Magpie on the Tracks

On the worn-penny tracks outside Stirling I saw a magpie, proud as a mini scrap merchant who had made a mint from an empire of muck.

It was prospecting a nugget of tinfoil in the sun

on one of those fine carte-blanche days

where you should walk barefoot in grass.

 

Instead we were crammed in and cooped up

on the late train from Edinburgh, the bird

of misery cackling from the hot tracks.

 

Daydreaming about the country of my making,

the woman who was right on time for her train,

she was one of my mother's wine-club friends.

 

She boarded the train with a lifetime of luggage,

but by the time she was found, the next morning

she was completely empty-handed, her ring

 

missing, the glint of avarice in that bird's eye.  

 

The Centenarians

 

Faces creased as the backside of a crumpled

tan linen suit, eyes that imbibed too much

and now frost to privacy like toilet windows,

dead prime ministers are their nail clippings.

 

At the Home another has joined the Queen's

century club and the reporter hangs on every

susserant word, taking notes on the diet, pills

and drink of eternal life, the tincture of sherry

 

just before bed, never walking under ladders,

work until eighty-three and strictly no cussing.

But the blue print for endless innings always

changes, and is often misunderstood, unwished.

 

My sister had a dream once where people lived

forever but said she soon bored of it, the beige

weather and woke up ten years later, spent

with only the green loose coppers of her youth.  

 

 

The Treble Clef

 

She signed her first initial 'J' always

like the first clef of a great musical score,

as if the inky tendrils of her pedestrian name

could give grease to the orchestra's elbow.

 

For sure she believed people could be

easily conducted, her letters full of quavers

teeming like tadpoles in flooded forestry

ditches, seeing only through envies of algae.

 

When did the world cease to sing for her,

when did the children stray so far off key?

She was the only alchemist I knew, who could

turn to gold the molten lead she tipped in your ear.

 

 

The Collector

 

Dead flies gather on the windowsill like raisins

and the dust, despite what Quentin Crisp said,

does get thicker after three years of indolence.

 

But you can also collect an almanac of memories

in so short a space of time, the books multiply

like mitosis and remain unread, promissory notes

 

to yourself that you'll have the time to finish them.

Things are starting to amount to a life. As a child

I collected Star Wars figures and stamps.

 

The little plastic aliens were my pliable friends

and the stamps, well-travelled artworks, my

favourite, the 1860s Andrew Jackson, blackjack-

 

The stamp of wild-west ghost towns, pony post

franked by an ink-dipped cork from a whiskey

bottle with a cross bowie-knifed into it. 

 

My grandparents were terrible hoarders too,

and the useless tawdry weight they became

in trinkets, ephemera, facetiae and curiosa.

 

Decluttering at sixteen was my way of therapy.

The urge to acquire is a need to hold on to what

is already lost, with museums full of time's rapine. 

 

 

The Hispaniola

 

I heard when I was little that every summer

they re-enacted the sinking of The Hispaniola

in the duck-dossing lake at Peasholm Park.

The actors gave out chocolate doubloons.

 

It was no more than a flaking rowing boat

with bed sheet sails held up by broomsticks,

the old tea-lady and gruff ice-cream man

dressed up as buccaneer and wench.

 

The only time I went there, the galleon

had already been sunk and its timbers

shivered in the shallows like the onset

of tears, I had never been so disappointed.

 

I have been down to the wreck and back since

for the child that stood shattered and looted

on the bank that day, and I ask him to hold

on now for us, and not cry until the rain falls.