FAITH

Faith,

This shadow keeps you distant at my side.

Between us,

The width of all those years

Unlit.

 

If we could newborn meet,

First time, once more,

I would unravel every stitch of my conceit,

Swim beside you,

And not feel the cold.

Thames at Deptford. (Extract from ‘Stone River Running’).

Once, someone took me to the beach when you were slim and narrow.

I pottered among your muddy petticoats

And found the broken stems of old clay pipes, and took them home.

After that, you followed me and crept into my tiny room.

I heard you, padding about – moving things, looking for them.

I slept on, safe with the river running through my bed

And turned on my back, to prove that I was not afraid.

Dream

I want to push a Silver Cross pram, blue and shiny with a navy hood.  The chassis squeaks and purrs as it rolls along, like bouncing on waves,  huge wheels splashing shadows on pavement sea.  A carriage  shiny and blue with a navy hood,  which I will fold down, concertina down to look at my baby’s face.  The sun in flower.  A smile opening like a flower to sun.

I push a proud Silver Cross pram.
My hair is long, shoulder-length, and kicks up at the end.  Glossy long.  Curly sunglasses rest on the bridge of my nose and tweak up the planes of a new face.  One I can’t recall yet know I should.  I wear a deep coloured corded coat, swing-back, probably mauve,  carefully thought with tangerine lips.  I walk in high heels, also blue; deliciously high, a thin piping in cream at the back. A livery of blue and cream.  Fifties.  1950s.
Squeak and sway, or bounce on waves.   We perambulate across years and back: click, click, my heels clip, swipe the flint or the tarmac, paving cracks swallowed beneath.  Parks brushed to the side, green whispers, lullaby grass,  safe scent of play, children’s future curving at play.

I don’t think of  futures, of playgrounds and simply swim on our gentle beat.   At the kerb: tip, a slight pressure with my palm on the pram’s ribbed white handle, and gently bump up the pram – down.  Curve.  The other side, same, quick.  Did we reach the other side?
Squeak, roll, do we ever arrive?

I know you dream in indigo blue, the navy hood now a canopy for your head.  Watching me in sleep, my gaze fastened forever in flowery dream.

Please let me have a pram to walk, to carry these years, to bear,  so  I may lean over our seamless dream,  kiss the shape we make in leaning
in curving.

I am you, within.  Watching.  Greeting.
My mother
Me in you, her in me.  Us
The pram
A house.
I didn’t say home.

I yearn to live for a while in a Silver Cross pram, my mother, me, you.

Take turns in being: still,  swaying, rocked, moving without leaving.
No matter if everyone looks, even if they see.
Cracks are swallowed beneath.

Cracks are swallowed beneath.

Barbican: a wave in arcane space

Barbican: A wave to Beatrice from arcane space.

Here, concrete towers frown in shadow and light.
They flower from armadillo, grey and thought-cast,
A spine whose genesis in war, foretold the dance that
Tests its uncertain step upon the blunted spear.

Vistas beneath us, chart the linear and the oblique
Destiny,
Purpose, to be and to arrive.
Marches grinning to their end
Because sometimes they look like combs, the teeth housing a vista,
Which holds St Paul’s in its duplicitous grasp.

Beyond, a nest of squares describes what we are
While doing.
A document of being signed in buff and delivered late, for some.

Is this evidence? This nest of frozen sand, prove that we are here
Once more?

Farther on, seams of streets knitted centuries ago,
Waste blood and memory.
Pattern unravels against empty fascia and the chilled lozenges
Bloated with Smithfield’s corpses.

Above this row of Stonehenge teeth and atavistic vertebrae,  a world saved for seeing.
Detached and reduced to shape.

Windows are what trees could say,
Architrave, stairwell and the soft separation of  rounded form,
The cull of solids.
Friendship lost, neighbours made.
One window looks, while others turn their backs so strangers can conceal.
Life clues fluid as semaphore, if you can read the signs.

The canny have long since banked on Barbican’s future reap.
So close to centres,
The Crunch of Ages, now masticated in an ancient jaw,
That it makes you laugh.
Except, it’s an idea, which only now remembers why it came.

Yes, some put money on Brutal being the way to sow.
But a wave fluttered from me to you
Between somewhere. Nowhere. Carried. Upward, downward
Love held invisibly, eternally intact.
Let go.

A sacred section sliced from line and place.
Did they bargain for that?

Unquiet Spirit. Quaker Meeting House, Letchworth Garden City

Palimpsest of silence

Flock lining, layers of it.

Sleep on sleep

Shelling words

Like peas.

 

Walls groomed in oak

Chairs, their stems uplifted

Faces tipped

Flower toward a light

Unborn.

 

I sit with them

On one sentry chair,

My back to the everlasting love

And lower my eyes.

 

At home,

In my homeless  heart, that is

I nurtured bindweed silence

Map of souls laid out

A scroll of untended lawns

Years strewn by.

 

In here, we weed, us few

A crescent in the glassy sun

The grassy sin.

 

By feet, handbag and itchy toe

Pitch-pine golden, an autumn pie

Sings of squash and pumpkins,

And the pattern of a damson smile

When you were six, or seven or nine.

Thought.

Mine, errant, childlike

Without control, flee and tear

An untidy torrent

Busy in the still.

 

Then he stands, an oak,

Friend

Creaking upward

Cracking from the earth.

Noise buds like conkers beneath our seats.

His words, sonorous as meat,

(Although, surely he must be vegan),

Batter at gossamer lines

Drawn across our faith

 

A murmur shivers; a glance from mullion window

To floor, to tipping spoon, shiny with patience

Receive.

Composure scatters its seed,

Who knows where?

 

Do I detect discomfort?

A discordant key?

This is where we trust.

Doubt has no place

Etched like graffiti

On this rough-cast affair.

 

Perfect pitch, pines at my feet.

Give me soup and holy, nutty bread

To soak up hunger,

Don’t send me belly upward to extra and

Unharnessed time.

 

No one responds.

We don’t, you see.
Porous as unfired clay; leaky.

We waver inward, a slight tremble

Solar plexus blinks to sudden sound

Circle breaks and heals and breaks once more.

 

Quaking in glass is not sacred

Hours are not sacred

They are spent and wasted,
A challenge to belief,

held back for

‘One’s own experience’.

What is that?

So slight, it blows from silent mouths

Until swallowed and deferred kisses plant their

Spirit last upon the tongue.

 

Before I leave,

The settled silence gently grazes at my ear.

I whisper out

And find, if not comfort,

Distraction on the road.