WATER NYMPH 
 

Sleeping with mouth slightly open,
eyelids not quite closed,
my daughter at seven looks like nothing so much
as a Klimt or early Schiele
and I can’t help being frightened by
the provenance of that feeling or idea ...

Yet now in a hand-me-down costume
safety-pinned across her spine
she’s found a tide pool all her own,
a weed-slimed setting in the rocks
where resentful wavelets lap her
and she sits back splashing with both palms.

I’m afraid she’ll catch her death of cold.
Barely half in her element
she hails a risen moon over the town
or thin green light-stripe along the far shore,
the near one cluttered by homing craft
while a docked ferry disembarks its crowd.

Distant, mist-flattened mountains steal
a sliver of the envious sun.
Setting, it would spoil this small girl’s idyll.
Still with the powerboats’ swell
hitting her gooseflesh, her gooseflesh awash,
she revels in the water’s force.

Oh my daughter, how I can’t but wish you well.
 

reprinted from Selected Poems(Carcanet Press, 2003)
 
 
 
 
 

Robert Robinson: Double Self-Portrait at Chess
AGAINST HIMSELF

This double exposure in black and white is
Uncle Bobby playing chess.
It’s as if the two sides of his face
were competing people, though their ties’
identical knots give them away.
The him on the right’s just pushed a piece
and now he sits with supercilious
look for ever fixed on half that face.

The other’s in quite a quandary, a trap.
Though he grips his chin like Rodin’s Thinker
playing up the differences
between his mirrored self and one opponent,
he’s caught, can never finesse an escape.
Besides you know his weaknesses of old;
ah yes, but then he knows yours.
Study more carefully the positions —
White’s a piece up, yet Black has past pawns;
both kings alone and almost mated,
neither has anything like sound defences.
So there we are: the self-defeated.

‘Not at all,’ says he, ‘I don’t even have to choose
whether I’m going to win, or when I lose.’
 

reprinted from the Times Literary Supplement no. 5160, 22 February 2002
 
 
 
 
 

ALONG THESE LINES
 

 1
 

Iced-over, the wharves flare in sunshine;
frost sticks on grass tufts; snow-melt’s refrozen;
a church clock shows just ten past nine.

Like the rare half-timbered house fronts,
blanketed hills form a monochrome scene
from tree, stone wall, and occasional roof line.
 

 2

This scene gives way to green mildew on cuttings
hewn out of the Pennine chain;
and you sense once more how heart-strings
were drawn taut along these lines —

lines that had taken us up to mum’s family,
taken me over to college
then home again with a degree.
 

 3

Crisp autumn leaves lie among red ferns
even now, swathes of low-hanging rain cloud
cut with blue splotches and light,
with cumulus auras or raking beams.

A twig in its mouth, that up-started crow
brings back rebukes to me, back
from Garforth’s church tower with its clock
stopped now thirty-two years ago.
 

 4

Through early mist and steam, a brazier’s
burning pallets in its wrecker’s yard ...

Then, between silver-birch saplings
suddenly, black and white magpies take flight,
and it’s as if the strings
of your heart, drawn taut across it,
have found their way through the litter of years.
 

 5

Derelict mills are still on valley floors
by winding river, over straighter canal,
and the flights of outstretched lock-gate arms.
 

  6

Yet as the farmed fields rise to moor pasture
there’s a thinning of the signs —
like winter trees seen on a skyline’s
turning curve, its mausoleum
of ash-grey cloud heaped up behind them.
 

 7

Never mind, you must manage the remainder.
 
 

an earlier version published in The Reader no. 11, autumn-winter 2002