Who am I, wind-flow, world’s-breath, sky-sweeper, sigh

of ever-after, lone vowel in search of a consonant, in wires,
waves, drainpipe, rigging – voice that can almost sing

in cave mouths, haunting empty walls or bunkers, all
your derelictions, always tuning, rarely music to your ears

but mostly I’ll be listening: eavesdropper, thief,

at any window, all night in your streets, in your trees,
amongst you, I’ll take a cry, strip a whisper, seize

a hint, a whimper, lie, confession, I don’t care,
off it goes, on the wind. Who can guess what I know?

All these voices, none of them my own. Imagine me

in my unthinkable home (where else but elsewhere
could wind live? how could I arrive?) in the wind-nest

that I’m weaving from your histories. You watch the sky
but it’s only the gulls can read me right. Go ask them.

They wheel high and away, leaving you with their cry.

*

Wind hum
in the hollows of the island,
wind in empty chimneys, in the mouth
of a hundred-year-old cannon, never fired in anger,
that never found its voice…

wind
combing the island,
feeling in its crevices, wind looking for
something, something lost,
wind listening…

*

Wind
that is the voices of the dumb,
the foreign seamen’s tongues
loosed in the toss and turn of cholera,
voices in quarantine

that no one understood,
not shipmates, not the nurse
who knew a truer thing,
that illness sounds the same in any language,

wind fluttering
the yellow jack, the plague flag,
wind plucking a sputter of smoke
free from the crematorium…

*

Wind thrum
across the concrete bunker

and the hush within –
get the angle and the huff just right

it would sound us
like breath across an empty bottle but

a note too low to hear,
only feel through our bones

and in the tonnage of gunmetal,
the great Moncrieff gun

with its private repertoire of groans
and creaks, levered, ratcheted up

to face, again,
a blank horizon, sea lanes empty,

where they watched and watched by night –
false alarm – the patient wind

bending in to lift the soldiers’ voices,
a grumble, a cough, a struck match,

through the long shifts, waiting
for the war that’s always

somewhere, some time else,
that could appear

like the sudden great moon
rising on the Mendips

so every last rock and wave-tip
is stripped naked in its steel light,

the watching and the watched
alike in its sight

and nowhere, in this wind-
swept world, to hide.

*

Wind in the cracks of windows
of the NAAFI canteen, among men’s chatter
or after the click as the film reel clatters off its end,

wind lifting left-behind voices
of the fever ward, the farmyard, the clatter of stone
in the throat of old lime kilns

and muttering skeins
of old Norse: Holm, the wind says,
word the Vikings left behind

for an estuary island,
a hawk’s perch for plunder –

and shreds of old monk Latin,
wind whose care is the voices

that nobody owns…

*

Of St Cadoc and his Book

Wind fingering the pages of his lost book,
the manual of devotions that his novice lads forgot…

Miles out on the island, wind is picking at the words
of wisdom, this admonition, that thou-shalt-not,

whisking them up off the parchment, dry husks that they are,
such a winnowing – to snag like sheep’s fleece on a thorn

to tremble, preaching to the indifferent grasses, then gone

while the old man, quick with his curses, scolds:
Get back out there and fetch it. And (a tetchy mutter,

this, that only the wind caught and carried it straight
to some dutiful angel) may you never return.

The sea’s up. Gasping-paddling back, book in hand,
they feel the tide race coiling round them – two boys drowned,

one washed to shore and one to Echni, the Saint looking on.

What kind of a miracle was it that night, the salmon hooked
and cooked to break his fast, carved open to reveal

the book “free from all injury by water and…
white”?
Washed clean?
If any words remained,

let’s hope he heard white silence round them open, wide
as the waters between
and all the tempers of the tide

he’d have to row for himself now. Again and again.

*

Wind
in the pocks and sockets of the island,
wind that always asks a question: Whoooom?

wind
that, just so, this angle
to the cave mouth, makes a boom-
box of the island, where a shaft or cleft

might turn to tunnels;
they say there are ways
for smugglers, say the island’s hollowed
like an ocarina, say there was a skeleton;

that’s just a whisper
in the wind, an old tune
on a bone flute millennia old.

*

Wind in the grass, lost
voices of the drowned,

their ships torn by the teeth
of the Wolves, rock-fangs
beneath the water line;

books say there’ve been fifty or more,
limp-draggled, wave-dumped on the west shore
buried on the island; turn the page to see where…
but it’s blank. Who knows?

*

Wind
that is all the dumb
and undiscovered calling: listen,
there is more to hear,

wind that can drop
so low it hears the slight shift
in the tide’s voice when it turns,

when it stalls,
then leans into the great heave out again…

*

Then… the sound
when wind withholds itself

and the mist is one resonant room,
of no size – whole days of no near or far –

mist, and the sound of no wind,

which is each least sound, when the crack of a twig
is echoed everywhere;

a generator’s hum, a single boat
miles off, your own heart,

close around you quivering in the grey,

when you could almost touch, could see
the ripple patterns spreading,

overlapping, in the grey wave-field
of shuddering air…

*

Fog, and the lowing of the fog horn,
the lugubrious lost bellow
of a great beast in the mist,

voice lost like all the others; wind
remembers and rehearses, wind

in the gaping-open mouths
of the dumb foghorn, whispering
Come home…

*

Wind rising,
wind like a great sheet slack and flapping,
white noise shredded at the edges by the skreel of gulls

and all around us one
Welsh syllable, that swashes to and fro,

the word Môr, sea, Môr Hafren,
where the coasts close in to eavesdrop

on the wind and waves in conclave
plotting… what?

The only word they catch is Môr, Môr, Môr…