Poems 1960-2000
Page 17
You go home cursing chemistry.
Choices
There was never just one book for the desert island,
one perfectly tissue-typed aesthetic match,
that wouldn’t drive you crazy within six months;
just as there was never one all-purpose
ideal outfit, unquestionably right
for wearing at the ball on the Titanic
and also in the lifeboat afterwards.
And never, a fortiori, just one man;
if it’s not their conversation or their habits
(more irritating, even, than your own –
and who would you wish those on?) it’s their bodies:
two-thirds of them get fatter by the minute,
the bony ones turn out to be psychopaths,
and the few in the middle range go bald.
Somehow you’ll end up there, on the island,
in your old jeans and that comic dressing-gown
one of the fast-fatteners always laughed at,
with a blank notebook (all you’ve brought to read)
and a sea-and-sun-proof crate of cigarettes;
but with nobody, thank God, to lecture you
on how he managed to give them up.
Thatcherland
Street Scene, London N2
This is the front door. You can just see
the number on it, there behind the piano,
between the young man with the fierce expression
and the one with the axe, who’s trying not to laugh.
Those furry-headed plants beside the step
are Michaelmas daisies, as perhaps you’ve guessed,
although they’re not in colour; and the path
is tiled in red and black, like a Dutch interior.
But the photograph, of course, is black and white.
The piano also sported black and white
when it was whole (look, you can see its ribcage,
the wiry harp inside it, a spread wing).
The young men are playing Laurel and Hardy
(though both are tall, and neither of them is fat,
and one of them is actually a pianist):
they are committing a pianocide.
It wasn’t really much of a piano:
warped and fungoid, grossly out of tune –
facts they have not imparted to the wincing
passers-by, whom you will have to imagine.
You will also have to imagine, if you dare,
the jangling chords of axe-blow, saw-stroke, screeching
timber, wires twanged in a terminal
appassionato. This is a silent picture.
Laurel and Hardy will complete their show:
the wires, released from their frame, will thrash and tangle
and be tamed into a ball; the varnished panels
will be sawn stacks of boards and blocks and kindling.
Later the mother will come home for Christmas.
The fire will purr and tinkle in the grate,
a chromatic harmony of tones; and somewhere
there’ll be a muffled sack of snarling keys.
Gentlemen’s Hairdressers
The barbers’ shop has gone anonymous:
white paint, glossy as Brilliantine
(‘The Perfect Hairdressing’) has covered
Jim’s and Alfred’s friendly monickers.
GENTLEMENS HAIRD in chaste blue Roman
glorifies pure form. The man
on the ladder lays a scarlet slash
of marking-tape for the next upright.
Below him Jim and Alfred are still
in business. Alfred munches a pie
and dusts the crumbs from his grey moustache
over the racing-page. A gentleman
tilts his head under Jim’s clippers.
In the window the Durex poster,
the one with the motorbike, has faded
to pale northern shades of sea.
An hour later the ladder’s gone
and purity’s been deposed: the lettering’s
denser now, the Roman caps
blocked in with three-dimensional grey.
The word ‘Styling’ in shapeless cursive
wriggles above the open door.
Swaddled and perched on Alfred’s chair
a tiny Greek boy squeals and squeals.
Post Office
The queue’s right out through the glass doors
to the street: Thursday, pension day.
They built this Post Office too small.
Of course, the previous one was smaller –
a tiny prefab, next to the betting-shop,
says the man who’s just arrived;
and the present one, at which we’re queuing,
was cherry trees in front of a church.
The church was where the supermarket is:
‘My wife and I got married in that church,’
the man says. ‘We hold hands sometimes
when we’re standing waiting at the checkout –
have a little moment together!’ He laughs.
The queue shuffles forward a step.
Three members of it silently vow
never to grow old in this suburb;
one vows never to grow old at all.
‘I first met her over there,’ the man says,
‘on that corner where the bank is now.
The other corner was Williams Brothers –
remember Williams Brothers? They gave you tokens,
tin money, like, for your dividend.’
The woman in front of him remembers.
She nods, and swivels her loose lower denture,
remembering Williams Brothers’ metal tokens,
and the marble slab on the cheese-counter,
and the carved mahogany booth where you went to pay.
The boy in front of her is chewing gum;
his jaws rotate with the same motion
as hers: to and fro, to and fro.
Demonstration
‘YOU ARE NOW WALKING IN THE ROAD.
The lines marked out with sticky tape
are where the kerb is going to be
under the traffic-scheme proposals.
This tree will go. The flower-beds
and seats outside the supermarket
will go. The pavements will be narrowed
to make room for six lanes of traffic.’
We are now walking in the road
with a few banners and some leaflets
and forms to sign for a petition.
The Council will ignore them all.
The Council wants a monster junction
with traffic-islands, metal railings,
computer-managed lights and crossings,
and lots and lots of lanes of traffic.
We are still walking in the road.
It seems a long time since we started,
and most of us are getting older
(the ones who aren’t, of course, are dead).
This borough has the highest number
of pensioners in Greater London.
Perhaps the junction, with its modern
split-second lights, will cut them down.
But while we’re walking in the road
others are driving. At our backs
we hear the roar of heavy traffic
churning from Finchley to Westminster;
and over it, from a loudspeaker,
a stern, conceited female voice
with artificial vowels exhorts us:
‘Come with us into the nineties!’
Witnesses
We three in our dark decent clothes,
unlike ourselves, more like the three
witches, we say, crouched over the only
ashtray, smoke floating into our hair,
wait. An hour; another hour.
If you stand up and walk ten steps
to the glass doors you
can see her there
in the witness box, a Joan of Arc,
straight, still, her neck slender,
her lips moving from time to time
in reply to voices we can’t hear:
‘I put it to you…I should like to suggest…’
It’s her small child who is at stake.
His future hangs from these black-clad
proceedings, these ferretings under her sober
dress, under our skirts and dresses
to sniff out corruption: ‘I put it to you
that in fact your husband…that my client…
that you yourself initiated the violence…
that your hysteria…’ She sits like marble.
We pace the corridors, peep at the distance
from door to witness box (two steps up,
remember, be careful not to trip
when the time comes) and imagine them there,
the ones we can’t see. A man in a wig
and black robes. Two other men
in lesser wigs and gowns. More men
in dark suits. We sit down together,
shake the smoke from our hair, pass round
more cigarettes (to be held carefully
so as not to smirch our own meek versions
of their clothing), and wait to be called.
Last Song
Goodbye, sweet symmetry. Goodbye, sweet world
of mirror-images and matching halves,
where animals have usually four legs
and people nearly always two;
where birds and bats and butterflies and bees
have balanced wings, and even flies
can fly straight if they try. Goodbye
to one-a-side for eyes and ears and arms
and breasts and balls and shoulder-blades
and hands; goodbye to the straight line
drawn down the central spine,
making us double in a world
where oddness is acceptable only
under the sea, for the lop-sided lobster,
the wonky oyster, the creepily rotated
flatfish with both eyes over one gill;
goodbye to the sweet certitudes of our
mammalian order, where to be
born with one eye or three thumbs
points to not being human. It will come.
In the next world, when this one’s gone skew-whiff,
we shall be algae or lichen, things
we’ve hardly even needed to pronounce.
If the flounder still exists it will be king.
TIME-ZONES
(1991)
Counting
You count the fingers first: it’s traditional.
(You assume the doctor counted them too,
when he lifted up the slimy surprise
with its long dark pointed head and its father’s nose
at 2.13 a.m. – ‘Look at the clock!’
said Sister: ‘Remember the time: 2.13.’)
Next day the head’s turned pink and round;
the nose is a blob. You fumble under the gown
your mother embroidered with a sprig of daisies,
as she embroidered your own Viyella gowns
when you were a baby. You fish out
curly triangular feet. You count the toes.
‘There’s just one little thing,’ says Sister:
‘His ears – they don’t quite match. One
has an extra whorl in it. No one will notice.’
You notice like mad. You keep on noticing.
Then you hear a rumour: a woman in the next ward
has had a stillbirth. Or was it something worse?
You lie there, bleeding gratefully.
You’ve won the Nobel Prize, and the VC,
and the State Lottery, and gone to heaven.
Feed-time comes. They bring your bundle –
the right one: it’s him all right.
You count his eyelashes: the ideal number.
You take him home. He learns to walk.
From time to time you eye him,
nonchalantly, from each side.
He has an admirable nose.
No one ever notices his ears. No one
ever stands on both sides of him at once.
He grows up. He has beautiful children.
Libya
When the Americans were bombing Libya
(that time when it looked as if this was it at last,
the match in the petrol-tank which will flare sooner or later,
and the whole lot was about to go up)
Gregory turned on the television during dinner
and Elizabeth asked the children to be quiet
because this was important, we needed to watch the news –
‘It might be the beginning of the end,’ she said.
Oliver, who was seven, said ‘But I’m too young to die!’
Lily, who was five, said ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t!’
Oliver said ‘I know! Let’s get under the table!’
Lily said, ‘Yes, let’s get under the table!’
So they got under the table, and wriggled around our legs
making the dishes rattle, and we didn’t stop them
because we were busy straining to hear the news
and watching the fat bombers filling the screen.
It was a noisy ten minutes, one way and another.
Julia, who was fifteen months, chuckled in her high chair,
banging her spoon for her wonderful brother and sister,
and sang ‘Three blind mice, three blind mice’.
What May Happen
The worst thing that can happen –
to let the child go;
but you must not say so
or else it may happen.
The stranger looms in the way
holding an olive-twig.
The child’s not very big;
he is beginning to cry.
How can you stand by?
A cloud crushes the hill.
Everything stands still.
Everything moves away.
The stranger is still a stranger
but the child is not your child.
Too soon, before he’s old,
he may become a stranger.
He is his own child.
He has a way to go.
Others have lived it through:
watch, and turn cold.
My Father
When I got up that morning I had no father.
I know that now. I didn’t suspect it then.
They drove me through the tangle of Manchester
to the station, and I pointed to a sign:
‘Hulme’ it said – though all I saw was a rubbled
wasteland, a walled-off dereliction. ‘Hulme –
that’s where they lived,’ I said, ‘my father’s people.
It’s nowhere now.’ I coughed in the traffic fumes.
Hulme and Medlock. A quarter of a mile
to nowhere, to the names of some nothing streets
beatified in my family history file,
addresses on birth and marriage certificates:
Back Clarence Street, Hulme; King Street (but which one?);
One-in-Four Court, Chorlton-upon-Medlock.
Meanwhile at home on my answering machine
a message from New Zealand: please ring back.
In his day it was factory smoke, not petrol,
that choked the air and wouldn’t let him eat
until, the first day out from Liverpool,
sea air and toast unlocked his appetite.
He took up eating then, at the age of ten –
too late to cancel out the malnutrition
of years and generations. A small man,
though a tough one. He’ll have needed a small coffin.
I didn’t see it; he went to it so suddenly,
too soon, with both his daughters so
far away:
a box of ashes in Karori Cemetery,
a waft of smoke in the clean Wellington sky.
Even from here it catches in my throat
as I puzzle over the Manchester street-plan,
checking the index, magnifying the net
of close-meshed streets in M2 and M1.
Not all the city’s motorways and high-rise.
There must be roads that I can walk along
and know they walked there, even if their houses
have vanished like the cobble-stones – that throng
of Adcocks, Eggingtons, Joynsons, Lamberts, Listers.
I’ll go to look for where they were born and bred.
I’ll go next month; we’ll both go, I and my sister.
We’ll tell him about it, when he stops being dead.
Cattle in Mist
A postcard from my father’s childhood –
the one nobody photographed or painted;
the one we never had, my sister and I.
Such feeble daughters – couldn’t milk a cow
(watched it now and then, but no one taught us).
How could we hold our heads up, having never
pressed them into the warm flank of a beast
and lured the milk down? Hiss, hiss, in a bucket:
routine, that’s all. Not ours. That one missed us.
His later childhood, I should say;
not his second childhood – that he evaded
by dying – and his first was Manchester.
But out there in the bush, from the age of ten,
in charge of milking, rounding up the herd,