* This December, I am reposting some of the more popular poems and articles that I have published in the course of the past year. These two poems, the first one of my series of hymns and odes, the second one of a series of loose translations of the elegies of Sextus Propertius, are very different in tone and style but have become companion pieces through having been posted this year in responses to the prompts Home and Away. *

 

Hymn to Home

 

Home-

ward

bound

on a trip

to ward off

ghosts of guests

and guard memories.

*

Home is focus, fetus & fire

heat & hearth

core of a world

where wary eyes await

and weary limbs

are laid

to rest

& the rest

is not history

just another sorry story

just another sore spot

*

your place was always

before the fire

& mine was in the clouds

*

Home is wherever

you go

at the end of the day

where the hat you keep

so many secrets under

is laid.

Boots by the bed.

*

Home is a hospital

ward,

a spare bed in a crypt.

*

Home is a snare,

a needle in

the amygdala

*

The plug-hole squeals

like a pig led to slaughter

as the deep bathwater,

murky with the filth of the whole family

–in which children might drown—

is sucked underground.

The fire is the focus,

but the plughole

is the secret meaning

of the home.

*

The bathroom is itself a sort of home,

with its plughole & its mirror

& a place for cleansing

& a window frosted against

the world

*

And, when heavy rain roars in the gutters,

racing earthwards,

or loiters moodily around blocked drains,

I remember

your hair and used cooking oil

clogging the plughole;

and, from afar,

am egged,

like a compass needle,

ever so gently, ever so slightly,

northwards

and home.

 

III xxi

 

Gotta get away.

Gotta get somewhere far from here.

Some place serious with a university

& sort out my serious woman troubles

on the long way.

‘Cos your girl worries only grow & grow

when you bump into her every day;

love fuels itself.

Everything is a temptation;

and the business of it bothers even my dreams.

*

There’s only one thing for it:

change address as often as she changes

mind and mood.

That way

I’ll keep love a safe distance from my soul.

*

& so, off we go again. Let’s launch

off into the air, Captain.

Put our fate in the hands of metal wings,

nose our way through the clouds into a jet-stream.

Let it carry us on our long-haul through the sky.

Cheerio towerblocks! Cheerio friendless city!

Ciao, ciao! Darling whatever you were!

& there I’ll be:

stuck in a seat with a safety belt,

being waited on by stewardesses,

held 30,000 feet up in the turbulent air,

praying there’ll be no in-flight incident,

to the incessant roar

of engines against earth’s resisting atmosphere.

Till they turn them off

& all turns eerily placid and still

& we begin our calm fall

through the air. Touch

earth with a bumping jolt of relief.

Even then, it’s not over.

The airport is a long isthmus

fingering the sky. You sit,

impatient, as the huge, metal pterodactyl,

lithe in the air,

taxis clumsily in from the runway.

Take a bus to the labyrinth of escalators

& queues of Terminal 2.

*

So, there I’ll be. What’ll I do now?

Check out a copy of Adam Smith

& set about putting myself straight

in local libraries. Hang around parks

and gardens of stately homes designed

by Capability Brown. Brush up

on my rhetorical skills in the armories

of Dr. Johnson, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke.

Relish the wit of Coward and Wilde.

& see which Turners or Gainsboroughs still take my fancy

in the V & A. Or better still, bronzes

and objets trouvés in the Tate.

*

& the empty years stretching out before me

& the wide moat of the ocean

& the sky will sterilize and heal

the lesions of love within me.

For, if I do not die, sillily, over a girl;

but quiet and alone in bed:

that, surely, will have been—

a worthier death.