by Fleur Adcock
no smoking (bad for the optics); no moon
above the tree-fringed walls of this grassy dip.
Nothing up there but stars. And it, of course.
15 Halley Party
A glow-worm in a Marmite jar
like the one her mother brought her once:
‘I dreamt you woke me in the night and showed me
a glow-worm in a Marmite jar.’
So these wee kids in dressing-gowns
will remember being woken up
for honey sandwiches and cocoa
and a little light in a ring of glass.
16 Orbit
‘It’s not like anything else, with its stumpy tail:
just a fuzz, really, until you get up close –
but of course you can’t. With binoculars, I meant,
or a telescope. Actually the tail’s fading.’
Higher than Scorpius now, higher than the Pointers,
high as the mid-heaven, she’s tracked it nightly,
changing. ‘I’m not the only one, but I’m once
in a lifetime.’ As for close, that’s something else.
AFTER
17
Landing at Gatwick on a grey Sunday when
the baggage handlers seem to be on strike as
they were at the airport before last (but no,
it’s merely Britain being its old self ) she’s
her old self – a self consisting also of
more hand-luggage than she’d thought she was allowed
plus her at last reclaimed suitcase: all of which,
however she may dispose them, hurt her hand.
18
Rise above it! Swallow a chemical:
chuck down whisky, Valium, speed,
Mogadon, caffeine; bomb it or drown it.
But wait! If chemicals did the deed
pandering to their ways compounds
the offence. Resist: you know they lead
to trouble. Find another obsession.
Face a healthier form of need.
19
Saving the world is the only valid cause.
Now that she knows it’s round it seems smaller,
more vulnerable (as well as bigger, looser,
a baggy bundle of dangerous contradictions).
There’s room for such concerns in student life,
if you stretch it. So: Link hands around the world
for peace! Thumbs down to Star Wars! Hands off
the environment! Two fingers to the Bomb!
20
‘Of course you’d have a natural sympathy…
I always thought it was quite sweet, your little hand,
when we were kids; but we don’t want other kids
walking around the world with worse things…
I’m not upsetting you, am I?’ No, she’s not,
this warm voice from the past, this candid face.
‘Right. See you tomorrow. The coach leaves at 8.
Oh, and we’ve got a wonderful furious banner.’
21
The fountain in her heart informs her
she needn’t try to sleep tonight –
rush, gush: the sleep-extinguisher
frothing in her chest like a dishwasher.
She sits at the window with a blanket
to track the turning stars. A comet
might add some point. The moon ignores her;
but dawn may come. She’d settle for that.
22
There was a young woman who fell
for someone she knew rather well –
a friend from her school: confirming the rule
that with these things you never can tell.
The person she’d thought a fixed star –
stuck on rails like a tram, not a car –
shot off into orbit and seemed a new planet,
and a dazzler, the finest by far.
23
She wants to see what it looks like on
a breast. She puts it on a breast –
not the one she has in mind
but her own: at least it’s a rehearsal.
Three weeks later, the first night:
a nipple, darker than hers, framed
in a silky, jointed bifurcation.
There is also dialogue. And applause.
24
And she never did learn to play the violin.
So it will have to be Musica Mundana,
‘the harmony of the spheres’ (coming across a map
of the southern skies cut out of some Auckland paper)
or the other kind: what was it? Instrumentalis
and – ah, yes – Humana. (Listen: Canopus, Crux,
Carina, Libra, Vela choiring together. She
has glided right off the edge of the star-chart.)
LOOKING BACK
( 1 9 9 7 )
I
Where They Lived
That’s where they lived in the 1890s.
They don’t know that we know,
or that we’re standing here, in possession
of some really quite intimate information
about the causes of their deaths,
photographing each other in a brisk wind
outside their terrace house, both smiling
(not callously, we could assure them),
our hair streaming across our faces
and the green plastic Marks and Spencer’s bag
in which I wrapped my camera against showers
ballooning out like a wind-sock
from my wrist, showing the direction
of something that’s blowing down our century.
Framed
(Sam Adcock, 1876-1956, & Eva Eggington, 1875-1970)
What shall we do with Grandpa, in his silver
frame? And why is he in it, may we ask?
Why not Grandma, still shyly veiled in her
tissue paper and photographer’s cardboard?
Of course, there’s his moustache: we can’t miss that;
nor would he wish us to. It must have taken
hours and all his barbering skills to wax
and twirl the ends into these solemn curlicues.
We can’t keep that in a drawer – or he couldn’t.
But Grandma, now, in her black, nervously smiling,
one hand barely poised on the same ridiculous
Empire chairback: what a stunner she was!
Why did he not frame her? After all, her looks
are what he married her for. He fell in love
with her portrait (not this one) in a photographer’s
window, and hunted down the woman herself.
She was a dressmaker’s cutter (cool hands);
he was an extrovert – a talker, mixer
(the Lodge, the Church, the Mechanics’ Institute,
the Temperance Movement). And it all came true:
seven years of engagement, fifty more
together. You can almost map their marriage,
decade by decade, through the evolution,
flourishing and decline of his moustache.
At twenty, not a whisker; at thirty or so,
this elaborate facial construct. In Manchester
it throve; then what did he do but export it
to droop and sag in the bush at Te Raua Moa,
on his dairy farm (how those cattle depressed him –
was New Zealand not such a bright idea after all?).
But it perked up for his passport in the 30s,
with a devilish Vandyke beard, for their last trip Home.
Not a handsome man, he must have decided
to take a bit of trouble and pass for one;
while Grandma, with the eyes and the bone structure
and that tilt of the head, decided to be plain.
She took to bobbed hair and wire-framed glasses,
and went grey early. He never did (unless
there was some preparation he knew ab
out?)
Here they are in a 50s Polyfoto –
she with her shy smile, he with a muted version
of the moustache, wearing his cameo tie-pin
and a jubilant grin, as if he’d just slammed down
the winning trick in his favourite game of ‘Sorry!’
The Russian War
Great-great-great-uncle Francis Eggington
came back from the Russian War
(it was the kind of war you came back from,
if you were lucky: bad, but over).
He didn’t come to the front door –
the lice and filth were falling off him –
he slipped along the alley to the yard.
‘Who’s that out at the pump?’ they said
‘– a tall tramp stripping his rags off !’
The soap was where it usually was.
He scrubbed and splashed and scrubbed,
and combed his beard over the hole in his throat.
‘Give me some clothes,’ he said. ‘I’m back.’
‘God save us, Frank, it’s you!’ they said.
‘What happened? Were you at Scutari?
And what’s that hole inside your beard?’
‘Tea first,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you later.
And Willie’s children will tell their grandchildren;
I’ll be a thing called oral history.’
227 Peel Green Road
Failing their flesh and bones we have the gatepost.
Failing the bride in her ostrich-feathered hat,
the groom bracing his shoulders for the camera,
we have the garden wall, the path, and the gatepost:
not the original gatepost, but positioned
in exactly the same relation to the house –
just as the windows have been modernised
but we can see their dimensions are the same
as the ones behind the handsome brothers’ heads
under their wedding bowlers. The gatepost
stands to the left, where nine-year-old Nellie
ought to be standing, in her home-made dress,
her boots and stockings and white hair-ribbon,
leaning her wistful head against Marion –
her next-best sister, who will have to do
now that Eva’s married and going away.
Father and Mother, corpulent on chairs,
young Harry wincing in his Fauntleroy collar,
James in his first hard hat, a size too large,
have faded away from bricks and wood and metal.
Failing the sight of Mary, flowered and frilled,
the married sister, simpering on the arm
of Abraham with his curled moustache (the swine:
he’ll leave her, of course) we may inspect the drainpipe:
not the authentic late-Victorian drainpipe
but just where that one was, convincing proof
(together with the gatepost and the windows)
that this is it, all right: the very house –
unless it’s not; unless that was a stand-in,
one the photographer preferred that day
and lined them up in front of, because the sun
was shining on it; as it isn’t now.
Nellie
(i.m. Nellie Eggington, 1894-1913)
Just because it was so long ago
doesn’t mean it ceases to be sad.
Nellie on the sea-front at Torquay
watching the fishing-boats (‘Dear Sis and Bro,
I am feeling very much better’) had
six months left to die of her TB.
She and Marion caught it at the mill
from a girl who coughed and coughed across her loom.
Their father caught it; he and Marion died;
the others quaked and murmured; James fell ill.
So here was Nellie, with her rented room,
carefully walking down to watch the tide.
When she’d first been diagnosed, she’d said
‘Please, could Eva nurse me, later on,
when it’s time, that is…if I get worse?’
Eva swallowed hard and shook her head
(and grieved for fifty years): she had her son
to consider. So their mother went as nurse.
Nellie took her parrot to Torquay –
her pet (as she herself had been a pet,
Eva’s and her father’s); she could teach
words to it in the evenings after tea,
talk to it when the weather was too wet
or she too frail for sitting on the beach.
Back in Manchester they had to wait,
looking out for letters every day,
or postcards for ‘Dear Sis’. The winter passed.
Eva and Sam made plans to emigrate.
(Not yet, though. Later.) April came, and May –
bringing something from Torquay at last:
news. It was Tom’s Alice who glanced out,
and called to Eva; Eva called to Sam:
‘Look! Here’s Mother walking up the road
with Nellie’s parrot in its cage.’ No doubt
now of what had happened. On she came,
steadily carrying her sharp-clawed load.
Mary Derry
The first spring of the new century
and there I was, fallen pregnant!
Scarcely out of winter, even –
scarcely 1800 at all –
with not a bud on the trees yet
when the new thing budded in me.
They said I ought to have known better:
after all, I was over thirty.
William was younger; and men, of course…
but he came round fair in the end.
We couldn’t sit the banns through,
giggled at for three Sundays –
not in Lichfield. He got a licence
and wedded me the next morning
in Armitage. July, it was
by then, and my loose gown bulging.
The babe was christened in Lichfield, though.
You knew he died? The wages of sin.
*
So this is where we began again:
Liverpool. Can you hear the seagulls?
A screeching city: seagulls and wagons,
drawbridges, floodgates, lifting-gear,
and warehouses huge as cathedrals.
We lived down by the Duke’s Dock,
one lodging after another.
The family grew as the city grew.
William sat on his high stool
inscribing figures in a ledger.
My care was the children, bless them.
I ferried most of them safely through
the perilous waters of infancy,
and saw them married. Then I died.
*
Well, of course you know that.
And you know what of : consumption,
a word you don’t use; an unwilled
legacy to go haunting down
one line of my long posterity
to Frank’s son, and his son’s son,
and fan out in a shuddering shadow
over the fourth generation.
And what I have to ask is:
was it the city’s fault, or mine?
You can’t answer me. All you hear
is a faint mewing among the seagulls.
Moses Lambert: The Facts
The young cordwainer (yes, that’s right)
got married at the Old Church –
it’s Manchester Cathedral now.
That was the cheapest place to go.
They married you in batches there –
a list of names, a buzz of responses,
and ‘You’re all married,’ said the clerk.
‘Pair up outside.’ (Like shoes, thought Moses.)
After the ceremony, though,
he and Maria waited on.
They had an
extra thing to do:
their daughter needed christening.
The baby’s age is not recorded.
The bride was over twenty-one –
full age. The bridegroom (never mind
what he might have said) was seventeen.
The young Queen was on the throne;
they’d have to be Victorians now.
Meanwhile, two more facts: they were
from Leeds. One of them had red hair.
Samuel Joynson
He looked for it in the streets first,
and the sooty back alleys. It wasn’t there.
He looked for it in the beer-house;
it dodged away as soon as he glimpsed it.
It certainly wasn’t there at work,
raining down with the sawdust on to
his broad-brimmed hat as he stood sweating
in the pit under the snorting blade.
He looked all over the house for it –
the kitchen the scullery the parlour
the bedroom he shared with two of his brothers –
and shrugged. Of course it wasn’t there.
So he tied a noose around where it should have been,
and slipped his head into it, for one last look.