Salmon Creek

On the beach we found three bodies
coughed up by the ocean,
guts open to the sky.

Two seals and something like a dog.
The little girl poked at their skins
with driftwood.

I thought I could taste the rot in my mouth.
There was something sick in the twist
of their white spines made by the sea.

Around the corpses the seaweed was
thick as a man’s neck and long as rope,
curled and prehistoric, tough as sinew.

They lay exposed on the long stretch
Of sand like a warning. Like the whales on the
west coast, swimming too close to ships,
breeding too close to land.

Like the sea itself sending out signals
of hardship. ‘It’s a bad sign’ he says, ‘and
we have lost our reading eyes.’

London look upon me

1.


Wisk this mixture of skylights up
over houses and gardens,
blend acid drops and the rot of summer heat
bake, smell rain rising from asphalt streets,
like steam, a lucid dream,
find this red brick, this brown stone,
this not-quite-nearly-almost home.


2.


The sun sets gold over this city
buildings silver in the soft light
glitter over train tracks,
Police kettle heart attacks on
streets that never caught alight.

Tonight I’ll paint the town red
with my old-found friends,
making plans, graffiti gangs
climbing on roofs over bombsites
alive in white nights that never end.


3.


These canals like veins breathe on summer days
graffiti names and vows of love scrawled under bridges
the sunset’s haze burns behind desolate factories as
skeletal gasworks tower over half-built frames of offices and
the gentle sway of boats soften the sound of a radio’s half-buzz.
We snake our way from wealth through forgotten gardens
barred windows and stray footballs, from landscaped lawns
to half-wild embankment, tracing the remnants
of great urban plans, the dreams of architects and the lives
of unseen strangers, the marks left by use and love, by misuse
and distrust, looking for a code in the chaos, finding only your
hand in mine, light projected in the water, the city in our hearts.

Halfway Hall

And what will become of us after all this?
Which of us will live on, names on stones or monuments,
names on cheques and contracts, awards on the
brutal white boards outside Senate House; the
arbitrary judgement of eight hundred years of scholarship?

Here, walking between white stone buildings and
expansive lawns, through medieval courts and
gothic windows to the edge of the river full of
half-submerged dangers, over incomplete bridges
through all this, we carve out spaces only briefly unique,

only briefly ours at all. The printed words of men in
countless books, the unconquerable canon, the legacy
of a culture vast and unforgiving. The piercing gaze in
half-domestic rooms, hastily written essays structured from
thoughts laden still with the anxieties of first loves, late nights,
the detritus of childhood dreams and adult desires, we construct

new identities, new humanities, struggling with injustices printed
loud and large in headlines, grand old narratives, intensely part
of this world and yet cradled in the safety of sonorous lectures,
quiet libraries, purely rhetorical debates, the
argument more important than what is said,
the sentence so much more than the meaning.

Here, half-finished, and I can be nothing more.

This house always catches my eye on the train from university back to London. So I wrote this.




Along the train tracks
Houses with their backs turned
To Finsbury Park Station
Bear the white graffiti scars:
NHS, POLL TAX.

Outside King’s Cross underground
On the temporary white of a scaffold wall
An unseen hand has scrawled an elegy to
Council housing. Capital letters seem to speak in
A lonely pleading voice:
THEY CAN’T EVICT US ALL.

A week later the wall is blank again,
The paint still drying on an industrial canvas.
So it seems in these secret corners
Only the searching eye can find the
Fleeting marks of our resistance.

Tell me it’s true.

Tell me every defeat is only
A new beginning.

Tell me no loss is so final
That we cannot rebuild.

Tell me about all the small victories.

Tell me we are part of something
Bigger than ourselves.

Tell me not to give up.

Don’t lie to me.
Tell me things as they are.

Don’t lie to me.
Tell me things as they can be.

Putney

Something I wrote when I went back home.




Standing in St Mary’s, on the same stones
That echoed out those long debates,
That Leveller green a shadow on these
New glass walls.

The radio plays Ever Fallen In Love With Someone
Drowning out the tinny recording of
Rainsborough’s poorest he,
And Cromwell lies dismembered somewhere.

The Thames rolls low and cold as it ever did
As two women at the bus stop argue in Polish
By the riverbank clean and cleared of graves,
Nothing now save coloured plastic where children play.

Every time I come back
More shops have closed down and
The weather seems colder.
There’s something older in my parent’s eyes
And in mine.

Walking through the underpass that, on match days,
Is full of bodies, noise and talk,
Black and white strip, cigarettes,
Tattooed knuckles. Today everything is quiet.

Sitting in the Italian greasy spoon,
I am the only woman surrounded by
Bus drivers and cabbies. On the white-tiled walls
Saturated photographs of half-forgotten beaches
Remind me, amongst cheap tea and steamed windows,
That we have always wanted to escape,
That we have always known:
There is no place like home.

An American Dream

For Christmas
My mother gave me a pillow
Sewn from a tea towel, showing
An illustrated map of
California.
Looking at it,
At the orange blue green
Painted names the
Childish waves where
The sea should be
I remembered:

Santa Barbara,
Where the dolphins leap in the bay,
San Diego,
Where Mara went to college,
Death Valley,
Huge, where it rained grey
Though they said it never would,
Big Sur,
Where we walked on cliffs, almost
Stepped on a rattlesnake,
Hollywood,
The palm trees, the Spanish villas,
No centre and no water,
White people in cars and
Mexicans waiting for the bus
Brett,
Picking up a crucifix on Venice Beach,
Listening to ‘I want you’ by Dylan on the way back,
Thinking for the first time
That I might want to be wanted.
He put his hat on his knee and smiling said to me,
‘This is Hollywood, kid, and its where
the American Dream comes to die.’

But mine was just being born.

Yosemite,
Pine cones on the ground,
Tahoe,
Swimming in the lake, reading Nancy Drew,
Taste of Jello in my mouth,
San Francisco,
Valencia Street, deals done cheap,
Alive with violence and rum
Dollar stores and beating sun,
Oakland,
The sound of the train whistle
Setting out across the country
Reverse pilgrimages, west to east.
Cheques cashed here, loitering on the street corners
I worked in a summer camp, slicing plums,
Teaching kids to paint.
Davis,
Went to a school that changed its named to Cesar Chavez,
Wore shorts, lived in a house with chickens,
Learned to ride a bicycle with scraped knees,
Spelling bees, birthday cake, bubblegum and lemonade.
Sonoma,
The valley of the moon, vineyards and glaring heat
Sebastopol
The Russian river rushing its whispers
Bodega
No name beach where we built fires,
Where the mist clouds the pacific,
Where I walked with my face to the wind and a broken heart
Nights in the darkroom watching
My friends’ faces bloom beautiful under red light

The Sierra Nevadas
Mountains covered in snow,
Gold in the hills and ice on the ground
Chains on the wheels as we crossed over old trails
Where pioneers turned cannibal
Mount Shasta,
Where the police pulled us over,
Where Mary read my future from the cards,
On a cheap hotel bed and told me
To keep my secrets to myself.
The Redwood Empire,
Felt like the oldest place in the world,
The tallest trees there are,
One so big you could drive right through it,
Since they were seeds I thought
Of the things those trees have seen
If they could see
If they could speak
The stories they could tell

But until then only I can remember:
California
Between the desert and the sea
When I sleep on that pillow,
Only I can dream you,
My America.