Michael Laskey Poems

You've fetched a duvet and laid it
lightly over the shoulders
of someone beside you who's slipped
unwittingly into sleep.
And drifting off yourself
on a sofa somewhere you've sensed
the same weight settle and known
how the warmth around you will soon
deepen your sleep. And that's something,
whatever else you've done or not done.
...

I may come back I'm afraid
as a faded floral curtain
hanging at the window of a flat
overlooking a city station
yard, the clangour and grind
of shunting, corrugated iron
fences and engine sheds.
The curtain will stay closed
always. Behind it in the room
lit by a single off-centre
ceiling light - a double bed,
twisted sheets, an implacable succession
of bodies, sagging bellies, armpits,
anuses, audible pain
the curtain will have to keep facing.
...

I didn't look at the carcass
stretched on the road by my gate
any more than I had to to know
the open-mouthed head and neck
twisted back was muntjac.

I wrapped myself up in the word,
a muffler against the cold,
and keeping close to the kerb
rode past on my bike.

I had bread to buy — the small browns
can run out unpredictably —
no time to see what we'd done
or even to imagine the damage,
bone spike slicing through muscle,
belly a staved in barrel
spilling out stuff.

And while I was gone, someone —
from pity or driven to it
by the hold-up to the traffic or knowing
his venison — got a grip
on its hooves, I suppose, and removed it

along with my chance to do
as I meant to, to use my eyes.
...

anyone can do it, and you wouldn't
have it otherwise, like readily available
access to the internet, foreign travel,
contraception. You wouldn't, really,
even given last night after supper,
when despite you regretting having come
without your glasses, undeterred,
your host — a good friend and in many ways
a most admirable person — pressed on
you photo after photo after photo
of Australia, the blurred exhaustive tour —
just to give you some idea — of the rooms
in his son's new flat, the final straw.
...

Brought to us on a plate
at half time by the linesman,
we break from the pep talk —
he wants us quicker
at the rucks, more possession —
and jostle for choice of slice,
suck them, make gumshields of them,
or thumbing them inside out
we gnaw the last shreds of flesh
off the peel, wipe our hands
on our shorts, on Gorringe's shirt.
Our perks, our just deserts,
not given a second thought
as we spread out, take up our positions
for the start of the second half.
...

I take my dead aunt for a walk
down the lane. How glad she is
to be out in the sun reciting
the names of the wild flowers for me
again — herb robert, mallow, fleabane.
Even thistles and nettles excite her.
How could we do without them?
Where would they lay their eggs,
the painted ladies arriving
from Africa any day now?
...

This is my footpath between birches and firs
my dogshit I'm always watching my feet for
my straggle of sycamores and holm-oaks clinging
to their dull leaves this honeysuckle wound
round brambles is mine and so is the bracken
my cliff-top's here crumbling under the weight
of my antique anti-tank concrete blocks
strewn at odd angles and this is my beach
layered with shingle which shifts with each tide
but never arrives these are my tangles
of orange nylon netting my plastic bottles
and this is my guillemot with oil on its breast
washed up here freezing or starving to death
here's my power station's perfect white dome
dissolving in cloud my swept horizon
checked for my ships and these are
the waves I own building and breaking
my foam at my feet for this is my sea
at springs and at neaps infallibly more
than I can imagine moving
and changing me always waiting.
...