyond the geography of small towns,

fields, and enigmatic hills, among which

your predecessors scratched...

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Before my approach to life grew earnest

I was all ears for Tamla: the sweet sounds

of soul as far removed from its roots

as I am now from The Motor City.

In the days when I was thirteen

the change a-coming

was an awkwardness with girls

and a biblical plague of spots,

as I tuned in on a cheap transistor

or played the vinyl

I’d bought from Woolworths.

An oc...

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A poor relation and a chit of a girl,

what else did you need to know

beyond your place in the scheme

of things, or the cold accountancy

of love versus indigence?  

The day you arrived your cousin

Edmund taught you the meaning

of kindness when, for a moment,

you felt like an equal

or something more than nothing.

These days, dressed decently,

you read to yo...

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There’s another city inside the city. It lays

its template of odours across postal districts. 

One day, perhaps, you will sense it

beneath your speed: a faint hint of fox piss

that clings to street lamps and bollards.

Leaving its marker, it establishes different laws.

Beneath our fences there are badger setts

and mole runs, scrabbling polities

obscu...

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for my daughter, Helen

The overarching bamboo grove

in the Morikami Gardens is nothing

more than grass writ large,

or grass the way we’d see it,

if we were tiny creatures.

In the wet heat of Florida

it grows four feet a day,

its hollow, knuckled stems

packed with strength and music

we’ve shaped to a thousand uses –

from workaday tables

and chairs ...

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It takes time and focus to make your way

around this star-studded necropolis.

Without a convenient plan or a guide

– pedantic, wry, and always affable –

you'll wander in vain its endless pathways.

Unable to spot the names you’ve heard of,

you will feel deceived and none the wiser.

Lured by bones, or the dubious remains

of two mythic lovers, what do we seek

before a ...

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In this town where I grew up, traipsing bored

to mass on Sundays, The Kingdom of God

was founded also by men who believed

in teatime treats. Abstemious fathers

of a global brand for whom the darkness

was devils that winked and slobbered in drink.

The Good News a source from which to drink

the truth, it brought hope to the weak or bored;

and those worthies knew that slo...

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Nothing comes of nothing.

Nothing can. Confused,

you wonder How so? and squint

through the lens of zero

back to the space

where nothing occurred

and then became

a cipher, a counter, a word,

the neat trick aligning

the numbers, harnessing

power. Step by step

in bleak regression

instinct fails to hit

the wall or find the door

that never o...

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Before abandoning the name 

their masters gave your fathers

you were just some colored kid,

segregated and sanctified

in the Church of Hallelujahs,

holding your own on streets

where Cassius Clay was what

they called you, stamped

and seared by a slaver's brand.

The voice of conscience

was Emmet Till, the imaginary

twin whose date of birth

obsessed you, his f...

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for Grant Tarbard

Northern kids, their futures

predictable, they grafted dourly

five days a week down pits, in shops

and on the factory floor –

paying their way with some left

for vinyl, speed and threads.

Travelling miles by train each

weekend with a change of clothes

and a box of classic tracks

– minor hits and rarities

by blacks the charts ignored –

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I remember his name and features

from my brief matchbox phase

that sparked up and fizzled out

like so many others. Phillumeny,

yes, that’s the word. Cutting out the labels, 

I glued them to homemade charts.

When Bryant and May raised his profile

he couldn’t have been more famous,

if he had stared from banknotes.

On a cheap box of lucifers

– the white cliffs at hi...

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I remembered someone saying

– with first name familiarity

but too young to have known him –

Miles would never

have stooped to a moonwalk.

Looking back through a nicotine haze

to the husky chic of the fifties

and then beyond, I might have added

or a Bojangles shuffle.

The first time he played in Paris

the habitués of St Germain 

queued up to see him back...

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The years are a series of small defeats,

bright rooms whose doors you open easily,

until out of the blue you don’t recall

why it is you’re standing there,

in front of an upstairs window

with sudsy swathes of blossom and then,

beyond them, the joists of a roof

your neighbour’s renewing, his spanking car...

But just as strangely you notice

–  where it m...

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(1619-1682)

The lonely queen’s poppet, her living toy,

he was no more than eighteen inches tall

the day he burst through the crust of a pie:

the model of manners making the man,

his step as sturdy as a cavalier's.

In a childish age he seemed a wonder,

the butcher’s boy from Oakham, whose father,

a brawny-shouldered oaf, supplied the beasts

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Whatever he knew he had learned

from nature, how even things

that seem at first fragile derive

strength from structure –

an insect’s wing, or a leaf,

its membrane stretched across

a framework of ribs and veins.

The simplest grasses, barely

noticed, assume their burdens

like trees. A small shell’s

convolution implies a flight of stairs.

You can roll out a roof ...

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Never willing

to accept his place

or stroke

the violoncello politely

for a bow-tied

maestro,

only the bass

could match

his ego.

Swaying, possessed,

like a holy roller,

he goaded

his band

and slapped

the strings

to imprecation,

whoop

and holler.

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Feeling no urge

to ransack harmony

or play more notes

when a few were enough

– burnished

and buoyant

as waves that wash

the Cape Verde Islands –

he hunched down

over the keys

and dug in deep

until, at last,

he made out

his father’s features,

smiling back

contentedly,

and smoking, as ever,

his rank cheroot.

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La Setmana Tràgica

With battle lines drawn between factory floor

and the ornate altars of Gothic faith

the anarchists crashed and burned in a week

on side streets and avenues, inciting

the Murcianos who, seeking work, brought

from the South their singsong vowels and grudges.

The ‘tragic week’ or a week of glory –

either way he’d watched, from his distant hill,

...

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From across the crowded passeig

your eye is drawn to the shimmer

of its otherworldly façade,

its bibs and bobs of broken tiles

washed by tides of light.

Its carnivalesque balconies

and freewheeling contours

are like the errant dreams

of those who have no need to prosper

by hard graft or deals.

Incongruous, then, the way

it rises from this city’s

remor...

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Your barest whisper

at first suffices,

expanding slowly

to an arc of sound;

each reticent phrase

the horn releases

freights the air

as a theme is found.

In dapper suits,

expensive shoes

you stand,

your back

half-turned

to a crowd,

giving the pundits

what they’ve paid for –

the music

you make, and time.

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Not faddy New Age

or ever preachy –

but just a healthy

college kid blowing

his trumpet

as if each time

the sun was rising.

No junk and no booze –

so only roads

could kill him...

Laid up in bed

for a year,

he had shucked

off his cast

then hit them again,

until he died, asleep,

on the late night

turnpike.

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The Baroness Pannonica

his muse, nurse

and patroness,

Nellie was also

his muse and wife –

the mother of his kids.

Taking the rap

for dope

they’d shared,

discussing sounds

he’d winkled

from in between the keys,

Nica bailed him

out again.

Holding on

to his cabaret card

he kept

the wolf at bay.

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Playing cards

at the back of the bus,

Sarah could swear

like one of the boys –

her mouth as foul

as any sailor’s.

Scatting hard,

across the octaves,

her lavish voice

was like a horn

swapping licks

with bop’s elite.

One step ahead

of the changes,

she harnessed time

as if she owned it

in pitch-perfect

glissandos.

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Praised to the skies

by a musicologist

when all

he had done

was play the blues

he took time off

to clear his head.

Without

a padded loft

or a tumbledown

woodshed

in the Lower

East Side

of crowded

Manhattan

he blew his sax

come rain or shine

way up on the Bridge.

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