Shadow on the drying green

Burden

Manchester 1954

London 1973

London 1976

London 1972

London 1970

London 1983

London 1998

London 1997

London 1996

My father like Leviathan

In different dreams,
my father visits me in the house I live in now;
wearing his dead-man’s shoes, he comes like Leviathan,
bigger than my memory of him, to meet me in imagined rooms.

Thirteenth Year

In my thirteenth year
I did not sing
on the school bus.

Dwinin

Sherp, deid gless glents oot o orra grun.
Midden-weeds that heeze aginst the rubble
grow in the shape o aabody’s pain.
Here, wi broken doors that nae human haun
can open, naebody wull tak the trouble
tae walk gled-hairtit on these steens again.

a first storm

wind beneath the door
its linoleum rattle
like a dying bird
on the lobby stairs

Second Decade

soun o sleat

Old Poet

The old poet in my house,

in the years before I found it,
had been someone else
lover, husband, father.

(I suppose)

I remember #10,121

I remember this and that, I remember how it was.

untitle

no name no pack drill
no loss
the poem goes unpublished