like a small stone you sucked once, for some reason,

on a beach. I tell myself the things you’d like to do to me

if you were here, where there’s no one to see for miles,

where I sense myself grow lighter and heavier, dizzy, solid,

and a bird swoops down, down, the light follows it.

Words, Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night

and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.

The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say

it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing

an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine

the dark hills I would have to cross

to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is what it is like or what it is like in words.

The Darling Letters

Some keep them in shoeboxes away from the light,

sore memories blinking out as the lid lifts,

their own recklessness written all over them. My own . . .

Private jokes, no longer comprehended, pull their punchlines,

fall flat in the gaps between endearments. What

are you wearing?

Don’t ever change.

They start with Darling; end in recriminations,

absence, sense of loss. Even now, the fist’s bud flowers

into trembling, the fingers trace each line and see

the future then. Always . . . Nobody burns them,

the Darling letters, stiff in their cardboard coffins.

Babykins . . . We all had strange names

which make us blush, as though we’d murdered

someone under an alias, long ago. I’ll die

without you. Die. Once in a while, alone,

we take them out to read again, the heart thudding

like a spade on buried bones.

Away from Home

Somewhere someone will always be leaving open

a curtain, as you pass up the dark mild street,

uncertain, on your way to the lodgings.

You put down your case, and a blurred longing

sharpens like a headache. A woman carries

a steamy bowl into the room – a red room –

talking to no one, the pleasant and yawning man

who comes in behind her and kisses her palms.

Miles away, you go on, strumming the privet.

*

The train unzips the landscape, sheds fields

and hedges. On the outskirts of a town, the first houses

deal you their bright cards. The Queen of Hearts. A kitchen.

A suburban king counting his money. Jacks.

Behind the back-to-backs, a bruised industrial sky

blackens, and fills with cooking smells, and rains.

Treacherous puddles lead to the Railway Hotel. No bar

till 7 pm. At the first drink, a haunted jukebox

switches itself on, reminds you, reminds you, reminds you.

*

Anonymous night. Something wrong. The bedside lamp

absent. Different air. Against the hazarded wall

a door starts faintly to be drawn.

You mime your way ineptly to a switch,

turn to a single room with shower,