The Door

One day you’ll see:
you’ve been knocking on a door
without a house.
You’ve been waiting, shivering, yelling
words of daring and hope.

One day you’ll see:
there is no-one on the other side
except, as ever, the jubilant ocean
that won’t shatter ceramically like a dream
when you and I shatter.

But not yet. Now
you wait outside, watching
the blue arches of mornings
that will break
but are now perfect.

Underneath on tip-toe
pass the faces, speaking to you,
saying ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘you’,
smiling, waving, arriving
in unfailing chronology.

One day you’ll doubt your movements,
you will shudder
at the accuracy of your sudden age.
You will ache for slow beauty
to save you from your quick, quick life.

Someone Else’s Life

It was a day of slow fever
and roses in the doorway, wrapped
in yesterday’s news of death.

Snow fell like angels’ feathers
from a dark new sky, softly announcing
that some things would never be the same.

I listened carefully to doubts and revisions
of someone else’s life, safe in my room of tomorrow,
a passing witness to sorrow and wonder.

Then night came and I was quickly
drifting inside that life. I was leaving mine.
Snowflakes continued to fall.

The street was deserted and dim.
Shrapnel wounds blossomed in stone walls.
There was no proof of the current decade,

and I could not recall
the names of faces that I knew
the smell of places where I’d lived

and why I lay alone now
so close to a vast, empty floor, so far
from the sun, so far.

Ship Advancing in the Fog

I don’t know why
the sound of the horn was near,
and yet the ocean was not.
Fog obscures the visible
and purifies sound,
which is to say that when nothing is clear,
something anticipates it.

In any case, I stood outside the door
and listened to a cargo ship approach,
forge its way past sleeping houses
and muffled street-lights,
and I was strangely calm -

like in a dream where nothing
surprises you, not giant waves
advancing from a personal afar,
nor giant ships.
You are too small to run,
you stand transfixed by imminent disaster
waiting for it to be too late,
waiting to be delivered.

Lying with the Ghosts of Berlin

Tonight is the longest night of the year.
We lie, patient with the seasons
in the glow of street lamps,
beneath the outlines of things
that could be ours, some other time.

To the sound of snow falling,
we must sleep, again and again
like diving into the soft centre
of each life we might have had.

Yesterday was the shortest day of the year -
a pale wing that beat just once
then fell into the twilight of three o’clock.
The snow has settled. We can hear it breathe.

I say we but I see no one.
The neighbour upstairs has gone skiing.
The people across have turned off the light
in their room. The rest of the street is a museum.
I lie on the slab of my bed, whispering: