by Fleur Adcock
4 p.m.
It’s a day for pictures:
this afternoon, in the course of duty,
I open a book of black-and-white photographs,
rather smudgy, the text quaintly translated
from the Japanese: Atomic Bomb Injuries.
All the familiar shots are here:
the shadow blast-printed on to a wall,
the seared or bloated faces of children.
I am managing not to react to them.
Then this soldier, who died from merely helping,
several slow weeks afterwards.
His body is a Scarfe cartoon –
skinny trunk, enormous toes and fingers,
joints huge with lymphatic nodes.
My throat swells with tears at last.
Almost I fall into that inheritance,
long resisted and never my own doctrine,
a body I would not be part of.
I all but say it: ‘What have we done?
How shall we pay for this?’
But having a job to do I swallow
tears, guilt, these pallid secretions;
close the book; and carry it away
to answer someone’s factual enquiry.
7 p.m.
In the desert the biggest tank battle
since World War II smashes on.
My friends are not sure whether their brothers
in Israel are still alive.
All day the skies roar with jets.
And I do not write political poems.
House-talk
Through my pillow, through mattress, carpet, floor and ceiling,
sounds ooze up from the room below:
footsteps, chinking crockery, hot-water pipes groaning,
the muffled clunk of the refrigerator door,
and voices. They are trying to be quiet,
my son and his friends, home late in the evening.
Tones come softly filtered through the layers of padding.
I hear the words but not what the words are,
as on my radio when the batteries are fading.
Voices are reduced to a muted music:
Andrew’s bass, his friend’s tenor, the indistinguishable
light murmurs of the girls; occasional giggling.
Surely wood and plaster retain something
in their grain of all the essences they absorb?
This house has been lived in for ninety years,
nine by us. It has heard all manner of talking.
Its porous fabric must be saturated
with words. I offer it my peaceful breathing.
Foreigner
These winds bully me:
I am to lie down in a ditch
quiet under the thrashing nettles
and pull the mud up to my chin.
Not that I would submit so
to one voice only;
but by the voices of these several winds
merged into a flowing fringe of tones
that swirl and comb over the hills
I am compelled.
I shall lie sound-proofed in the mud,
a huge caddis-fly larva,
a face floating upon Egyptian unguents
in a runnel at the bottom of England.
In the Dingle Peninsula
We give ten pence to the old woman
and climb through nettles to the beehive hut.
You’ve been before. You’re showing me prehistory,
ushering me into a stone cocoon.
I finger the corbelled wall and squat against it
bowing my back in submission to its curves.
The floor’s washed rock: not even a scorchmark
as trace of the once-dwellers. But they’re here,
closer than you, and trying to seduce me:
the arched stones burn against my shoulders,
my knees tingle, the cool air buzzes…
I drag my eyelids open and sleep-walk out.
‘We’re skeletons underneath’ I’ve heard you say,
looking into coffins at neat arrangements
laid out in museums. We’re skeletons.
I take the bones of your hand lightly in mine
through the dry flesh and walk unresisting,
willing to share it, over the peopled soil.
In the Terai
Our throats full of dust, teeth harsh with it,
plastery sweat in our hair and nostrils,
we slam the flaps of the Landrover down
and think we choke on these roads.
Well, they will be better in time:
all along the dry riverbed
just as when we drove past this morning
men and women squatting under umbrellas
or cloth stretched over sticks, or nothing,
are splitting chipped stones to make smaller chips,
picking the fingernail-sized fragments
into graded heaps: roads by the handful.
We stop at the village and buy glasses of tea,
stewed and sweet; swallow dust with it
and are glad enough. The sun tilts lower.
Somewhere, surely, in this valley
under cool thatch mothers are feeding children
with steamy rice, leaning over them
to pour milk or water; the cups
tasting of earthenware, neutral, clean,
the young heads smelling only of hair.
River
‘…I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission; the long sought for, majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward.’
MUNGO PARK
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
The strong image is always the river
was a line for the poem I never wrote
twenty years ago and never have written
of the green Wanganui under its willows
or the ice-blue milky-foaming Clutha
stopping my tremulous teenage heart.
But now when I cross Westminster Bridge
all that comes to mind is the Niger
a river Mungo Park invented for me
as he invented all those African villages
and a certain kind of astonishing silence –
the explorer having done the poet’s job
and the poet feeling gratefully redundant.
To and Fro
The Inner Harbour
Paua-Shell
Spilt petrol
oil on a puddle
the sea’s colour-chart
porcelain, tie-dyed.
Tap the shell:
glazed calcium.
Cat’s-Eye
Boss-eye, wall-eye, squinty lid
stony door for a sea-snail’s tunnel
the long beach littered with them
domes of shell, discarded virginities
where the green girl wanders, willing
to lose hers to the right man
or to the wrong man, if he should raise
his frolic head above a sand dune
glossy-black-haired, and that smile on him
Sea-Lives
Under the sand at low tide
are whispers, hisses, long slithers,
bubbles, the suck of ingestion, a soft
snap: mysteries and exclusions.
Things grow on the dunes too –
pale straggle of lupin-bushes,
cutty-grass, evening primroses
puckering in the low light.
But the sea knows better.
Walk at the edge of its rich waves:
on the surface nothing shows;
underneath it is fat and fecund.
Shrimping-Net
Standing just under the boatshed
knee-deep in dappled water
sand-coloured legs and the sand itself
greenish in the lit ripples
watching
the shrimps avoid her net
little flexible glass rockets
and the lifted mesh always empty
gauze and wire dripping sunlight
She is too tall to stand under
this house. It is a fantasy
And moving in from the bright outskirts
further under the shadowy floor
hearing a footstep creak above
her head brushing the rough timber
edging further bending her knees
creosote beams grazing her shoulder
the ground higher the roof lower
sand sifting on to her hair
She kneels in dark shallow water,
palms pressed upon shells and weed.
Immigrant
November ’63: eight months in London.
I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans:
they float swanlike, arching their white necks
over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings,
burying awkward beaks in the lake’s water.
I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer’s jacket
and secretly test my accent once again:
St James’s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.
Settlers
First there is the hill wooden houses
warm branches close against the face
Bamboo was in it somewhere
or another tall reed and pines
Let it shift a little
settle into its own place
When we lived on the mountain
she said But it was not
a mountain nor they placed so high
nor where they came from a mountain
Manchester and then the slow seas
hatches battened a typhoon
so that all in the end became
mountains
Steps to the venture
vehicles luggage bits of paper
all their people fallen away
shrunken into framed wedding groups
One knows at the time it can’t be happening
Neighbours helped them build a house
what neighbours there were and to farm
she and the boy much alone
her husband away in the town working
clipping hair Her heart was weak
they said ninety years with a weak heart
and such grotesque accidents
burns wrenches caustic soda
conspired against she had to believe
The waterfall that was real
but she never mentioned the waterfall
After twelve years the slow reverse
from green wetness cattle weather
to somewhere at least a township
air lower than the mountain’s calmer
a house with an orchard peach and plum trees
tomato plants their bruised scented leaves
and a third life grandchildren
even the trip back to England at last
Then calmer still and closer in suburbs retraction into a city
We took her a cake for her birthday
going together it was easier
Separately would have been kinder
and twice For the same stories
rain cold now on the southerly harbour
wondering she must have been why
alone in the house or whether alone
her son in Europe but someone
a man she thought in the locked room
where their things were stored her things
about her china the boxwood cabinet
photographs Them’s your Grandpa’s people
and the noises in the room a face
Hard to tell if she was frightened
Not simple no Much neglected
and much here omitted Footnotes
Alice and her children gone ahead
the black sheep brother the money
the whole slow long knotted tangle
And her fine straight profile too
her giggle Eee her dark eyes
Going Back
There were always the places I couldn’t spell, or couldn’t find on maps –
too small, but swollen in family legend:
famous for bush-fires, near-drownings, or just the standard pioneer
grimness – twenty cows to milk by hand
before breakfast, and then a five-mile walk to school.
(Do I exaggerate? Perhaps; but hardly at all.)
They were my father’s, mostly. One or two, until I was five,
rolled in and out of my own vision:
a wall with blackboards; a gate where I swung, the wind bleak in the telegraph wires;
Mother in this or that schoolhouse kitchen,
singing. And, in between, back to familiar bases:
Drury again, Christmas Days in grandparents’ houses.
Suddenly no more New Zealand except in receding pictures
for years. And then we had it again, but different:
a city, big schools, my father a university teacher now.
But, being a nostalgic family, we went
in a newish car, along better roads, where once we’d rattled
in the Baby Austin over metal or clay surfaces, unsealed.
And we got most of it – nearly all the places that seemed to matter:
‘Do you remember this path?’ and ‘There’s the harbour
we had to cross in the launch when you were a new baby
and a storm came up, and we thought we’d go under.’
Here and there a known vista or the familiar angle
of a room to a garden made my own memories tingle.
But nostalgia-time ran out as I grew older and more busy
and became a parent myself, and left the country
for longer than they had left it; with certain things undone:
among them, two holes in the map empty.
Now I’ve stitched them in. I have the fabric complete,
the whole of the North Island pinned out flat.
First my own most haunting obsession, the school at Tokorangi.
It was I who spotted the turning off the road,
identified the trees, the mound, the contours programmed into my system
when I was five, and the L-shaped shed
echoing for two of us with voices; for the rest
an object of polite historical interest.
And a week later, one for my father, smaller and more remote,
a square wooden box on a little hill.
The door creaked rustily open. He stood in the entrance porch, he touched
the tap he’d so often turned, the very nail
where sixty years ago the barometer had hung
to be read at the start of each patterned morning.
Two bits of the back-blocks, then, two differently rural settings
for schools, were they? Schools no longer.
Left idle by the motorised successors of the pioneers
each had the same still mask to offer:
broken windows, grassy silence, all the children gone away,
and classrooms turned into barns for storing hay.
Instead of an Interview
The hills, I told them; and water, and the clear air
(not yielding to more journalistic probings);
and a river or two, I could say, and certain bays
and ah, those various and incredible hills…
And all my family still in the one city
within walking distances of each other
through streets I could follow blind. My school was gone
and half my Thorndon smashed for the motorway
but every corner revealed familiar settings
for the dreams I’d not bothered to remember –
ingrained; ingrown; incestuous: like the country.
And another city offering me a lover
and quite enough friends to be going on with;
&nb
sp; bookshops; galleries; gardens; fish in the sea;
lemons and passionfruit growing free as the bush.
Then the bush itself; and the wild grand south;
and wooden houses in occasional special towns.
And not a town or a city I could live in.
Home, as I explained to a weeping niece,
home is London; and England, Ireland, Europe.
I have come home with a suitcase full of stones –
of shells and pebbles, pottery, pieces of bark:
here they lie around the floor of my study
as I telephone a cable ‘Safely home’
and moments later, thinking of my dears,
wish the over-resonant word cancelled:
‘Arrived safely’ would have been clear enough,
neutral, kinder. But another loaded word
creeps up now to interrogate me.
By going back to look, after thirteen years,
have I made myself for the first time an exile?
Londoner
Scarcely two hours back in the country
and I’m shopping in East Finchley High Road
in a cotton skirt, a cardigan, jandals –
or flipflops as people call them here,
where February’s winter. Aren’t I cold?
The neighbours in their overcoats are smiling
at my smiles and not at my bare toes:
they know me here.
I hardly know myself,
yet. It takes me until Monday evening,
walking from the office after dark
to Westminster Bridge. It’s cold, it’s foggy,