you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

GOOSEBERRY SEASON

Which reminds me. He appeared

at noon, asking for water. He’d walked from town

after losing his job, leaving a note for his wife and his brother

and locking his dog in the coal bunker.

We made him a bed

and he slept till Monday.

A week went by and he hung up his coat.

Then a month, and not a stroke of work, a word of thanks,

a farthing of rent or a sign of him leaving.

One evening he mentioned a recipe

for smooth, seedless gooseberry sorbet

but by then I was tired of him: taking pocket money

from my boy at cards, sucking up to my wife and on his last night

sizing up my daughter. He was smoking my pipe

as we stirred his supper.

Where does the hand become the wrist?

Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed

and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that razor’s edge

between something and nothing, between

one and the other.

I could have told him this

but didn’t bother. We ran him a bath

and held him under, dried him off and dressed him

and loaded him into the back of the pick-up.

Then we drove without headlights

to the county boundary,

dropped the tailgate, and after my boy

had been through his pockets we dragged him like a mattress

across the meadow and on the count of four

threw him over the border.

This is not general knowledge, except

in gooseberry season, which reminds me, and at the table

I have been known to raise an eyebrow, or scoop the sorbet

into five equal portions, for the hell of it.

I mention this for a good reason.

AT SEA

It is not through weeping,

but all evening the pale blue eye

on your most photogenic side has kept

its own unfathomable tide. Like the boy

at the dyke I have been there:

held out a huge finger,

lifted atoms of dust with the point

of a tissue and imagined slivers of hair

in the oil on the cornea. We are both

in the dark, but I go on

drawing the eyelid up by its lashes,

folding it almost inside-out, then finding

and hiding every mirror in the house

as the iris, besieged with the ink

of blood rolls back

into its own orbit. Nothing

will help it. Through until dawn

you dream the true story of the boy

who hooked out his eye and ate it,

so by six in the morning

I am steadying the ointment

that will bite like an onion, piping

a line of cream while avoiding the pupil

and in no time it is glued shut

like a bad mussel.

Friends call round

and mean well. They wait

and whisper in the air-lock of the lobby

with patches, eyewash, the truth

about mascara.

Even the cats are onto it;

they bring in starlings, and because their feathers