Corn in Egypt. I looked on

from the upstairs window like the midday moon.

Back below stairs on its hook, the chainsaw seethed.

I left it a year, to work back through its man-made dreams,

to try to forget.

The seamless urge to persist was as far as it got.

THE STRID

After tying the knot,

whatever possessed us to make for the Strid?

That crossing point

on the River Wharfe

which famously did

for the boy and his dog;

that tourist trap

where a catchment area comes to a head

in a bottleneck stream

above Bolton Abbey;

you in your dress of double cream,

me done up like a tailor’s dummy.

Surely it’s more of a lover’s leap:

two back-to-back rocks

hydraulically split

by the incompressible sap of the spine;

let it be known

that between two bodies made one

there’s more going on

than they’d have us believe.

Whatever possessed us, though?

Was it the pink champagne talking?

Or all for the sake of carrying on,

canoodling out of doors,

the fuck of the century under the stars?

Or the leather-soled shoes

with the man-made uppers,

bought on the never-never,

moulded and stitched

for the purpose of taking us

up and across, over the threshold

of water-cut rock and localised moss

in one giant stride,

bridegroom and bride?

A week goes by,

then the rain delivers:

you, like the death of a swan

in a bed of reeds,

me, like a fish gone wrong

a mile down river;

exhibits X and Y,

matching rings on swollen fingers,

and proof beyond doubt

of married life—

the coroner’s voice, proclaiming us

dead to the world, husband and wife.

THE TWANG

Well it was St. George’s Day in New York.

They’d dyed the Hudson with cochineal and chalk.

Bulldogs were arse-to-mouth in Central Park.

Midtown, balloons drifted up, red and white streamers

flowed like plasma and milk. The Mayor on a float on Fifth,

resplendent, sunlight detonating on his pearly suit.

The President followed, doing the Lambeth Walk.

It was an election year on both counts. In the Royal Oak

boiled beef was going for a song. Some Dubliner

played along, came out with cockney rhyming-slang,

told jokes against his own and spoke of cousins twice removed

from Islington, which made him one of us.

A paper dragon tripped down Lexington, its tongue

truly forked. Two hands thrust from its open throat:

in the left, a red rose; in the right, a collection box

for the National Trust. I mean the National Front.

THE STRAND

We were two-and-a-half thousand miles west

and still putting miles on the clock, driving

at night, the small wooden towns of the coast

coming up in the rain like cargo adrift

then falling away into dark. The road

followed the swell of the land, riding the waves,

then slowed in a town whose name I forget,

a place picked with a pin and an old map

by pricking the bent finger of Cape Cod.

This time we meant it. This time we’d drawn blood.