© Michael W. Thomas

Impresario

If I think of my father now,
I see a figure on an oil-drum
at the garden end, coat spread
over his shoulders in the late evening sun,
like an impresario who’s just been told
first night could conceivably be last
or a pundit warned to avoid the purlieus
of Lingfield and Kempton Park.
Chin on hand he stares at the ground
where he began, though elsewhere,
the Llanelli mines—for all of half a day
in family lore, after which he upped
and resolved to discover Xanadu,
which is always one hill beyond
and anyway at last dissolved into Sedgley,
Bloxwich, Fullwoods End, none presuming
to be the prize for tonight
or even the passing moment.
Follow That Dream,
sang Elvis in a pub where dad
once bought me a Vimto, parked me
in a room where the tv didn’t work.
Each day of his foreshortened life
his dream minced and gurned
and blew raspberries. Leave him so, then,
on the drum as the sun turns to other lands,
shopyard grease on his palms and cuffs,
Xanadu still in his eyes.

21st June, 2020, Father’s Day.

© Michael W. Thomas

Ways to say it

Footsteps go down the stairs.
A door closes. After that,
the silence is deeper
than the drop from that clutter-shelf
to the tiles that share a crack
like a sealed mouth. Strange
how such sounds can work together,
contriving pocket finales:
the castanetting of curtain-hoops,
the far detonation
of a stuck drawer nearly shut.
Sometimes it seems
that a house knows goodbye
before any other word
and slowly brims with all those ways
to say it – letting them slip
like something off a mantelpiece
on a morning when the world
is shod in felt. A postcard
from a season that’s lost its light.
A docket for some passing service,
costed by a spider. A note,
folded just the once,
saying don’t ever try to find me.

© Michael W. Thomas

A house to be shut up

The time of my quickness is gone.
Now my pace is that of a child
on a midnight stair. So bear with me, please,
if I drape too long a shadow on your day
as I lean to your table
and turn over this or that trinket.
Soon enough though slow we’ll straighten up
and let the light at you again. I’ll walk away
while my shadow bestows itself on casual elsewheres
like a sheet in a house to be shut up for the summer,
floating down fully spread,
knowing before it makes first touch
the breadth of peace its furnishing will need.

Michael W. Thomas, from Under Smoky Light (Offa's Press, 2020)

© Michael W. Thomas

Bikes

(July 1969. For Mike Evans, 1953-2014)

We stood smack in the middle of summer,
felt the minutes, hours, days flow down our skin.
A crazy bunch of miles above, some man
was set to trampoline about the moon
and get himself misheard by history.
The sun was our manor. We swung our bikes
along its beams, its paths and cut-throughs, out
across the molten ways of housing schemes,
where peace begged for a chance from open doors
and windows sang of pinball wizardry.
No freedom for the man up on the moon,
no change of gear or bush-grassed gulley. He
was parked before the world, a black-white moth
netted with one wing twitching. We roared on.
He jumped stiff-legged, a toddler testing beds.
We slicked our tyres with ancient oil. He coped
as best he could with ice-white silence, left
a flag to be unloved by July breeze.

Did we feel autumn in our bones as we
rode home, hear time complaining at the snow?
Course not: we’d been bowling over fire,
chasing sun-spots like rooks. Our transmissions
were simple as a breath, joy to muscle
to speed to joy to muscle—the right stuff.
Meanwhile, beyond the day, the moon man tried
to get back up a ladder as unsound
as those our dads ascended, bulb in hand,
mithering of expense and foreign tat,
while far below our mothers gripped the rungs
and tuned their minds’ dial elsewhere, to their times
of joy, of speed and fire, endless sun.

Michael W. Thomas, from The Stations of the Day (Black Pear Press, 2019)

© Michael W. Thomas

Last Poem

On a Thursday afternoon
with the roads and the gardens
full of nearly rain
the final word gives in
and takes its place

such an ill-sorted word
for that moment
a morning-flower word
an eye bright already
in the minute before dawn
a word to start a holiday
to blow about
a bride’s step-frothing train
a yes in its own circle-song

but there nonetheless
in a poem that clangs the door
that is the back view
of a trilby’d man with a suitcase
on a smoke-baffled platform
as the porter draws the gate
on the late express
that is the arranging handshake
of old friends who part for home
one to stamp feet on the porch-mat
the other to die in the dark

a word running this way
in a poem running that

and the pages lie as left
the pen sleeps capless
on a road and garden Thursday
with rain just begun

Michael W. Thomas, from Come to Pass (Oversteps, 2014)

michaelwthomas.co.uk