Two Poems

My Future

– waiting for me somewhere out of sight
past the betting shop and the Nationwide
where buses stop
to shiver in the middle of the night –
doesn’t for a moment doubt
we’ll recognise each other
when he looks me in the eye,
but wonders if the buttonhole was wise
or lifts a wristwatch to his ear
then sighs before a table
laid with shiny cutlery and a cloth
so white
it seems to generate its own light.
The napkins’ beautiful, useless folds.

The Summer of Love

of Patrick Troughton’s puckish Dr Who
of the dark-wood-and-mullion-doored bureau

and the coal bunker, dwarfed by my father’s shed
of my canary-yellow candlewick bedspread

of the dog at our back door, waiting for bones;
its hind leg broken on Pentregethin Rd

of the day my father’s mother died
downstairs, of the day my father turned aside

of the walnut sideboard I hid my toys beneath
of the snails that clung to our pond’s greasy slopes

of the garage my father refused to complete
of the space where a door should have been