This poem won 1st Prize in the 1996 'Poetry Life' International Poetry Competition, and appeared in the Autumn issue of that same year.

HUNTING AMBER 

Do you have an eye in the long side of your head

to squint down into seaweed tangle,

bobbing up sea-apples, cockle shells and ivory?

Do you love winter, and the numb itch of storms

knuckling the sea bed where old forests dream?

On moonlit nights a bronze gong trembles,

calling you out into the wind;

pacing the tide's loose chain-stitch

where wreathed pebbles gleam,

crisp sigils, wrack and limpet,

boned driftwood, feathers and beaked skulls.

Watch for it, that sly, gilded wink, 

a sigh from the woods where hunter's fires

burned in the snow.

Fix it. Don't look away.

The embers flush under old precessions;

game-trails and hunting shelters,

bruised bark, and the glitter of unnamed stars.

Amber loves winter,

a soft nudge from high up in the surges,

kneading it free of needle-mulch and sand.

Æons rise with it to the veiled light,

bonded and firm, snugger than glass;

voices awash in spindrift bottles,

ravelled with kelp and furled sea-stars.

A bead with a spider in it,

a midge embalmed in sunlight.

Or Neolithic talismans;

sketched elk, 

a bear from the drowned bluffs.

Kit up, forge out,

pinched toes and nerveless forehead,

up to your waist in white combers and the barging wind.

Netting each trailing nap for lagging splinters,

barley-sugar motes a-swing in turbulent light.

Electrum, lacquer, mastic, or Roman amulets.

Whatever you believe,

these goddess tears have strange powers.

You could be sleeping,

tucked up out of the flung sea grail;

instead, here you are,

well towards dawn,

teasing the strand for scintillae,

spinthares, leven-brands;

obscure tapers at the sea's licked rim.

The moon rocks westward,

topaz and heliotrope;

and crouched at the meniscus

a puckered sun smears ochrous resins.

Leave now,

while the sand is loose and cloudy.

Your feet slug, your legs are stiff and heavy.

Already the brittle sky is softening.

This poem won 1st Prize in the 1998 'Tabla Poetry Competition', and appeared in 'The Tabla Book of New Verse' 1999. It was also printed in 'Stand': (New Series) Volume I, Number 1 (March 1999)

IMAGO MUNDI

Stalled at the Pole, the compass points desert you;

tiptoe on an asterisk that furls up like a claw.

All routes lead south,

or north, depending,

but you're down to one dimension,

and the lodestone shimmys all across the map 

until you get a grip.

Co-ordinates are meaningless.

Slick as soap, and flippering between meridions and isobars,

they clog the trawl with wanhope, scrimshaw, hyperborean feathers;

and a clutch of rainbow continents arcing the dusk to snap at gadding stars.

But don't be fooled!

They're far too old and fundamental for such capers.

Creamed on the peaks with drift and avalanche,

their rawhide itch persists.

Heart-lands and coasts, tectonic snouts;

roots down, bulldozing the core.

Fire-barnacles burst out and coruscate

while fen and forest tangle with the rasping light.

Forget the lines and nets.

It's down to footwork.

No-one else can tell you where to start.

You're on your own in this god's game; world-making.

How it stands already is irrelevant.

Hopscotch between the magnets,

pirouette, dodge sideways,

take a pot shot at the azimuth;

but ultimately make a step

and walk until perspective reasserts itself.

Nobody can help.

Not even Atlas;

bunched up, sullen, 

moiled in ice-work,

beach ball oiled in the fontanelle;

continued making heavy weather of his chosen perch

between a base and apex.

Hell-bent. Classic head-case!

And cartographers.

From Pytheas to Strabo,

Ptolemy and Marinus of Tyre;

their geodetic needles clacking

on a stretchy windsock for the Magna Mater.

Conic, cordiform, Mercator, polar or oblate;

choose your projection,

kneading it to taste.

The geosphere is infinitely malleable.

Meanwhile the axes scintillate,

grinding a bevel on the Northern Star,

or probing blindly in the south.

The bearings smoke and rumble

but, so far at least, they're holding out.

Commended in the 'Daily Telegraph - Arvon International Poetry Competition' 1998. Appeared in 'The Ring of Words' anthology 1998.

ERRANTRIES

Slip on your lobster hauberk with the breast ridge of blue steel,

Hang out a pouting casque beside the saddle-bow

and slowly jog into the rains.

Ride over three pearled fields, or one good mile of heather,

with Rosinante's fetlocks threshing the tall brome;

drubbing together like a mace's down strokes.

Look out for towers; ivyed and silent in the dusk;

a cave, a ditch, a hollow oak or, if you must, a heath;

between the hours of dog and wolf.

Sleep in full armour. Difficult enough!

But also try to dream of ruffled silk,

pale hands, red roses and blue eyes.

Mount up at dawn, stiff-limbed and shivering,

point north and tremble. Compass this.

Then ride home to your central-heating.

Download the chills of night;

add forests, fairy hills, cash-counters

and a white face, glimpsed in dreams.

Click Rosinante to her binary stable,

save it, then exit; turn your mind to other things.

Hoover the front room, clear the breakfast table.

And once upon a motorway, somewhen or other,

you'll pull in for a breather or a snack,

and suddenly one word you'd never thought of -

certainly a word you'd never go out looking for -

will break in on you through a crack between the worlds. 

You'll know. 

Because the moon will be before you at the check-out;

with a basket full of icicles, and frosty smile.

Now, while she counts her money..........

Whisper the word across her shoulder!

Watch her glow gold; and melt until she's sweet as honey.

(Though get it wrong and you could be arrested!)

This is your first quest anyway. Run through it at your leisure.

Now, dig out shield, lance, sword, mouse, modem, or whatever.

Make back-up copies. Surf the web. Check forecasts of the weather;

and whistle up the groom to bring the horses.

Won 3rd prize in the 1999 Trewithen Poetry Prize.

Appeared in the 'Second Trewithen Chapbook' March 1999.

BRIGSTED'S NIGHTINGALE

Thorn-flower dusk, 

rain loafing in.

A coaldust sky.

Lacklustre birch and wild cherry;

with the estuary's frayed strip

picked at by rag-and-bone rooks,

jeering full-ooze from the mud flats.

All day we've dodged it;

flight on flight of chill goose fletching

from a needling thrum of wind.

But now a nightingale kicks in,

tirling his crystal rod against the wind's bodhran.

Dew-pointed strophes, 

flipped up and juggled;

bubbling cast-offs,

lilted, flourished, 

flung out at the rain.

If there's a moon up there

behind those drab cloud scuttles,

this song's for her,

and us;

and for all lovers who recall

that to be cold and cosy

in a Transit van somewhere in Denmark,

when the calendar says 'May',

but when the sky says 'Winter',

is one of those peculiar privileges

Life withholds from anyone who goes in search of them.

He can't have much to sing about.

A sodden nest, scant shelter,

Spring petulant, and arguing the toss.

But beak and breast against the weather

he lets fly his fusillades;

engorged, warm, fulsome,

buoyed up in this miserable gloom,

dousing the shrubs with joyful stars;

from here out to the tide's edge,

where they patter down and lie there shimmering.

Scintilla 5 2001 - 2nd prize

FIRE TO THE FROST

You bring fire to the frost

this blue day of white grass,

lying, hands folded,

cold in your gown and collar.

Trees scuff their frozen shadows

and the wind combs gulls 

up from the estuary,

but you will not come back.

Already you have settled

in your hull of pleated satin,

head sunk, face waning,

to sleep through fire and ice.

Who are you these dark days?

Where have you gone?

Cancelling dawn and sunset,

needing no-one.

Absolved from pain or mischief,

Sleep carries you. 

And reluctantly we follow;

afraid of love, not daring to look back.

Another world is slipped.

Another glass is sand again.

Snug in your blue-hot keel

you leave no track.

Your provinces are dreams,

your laughter is the living,

who remember everything

until the pain no longer matters.

You have grown smaller, fallen away

into a web of sunlit lanes,

a sheen of faces too far down to catch.

And as you fall your fingers tighten,

fine, long fingers,

locked beyond my reach.

Beyond touch, beyond breath,

beyond this poem you will never read.

Time draws the barb at last.

Now only fire can hold you.

Uninvited, at your side,

Death in her working clothes.

EFL 'Chalkface Muse' anthology 1999

LOST FOR WORDS

Alessandra, honeyed by the twilight,

recited verse from Michelangelo.

I didn't understand a word, although

she stunned me with her eyes, as if I might.

'What does it mean?' I asked. 

With a delightfully sly smile she said,

'You still don't know?

Is difficult in English. I speak slow.

'L'intensa voglia'. So! Is simple. Right?'

She leaned towards me, folding back the book,

breathing above my shoulder as she traced

each word, and brushed her palm against my hand.

Her tawny hair, her laugh, her sidelong look.

'L'intensa voglia'. Fingers interlaced,

the words grew easier to understand.

'L'intensa voglia' powerful desire.

MONTEPULCIANO

Remember that evening in Montepulciano?

A gonfalon sunset folding into the west.

Steep streets,

and that indrawn, aching, sweet cadenza;

a violin, locked up in the dark, high houses.

Svelte Venus on a hotbed of rust and crimson,

stars circling,

and that windfall of notes in the dusk.

Contained and undateable, shrugged out of sequence;

a catch in the fabric as the world drew breath.

Then suddenly the cars were back,

with Time in its groove

and a stark, sad bell tangling among street lamps.

No-one else heard it,

that sigh in the dark,

briefer than bats' wings over a star,

but, like so much between us,

neither would doubt it,

and nothing will convince us that it wasn't so.

Tabla 2000

MOON SLEDGING

I

Don't forget the moon.

She's ruffling her hair and scattering shadows from the wood.

When you sledge down a gully her cold breath hits you

as if she were perched on the rim breathing into your face.

She flexes a fan of white feathers,

shakes out a net of brass stars 

and dipping her glass pen 

etches curlicues and sigils on each branch;

signing her name and forging the wind's cuneiform.

But for all her barefoot dances

when you actually look up

she displays only a gibbous keel,

a slicked runner skating matted cloud

and, head down, face close to the ice,

you suddenly recall that 

out of all the dunts and swoops and stallings of this fragile afternoon

only the lightest cuticles of snow were her idea.

II

Never forget the moon.

She'll re-arrange the months and set you spinning;

the bloom and blight of her cheek 

cocked to the sun's star-solitaire,

his sinuous comets and ecliptic ladders

where she pirouettes in brittle shoes.

Accept it. 

You'll never even touch the rungs, 

where night by night she trolls her blue mirror,

whispering growth and confusion.

She's drawn you down to sleep so many times

even the roots of your shyest dreams

are cobwebbed with her silver frost.

PIG'S EAR

Ein 'Schweineohr'.

A pastry maze,

a toothsome trotter-print, 

thick hog's-back horseshoe,

blunt tips dipped in chocolate.

Not in stock at every shop,

but maybe this one.

Worth a shot,

to lug a bagful home!

Sweet, flaky porcine auricles.

Delectable pig-out!

Herd up your daundering porkers;

Mastschwein, Ferkel, Keiler, 

(Sauschwer this German syntax!)

reach down a formal, interrogative;

an ashplant shaft to thrust with.

Grasp the haft,

heft it, hone the edges,

stud your fidgetty pig-sticker,

and .......

'Ein schönen guten Tag.'

The woman is a valkyr!

She doubles chins, and grunts.

Not one to bandy words with!

Smile. 

She will divine your meaning.

All or nothing!

Quiz the swinish oracle.

Say 'Guten Tag.'

(Don't overdo it.)

Just ask! Ask now!

Thrust home! Risk it!

'Haben Sie Schweineohren?'

*Pig's Ear: There's a delicious pastry sold in German bakeries which delights in the name of 'Ein Schweineohr' (Literally, 'A Pig's Ear'). 'Mastschwein', 'Ferkel' and 'Keiler' are all pigs of one sort or another; and 'sauschwer' simply means 'Pig awful'. The real dilemma is how to ask for it. If your grasp of German is less than perfect, can you really trust yourself to say, 'Haben Sie Schweineohren?' (Do you have pig's ears?)