The shape of water 

 Turning

he pushes from the side

glides and before he breaks the surface

feels for the time-locked silence.

 

He never sees her

high in the gallery

those Tuesday and Friday lunchtimes

as she watches

 

counting off the strokes and lengths

measuring the twist of his shoulders

and waiting for him to pull himself

up onto the tiles and reach for his towel.

 

She feels the hold of her land-footed status

a non-swimmer who wants to follow in his wake

get to where he’s been before the space fills

and becomes water again.

 

At half past one

she drifts towards Tesco

to get oven chips

for the kid’s teas

 

and as he slouches

back to an idling monitor

she follows for a while

occasionally close enough to rest her foot on his shadow.

                                                       (from Untepid Days)

Zen and the art of washing up 

 

He is up to mid forearm in Marigolds

    not listening to the Radio 4 news

    not wishing they had a dishwasher.

 

He wallows in his time at the sink

    first a rinse

    setting the piles to his left

       

then the glasses

    bowls above plates

    cutlery soaking in a saucepan.

 

He runs the hot

    squirts Fairy Lemon

    and starts.

 

There is an order to his actions

    allowing his thoughts to idle

    into spume-filled dreams

 

so minutes

    sluice through the water

    and onto the drainer.

 

His unwinding is completed here

    as he prepares for an evening

    of few words and cheap television.

 

Finishing

    he swills the bowl

    and wipes down the worktops

   

then thinks about the woman

    the one he has seen up in the bleacher seats

    when he takes his bi-weekly lunchtime swim

                         

and he wonders if she’s ever noticed him

    crawling up and down the liquid lanes

    or hauling himself out into dryness.

 

He practises pulling in his stomach

    as he reaches

    for the tea towel.

                                                  (from Untepid Days)

The ordinary things that happen 

 

 

She’s wide eyed by the time the heating fires up.

It’s the same muffled whoomph she remembers.

 

There’s a pulse in her neck gently drumming,

she moves her hands from her sides,

grips the edge of the three-quarter bed

and lets her eyes trace the crack

from the rose to the switch.

 

She doesn’t allow herself to look

at where the wardrobe won’t close properly,

threatening to disgorge its taffeta beast

into her just-dawn room.

 

But the window twitches and rattles the latch,

she holds her breath

wanting no more than a breeze;

a nudge at the topsail,

a caress across the veil,

on this perfect-weather day.

 

And she realises how much she misses him,

how her itinerant sleep

is as much due to the lack of him

as it is to the unlack of circumstance.

 

And she realises how she misses his smell,

the smell of settled darkness,

the smell of an unshaven chin.

 

She touches the place he’s often touched,

where today he’ll touch with gold.

                             (from Untepid Days)  

Amala’s Tree 

 

 

The tree stood at the far end of the orchard

trunk corkscrewed

 

branches harsh and pointing

to an unseen horizon

 

During long summer visits

we never climbed it

 

the crooked alien thorns

dissuading even the most daredevil

 

Grandpa said he’d got the seed

stuck between his toes

 

during a game of barefoot cricket

three weeks before El Alamein

 

It had travelled back inside pockets

and was put in the ground on VJ night

 

then thrived

for its lusher interment

 

 

It was going through his things

- distilling a life into different coloured bags -

 

that I’d found the

blurred browning snapshot

 

him smiling and handsome

an arm around her waist

 

she slender and tall

with a nomadic grace

 

behind them a tree

 

on the back of the picture

a name

                    (Winner - Regional Heat Ottakars/Faber 2003 Poetry Competition)