In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

Criss-cross in useless equilibrium

And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze

I hear again the sure confusing drum

You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans

But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.

You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones

Though all of you consort now underground.

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,

You in your going-away coat speeding ahead

And me, me then like a fleet god gaining

Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson

As the coat flapped wild and button after button

Sprang off and fell in a trail

Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,

Our echoes die in that corridor and now

I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones

Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station

After the trains have gone, the wet track

Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

For your step following and damned if I look back.

A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann

The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon

just out of the water

is gone just like that, but your stick

is kept salmon-silver.

Seasoned and bendy,

it convinces the hand

that what you have you hold

to play with and pose with

and lay about with.

But then too it points back to cattle

and spatter and beating

the bars of a gate –

the very stick we might cut

from your family tree.

The living cobalt of an afternoon

dragonfly drew my eye to it first

and the evening I trimmed it for you

you saw your first glow-worm –

all of us stood round in silence, even you

gigantic enough to darken the sky

for a glow-worm.

And when I poked open the grass

a tiny brightening den lit the eye

in the blunt pared end of your stick.

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon

a kite flew above Sunday,

a tightened drumhead, a flitter of blown chaff.

I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

I’d tied the bows of newspaper

along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark

and now it dragged as if the bellied string

were a wet rope hauled upon

to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul

is about the weight of a snipe,

yet the soul at anchor there,

the string that sags and ascends,

weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.