The End of the Holidays

[hallaig]

The bay is flat
and the islands like stones on it.
We are trying to have a quiet drink,
there are things I need to say,
but you phone your friend Steve
to see if he’s ok and turns out
he’s in a tree in Salford
about to hang himself,
with someone called Pete,
a traffic engineer, trying to
talk him down.
I order drinks and we sit
at a scarred wooden table.
The bar is empty, in the corner
a fruit machine winks spasmodically.
Steve you are saying, Steve, listen
nothing is as bad as it seems.
I take a mouthful.
Through the high window
gulls are circling slowly
in a sky like paste.
Steve, you can’t hang yourself
at Christmas, think of the kids.
I take another, and the beer
washes over the smooth surface
of the glass leaving flecks
of foam like the sea.
Pete is that you? Are you in the tree now?
The beermat says there are nearly 800 islands
off the coast of Scotland,
and of these only 2 begin with e,
which is ironical since eilean
is the gaelic word for island.
‘He’s had a bad time’ you are telling Pete,
‘he’s in a difficult place’.
We are all in places filled with trees
or windswept, just with thorns,
it is the season for it.
You put the phone down for a moment,
to find a tissue with which to wipe your eyes
and in the distance I’m sure I hear
the cops arriving.

[Haunted]

This is really interesting, full of ironies and understatements. It starts out flat, most likely intentional with "The bay is flat". It's anything but. It gets better and better as it unfolds. One suggestion — break it up into several stanzas to make it easier to follow. You already have the internal pauses built in. You've raised the bar so high during the poem that the end feels a bit anticlimactic, almost "flat", but maybe that's also intentional, to encapsulate the piece like bookends.