How much more straightforward
could it get, the exact fit:
flat-bladed screwdriver, slotted screw –
roller blind, curtain rail, door knob –
yet often it slips, gouges the wood
or plaster, stabs the steadying finger.
You’re wild, you’re flapping your hand,
it’ll snag on your pocket, sting
slicing a lemon. You’ve done it again.
from House on the A34 (2023)
Hip height, at the kitchen sink,
same alloy handle, same chamfered edges:
you still keep on trying it.
from House on the A34 (2023)
Daft trying to fang hold of it in the middle
or grabbing it wherever suits fit.
Take one end and lift.
Run it up to the sky on its heel.
Get a shoulder under it – take the weight,
and feel for the point of fulcrum.
Allow it to settle on the clavicle,
horizontal, hardly there.
Fist a rung, no sweat:
between parked cars, down entries;
one arm around it, the other swinging.
Beware of washing lines.
from City Works Dept. (2018)
The Girl from the Triangle House
for Kerry Davis
A gunshot in a one-horse town
is the clack of the latch
of her garden gate. Starlings flit
to the pylons. Boundary hawthorns stir.
Our trailing feet brake the roundabout.
Lithe and angular with a paprika Afro,
she jigs behind a World Cup football.
Forty keep-ups then shooting-in;
Rigger’s drawn the short straw,
paddles in the crater beneath the crossbar,
always fooled by her touch.
The ball gummed to the criss-cross
lacing of her left boot, I’m wrong-
footed by her step-over,
undone by her nutmeg.
Simple passing long after the Evening Sentinel’s
have been posted and the three blind mice run off
with Giannasi’s Ices, until paraffin heat
sweats greenhouse panes and empty buses
flicker between the houses like cine film.
Tonight, the stone I dribble along the pavement
won’t escape me. I turn for home,
head full of those orange freckles
coming out like stars, of boots like hers,
Pumas with the white flash.
from Hearing Ourselves Think (2009)