Saturn

(after W. G. Sebald)

On small hills where the rings are broken
and by trees. Un-switched-on lighthouses
demobbed and stiff in black pools where
there is an orbit of moony crabs. Surely
that can’t be light from a boarded-up
hotel. A circle – a perfect maze (and we know
from science that a blindfolded man can’t walk
in a dead straight line.) Sulphuric rain
has destroyed these lips. Trout and elm
also. And blinded statues. Things on stilts
must keep moving. Curlew; houses. Rot is
the only alternative where heatless alchemy
turns everything to gas, and goshawks
are still crucified: a limited alphabet of ‘X’s
and ‘T’s decorating blank spinneys and unstraight
defective groynes.

River

i
Two-backed, turned-
in-on-itself. A lip.
Duct. Clipped rushed

breaths over troughs
where dippers walk
– cinclus cinclus –

familiarity lost
in the song of name.
The twelve-digited

ii
weir a duodenum,
a conduit of rude
chyme. A film

on the surface.
Thick as a holly
leaf. The surface of

what? Whisper
it. The paper
or the celluloid,

iii
magpie images are
words, and words.
Somewhere

is a duplicate
of this river,
in three dimensions.

Bellows of lock-
gates. Rust of
water. Drip-

iv
drip of ducks.
In time faces
may be revealed,

but here in
the original,
the type that is

motionless.
Fated to be
static.

A Challenge to Piotr Wozniak

You cannot learn paths
by incremental reading alone –

at least not the paths that change
before maps can be born – spaced

repetition doesn’t work in the woods
and can’t account for circles,

for walking in circles. In Sidmouth
one year we both danced a six-time

Breton dance that wasn’t altogether
a circle but still didn’t end or begin

in anything but an empty hand –
an un-ouroboros, a snake that has freed

its own tail and is lost. When, shitfaced,
I couldn’t find my way back and pitched

an invisible tent in the red lee
of Salcombe Hill, the mapless spiral

sea apportioned blame percussively,
and according to the exponential nature

of forgetting.

After Charley Harper’s Twowls (Two Snowy Owls Perched Together)

Audubon’s are slow and moony,
big-breasted and restful ghosts
of Rubens’s ladies, slippered
and jaundiced, no more alive
than when they were painted.

Perky urns, Harper’s. His and hers
hearts. Unskittled skittles weighted
with a symmetry of snow, three-
eyed. Two Russian dolls
that cannot fit inside each other.

Famous Deaths of 1992

Ten. Said, ‘doc, I think I have
idiopathic pleurisy. Nothing
gets past these tiny lungs,
they’re infallible filters.’

‘Champion’ Jack Dupree
(or ‘Harelip’ to his friends)
had ten mini fists for fingers.
Stef Sargent was different,

The drain of, not of mortality
but the idea that panic
and prettiness could cease
to be observed (which was

she had syringes for fists
and pumped them ever
slower, slumped under
a shower. Mr Magoo (or at least

a good idea, but not one
I liked) first gaped at me
In 1992. Deathlessness
at the age of ten is this:

the man who made him
blind) died that year
too, reconciled with the family
of the Peter Pan Nazi

Standing over the stream
that fed the reservoir, pulling
down your trousers and smugly
pissing, knowing that the Poles

who paid him in frowns
and in spite. In D.C. Zoo
Ling-Ling’s gigantic black-
eyed kidneys turned to stone

used magic to poach carp
from under the pissy water
for their Christmas dinners.
I didn’t think then that

and panda diplomacy died,
whilst in a Southampton
cemetery Benny Hill’s bones
were moved by bandits

knowledge of death
would involve writing
a poem about the dead
guitarist from 7 Year Bitch.

who found nothing
but the echo of a laugh
that could have been a cough,
and two shrivelled kidneys.

The Boat House

on stilts. The sixty or so birds that make up
the neighbourhood cannot make holes
in the ice. The house built on the lake
for boats or ducks or otters is now stranded
on dry water, can be reached on foot. Speaking
to each other, the wood cut years ago submits
to the ice that was born yesterday. A train passes
like a wild boar and is swallowed by silence.
On the ice, objects: a toy car, a plug attached
to a cut cable (choked on its copper spew),
a baseball hat embroidered with Toronto’s
clean cut blue jay, and an open-mouthed
video recorder. When we stepped onto the lake
I did not feel it creak or heave. The rock I pitched
jarred like a spade on flint. There were prints, too,
a dance of invisible gulls, the belly-dragging scoop
of a pregnant cat, and, always going towards
the boat house, two upright unknown animals.

Another Poem About a Charley Harper Painting

You cannot blame a child
for wanting to bob stupidly
on a lake in a fibreglass parody
of a boat: it is a right
as inalienable as that
which binds a stick
to its dog. There is a path
that goes around the lake
twice – once each way –
and jetties on the bank
where fish can be pulled
like teeth, at an alarming
rate. The heron looks
at the pink stiff-necked
things with ineffective
mouths, and wonders
how something can be
both driven and directionless.