Sonnets in Brackets
Contents
1 (Sonnet of hope)
2 (Ice-cream sonnet)
3 (Sonnet of these minutes)
4 (September sonnet)
5 (Sonnet of seeing)
6 (Sonnet of disappearance)
7 (Sonnet of Prudence)
8 (Second sonnet of disappearance)
9 (Sonnet of evening and dawn)
10 (Sonnet of balance)
11 (Sonnet of moon)
12 (Sonnet to McKenzie)
13 (Sonnet of wall)
14 (October Sonnet)
15 (Sonnet of joy)
16 (Sonnet of folly)
17 (Sonnet of silo)
18 (Sonnet of beach life)
19 (Morning sonnet)
20 (Sonnet of noisiness)
21 (Nature sonnet)
22 (Sonnet of the head honcho)
23 (Sonnet of bananas)
24 (November Sonnet)
25 (Sonnet of time)
26 (Zach Hamm sonnet)
27 (Love sonnet)
28 (Sonnet of pebbles)
29 (Showtime sonnet)
30 (Sonnet of Sardanapalus)
31 (Second morning sonnet)
32 (Sonnet of wolves and hound)
33 (Sonnet of Felix and Haydn)
34 (December sonnet)
35 (Prehistoric sonnet)
36 (Third sonnet of disappearance)
37 (Sonnet of Justice)
38 (Animula sonnet)
39 (Sonnet to Tim Souster)
40 (Milo Sonnet)
41 (Sonnet of Fortitude)
42 (January walking sonnet)
43 (Sonnet of counting)
44 (Sonnet of rooms)
45 (Sonnet of breathing)
46 (Third morning sonnet)
47 (Sonnet of old Yorkshire)
48 (Sonnet of stepping out)
49 (Sonnet of my mother’s bench)
50 (Fourth sonnet of disappearance)
51 (Sonnet of Temperance)
52 (Sonnet of trust)
53 (Sonnet of wine-glasses)
54 (March sonnet)
55 (Sonnet of Nilanjana Roy)
56 (Seaside sonnet)
Sonnets in Brackets
1 (Sonnet of hope)
Boo! Let the fantoms fade, the ketch lurch on,
to rocks, or port, though glugglugglug aleak,
with angel hope to swoop and spring you free
into the passage to eternity.
Nuts! You’re a wobbler on a windy street,
betting the tumble won’t be bad, amused
by whizzers past and watchers, wondering
haphazardly at place and time, lost though,
looking to others who lived wobblingly,
but packed up stuff and waved to passers-by
to pick a bit they fancied out, or leave
if they saw better things to do or eat,
hoping to catch a pleasant cry of ‘Oo!’
before they lost all sight of hands and feet.
2 (Ice-cream sonnet)
Time, she’s the wild one, pallid hair astream,
pedalling past me in a flimsy dress,
stopped for a moment breathless at the lights
and I glance at a strong-boned, suntanned face,
and the quick indifferent look she gives
I wouldn’t want to change now, no, though she
back summersaulted all but bare before me,
and we rolled laughing fifty years ago
where surf boomed amicably as we dipped
our tongues into the single ice-cream cornet
and licked and sucked it long after it wilted.
I roll a husk around my tongue. Her calves
again flex into soundless forward motion,
gleams of sunshine on the blonde down a sec.
3 (Sonnet of these minutes)
Of course I said these minutes can’t be left
like rooms you don’t know what to do with
or like stray puddles which eventually
evaporate on the pavement from such warmth
as the day happens to have available.
For have you noticed all the activity
around their apparent inertia? You would think
they would be magnetised into it too,
or spread themselves with some colourful coating
the visitors would glance at and approve
before passing on into the next building,
talking of times to come and what they’d seen
and then out again. Or that’s what I said.
Blank, blank, blank, blank, they fired back, blank, blank, blank.
4 (September sonnet)
September morning when nothing much seems
to be stirring except the sun and the earth
which are still working away in the garden
and will let you look in, if you behave.
You might catch tomatoes painting their skins,
figs standing more or less upright, grapes posed
in bunches, and crashed apples on the lawn
their brown wounds bleeding, with death not yet come.
And puffing pigeons, pert robin, dull wasp,
fast-footed spider, steady snail, and goldfish
(which circle up and down the pond’s reflections)
deserve a mention. And each blade of grass
each thorn, each white mite in the ivy’s tangles,
each mote spun not a moment in the air.
5 (Sonnet of seeing)
‘Look!’ he shouted, ‘Look, look, look!’ And our eyes
lifted to the hills beyond the little bay,
puzzled over them and came back to the arm,
the finger and the air into which they pointed.
We stood expressing concern and respect
until his usual self returned and smiled.
The late afternoon sun burnished our faces,
soothingly now, as if its light were ointment,
and everyone could make their own way
comfortably towards the dark, conversing
with each other about things heard and seen,
and later send out their messages, as if
there’d been a revelation to witness,
a seal’s head singing out there on the tideway.
6 (Sonnet of disappearance)
I’m spending the odd while thinking about
disappearing, not the kind where you’ve just
run off secretly round the corner, and
then take a peek back, as if from a planet
you’d actually got to, to the surprise
of everyone who’s still chomping away
at daily bread, with just days-out or cruises,
ascents, descents and views, at speed or slow,
all there to soothe the retrospective glance,
but no, I mean the kind which lets go of
places and people and their properties
for good – you, me, New York, Jupiter,
those apples gleaming in the steady sun,
the whole caboodle and canoodle snuffed.
7 (Sonnet of Prudence)
‘Have you any idea what you are doing?’
So old Miss Prudence starts the interview.
‘Or going to do?’ Her scrawny hands are busy
testing the blades, her eyes calm, she looks ready
to cut through the worst waves the sea throws at her,
backed up by sandwiches, greased keel, and training,
though indiscriminably, she says, they lift
up or let drop the ablest, her included.
‘You’ve just got to know where it’s right to get to,
then choose just what you need to get you there,
and then you go.’ Then with a smile she went.
‘Laudable baggage there,’ I tell my crew,
as we straggle back up the gleaming shingle.
‘Now what about a sunset pint or two?’
8 (Second sonnet of disappearance)
I’m thinking about disappearing again
after the cheese sandwich and apple juice,
savoured and now in metamorphosis,
out of sight and mind, down in the stomach
prior to suction through the long, coiled pipes
to a short fall, mulching and resurrection,
for spring still splits seedcoats under the soil,
and udders are still bulging in sheds and dusks
beside the long multiplicitous tumult
it is hard to get out of or enough of
until vroom vroom and they’re waving off
the droopy, nonplussed voyager, unless
it’s the big bang, silence, a wheel left turning,
a hole torn in the wall you were thrown through.
9 (Sonnet of evening and dawn)
The day was a tough one, its face all bloody
and mashed by purple and yellow bruises
when it eventually went down, but then
after the birds stopped jeering and went home,
out came the nursing lights with their red badges
and busied themselves keeping the dark moving,
until they too one by one decided they’d had enough,
and their big brothers were left gawping after
what late night action was still going on,
dozing a bit towards dawn, which turned up
on time in an old party dress, yelling
‘Surprise!’, by when there was a lot to do,
not least the accounts, which from another angle
were finally looking infinitely better.
10 (Sonnet of balance)
From balderdash to trash, from mound to hill,
I pushed my muddied feet, each print
holding the weak gaze a minute or two,
the summits misted, even if the sky
shone like a crystalline, porphyrian egg
and nesting storks rose up on gabled roofs,
to crack it in their calls. Nope, it’s downhill
I stumble on some slithering sense these days.
And then I dream of equilibrium
out in the morning air, to toe by toe
take on the rope the road is stretching forth,
keeping my balance with a rigorous pole,
which any time might choose to dip, and send
me hurtling underground, or at last flying.
11 (Sonnet of moon)
Essence of moon, how oft a drop of you
has landed on a daylit page and been
brushed rapidly aside, leaving a stain
it took a gentle, modern cleaner to erase,
and most of those nights that our bit of planet
got some of the suffusion over it,
our wakeful lights and screens took hold
and shook it out until we slept or screamed.
A primary matter, rolling around us
rolling around - I meant, the tidal joy
of syzygies and perigees, of sheer lunation -
how nice it is to see your fullest show:
it outshines the infinite stars, tells us
that we essentially, like you, exist.
12 (Sonnet to McKenzie)
Don’t think, McKenzie, that because the car
is waiting in the winter-garden lights
you can always be excused from meeting
that utterly dark lady of your dreams.
What then the glances of crystal and candle
you have made your reward? The slender hands
raising their rings? Old songs rise too and swirl
until you have to look away again.
Cushion the cool glass, McKenzie, there’s no hope
for anyone who’s dining here tonight.
Let’s wish for you what we might wish ourselves:
May you just hear a lullaby across the sands,
and then a final kiss come to your lips,
from which your skiff at last can row away.
13 (Sonnet of wall)
This brick you’ve stopped at is a bit of the
efficient system we keep on discovering;
behind it you can see another one
that doesn’t look like it at all, and then
behind that jumps and whirls and space
and nothing that we know, which uses it all
to manufacture bricks, and, yes, of course
many millions bricks more to make a wall
that stretches out past any numbered star
and back past any start we’ve so far seen.
The clever thing is that these bricks are here
and only we can see them look like this,
and only you, my passing flower, receive
the gift of now that this brick now makes clear.
14 (October Sonnet)
Red and gilt shivering among sunlit branches,
old joy, and no, these days I don’t much go
a-wandering in the forest, what with naming
going on all the time and the ululations
and leaf after leaf tanned with anticipation,
though I’ve heard some good things about mudlarking,
say rolling, rutting, and smelling. Some of us
knew the script, but not how it would be filmed.
In one scene there is immense bloodletting
and then it dries, and yellow and russet survivors
pose together in their unsmiling thousands,
keeping almost still in spite of the cold,
before letting go. The last shots are just smears,
and tears turn you away, all these years later.
15 (Sonnet of joy)
It was her, it was joy here in the street,
the blonde, the bright, the beautiful, the hair
blown free, the back-turned head, the glance, the lips,
the smile, the hands, the form, the running feet,
the nose, too, and the elbows, and the teeth.
No wonder we stood looking in the glass
for such sweet residues as we could buy
before it cracked and told us to walk on.
For there was beggars’ singing to be heard,
and someone claimed the law of loss we’d seen
enforced again was just another song.
We looked then at each other for the nod
to make the best appearances we could,
and exit smiling as we said she smiled.
16 (Sonnet of folly)
Sweet is the sky, and earth is sweet, though creatures
go hopping for reality on screens,
tweeny, outsize and in-betweens who dream
of a fagocitation of extremes,
from which delightedly to jump or saunter
in excellent cognition through new scenes
of polymorphic dance and colour
evil cleaned out, and the obscene redeemed.
But here comes an apocalyptic beast
cantering shapelessly along the street,
loud as a verdict no one can defeat.
For God’s sake, someone press delete at least,
or grab a stick and overbalance it.
Then we can walk past, bread in hand and breathing.
17 (Sonnet of silo)
The old silo has gone, the one everyone
for decades could not help but notice, stopping
and starting from and into Kidlington
the chatter that their cars and buses made,
which it would listen to and watch, a hunched
hulk standing back from the road, worn-out slogans
bandaging its head, concrete blankets stained,
eyes blanked, a thumb the villages beyond
could see poking at them and at the sky.
The drop one dawn was quiet, neat and fast,
and then there was a space which within days
could not be told from all the air around.
A station has moved into where it stood,
and holds out cushioned trains in which to hide.
18 (Sonnet of beach life)
Oh to squidge toes again in the warm sand
en route to upturn on the sunbed waiting,
a cool glass fingered, tum and nose well-oiled,
and lovely bosoms picked out through the shades!
Oh for a loiter where the wavelets flop,
a splash of quiet and a lustrous swim,
and then distension and forgetfulness,
until the blue pales in the evening wine.
Not these thin fingers sand scratches away,
bare feet that barely stand, voices the waves
unravel with their tongues but which are heard
climbing the nighttime surf, rushing the beach,
and then are past, except they leave those faces
stuck looking just behind us for our eyes
19 (Morning sonnet)
Here I am one breakfast time knife agleam
with butter in my fingers and a smile
for you, our toast and marmelade waiting
for commixture and (with tea) ingestion.
Rare bites and swallows that some round here
have long been given! Blades almost since ever,
matured corn and cows too, then oranges
cut from the setting sun, tea from the dawning.
How many were in want of bread? Want still
for rice or water? Did papavas glow
in lands where any hand could reach for them?
I imagine being held up to the light,
then unpeeled, an eye or something like one
peering for any goodies in me hid.
20 (Sonnet of noisiness)
It’s so noisy sometimes I can’t believe
it, what with the spillage and clatter of
galaxies like motorbikes off down lit
streets that might any mo go dark and bangs
and voices circling and pouncing, including
sussurrations of microbes at their long
gnaw of skins and skeletons and each other
that makes our swivelling eyes stop and punctures
the colourful tyres we’re trying to float
it all out on. But sometimes there you come
again distributing nudges and smiles,
and I reach greedily for one, and then
the din softens and you’re walking me over
the ground grinning through the middle of it.
21 (Nature sonnet)
She’s put tarmac ribbons on her green dresses,
with farmhouse buttons and zip terraces,
one of those crazy sights from a balloon
adrift in the evening on bursts of flame.
Along the roadsides, though, there are crows picking
at small corpses and other edibles,
and nettles and their friends, who are as eager
to be up and doing as in Roman fields.
Tyres whistle at them, engines thrum, as we
parade past in triumphal cars, and she
watches the show with seeming stupefaction.
Some day, though, she’ll set brambles or their children
on the shreds, as she let our relatives
sample wines and villas under her hills.
22 (Sonnet of the head honcho)
Time to get onto the head honcho, bro,
to get your own head together and walk
in as if you know what you’re doing and
for once ignore the cool chicks on reception;
you by-pass security and the suits
and take the lift up to the topmost suite,
where he should be, busy but relaxed.
He can smile and do sums at the same time.
If he’s out, or they have to throw you out,
(as has happened to me, bro, regularly),
I advise walking away with dignity.
You can try phoning or leaving a message,
and you might get some code or music back,
or a dead silence he says to live by.
23 (Sonnet of bananas)
How quick bananas are to change green robes
for yellow, yellow ones for brown and black.
The hard white flesh beneath softens to beige,
with little droops and stains and wens from dark
procedures we forget are mandatory
within the bunch to which we stretch our fingers
for fancied ones that peel before our eyes
and let us eat their bodies as we like.
Weeks back, when they were young, they clung
to each other in chilled chambers, and then
there were sunlit plantations, mile on mile,
the ruthless growing grounds. If only they
were like clear water from the taps which we
turn on and off to rinse our mouths and hands.
24 (November Sonnet)
Lesser clouds stroll in ones and twos across
a visible blue heaven, casting brown looks
over the beeches in their antique gold
which they keep dropping bits of round their feet,
but the breeze runs its fingers over them
and tells them not to be scared, not today,
with a duck chorus glittering on the lake
and pheasant solos on the rise behind,
all convocated in oblivion of
the duke, the duchess and their gardeners
this delicate November afternoon,
when not a cartridge nor a barrel stir,
and we say nicer things; like put your arm
through mine, which we can smile at vanishing.
25 (Sonnet of time)
How nice to sit down again with you, time,
and look over childhood photos, or into
grandad’s watch, before we go out to visit
some coins, tiles and castles, by when you’ve started
running and I’m watching foolishly, as
you sprint past the menhirs after the vast
gas blobs somewhere out there aeons ago,
and then you’re back and we’ve the kettle on,
talking about this evening and next year
and who’ll be around years after that
for a while until you lose me again.
Here’s a present, you say laughing, and whisk it
under your magic, many-coloured cloak,
which I tell you I see through, you old joker.
26 (Zach Hamm sonnet)
Zach says, I like my house. My house is happy.
It makes me happy. I am happy. All the time.
Yes. I want you to see that I am happy.
Why are you so happy? Because I choose
to be. I will draw my house. My house is
the same every day. It never changes.
When you see me I am always the same.
I don’t change. My world doesn’t change, it does
stay the same every day. And I like it
a lot. My house is always the same too.
I like me. And I like my life in my house.
Why do you create art? Because I want to.
It makes me happy. This is what I see.
I like my house, says Zach. My house is happy.
27 (Love sonnet)
My heart has grown hard and shrugged off the flou,
and flimsy façades and all effing fluff.
Its big word’s ugh and it’s thoroughly tough,
with an ugliness no-one can see through.
I’m like concrete, I said, unpainted, rough,
angular, its full self fully in view,
with a back and a front that are both true,
the inside and outside the same hard stuff.
Then I saw wartime concrete weeping rust,
concrete pillaring that had gone down sick,
balloons of concrete shaking in the sky.
It follows, mate, it’s just another trick.
The real tough stuff’s kept hidden from the eye,
like love, which is the hardest thing to trust.
28 (Sonnet of pebbles)
Some plough insisted the pebbles get up,
and now they’re lounging about in the field,
looking plump and tanned in the late autumn sun,
though we say that they’ve been that way for ages,
if one of them should catch our eye and ask
what we think. Then it rolls over and shows off
the roundnesses, the tattoos and the nicks
that make it different from the rest and us.
Others are still asleep under the grass,
and these awake will soon pull blankets up
round them again and fall back into dreams
of slowly stirring wombs in which they were
first rocked into their shapes, before the hills
rose to their feet and kissed the seas goodbye.
29 (Showtime sonnet)
There were tweeters out, and squealers, plus titchy
upstarts in white, shouting at the wind, which
just couldn’t squash the greens blowing upwards,
and others overhead going pah pah pah.
And on the programme were swinging blue boys,
ruddy long heads, fat ladies who could fly,
and lots more who’d all promised afterwards
to join the great green crowds and with them wave.
Oh sunlight then performed so well we were
agog. Amazing now most places still
some tootling and some dancing are going on,
if you know where to look when it gets dark,
or feel into the ground where wriggly friends
damply embrace each other and their roots.
30 (Sonnet of Sardanapalus)
How open-mouthed would Sardanapalus
have landed in the unimagined aisles
of Sainsbury’s - the grapes, the trout, the wine,
the packs of tea, spice, chillies and potatoes,
and cereals, liquids, papers, plastics, tins,
and lushest girls and boys to goggle at,
stuff picked by hands of seven continents
that with a card he too could pick and bag.
And then he turns into a tired depressive,
searching the shelves for the old cruelty
and death. Still you might sidle up and whisper,
‘Consider, sire, that jerky, bulging girl,
with the poor-sighted man who’s bumped her trolley,
and won and given her back a laugh and kiss.’
31 (Second morning sonnet)
It was one of those 7ams I yawned
over a precipice to left, and right
there was a beetling wall that wouldn’t stop,
with Chinooks up above that chuntered off
and then came louder back, maybe because
the drilling underneath kept on restarting.
‘Scary’, you said, ‘but your age do you need
anything to go on?’ and fell asleep.
And I was screaming inside at the bits
of people and buildings just out of sight,
and at the clouds of words falling on them
and us. ‘Try not to listen,’ you said waking,
‘Let go this pic of you with cake and coffee.’
Then held a hand to me, held me again.
32 (Sonnet of wolves and hound)
Ah, yes, the wolves, the ones with care restored
to woods on high to howl on camera in,
teeth on display, plus sideways runs and scraps,
oh watch the natural mysteries a min.
But here’s a brute that’s ravenously thin
for all the hungry ones on whom it’s fed,
that couples fetidly with anyone,
then after licks and paints the undead skin.
And not a hole, cove, chapel, dump or shed,
but it will sidle into and caress,
laughing if someone pulls its trousers down.
Look for the hound who’ll bite its bollocks off,
chase it with fury out from town to town,
and eat its guts with wolves on mountain tops.
33 (Sonnet of Felix and Haydn)
I was looking for something else, a pen,
a knife, say, you not being here to keep
me innocuous and unharmed with your
impenetrable gossamer shield and
insouciant blunderbuss that showers sparks
and has marauders giggling in the wings.
But then our Felix climbed up and stretched out
humming a purr of you into my nose,
and rolling over turned some Haydn on,
the Joke Quartet, which ushered sanity
back into my emptying concert hall.
No doubt he too has entered your employ,
the cheerful, honest, living clavier you’d left
bewigged in Esterhaza until then.
34 (December sonnet)
Slippery days to be lurching towards God.
How easily he seems to duck or shove me
off on a tangent and then jerk me back.
What unsprung pins I’ve got to keep me up.
Was I once that neat mover who'd pirouette
over faces under the ice, and skate
dreamily off to warm windows and muffins?
Clap-clap of gloves, and clouds of frost were gone.
I can’t believe he’s just pacing his office,
checking the same old clock from time to time.
Maybe he’s out and holed the frozen lake,
and there it shoots, the whistling silver line,
a hook in the lip and a fish’s eye
as it soars in the night-air he has lit.
35 (Prehistoric sonnet)
Just up from Laisterdyke a blackened door
opened on roving shadow, coal and flame,
by which a blinkered horse, one back hoof raised,
stood quiet as a gnarled hand stroked its mane.
Prehistory! Like the spare, wizened man
in muffler and flat cap who now and then
over our cobbles drove his cart - its tyres
swished loudly and the piebald pony clopped -
oh he drove fast up on his empty cart,
though slowed if he had bits of this or that
from somewhere he was taking somewhere else.
From time to time a kindly figure bent
to ask what I would be when I grew up
and I said wistfully someone like him.
36 (Third sonnet of disappearance)
This morning I felt disappearance was
happening so quietly in grey beyond
the cushionings of glass where polled trees rose,
and ones or twos of human figures came and went
below them, joining or unfastening each other,
beside the rails that marked the unseen river,
with its backdrop of vast pale frontages,
their black sockets probably on watch.
If you’d been here, we could have talked or walked,
but I sat looking at the outside scene
and water sparkling on the café table.
It was not strange that someone left the path,
loomed up and vanished in the glass, but odd
there was a part of me that stayed in view.
37 (Sonnet of Justice)
Justice never seemed the big, florid girl
she was said to be, the one who’d knock out
for good the block-headed neighborhood gangsters
and the shiny managers at their backs.
We still say she can, though right now she looks
just skin and bones. She weaves rightward weakly,
then weakly left. When she does hit, she misses.
It looks like any night she might give in.
She still winds herself up for each bout, though
by round three she’s run down and everyone
goes boo, and it’s horrid, the flimsiness.
But it was no prankster who fashioned her,
lavished his death-defying kisses on her,
and laughs pityingly at our distress.
38 (Animula sonnet)
Off you go into the woods, little chum,
little wanderer, the boat floating loose
by the jetty will be a souvenir
until it drifts away. Off you skip lightly.
Who knows what is opening up for you,
what music might be playing, or what sights?
Pallid little shadow you seemed among
all those colours and noises that you’re leaving.
Off past the injections and introspections,
leave matter to its courses now, and jump
uncaring onto some angelic shore.
There was a heavy beat of wings and honking,
geese flying fast over the trees, but you
had skipped off out of time by then, gone quiet.
39 (Sonnet to Tim Souster)
Clear beads hang from the tips of whitened branches
like two or three notes from you hesitating
over my head that just now I can hear
drop through the January sunshine in a phrase
you never wrote and then see rise, as though
to make a tune - you bent late in your room
to gather Mozart from a tinny radio,
you spreading relish from a tiny jar,
your restless laughs at the last restaurant
we chanced to meet one summer night and eat in,
and out there Darmstadt, Stockhausen, The Who.
Poor la-la-la, and your own music hidden,
even perhaps that tender song of brass
that sounded round the chapel when you left.
40 (Milo Sonnet)
Milo’s been putting in appearances:
they came as downstairs runs, flung doors, jumps, shouts,
then sittings, open arms, large smiles or sadness,
they came as total sleep and mumbled mornings.
The gold leaf was so light it wasn’t there,
a shimmer in the breath, but then it could
shine with no tarnish for a thousand years,
put away somewhere and disclosed with care.
Milo’s already doing other shows,
and these are shrinking back to coloured labels
for what was for a moment visibly
as new and old as anything could be,
as if it could be archived against time,
and we could always take it out again.
41 (Sonnet of Fortitude)
Really the plump dear with the primped pink curls
and defectuous legs pushing her shopping
trolley jerkily all the way and back,
should not be always singing to herself
and whoever else en route overhears
through business, leisure or sadly paused
to brood a mo on meanings and their ends,
except she’s also a big, bronze-eyed woman
who peers out from her plinth at what’s to come,
not minding if her beauty is ignored,
showing she is still standing with us there.
(She stretches out one hand towards her maimed,
invisible siblings, as if it might
help them outstare their darkness into light.)
42 (January walking sonnet)
Stringlets of little mirrors of the sun
hung on a dark transparent hand that reaches
under a shining cloak and vanishes
(Glyme, Blenheim lake, clean boots, elevenish).
Passage of thornbush script its finger-nails
show up against a scroll white water keeps
unrolling just the sun behind can read
(muddier round twelve, near Stonesfield, Evenlode, ).
Matt messages from hillside woodland shades
float on a silver anklet’s dance below
(Evenlode, boots clagging, twelve-ten or so).
A green book lies face downwards, brown spine bent,
(Windrush near Witney, mudcaked, after four)
trace of gilt lettering not quite evident.
43 (Sonnet of counting)
The other month I was four-forty-four
haircuts, one-thirty-six tooth-inspections,
twenty-five-thousand-five-five-oh breakfasts,
seventy-six-thousand-six-five-three pees
old. Or about, for hard data is sparse,
and sparser still for winks and twitches, say,
which slip the gaze into the swirling sea
and leave no bits of shell for resurrection.
Some evenings strings of numbers come and play,
or dance like fireflies on the walls. And more
keep climbing out and asking to join in -
e.g. haircut four-forty-five which you
gave me with kisses to tot up today;
the x’s, though, made it inestimable.
44 (Sonnet of rooms)
With these walls on the make round where we sit,
edging up asking for a name or two
to keep them quiet, or, if they’re smart,
to get more movement moving them and us,
no wonder wanting peace we push them back,
saying we don’t know about panels, paint,
struts, clamps, plastics, nails, bricks, not what they’re called,
or where they’re from, or when or how they came,
transformed from growths and ores and liquids
into these shady rooms. O naphtha, Nordic pine,
leave me to rock what soul is left to sleep.
O polyethylene terephthalate,
let me just bite the apples that you shine,
let me forget what you would have me learn.
45 (Sonnet of breathing)
Breathing has no concern for living borders,
out coming in, in going out, changing en route
the composition of the unseen air
it carries to the cells and brings back free.
You hear the changes in breath’s speed and tone,
the silence when it stops, see clouds of it ,
feel it on hands and lips, sniff it at times,
notice perhaps it’s there in songs and sneezes.
Behind the lines, though, breathing’s always there
inhabiting each bit of everything
that steps into the light and then withdraws
- microbes as well as boles and leaves and bark,
the plastic bags that take so long to die,
stones standing by in walls and avenues.
46 (Third morning sonnet)
Eight ten this morn stood me from bed upright,
and walked me off for downpour over head.
Towel dried skin which wool and cotton wrapped,
then teeth and throat blent toast and tea within.
And fingers moved on hands and eyes looked out
and legs bent feet and toes and ears heard song
and mouth gave voice (la-la) and through a door
my body passed into an empty street.
Were those not thoughts that flipped and flopped nearby?
And what of sunlight? what of marmelade?
what of the black and gold eyes of the cat?
Old boxes lay half-buried on the floor,
but head floats on calling out bye or hi
to this sweet interlocutor or that.
47 (Sonnet of old Yorkshire)
Some nights ghosts of old Yorkshire come round like
t wimmin callin ovver t wall, t lav in t yard,
an’ t back thëer wher ah laiked wi’ t lads,
an’ allus muck an’ smuts, an’ aye, grand folk.
They’re ghosts that most times just stick out their tongue
in some odd tone or turn of these words that
I speak and write almost as merrily
as you who’ve had your home here all your life.
I try for both of us a rough translation:
I hear women chatting (‘callin’, flat ‘a’)
over the wall, see the loo in the yard,
and the street’s back I played in with the boys
and omnipresent dirt and smuts of soot,
and yes, lovely people. (Oh, so much lost.)
48 (Sonnet of stepping out)
So I take a step or two from my shadows,
awkwardly, with others stepping out too,
with lots of others who stepped out and spoke
some version of what someone clearly said.
We’re trying not to mumble, stumble, slumber,
not to go off down the numberless byways,
and to put in acceptable requests.
But we need help with the wording, with what
to ask for, who to ask, and what to do
with the silence that follows when the curtains
close round us again. So unfamiliar
is this patch of sunlight. We edge forwards
like sheep and look round for someone who can
soothe us into the vast transporter waiting.
49 (Sonnet of my mother’s bench)
Every two springs or so around your birthday
I feel that it’s time to renew the paintwork
of the bench you were so proud of that stood
unsat on by your pond and now stands here,
its bars and curlicues a sheet of song
from years ago you could not read or needed.
‘Oh what a beautiful morning!’ You fling
the curtains wide and sing into the sunlight.
You’d be a hundred and five this March 5th,
and as tuneless in fact as those who only
half-heard your music always said you were .
I get out wire brush, sandpaper, white paint,
tell myself these aren’t bones I’m cleaning up,
join in your singing almost cheerfully.
50 (Fourth sonnet of disappearance)
And Haydn, bananas, weirdos, buttons,
essences, tea, baggage, bars and bones,
inertia, puddles, dignity, la-la-la,
triangles, breakfasts, trolleys, seals and smuts,
Felix, translations, nafta, jokes, Bengali,
shovels, twitches, pranksters, you, back-streets, ketches,
apples, explosions, hair, hands, numbers, teeth,
injections, squealers, silos, cobbles, walls and breath,
and llamas, furrows, eglantine, Peru,
settlements, leprechauns, roubles, yesteryear,
Aldeboran, billiards and ataraxia,
et cetera – the whole lot just not there
at all again. The power and the glory
are ever awesome, more than any ever.
51 (Sonnet of Temperance)
Remember Temperance who once came by
and played us that incredible guitar?
No looker sure but that music of hers
was pure universe. If you’d heard, you’d know.
That day bandits and weirdos calmed down
or headed out of town pianissimo.
We shouldn’t have let her go, but no one
stays around when they’re made to feel unneeded.
If it should happen that you’re travelling far,
and light upon a star where she is playing,
you could maybe whisper our planet’s name.
If it touches a chord, maybe she’ll play you
some classic number, maybe say she might
have stayed longer but for our ignorance.
52 (Sonnet of trust)
Well, I trust yesterday has been and gone,
and years seen and unseen are left behind,
and that tomorrow will stay out in front
with lots of futures coming after it.
I trust there’ll still be places with things in,
though nowhere with just nothing might be one,
and then I ask myself if time and space
will splutter out or come back redesigned.
Mostly I trust the here, the now, the live
that’s always on the run from eye and mind
but runners with it claim they can believe.
You find me breathless, offer me a smile.
and spell out that it’s you I have to trust
with life, belief and love before I leave.
53 (Sonnet of wine-glasses)
Dunno nor will anybody know ever
why one moment one of the wine-glasses
opted to give our adept hands the slip
and tip head over heel out into space.
It was the last we saw of its balloon,
crunching and crouching in the shards and specks
whose posthistoric polyoptic glitter
we might have marvelled at but swept away.
So fragile is the mind, so prone to fly
out of the solid head in which it sits,
and come back, if it does come back, in bits.
It seems a miracle that on the shelf
some glasses gather sparkling for a while
each a contented being of itself.
54 (March sonnet)
There can be no doubt, even for the dozy,
the blurry, for the speedy, the worried,
for those looking around wide-or keen-eyed,
let alone average stoppers and starters
who like a good yes when one comes along,
that our local big planet is these days
beaming down longer and less chilly light
on everyone and everything round here.
Say it or not, March is out and about.
It’s a bit sleepy, a bit tearful, but
it’s a wild dancer, with daffs in the hair,
who throws sticks and then goes suddenly cool.
Some hills are giggling in green at it all,
and blackbirds have started tuning the trees.
55 (Sonnet of Nilanjana Roy)
Nilanjana is not to be nailed down.
She said she liked writing English since she
in it felt free to make mistakes - and in
Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish too.
We are all strangers here. And when the train
sounded Mandarin and Arabic calls
for Bicester shopping, then the mixing was
for her a momentary returning home.
Writing, even the fighting sort, she said, was fun,
and smiled at us sat there with serious ears
staring at sunshine in the lecture room.
Later I went looking for her books, but
they’d also disappeared, till suddenly
one came up, clasped my hands and whispered, ‘Welcome’.
56 (Seaside sonnet)
Trapezium of waters in the sound
with hills inscribed as triangles each side,
the far edge blurred, the near a thin white line
rubbed out, then rubbed again into the sand.
On whitening arcs and circles in the sky
black vees of gulls glide screeching for equations
to be completed by the missing sun,
though on the beach some perfect numbers play –
looking a little lined, though small and blithe,
in colours that keep changing in the light,
larking away through countless songs and reels.
A five leaps high and pirouettes in blue,
then shimmers down to kiss a reddening six,
and dance and chant into today’s solution