Brian Wake

At thirteen forty five our train begins to move, and, late
to board, what seats remain face not toward but from.
I shuffle off and fold my overcoat and sit, do battle
with a newspaper to find a decent page and settle down
...

Eighty seven or eight years old,
she was, quite deaf and yet
we'd bawl our names as though
to rouse her from the slow
...

There is nothing to be frightened of, she said,
but come along and lie here on the bed.
We spoke of country dancing and of how
so very sad it was to have to dance alone,
...

Goethe’s clock is ticking in an empty room.
He sits quite motionless. All art, then peels
a curling strip of wallpaper from a dilapidated
wall, begins, he says, from what we know
...

He fills, with pink, polluted dregs,
a yellow plastic can, and Lake Muhazi
fills again with water bleeding through
its pot-shot bullet holes.
...

A good, Cain sighs, book, counting the steps, four, five, then resting,
six, for a moment on the seventh in his cell, is quite, good morning sir,
the purest essence of the human soul.

I’m best inside, he says, best locked away.
...

Lucky for you, lucky for you
I lived not in the glass house
of my fathers, not in the bricks
and mortar, in the mud and bullets
...

An unexamined life, thought Daniel,
settling for the night on an eiderdown
of lions, is not a life at all.

I was hardly born until a little while ago,
...

Hiding from me at bedtime, my daughter
sneezes and giggles from inside the wardrobe.
I wonder where she is, I act. Pretending
not to see her four small fingers clutching
...

I never did think highly of the sea,
said Noah, but used it as a means to come
and go heroically, pack suitcases and kiss
someone goodbye, to be wished
...

We graze for hours through the densely structured arguments
about what is and what is not, the genesis of patterns framed
and hung for all to see. But we are prisoners.
...

In the early hours then, sometime between
not wanting to get up and needing to,
expectant silences, the visual discrepancy
between gunmetal blues of fading night
...

Blind himself, so Samson’s dog made absolutely no concession
to the dark, but would cross, and bark, the river on a bridge of crocodiles
with neither he nor they aware that either he or they were there.
...

My father talks of being twenty
days in an open boat. Adrift.
My father and others. War time
and the ocean was a bloodslick
...

During the war, their breakfast, every morning
on the devastated farm, was either, nine times
out of ten, an extraordinarily renewed determination
or remorse. The cattle gone, the sheep, the horse.
...

Died at sea. The pylorus blocked-stop-suddenly-stop-kingsline-stop
was latin we had never learned, was the ship that ran aground,
a killer, caught too late, that swam in him. The shark’s unblinking
eye and terrifying fin both shocking in the foaming depths.
...

What bothers me, said Lazarus,
trapping flies in a glass,
brushing dust from his shirt,
what concerns me most of all,
...

A hunter, Daniel ponders, looking down
from the safety of his tree, its claw-scored bough
barkless in the quiet heat, that can impose
on any creature all the power of the human mind,
...

From Wednesday to Saturday we came and went in shifts;
brought outside in, disguised as flowers, to her bed. Would
take, not her, but only whiffs of disinfected hospital instead
back to her garden. Stones there bled.
...

Adjusting my amusing hat, on backwards
for that extra laugh, and feathers in a pail,
pretending water for applause, to drench
with, if not wit, dry humour, half the audience,
...