Walk from the gatehouse – grey stone, Gothic windows,
a rusting padlock – between cypresses
to darkness. Goodbye, strangers’ kindnesses,
the offerings of streetlamps. Past the willow,
at night a drift of harp-strings, past the graves
of those who gave up sooner, those who tried
and never made it, those who did, and died
leaving no chronicle. An angel waves
a despairing hand at mud. You mustn’t ponder
lead coffins, plague-pits, skeletons. Your task
is keep on walking. As the silence grows,
your mind renounces thought. Your body knows
it may not manage all your mind will ask,
and that could be your catastrophe, your wonder.

Not in hospital; nobody wants that.
Nor the pale-blue rooms and communal eating-spaces
of the hospice, however kindly. Not alone
on an industrial estate in Switzerland,
being filmed stating Yes I understand
if I drink this liquid... Not even in bed at home
surrounded by sobbing family, Victorian
fantasy of reunion and forgiveness.
Since it’s going to happen and won’t be dignified,
you could do a lot worse than a railway station
waiting-room. Say Barnham, where after class
with the boys from the boys’ school we dawdled for the connection:
coal fire, view of the station pub, a playground,
mourners hurrying up from the underpass.

*

I’ve certainly known some beautiful railway stations.
St Pancras before it became a shopping-mall
and they hid the trains: wood-panelled ticket office,
six empty tracks leading the mind north
past the gasometers to an improbable
state of grace; or Milan with its Day Hotel
where you could have a change of clothes, a shower,
then off to meet Leonardo, your Last Supper.
But the number one station for dying in
must be Ljubljana: the driving snow, the boys
off to art college in Venice, the gun-metal
socialist-realist trains, their sides announcing
the life beyond: Budapest, Bucharest,
Prague, Skopje, Thessaloníki, Athens.

*

You’re not taking this seriously. It’s not about
childhood or tourism or the early years
of your marriage. You are deciding where to die,
assuming you have a choice and aren’t knocked down
by a single-decker bus at Turnpike Lane,
or a heart attack in the Parkways ladies’ toilets.
It’s losing control of your body, shamefully,
and your mind, which will stop writing poetry forever.
So what you need is less the architecture
(though a final view of a vaulted wrought-iron roof
would do for transcendence) than the sound of trains
leaving for cities you can dream about
in your last minutes, and busy humanity
with its suitcases and phones, its sudden weeping.

From the Swiss border down along the Rhône
and into the narrow lane through the chestnut woods
of the Massif des Maures, a bubbling blethering
breaker of white fleece around a bus
at night, on an old stone bridge, the headlights dimmed,
silence inside, the driver sitting back
and outside the shepherds, tall, walking and calling.

One day, not so far into the future
that I couldn’t count the days if I sat down
at my desk in the grey light of a Sunday morning,
it will all start flowing
away, the word transhumance and the sheep
pouring down to the plain. I won’t remember
the time for breakfast or my lover’s name

nor how I got here, transmigration of souls
from the child abandoned in the empty ward.
Then what is left of me will be the moment,
exquisite in its colours and modulations,
the touch of glass on my fingertips, the scent
of hyacinths in a pot on the window-sill:
intensity I’ve wanted all these years

and useless because I’ll no longer have the words
to turn it into a poem, to make it say
anything about my own life or the lives
of people shut the wrong side of a wall,
their olive trees on the other side still shaking
silver leaves in the wind, the olives swelling
and falling onto a net on the dry ground
to shrivel and rot, unharvested, untasted.

The tigers wait outside the villages.
The crocodiles wait below the water-lilies.
I’ve waited twenty years for permission to live here.

The informers wait in shaded alleyways.
The soldiers wait tetchily at the border.
I am waiting for my landlord to evict me.

The dictator waits for signs of disagreement.
His supporters wait to shoot at demonstrators.
I am waiting for my child’s school to report me.

The traffickers wait for someone to pay a ransom.
The fisherman waits for his boat to come back empty.
I am waiting for the bank to withhold my money.

The children wait for a lorry to hide and die in.
I am waiting for you to decide to send me back.

an elegy


This morning the fish-man lays out the white boxes
on his stall at the corner as usual: river trout,
red mullet, prawns; as usual the greengrocer
calls Two for a pound! and the sports-shop manager
bends to unlock the metal blind, which rises
out of her sight like a ladder into heaven.

The shoppers begin to arrive, stepping off buses,
coming down in the lift from the carpark: determined women
followed by shopping-trolleys like tired retrievers;
couples with buggies. A man in an anorak
hunkers down on his cardboard by the cash machine,
the Witnesses set up their stand outside the station.
Girls screech at each other like herring-gulls,
boys stroll in their white trainers. A day passes.

*

Who is the patron saint of teenagers?
Which pagan god protects them? Stall the buses!
Block Lordship Lane to pedestrians and traffic!
Let it rain in torrents, thunderstorms distract them,
hailstones batter and bruise the knifing arm,

and it won’t have happened. Where were you, blindfold Justice,
where were you, Mercy? Why did you give these children
not bread but a stone, not home but a crowded room
with damp and despair? Wisdom, why did you tell them
they were nothing, could be nothing but blades of vengeance?

*

The blood that just now was speeding through his veins,
pulsing his heart, is washed into the gutter.
His body’s gone
to the hospital, in the yellow ambulance.
The boys have gone,
skeetered away from the screams, the onlookers,

their power and their own terror. Tomorrow morning
the children will come with roses wrapped in plastic
bartered from Lidl and the market trader
for all their savings; tomorrow a dune of flowers.
Tomorrow the people waiting at the bus stop
will wander over to see, and the bus will come
and take them away, shaken. Today at home
his sister opens the door to the policewoman.

Then sometimes people ask you how it was,
and what you see’s a pale green corridor,
blood dripping out of you, the man who swore
it wouldn’t hurt, and hurt you. Just because
you could tell no-one (shame) you can’t say now
where you have been, or why. The simple answer:
It’s past, I’ve changed. You wouldn’t want to squander
scarce memory on the prurient, anyhow.

So time spreads blankness, like an overcast
November morning, mild, an even light
over the park, the pond, the lime-tree walk.
That backlit terror disappeared as fast
as lightning sketched across an autumn night.
If you want thunder you must learn to talk.

believes in silence
only the oars’ discussion with the waves
only the sigh as a duck lands on the river

which is ever wider
however often his arms lift and fall back
however cool the sun sings in the mist