...while father, you, remembered, white, unmoving,
still as earth, as chalk-bone soil
to which you now return, for you
no flow of life, no moving air.

The land itself, the hollows and the levels,
fed, fertiled and disturbed by moving air,
feels it creep like water on its surface,
gently changing as the tidal air demands.

What calcined skeleton beneath supports
upholster soil and fibrous roots of grass and trees,
how constant is the profile of this curving country,
that knot of trees, of sorts, how long has stood?

And in this morning moving into midday
time measured, measuring the grain of air,
house living over by the spinney
where shelter, water, growing land ensured
human companionship for plants and soil
down years where air moved measureless, measuring...
air moving.

It would not do to die today,
would not be meet to separate
the flesh and pilot animus
in such a spell of early sun
of crocus daubs on sudden green
a season more for flight of new fletched birds
in the fast grass-growth of the urchin year.

Beyond the curtained window
children playing in the early air of summer
can't envisage, as it were, a bridge
connecting spring with autumn;
each pillar needed for support
completing the existence of the other.
So each birth prophesied your death,
each grandchild marked a countdown to this morning.

And on a morning of such gently-moving air,
a lorry central to its ball of sound,
a never-bursting bubble stretched shapeless by the wind,
provides a pedal-tone on which the world can rest,
construct its harmonies upon a fundamental bass.

The moving air foretells so many things:
this coming truck-bassoon, the tunnel train,
the unknown storm, the anticyclone clear,
the rain, the sea-fog, the migrating birds,
and underneath the partly-plated sky
from all far places out across the world
brings dusts and smells and tastes of outland parts
as surely as its now slow moving in your chest and throat
marks out the imminence of your death.

That last slow raven cry -
the spirit tearing up its roots?
Or just the failing breath,
the final slug of moving air
forced out past the collapsing tongue?

And who dares use the phrase 'democracy of death'?
This is no democrat that comes, inexorable,
crushing like an empty tube your withered husk.
Watching, I am crushed, and changed-about,
passing, as you pass, the final reach of boyhood.
And, father, have you also reached a childhood's-end?
Is there a place for you to go
the way our shared religion teaches?

I wish I could have thought
I felt your spirit leaving on its flight
borne into the birdsong of this moving air,
but what I saw was like a factory shutting down,
the switches pulled, lights going out,
windows darkened one by one,
watched consciousness evaporate as spirits will,
and all your knowledge, like a tape, erased.

The stilling of the air tests faith,
for when the passing-on is done
the body grounded finally
the relatives returned to anonymity,
even believers wonder why there is no sign,
no contact withthe now-beloved dead.

Here on this rise, this other morning,
a lark displays itself between the sky and earth,
struggles, so it seems, to keep its hold on air.
How unbelievable its strength,
how rapidly would my arms become exhausted
had I to fight for height, to push aside the moving air...
yet that small body has the strength to spare to sing!

So could it be, the newly-dead
wakening to unconceived dimensions
unable both to hold a place and sing
yet forced by birth to glorify the day
cannot help but lose their track
find their frame of reference disappeared
gone past rediscovery, past recall,
and matter not if wils, or whether wants, or wish,
but cannot, in such vastness, see such small?

As singing in the moving air
a voice; magnetic echo
down the ether tremulant,
voice of dead Caruso
living in the moving air,
or orchestras or choirs long disbanded,
organs muted, within whose tubes the air not-moves,
now like the lark, the soul, revital
through the engineer's control
of air and its movement.

And other voices, millions, like in-transit spirits
haunting and competing for a second's speech,
yet with a metal line I trawl this live and moving air
selecting from the immolating shoal
one fish, one bat, one voice,
as coil commands the others go.

What stills the voice? When air is still.
His voice, once all-commanding
now, like airless organ-pipe, is mute;
like untuned air-voice sweeps away
to other, place-unknown receivers.

Warm winter cannot help his cooling hands,
nor widow's tears relax his rigid face
and I, in eggshell-broken glass of promises
think what right I have to weep my father's death
with others' fathers dying by the minute.

If I were ordered now pay what thou owest!
how would I make return on all my debt?
What value is a life, what worth has wisdom?
How much the service-charge, the interest?
And, father, I would pay you now in years
from off my life, breath given from my lungs;
yet all I do is place a tribute on your eyes,
two coins - grey moons reflecting back my selfish face -
and draw the sheet across them, cancelling
this final notice of my obligation.

Here on this morning rise I lie
observe the airflow measure time
cloud-bars skim the sky like clock-hands
bringing time across the moving air,
look for other places mirrored -
under that cloud lies Damascus
and under that, Tashkent,
and this, New York, that other, Lima,
those icy crystals there, the Pole,
and yet another punctured by the spire of Everest.

Sun moves across my foot
dispenses, with its inches, time,
marks my journey to the future cold,
slides me further from my history,
makes me more an exile with each inch:
we wander time like gypsies
unable ever to revisit or resettle in
whatever part we think about as home.

For time kills everything that lives,
and as I look at last at you it killed,
I know why saints are made of marble
glowing with an in-reflected light.
Within your satin cloths I watched your face
and see as if in mirrors
all the faces that you wore the long way back to childhood
my face too is there -
only now I see how similar we were,
while you lived I thought we were so different.

In these considerations I put things in balance
taking succour from this place's permanence,
from wind, from weather-engine moving air,
from all far lands, from hanging lark,
from trees, from earth, from sound, from heat,
and you, your life, your death, your life-in-me,
and from the all-connecting air
in which birds swim and insects float,
which measures time, moves heat, makes sound,
and carries life...

... for, even now, through soil-chinks, gases creep,
oxygen, nitrogen:

air, moving...

...where I have sighted islands
lost since every morning
ground on sandbars
humping underneath the hull
walked bleach-white beaches
and lain at evening
couched in hollow grasses
past the reaches of the sea...

...listening to music on the wind
ancient aeolian airs
tasting their quinine upon my tongue
grinding crystal salt between my teeth
taking pleasure in their citric sting...

...and in these infinitely far havens
felt longings ease
and peace envelop everything
like evening sun
warming still the distant waves
soaking pain from limbs
wrenched muscles
blistered skin...

...there I have met with friends long dead
spoken with surprise
that they should greet me
joked on their appearance of health
wondered why I ever should have
mourned or missed them...

...and I have visited old homes
places skeletal in memory
houses half forgotten
attics full of dust and broken toys
windows offering perspectives
formerly unseen...

...and though on these dream islands
I have encountered sorrows, too
seen devastated futures
children dead
or met (so many times)
the lost and unknown love
yet facing each return
to harbour in the grim dawn
I would go back
find the keel track in the waves
follow the furrow of the plunging stem.

          * * *

But I am a navigator
forced to draw on moth-wings
paper tenuous as early daylight
shellac-thin glass
that shatters at a touch...

...such charts as can be saved
on fragile, glittering mica-shards
I offer you.

You were gloss and gleam and curve and fullness of flesh,
you were breast and buttock, ankle and knee,
coil of copper and sheen of silk.

There were around you in their number
men to my youth -
firm muscles, dark voices, confidence -

and I would have given all my worthless life
if I could have fluttered away its force
in just one, ecstatic joining with you.

You were utterly proof against my callow lust.
Glass-walled behind my anonymity, my fear,
I watched at the edge of the adulous crowd.

You did not know me then;
you do not know me now,
though I know you.

I have watched while my desire faded with your beauty,
and have seen you turn them all away, engrossed
in the mirror-image of your own perfection.

I have seen your struggle with clothes and hats and paint,
your hair-colour changing with the seasons
that marked the advancement of your years.

I watch you now at sixty,
still slim, your fullness unfulfilled,
your door forever shut against the thrust of man,
against the birth of children.

I see you casting bread upon the water,
feeding the swans in wrinkled silence,
reaping no harvest even here.

I move away.
I do not speak.
I never did.

(From the book Mica-Shards, Moth-Wings / section: All The Slain Soldiers, Part 1: People And Other Soldiers)

One day, the pain
that scratched his back from time to time
changed nails for knives,
forcing him to consultation and conclusion:
'How long?'   'Not long. I'm sorry'.
'Ah, never mind. I've seen it plenty times!'
Then home to tell his wife
sort out the business,
make a coffin to his measure
and, three weeks later, borne
by four unsmiling men
(dark-jacketed, pin-striped)
to his terminal bed.

Some who can believe, as he,
there is another place to which we go
will see him joking with the shades,
amusing angels, jollying heaven.
Maybe so. But at his funeral
jokes were few.

(From the book Mica-Shards, Moth-Wings / section: All The Slain Soldiers, Part 1: People And Other Soldiers)

Before him, music moves in chorded curtains,
dampness condenses in his lungs,
alligators glide
among sickly blossoms.

His boat is stagnant in the stream in the green gloom,
dull sunshine presses in upon his headache,
he dreams of Koanga
and oranges.

Thunderheads are piled pillows in the horizon haze;
time is as paralysed as the viscous water.
To move
is to sweat.

Green room, green gloom in the willows' dome;
he is nailed to the clinker hull by the weight of air,
he is bound by sloth and sleep
awaiting the releasing rain.

(From the book Mica-Shards, Moth-Wings / section: Helix, poem no. 5)

Then you reach across the table, over
the river, take my hands, so that once again I fall
forever through your eyes, hear you somewhere
speak of love...

Later, in the cold streets, we kiss
careless as children tasting first
fruit. Feeling your tremor
I take your hand beneath my coat, my warmth
rewarded doubly as you smile,
striking out of darkness, light, making
from late winter,
spring.

(From the book Mica-Shards, Moth-Wings / section: Following Springtime; poem 4)