like the name of a cousin at a wedding

three times removed.

The trick is not trying to remember,

to hover in the doorway at a loss,

a visitor among the things of the world.

There will be no words

for what comes back to you then –

call it a kind of stillness, rarely entered,

which might be its own reward

like the scent in a drawer of folded scarves,

or a bed not slept in since winter.

Morandi: Still Lives

In the same year the tide of war turns

a porcelain bowl nestles, lip to foot,

against the milky glaze of a favourite bottle;

the balance of power tips

depending on whether the rusted enamel pitcher

is painted facing left or right.

Sometime in the early sixties

a candlestick takes a vow of silence.

Always the eye and the hand remain constant

inside this small room with its shelves of bric-à-brac

and one source of light;

a white vase with its cargo of roses

still carries on voyaging

towards the edge of the known world.

The Dew Artist

Perhaps it’s enough that someone thought of it:

of rising in the gap between night workers coming home

and the first dawn commuters,

to stand barefoot on a canvas of grass

brushing the knap patiently forwards and back

like a finger marking the softness of baize or suede

before shouldering the broom through the tall city streets

past the boy bleary-eyed behind all-night glass,

the nurse finishing her shift in intensive care

as the moon fades.

Perhaps it makes no difference

if the pattern burns into mist

long before the woman out walking her dog

within the roar of the bypass

has had time to glimpse the impossible:

perfect circles arrived at

through a concurrence of water and light

glittering the earth’s surface like a dream,

if we believe they’ve been prepared –

those small green spaces

where we gather in our lunch hours on warm days

to sit and eat

or, loosening our ties, lie back with eyes closed

on the common or garden.

The Messengers

Babies are, so too the newly dead,

sometimes also the drivers of tinted cars.

Others we know by name, though more often than not

the future’s an officer removing his hat

as we answer the door.

What they deliver in words and flesh

is irreversible –

a woman pegging out bed linen

hears the phone ring and goes inside,

not knowing that, by the time she returns,

the weather will have broken,

the sheets left flapping on the line for days.

Awkward, casual, oblivious,

appearing out of the blue

or leaving a note wedged in the crack of a table,

they give us our lives,

the ones we know at the end of them

by how they’ve been mended.

This is true even of the man dressed in white

who faces the woman with gauze at her throat.

In a moment he’ll give her the news,