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Father’s wine had its own lexicon
of awfulness: mousy, ropy, goaty…
his proud but uncontested claim:
you can make wine from anything.
And to prove it would hoard unwanted produce:
parsnips, pears, beetroot, marrows, peas,
brambles and crabs and sloes from the hedgerows,
and douse them in a filthy bucket
with boiling water laced with sugar
to let the errant air-borne yeasts
that hung about the nether regions of our house
perform their alchemy.

And yet to go with Sunday roast
he’d find a dusty bottleful
of pink, sparkling fruitfulness
that made us chatter and laugh, and once
made mother throw her empty glass
over her shoulder as if she didn’t care.

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Don’t try, and you can feel
how it will lose its form,
the fading stain of paint
spilled before its destination,
friends spread out so far
they cannot be friends.

That time breathless after the ride home,
bikes abandoned in our hunger. Later
handlebars entangled in an embrace
curve to curve, hard edge to hard edge.
Rust-crusted chrome.
Between the forks spiders bred generations.

In my hands a handful,
sand gathered from a sun-flecked pool.
It has lost its glitter,
sifted grain by grain,
each with its own history.

Old loves lie in dusty albums,
compressed in notebooks,
fading in the script of rubber-banded letters.

Within the abandoned garden
once it is no longer a garden
only someone who has gone
knows where paths led,
how floribunda bloomed crimson
where briars hide the trellis by the lean-to shed.

Heavy-lidded, flannel-headed,
straining for familiar sounds,
a scutter of rain, the riffle of wind.

Outside, over Cumbrae
distant house lights blink and tremble,
dance through drifting veils.
Inside a silent presence of machines,
garnet in the dark,
an amber eye on the skirting.

Unkempt thoughts,
their tangled skeins,
searching loose ends
among the wind-snagged rigging.

To sink and watch
the hulls of passing ships,
keeled and barnacled.

And later, a wandering absence of light
against the star-pinned dark.

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Crouched in its corner
at the elbow of the joists,
huddled under their bare wood,
it is as big as a human head
and, for all I know, as full of spite.
I could judge its weight like a home-baked cake,
reckon its contents like marbles in a jar
yet miss the point.

For this thing grew from its heart,
folded itself layer on layer,
crusted its dry floors from the forest stuff of its making.
If I could guess at its entrance
and dream along its tindered passageways,
I might fly or creep or delve
to reach the maze of its beginning,
sup at its table, seek out its secret, seeded orifice.

I can feel the pull of its call
across untended gardens, through brambled skeins,
a shrill thrill seeping into runs and tunnels,
past the puckered heads of blossom
and the wallow of fruit,
but still not tell what lies
within the creamy ooze
at its dark, loveless heart.

He would have waited, beadily,
an old pro with nothing left to prove,
confident his call would be answered,
that there would be takers for his mottled sack
stuffed with gene juice
and randy again for the next round of the old game.
Last night must have been a threesome at least,
mounting and being mounted.
Spawn slithered implausibly
from its small distended source.
Seed spurted blindly in the blind dark,
foam boiled over into jellied mounds
as the cup flowed, on and on.

And this morning we marvel
at the sheer volume of the stuff
piled there amongst the reeds
like left-over tapioca
but each bubble pregnant with a wriggling pupil
primed to do it all again.

When You Were Born

When you were born bells peeled, klaxons sounded
and choirs sang hallelujahs in my head.
I cradled you and marvelled. Surrounded
by wonders I slept soundly in my bed.

Ten years on you made me laugh, told me things
I did not know. You had a knack that brightened
the space around you. I was like glass that sings
in sympathy. My heartstrings tightened.

At twenty, a head and shoulders higher,
you fizz with life and sometimes parachute
into my days. You have the skill to fire
people up but leave me trailing in pursuit.

Swollen with pride my heart leapt
at your coming, and when you went I wept.

Thin Ice

The Inuit word is sikuaq, ice so
thin you cannot trust it, for dangers skulk
in its growing and dying, its slow flow
and ebb of strength, the life within its bulk.
The secret is to spread yourself, avoid
all sudden movement, concentrate on how
the ice breathes, sense its mood, how it is buoyed
up by the dark water below.
                                                          Now
edge to where it leads you and try to find
a path that may not be there, like a spare
rib in a frozen skeleton or a blind
lover sensing tension beneath bare
skin: like love the outcome a leap of faith,
unknowable until it is too late.

Happy Hour

Again, from somewhere,
the amber idea
has
sidled
up
filled waiting mindspace,
blunted this morning’s curiosity.

Once conceived the notion nags,
weaves tendrils through all other thoughts
crouched
down
there
tight as a balled root,
fixed as a fat tick.

Need fidgets
like too much change in a trouser pocket:
its restless
breathless
presence
strung taut across the mind’s wires
grows gimlet sharp.

But, at the bar at last,
for five full minutes or maybe more
it’s pure magic
celestial bliss
supernal blessing
optimism in a straight-sided glass
and stillness settles like dew on parched grass.

The Keeper

People were surprised to hear he’d been there forty years,
and yet it had been easy.
Swept up by the daring of the impossible enterprise
he watched the tower rise, block by block,
an ungainly birth from the rocks
until, with sheets and scaffold swept away,
the clean new thing stood strong in its proper place,
tall as truth, steady as a lodestar,
its lines an affront to the chaos of tide race.
And the memory of how it was before,
the basalt reef churned and drenched
the waters heaving prussian blue and acid white,
still burned his mind.

And then the complex business of topping out
and the necessary equipment,
derrick, hawser, winch, windlass,
flares and mirrors, ladders, rails, pumps and cylinders,
and the conductor fixed at the highest point;
not to speak of all the domestic offices,
the scullery, stores, parlour, pantry
and the room set aside for sleep,
for a man must have all he needs to survive in such a place.
The woman too: spoons and firkins,
brooms and ladles and washboards,
skillets, kettles, curtains,
and the writing desk where she sat during her afternoons.
She lasted less than a year after the child was gone
for the comfort she needed
was beyond his power to give.

Later it became easier: the routine inspections,
the constant adjustments and minor improvements.
Periodic deliveries of supplies were an intrusion
for they distracted from his purpose.
And always the passing of gulls and the surge of swell:
neither days nor nights were ever still.
Shags and guillemots became his friends, and strangers
in passing ships watched for his light.

When after many years they sent him a letter
to tell him it was time for him to go
he placed it unopened on his table.
It lay like a carefully crafted sentence,
an inscription on an unloved grave.
Twice they had to come for him in the end,
the second time with dogs and axes,
taking him trussed but still crying out.
Now in the silence
he counts the lives he saved with his own.

The Mackerel Pit

When the tide is right
I slip out past the last buoy
to the mackerel pit.
Lines meet at house, hill, spit, copse,
and I drift
as soft sea slaps the hull’s hollow.

Then it is time for rod, line, knife, bucket, priest
and sometimes I shave grey fish flesh,
impaling sushi on each beaked barb.
The long-line drops on its weight.
I watch each baited hook glow ghost white
down through the watery dark.

My lures are gaudy fairground glitter.
They plumb their depths
while the line reels out turn on turn
to where the very idea of air
is no more than a faintness of light,
and I can reel in and play and wait.

And when it comes it is rainbow-oily,
wrenched from its element, flipping and leaping,
even out of water, true to itself.
Embraced by my warm fist it awaits the priest.
It knows only what is known in the dark glitter of the sea,
twitching, flexing, like silver drowned in air.

I would like to think these barbed hooks
no more barbarous than a passing-on of old ways
and though the days of whiting and cod,
herring and ling, are long gone
and deep down the mackerel pit is dying,
the old stories still hold.