Bland, with cold air rushing.
Flattened out and silent,
you refuse to tell us.
Only the sway of branches –
a ragged trim –
breaks through,
and a call home breaking
the joy of grinding a tennis ball
between sodden teeth.

The one day I didn’t crave the
commentary of strangers, it rained hard
and I hid under a tree with my guitar sealed
in its faux-leather case, silenced by
clatter. No tremor needed.

Now my fat fingers compensate for its rising
with a too-hard grip on the pick,
and that boom without roll off
as I hide at least my mouth close
behind the mic. Sharp lights and burning sweat.

Everything is stilted where it had flowed
with skipping notes I controlled,
powerless under your hard gaze,
and all to amplify my slight joys into
the air loudly, in a strange play.

Fade away, daily,
but return without interruption.
You’ve left Jill and I,
and her eyes sting
when she thinks
of the desertion. That boy
was up too early, hugged
us without warning, and
reproached our nights away.

Now he’s misplaced,
has forgotten
our aching as he runs
across the field
to jump
in the stream.
I can’t miss him
or it will engulf me, scorching
those arms that I used
to hold him back
from the saturated mud.

Nice to meet you,
love. Your smile is a replica,
but I can take it to
lift me off the ground
to standing.
You still know
not to feel
my stiff movements,
but only the warm breath
I push into a pale neck
as your wriggling torso
settles down
in bed.

I came here when there was secret potential,
and I could think necks craned
to glimpse me. Giants beckoning and
rolling from bar to bar, to huddle in the knowledge
that we have talent enough to waste.
I might have let that go, until the whole tour

is wowed by our guide’s story of Behan’s
blinding brilliance. I hardly know the writing
of course, but I’m sure I knew
the man, launched from my shadowy
confidence into myth. He will be my proxy,
and I will be the crowd.

Impossibly serene, both
the grass and you,
reclining. Each sunny filament
even, pared. Your torso
melted into them.
Just the arc, pushing
this reccy’s bluster away.
I would have left you
alone here, as the drizzle
rinsed you
through the soil. Then
this unreal image wouldn’t
batter me.
I would have glanced at
your shoulder’s curve from
nape to lawn
as I walked past you,
gone home to write
about some other.

You hold composure.
Khaki to mustard burnt
patches, but always the sturdy
Northerner. You endure
through whole long lives,
unmoved by the electricity
of a new kiss, while
teens, drunk, slip around
each other in the rain.

A picture on my desk of the three of us.
Black and white, to match our teenage grimace.
Although we couldn’t lift our mouths
to smile, we were each in love. Huge.
Equal to the height of the smallest wisp’s
of top branches on that big tree over the brook
we pretended to climb. I sat on damp grass.
Your valiant bulk stuck on the first kink
in the trunk. We both looked up
to his spindly shape, spreading
his weight on stems a fraction the size of his limbs,
swaying magically. I have walked past there at times since,
gravity’s draw to you, but bowing as a body does
high up in the leaves.

Pass my dozy eyes in the terminal,
firing off to your hometowns,
leaving suitably grey arcs
in your wake. There are so many
millions of you, slow paced or at a run.
Digging in, I wouldn’t be able to dismiss
those lives as futile, obvious.
Under glass like specimens pinned
there is cutting loss and
passion – cares so much more
than flight numbers on a screen.

The sum total’s crescendo: I’m sorry.
Speak something that doesn’t hold,
the dark of our bed thick
on my eyes’ salt. You
don’t unfurl. Only the hush of
your long, curved back, breathing
lightly in a concentric circle.

Awake, another reproving sigh –
a sequence of battery.
Asleep, respite.
Between them, rear
from the ease of fantasies
to pull and curl from the
sticky tethers I’ve spun. Fall away.

Your straight back
to a wall, looking over
at me, no more than ten feet
away (a greater distance
than ever before).
Standing in the lobby
of an anonymous new school.
Not the loss of you – a protracted thing
I weather like tiny shears
in muscle-fibre straining.
It’s sight of the world’s
indifference. One stunted blade
in the darkness,
consumed whole. Those people
that my eyes drift over
as the plane comes in to land,
behind the specks of headlights,
circling tar fields.

There were splinters
of rain firing off
the screens, sparking in
all directions to spit mist
on my t-shirt. Guffaws
landing hard on the lawn.

A moment where we were
allowed to watch together
without recriminations,
quiet. Shallow breaths
listening to nothing
but steam in the air. Two days later

it was time to turn over
our lives and shake them
out like the ferns shook off
their inundation. Our histories
shrugged off and broken apart, too. Not
a word then, either. Haphazard

and no plan for winding our way
back down to the stream.
It was a clash of
humidity and air
pressure, as hopeless as
two droplets recombined.

We need you. Quietly
and without fuss.
All the surety of earth,
at the centre of the circling
terraces of our homes.
Forgotten, sometimes,
like the rising frailty
of now hearty bodies,
at a run.

A confirmation like a shadow
of that weight, stripped of
fury,
stinging,
stiff arms,
tears, shallow
breath, turning over
myself. He just said I felt
sad without any need for it.

It had a name, he was sure,
but it was too abstract to say
low,
depressed,
bipolar, mentally
ill, sick in the head.
Or simply mad, as I would
sometime joke he was in his dizzy
play. Time taken to shatter him a little.

He didn’t look at me as we walked
to school. And every word was
just
a way
to release
this from my body
into his unspoiled one.
Looking at the moss and weeds,
he told me he loved me in spite of it.

I

I creeped toward a gap in the bridge floor.
Grandad held me back as I teetered over the risk.
The sun was so hot the water seemed to steam below.
His grip on my arm a smile that could have leapt.
All forgotten as we turned back to home.

II

I watched the blurring of the rail as we span.
My child whooped as I counted the fiery seconds.
The field-grass seemed more yellow at greater speed.
A dream I would shelter his desire in my hands.
I yearned for solid earth to stamp my soles.

Then I saw him as just the end
of a story. He could have answered
anything with an insight. Now I had won,
and he closed his mouth slowly, passing
a wiry hand over that veiny skull.
Dressed like an aged, urban seer,
he said sorry for something
he couldn’t place. I lied
and told him there was nothing good
in out-flanking, but proof of sanity
was like running, breakneck, over the flattened
weeds, to fade towards the horizon.
With me for the first time,
sitting in the orange light of his office.

As they fizzled through
fractious light in the mist,
dipping behind clouds,
our laughter fell to darkness.
Swallowed by disdain for
the community that hadn’t
protected us from our fathers.
That people just went on.
Clustered around the
fire on the horizon.
Content maybe, but at least
not wringing with contempt
for the injustice of whatever
drove me from everyone but you.

We watched the lights
rise out of the tree line,
all around us,
joking that we had duped
them. Keeping sight of
the wonder we had, but
stood in the far field
alone, arching pillars
that the rain couldn’t rinse
free. And we were close
to each other by it, holding
it up to the flashing light
to define us. Hopeless
to get away, even

across the water
to the new world.
We don’t talk about it
when you come home,
sitting over a pint
in all the same places.
I doubt you are as free
of all that futility
as you look, recalling
the taste of special brew
we choked on in the drizzle.
I am back here now,
and scared that the lights
will peter out.

So I left it behind, and nothing changed. The rain
came gentle, but unmoved, the ground took it
silently. Daily, dogs ran, scarring the grass
and weeds in a frenzy, so mud suckered
back, achingly slow in the dark. By morning
there was only a shadow’s history of movement.
All gestures fell short – the hard casey
and endless studded boots couldn’t defeat it.
A relentless dream, passed the house rows,
where I should be able to recall something more
than kids’ litter blown to the corners. Cheshire,
flat to the horizon, up to the city’s edge. But I left it,
looking for the single busiest place, where there was
never its quiet confrontation with my mind.
An inexorable quiet, with string ties that
hauled me in from across the Atlantic.
All I can do is walk the perimeter,
edging around it with Colum at
dawn. Look at the ground
to blinker that open
field, glistening,
unconcerned.