I’m in Kew Gardens where there seems to be a temporary sculpture exhibition amongst the barberry shrubs, under full-leaved summer trees. I pick up a leaflet: Emily Young, sculptress, descended from the singing pirate, Admiral Sir George Young, and the widow of Captain Scott of the Antarctic, has made this Spangle Stone Fool Boy who looks at me with an idiot’s lack of reserve. I can make a relationship with this head. I know him, and he is easy with me.

My older son was difficult to read at breakfast, with a give-nothing shrug and so-so eyebrow. He’s no idiot. He learned refusal – it toughened him – during the Rejection, twenty five years ago. His mother left him, and rejection came down to her through her mother, who talked to blot out listening, and her father, a non-singing pirate who ransacked Borneo’s rainforest. And it came to them from who knows how much further back, way back…

sculpture park –

fossilised snail shells

polished to a warrior’s head

I’m a product of the long English tradition of stony childhood.

tourists pass –

gold flecked onyx streams

from the angel’s wound

I once read a Venetian traveller’s account of England he wrote in 1500. “The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children; for having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people…” The astonished Venetian relates that the children, “never return, for the girls are settled by their patrons, and the boys make the best marriages they can, and, assisted by their patrons, not by their fathers, they strive diligently to make some fortune for themselves.” As my favourite cockney mystic put it, three centuries later:

The Angel that presided o’er my birth

Said, “Little creature, form’d of Joy and Mirth,

Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth.”

I took on history and reversed the culture. I loved my babies, changed nappies, sang them to sleep, and hugged them.

But you don’t buck the dread English family that easily. To love your children won’t be enough. No no no no. You also need to create a sweet understanding with the mother. Out of nothing, make joy, like a vaudeville conjurer pulling a spreading rosebush from his dusty sleeve. So the boys got rejected anyway. She abandoned her infants.

four thousand million years

of yellow quartzite deposits

roughly shape a woman

My younger son and I now understand one another, nevertheless, more or less. We swap guarded exchanges over the crossword, and coded commentary on football and cricket.

peering from thick foliage

a Pleistocene rock

with a gleaming eye

The shrewd Italian writes that, “Although their dispositions are somewhat licentious, I never have noticed anyone, either at court or amongst the lower orders, to be in love; whence one must necessarily conclude either that the English are the most  discreet lovers in the world or that they are incapable of love.”

moonlight caresses

the black surface

of the marble girl

I don’t regret that I was never indiscreet. If you’re English, you should know, without all that. I feel admiration for ex-lovers and I delight in other women friends too, I do, really, and I will, unless, and until

marble man, still shrub –

in the heart of one of them

a squeaking wren

Note: Passages in quotation are from A Relation of the Island of England c.1500, published in The Portable Renaissance Reader ed. Ross and McLaughlin, Penguin.

On 7th. November 1991 my father died. I walked by the shores of Langstone Harbour.

winter wind –

two geese turn

a broad descending circle

and end

facing it

knowing how to touch down

lightly

At the wake my sons looked after me sweetly, talked of family memories and had me laughing. I returned to Langstone Harbour and watched the birds, and watched yachts on their moorings as fishing boats motored by.

I lift, judder

spin and settle

in your wake

water in the bay

no trace

of the splashy wing beats

 low tide mudflats –

I breathe out

tremble

dense cloud

the colour of ashes

the sky is my father

One night, fascinated by the waves slopping inside a wreck with the life-force of the ocean:

between the ribs

of the broken boat

rises the moonlit tide

In the New Year:

bright cold morning –

for breakfast let’s open

the last of his marmalade!

On the anniversary of his death I stood on the ferry pontoon at Eastney Point, tasting the windblown spray:

grief, and breathing

the salty fragrance

of the deep tide drift

I revisited the Heath by the family home, where we scattered his remains:

under my foot

at every step

my father’s ashes

I inherited a dusty oil portrait of my father reading a book, painted in the forties, with a rip in the corner, and I commissioned a friend of mine who is a conservator to repair it, clean it and frame it.

his portrait restored –

my father

younger than me

In this Haibun the relationship of the poetry to the prose is what I call parallel: the poems do not intensify or illustrate the prose; they come from a parallel world and complement the prose:

ablaze with light

a ferry throbbing

into the black night

Here is a man – as light as a sparrow. The skin round his mouth is hard as a beak. I balance the nipple of the nylon drinking cup between his lips feeling his arm like an anglepoise against my side. His gasping widens the splay of my fingers on his ribs. He won’t bother with today’s local election results floating on the radiowaves like ghosts through the prison walls and he won’t ever again taste a drink or confront with his withering intelligence an obstinately literal Prison Officer. He concentrates on something inward – nothing as capricious as thought, but a landscape, perhaps, an arid boundless place where the pain helps focus his attention on watching the distance beat by beat.

in blue space

a cloud

evaporates

This is the Winchester Prison Hospital Wing, a rattling dungeon of Bedlam shrieks, dog-ends and sputum-tissue, neglected by a cheery Trusty, and a smarmy nurse. I go to find the SMO. I say that he’s nominated me next-of-kin, can she tell me the prognosis – and realise with astonishment that she hates everybody, even me. She refuses him morphine, sneers, “He’s devious, he’s not dying.” I stagger out of her office, the words she spat ringing in my ears. “I’ll give him painkillers when I’m good and ready.” Fergy deals with it better than I do. He’s had four decades to learn. I am deeply ashamed that I cannot care for him, that I have to leave him there.

tugged half under

mooring buoy

in the ebb tide

At the newsagent’s I puzzle over what a man is: How to be a Sex God is one cover story, followed by Shooting Machine-Guns with the Rednecks! and The Berk Who Lost Two Million! The cool names are Brett Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh, and the photo feature is Autoerotica, (pin ups of cars, I think).

His father was a man – a hard-drinking wife-beating friend-brawler, who thrashed Fergy with a belt-buckle. He cooked Fergy’s pet rabbit and forced it down the child’s soft mouth. But you can’t refuse your father; his alcohol and violence rushed up Fergy’s capillaries, entryists, pickling his heart, and erupted on Christmas Day as the drunken boy of twenty-one killed his girl bride.

moon and sea all night long force six

Fergy has never had a sniff of a BMW; he scorns the men whose cells are ripe with girly pix, men “in thrall to bimboism,” (that’s his phrasing, and he calls it “self-inflicted bondage, the injustice which they have imposed upon themselves,” in his gravelly mining-town Geordie). Money does not cascade through his hands in jackpot imagery: he earns four pounds sixty two pence each week. But he is a stone in the shoe of a Governor, indomitable with murderous convicts, and bracing to my bland goodwill. Over forty years of incarceration he has found the irreducible core of a man: mind, and will. There is no likeminded thinker to appreciate this. He tells me, “No-one will ever know I lived.” His speech is cast in Victorian prose from the prison library, poured through the pursed vowels and rotten lungs of County Durham, an eloquence finely wrought and strange: “I am a caricature devoid of humour…”

labouring

through a patch of brilliance

the tiny boat

Fergy is in Heaven. He is not conscious that for his last hours he has been released from his Life Sentence into a hospice and lies in a bed of lovely linen in a brightly painted room, flowered and sunned through rose curtains, and he is touched with motherly care, perhaps for the first time, by a great exponent of the Hippocratic oath whose kindness opens the sluice on my heart’s pity as none of the callous neglect ever did. It is goodness that makes us cry, not suffering. Fergy is Christian and I murmur in his ear about angels and light. His body now is stiff as saltcod, drying into the warm air.

I thank the doctor. That pathetic bundle of clothes! Away from there, breathing deeply where a fine mist is coming in off the sea.

on a rusty buoy

the fog bell feels

each melancholy wave

“…for everything that lives is holy” William Blake

Tenacious flowers of golden weed grow from the cracks. No roof, no door, no pews, no treasure – does it still have a bellyful of love?

entering by the arch

a Cabbage White searches

for what it needs

high above

swifts feast

in endless blue

from an oubliette

in the abandoned ruin

crawls a ladybird

pecking together

a chaffinch couple

graze on the ancient stones

The church walls are blocks of yellow rock, still bearing the scrapes of the rough stone-cutting tools used to square them off. There is a bees’ nest in a hole, hectic with hovering traffic.

Bee City Airport

helijet entrance arch

in the broken mortar

buzz buzz buzz

the congregation ignore

blackbird’s sermon

The blackbird watches me with a bright black pupil rimmed with yellow. The gecko I study is also bright-eyed. A smart beetle, like my neighbour, comes from the car-wash with polished metallic bodywork. From the lean-to outside the church there’s a strangely insistent rhythm.

in the thatch

squeezing notes in unison

a choir of sparrows

in the heat of the sun

a dry font

christens everything

I’m squatting

on the altar

awed by ants

I feel as old as the need for rain, here with the ancient urges of birds and bees. I just sit in the ruins, with my evolutionary company.

I am a bee

I am a lizard

I am a people

Here is another haibun:

There’s a dead man on the Lifer wing. I left him there with my Lifer friends and came to gaze at the lake. The dripping dip of oars and complaints of a goose reach me across the still water from a mile away.

pale afternoon

a grebe vanishes

into the white mirror

C is a dangerous little career criminal with flat northern vowels. His mother tortured him. But he has just learned politeness and likes it.

S’s mother sold him to her queer doctor for £15. Now he writes his engineering thesis.

K is the prison billiards champion with the silly smile. His mother had a toxic tongue. His brother escaped through suicide and K turned on her.

J’s father forced his pet rabbit down his throat. Now he’s brittle as a corn dolly. Secondary cancers have devoured him.

Who was the monster that was C, spooked on alcohol and speed, on the rampage in 1986 with murder in his heart?

Who was S when he shot the wrong woman?

Who was it who lifted K’s hammer?

Who battered J’s wife?

Inside the precarious Self cobbled together by sadism and abuse, by a frightened child with no strategies, and no help, is there a True Self? And is it calm, and tasteless?

Set that aside. Set all that aside. There is love. Not in what your mum and dad gave you, perhaps, but in politeness, engineering, and billiards; and in the body, which is made of it. J’s body lost its own love, but I love him more freely now he’s dead.

pub lunch –

wiping gravy from my lips

with the wet hanky

Despite the overcast sky there is a mysterious illumination within the scene. Clouds glow, the water gleams. It’s so calm, and tasteless, that I hold my breath like K at a billiards shot.

I daren’t move

or the lake

will wobble

“Expanding, contracting, killing, giving life – such is its subtle function.”

[Zen Master Yuanwu, author of The Blue Cliff Record]

At the Large Hadron Collider they accelerate particles round and round a seventeen kilometre tunnel to meet each other coming the other way in a kiss throwing out a starburst of fizzing debris. They want to find out what is hidden inside. There must be something else. They think it will be the Higgs boson. This, dear one, is our Anniversary Metaphor.

The Higgs boson has revealed itself to the Collider’s detectors, but in a teasing flash of thigh.  The Higgs is laughing at them, balanced between Supersymmetry theory and Multiverse theory, where it should not be, where it confirms neither theory, and where it should be unstable. Could the whole subatomic realm collapse?

O the sun burns!

This mountain was syrup

flowing under my feet

Imagined numbers explain the laws of nature to us, but we don’t know if we discovered mathematics or made it up, whether it is out there or in here.

Always roaring

the echo in me

of the wind between the stars

The Higgs refuses to reveal whether the universe was born, or born again and again, or inflated as a bubble in a multiverse of infinite bubbles.

Beginningless kalpas of time perhaps

to the Big Bang

of this ripe nectarine

Gravity is weaker than the delicate tension in finger and thumb pulling skin off a ripe peach. Like Higgs, it is not the power it ought to be, and won’t fit into the theory. Perhaps it is not even a force, just dimples in space. And perhaps the exploding universe is really sitting still. While space inflates. Maths gives us the speed and strength and size, but of what?

Fractals in sand

the ebbing tide

knows how

At the Hadron Collider nature is being mysterious. You have got the best answer.

For the unloved

an immense night sky

creamy with stars

The stars are mother and father to us.

Farmyard flints

through the soles of my shoes

the Milky Way

Outer and inner cannot be distinguished.

She licks her kittens

and her fur

as if it were all the same

We may be particles, we may meet, but there’s something else hidden in or around us which may or may not be dark energy or something Higgs-like.

The feeling’s my hand,

your skin, our bothness

and