Tailor Made

Crippled,

fire-watching over England,

dark hours lost at the top

of a cold station, my father

crept home with the dawn,

dull eyes pink-rimmed,

to the bespoke ahead of him,

stretching a collar smooth,

neat-stitched without,

raw canvas within.

Death in Samarkand

Your star’s fixed firm in subtle skies

over the orderly Registan, square

in its maidan; mosque and madrassa ripple

their domes under a cut moon.

Out in the shelter of midnight’s observatory,

your sextant, embedded supple in marble,

measures the sharp shaft from its arc

into the niched matrix of night,

Ulugh Beg.

You pin it down with the gazer’s art,

but decline the empire left to your care,

the son shut out, his fate inclined

to your Hajj and the hunt. And you still commune

with those points in space the Zij-i Sultani

captures. A blood-gout will garble

what’s left when their sparkle is dark, faint

on the page. Your last dawn’s in flight,

Ulugh Beg,

as you fall slant between column and table

of that caught heaven you scribe. Now blink

its blaze from the end of your irritant day,

for no armillary sphere will enable

your sure ascension from life at the brink

as your sun rushes away, away.  

                                                

Snow at Easter

The city’s held in a shiver of snow.

Two days back, daffodils

bounced in a spring wind;

now they are blasted and black.

Venus and Mars unpair

on this crisp night of a moon-thin,

silver dropped behind lumps of cloud

heavy on house tops:

we hold beneath weight,

resentment a yard ahead,

all light out.

She moves beyond

our stand, rising and dipping

with the year’s jarred cycle,

missing the merging

of shoot and snow and star

while the stretched web quivers.