OCCASIONAL POET
Dog End
The dog died the first day
of Finals. An embarrassing bouquet
had arrived in the morning from parents.
I lumbered it across Quad past
ignorant glances before checking
the crib on Barthes and Lear.
That night, twenty p in the box
confirmed: “We weren’t going to tell you but ...”
we’d known for weeks.
Vomit, a growth, perhaps
all that retentive noting
had sucked the life out of her.
Hardy we had called her, Oliver not Thomas,
the faithful hound, the true believer
in childhood capers. I used to lift
her paws and dance to the music
of my innocence across the carpet.
My mother never did work that one out.
She had survived into my majority,
sniffed through the crazy communism of
family, the Cold War of fraternal
misunderstanding, just long enough
to send me on my way into the brave
new world. She was a mongrel,
saved from the backstreets of Luton town,
a most natural oddity.
Older than the Nineteenth Century
It always rained on Mull, those teenage holidays.
True, the evening ferry out
would be bathed in sunshine.
Fifty thousand tonnes of Glaswegian brawn
tooting its horn at Duart Castle.
“Make mine a double, Sir Fitzroy.”
But ours was summer’s booby prize,
and for two weeks coming we were
penned in like sheep in a sodden field.
We had our fun of it, clicking
mah jong tiles against a glass top
as my father fiddled for the Test.
A dash for the sea was made.
My mother would proffer postage stamp sized towels
as sole protection against the Atlantic gale,
and friends of friends looked for cowrie shells
older than the Nineteenth Century.
We saw Sir Fitzroy once, checking
all was square amid the car park.
The castle itself had long been in
need of protection. Its donjon
echoed with the shrieks of children.
In the tea shop, my brother halted
at his third slice of cake as our exchange
from Bordeaux informed him
Les yeux sont trop grand pour l’estomac.
My second Easter vac at Oxford
I went back with friends.
The sun trickled down
the lochs all bloody week,
a message from the North Pole.
A photograph remains of me
freewheeling down an empty road.
Nick played his oboe
like an Ovidian nymph.
Al spoke Yeats into
a battered tape recorder,
and Justin wound us up
with unseasonal jokes.
In Search of a Perfect Haiku
The white Toyota turns a slow
corner and halts upon the slush,
a golf ball finding its hole.
Not so much an advertisement
but an arrival, and I have not known
how cold the day is.
This is Basho’s stone, flung
in anger by a farmer from his mountaintop,
for they were all either gods or demons in those days.
We raise umbrellas and mount the steps.
The poet came all the way to see this rock,
when he could have chosen many other remarkable places.
I make out the inscription, wishing to know why.
It must be brighter in summer, I suppose,
and greener. This rock has always been a lonely one
waiting to be gawped at by the likes of me.
It is a great rocky turd, the turd of the gods,
which has refused to disintegrate.
And those solemn pine trees the grasses
in which it landed with a prehistoric thud.
I check the time and light a fag.
My companion exchanges pigeon post
with the custodian, and then we’re off.
Unlike Basho, who walked or went by horse,
the car separates us from cool nature.
I doze off past storky snow-beds.
We skirt the way decently
round the city. We get lost,
find it again down logical lanes.
And then we’re there. A real old temple
with a story and a path to Nirvana.
Imperfect haiku
hurtling towards
Narita, we got some things right
full August moon
Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’
in a foreign land – the landlord
says ‘No worries’
returning the key
after a long semester
February sunshine
laughing over Woolf
with my esteemed colleague – dull
February day
swish of early
morning traffic – decade
gone in a jiffy
a year’s end sun sets on
the great oak wood a family
walk off their desires
tall iron railings
around a wide, open park
I want to walk right through
On Dipping into the Norton Anthology
It was more than a dip.
It was a Channel swim
to Ginsberg and back again.
Sometimes I felt utterly lost,
often the waves rode high and low.
Wordsworth was the coolest, true poet of God and man.
Those finicky well-heeled Americans,
pen in one hand, priceless jade tiger in the other,
the hardest.
Always there was a current, however slight,
the water lukewarm.
And so it was I found my way
to an island called Eliot
some distance off the New England coast.
An old man there with wizened dugs
has sent me back to the Metaphysicals.