I’m hunting poems in the jungle.

When I catch one I shall stab it with my pen

and stick it in my book with spit

and glue. I expect that it will wriggle

for a while, and snarl and struggle to be free.

That’s the sort of nuisance that a slippery poem can be.

Sometimes I see peaceful poems sleeping in the shade

and when I pounce they wake, bemused,

and find themselves stuck firm in place, confused,

and wonder how they got there. But it’s too late:

they’re stuck and find they have no choice

but resignation to their fate.

I’m sad when poems get away:

they let me catch a rippling glimpse,

a tantalising sense of shape and then

dissolve themselves in undergrowth.

I’m dazzled by a gleaming eye,

a graceful swerve, a rhythmic gait.

My fingers clutch the empty air

my pen stabs sharp – there’s nothing there –

the poem’s gone and it’s too late.

But the ones that I like best of all

are those that seem compliant:

they let me toy with them like mice

then eat me like a giant.

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Remember fireflies in that magic wood

Where finger-roots and tangled branches made

A ghostly cave, as dusk surrendered to

The dark? We’d left our Hoi Ha tent to sneak

With Toby down the village path to buy

Warm beer and cans of Coke. We wedged them tight

And cold among the stream’s wild tumbled rocks

And shivered in the pool while Toby barked

And leaped at monsters in the dark. Our fire

Burned bright. I read aloud and then you slept.

We’d jumped the sand cliffs, swum the stream’s wide mouth

And floated out into the scary deep.

Later, as you dreamed, curled small and only

Eleven, I stood outside and stared at stars.

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Beautiful game? Don’t give me that – football

Diminishes us all, coarsens the soul

Makes the mild man vicious: watch him put ball

And foot together – whack – the only goal

Is “Put the boot in!” on or off the field.

Zidane was football’s gent but there he went,

A head-butt, just because he wouldn’t yield.

  But wait – you know a sonnet has to turn

And here it comes: there’s no amount of stick

Or whingeing at the cash those comets earn

Will counteract the magic of the kick –

That moment when, three-nil, your team is spent –

  They’re fucked, with fifteen desperate minutes left to go –

  Yet make their miracle: a draw. And then you know.

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In Grandma’s house when we arrived on leave

the grand piano yawned and woke from two years’ sleep

and bared its gleaming teeth – black-gapped and white –

sprawled out, a friendly beast across the sunny parlour floor.

There was a box of sandstone bricks

for building castles by the fire. We had a

satisfying way of making thunder for our cannon

with a fist of lower keys until the staircase thundered too

with Mummy’s tread: “Don’t touch it!” and we stopped.

The whole house hummed the taut strings’ tune

when Daddy played sonatas on our last night in that room

– every note touched lovingly like trembling light and air –

and Mummy leaned with eyes that gleamed

and smiled that wicked smile behind the curtain of her hair.

When Grandma died the grand piano

swelled its bulk to fill the tiny Highgate flat,

absorbed the little light and bullied all the crowded room.

Its lid was weighted shut with books and wedding photographs –

my mum and dad both still alive in black and white,

the old ones dead and fading faintly into yellow like the pegs

that filled the grand piano’s wide and sulky mouth.

At the end of one summer mum was sick

and no-one came to tune the strings.

Father banged out booming muffled thunder –

angry rock and shaky ragtime tunes,

the bloody pedal held down far too long.

And then the music stopped.

My mother died that English spring, the age I am today.

My father went abroad to work. We cleared the flat.

The bits and books were taken home, or sold

or carried to the skip that we had hired. We drank.

The old piano – Boosey – had a name that fit the time

but no-one wanted it or had the room.

Some smudgy men appeared and fingered what

was left. They wanted fifty quid we did

not have to haul it down the path. They’d take

it to the tip, or so they said. It stayed.

At first it was screwdrivers and blisters on our palms.

The lids. The legs and pedal spindles. The body on the floor

and all the length of keys and hammers dragged

and twisted out and lugged along the path.

Varnish thick with polish, immaculate for all those years – clawed.

Then other hammers and a borrowed saw. We smashed it up.

I keep with me a dozen stubs of keys –

a memory like my mother’s jaundiced skin.

The night before she died her eyes were closed

and thunder – really – rolled far off. Of all

the many light and loving words she spoke

only the last three remain: “Don’t touch me.”

Half a world and life away my mother’s

wedding photograph is here, upon my wall –

the eyes alert, direct, not weak; about

to wrinkle in a smile, about to reach

the mischief round the mouth – about to speak.

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