My father was insatiable salt, pickled

against his maimed leg and mislaid love

with litres of cheap whisky, smoked

joint after joint until the cabin was a cave

and there he squatted by the fire

trying to make sense of shadows.

He was man out of time, could have been

a great victor—dragged his mauled corporeality from the fray of horse

and mud and sword into the heroic—now only ridiculous

in the mirror, a limping giant left smashed

by the roadside while history sped off

without a backward glance.

Still, he had his man-out-of-time personality:

stalked the dark depths of himself

like a ferocious deep sea fish, baited

women with his charm, the glittering dangled light

drew them through black water, through the maw

of his misery, past the laced tongue

of his anger until they were in too deep —

Snap! Off with their heads!

Snap! Off with mine!

It grew back so many times I was

a cat with nine lives balanced on the wave-beaten gunwale

as we fled and fled and fled

from his father his mother his happy-faced family

in the clench-shouldered house in Highgate and that wild spring

heath of the Sixties he strode as my mother’s lover

and how that brief lucid spring

ended one morning in a helmet viscous with blood

ended one morning with this,

our endless wandering in the cave of love.