What does it mean for us that life, for you,

became too bleak to bear?

By your not ending it, your life as such

would not have changed.

The room would be the same,

the world would still have gone about its restless business.

You might have seen it differently.

But three days later it might still have been

as dark and fruitless as before,

regardless of the love we heaped on you,

the testaments to all you did for us.

How could a woman who had given all give up?

Where did those sinking lows take you?

We could not reach you there. We were irrelevant,

were talking loud and only speaking air.

Did you believe that it would change you

in transforming consciousness to naught,

in jolting you from day to night? Well, you were right.

It leaves me questioning my own diminished appetite,

however schooled I’ve been to stop the plunging lows,

to put one foot before the other

and to give this life another go.

My paternal grandfather Chandos died in June 1940 of the wounds he received at the Siege of Calais. Herewith a few sheepish thoughts about a man I never knew.

To understand from whence I came,

I’ve said I’ll look into some papers

and some ancient clippings from The Times

as yellow-grey and dry as bones.

I finger through the pale blue letters sent

from farms in Gloucestershire and Kent:

the hardened stance of all of us in this together

who’ve lost a brother, lover, friend.

But then a sprig of chestnut hair, as little as a fishing fly,

that Chandos Hoskyns clipped, intended for a locket

should he fall, now twisting in between

my forefinger and thumb.

And further on I fall upon

the letter that my father John wrote home at 12

from school in Scarborough, begging Mother

to “cheer up” and not to be “too awfully sad”.

And now I’m spruced and suited in the Calais sun,

a hundred yards from where the C.O. fell,

a wreath clutched in my hands, and ready here

to lay it with the other rings.

I’m thinking what my grandfather would make of me –

this milksop pseudo-intellectual who cannot glorify

the wars of fools, yet here must halt

to mark the life he sacrificed.

We will remember them

and then we’ll return across the sea.

We may be home in time for tea.

They say you can’t describe a smell,

but when I’m in the bath or shower I want to say

where these scents send me:

to a special place in memory, or merely to the hotel room

where first I was suffused by Templetree or Silver Birch

or where the drenching of sweet Bushukan

transported me to honeyed glades or back

to other hotel rooms where odours spoke of luxury, enchantment,

and the softening thighs of dreaming girls.

These colours and these scents combine at 7.25 am

and for a moment drug me with perfume and with turquoise,

or drown me in their glowing amber pools.

Later comes the plunge in milky waters with a book:

I’m all but drinking the elixir of Fenjal,

an oil of blueish green that speaks

of foreign nights and vintage Vogues,

of willowed women in exquisite robes.

Long Player

The name’s a strange one:

Sexsmith by trade or by vocation

with voice of plummy angel and sad child’s face,

distilling pitfalls of our frailty,

miniatures of moments,

reveries of sorrow and of fate.

Friend in need

when I have need of tender mending,

I love that you don’t strut and are not smug –

are sweetly vulnerable instead,

self-effaced Canadian

with nest of hair and doleful eyes.

Ghosts of ’60s harmonies

haunt every song and well-honed phrase

repurposed and reclaimed:

Your former glory in a flash,

Now lost in thought or thought out loud.

Who cares if you’re not hip.

These songs will sound around the world

through my remaining days.