Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

  were only our reputations, we thought –

  bright-eyed with panic and bravado.

  It can take thirty years to find out.

  Stockings

  The first transvestite I ever went to bed with

  was the last, as far as I know.

  It was in the 60s, just before tights.

  He asked if he could put my stockings on –

  on me, I thought; on him, it turned out.

  His legs weren’t much of a shape,

  and my suspender-belt was never the same

  after he’d strained it round his middle.

  But apart from that, things could have been worse.

  The whisky helped.

  I never went out with him again;

  and I never, ever, told his secret –

  who’d want to? (He must have counted on

  the inhibiting power of embarrassment.)

  But I still went to his parties.

  At one of them I met Yoko Ono.

  A Political Kiss

  In the dream I was kissing John Prescott –

  or about to kiss him; our eyes had locked

  and we were leaning avidly forward,

  lips out-thrust, certain protuberances

  under our clothing brushing each other’s fronts,

  when my mother saw us, and I woke up.

  In fact I’ve never kissed an MP.

  The nearest I got was a Labour peer

  in a telephone box at Euston station

  (one of the old red kiosks –

  which seemed appropriate at the time).

  But I don’t suppose that counts, does it?

  An Apology

  Can it be that I was unfair

  to Tony Blair?

  His teeth, after all, are beyond compare;

  but does he take too much care

  over his hair?

  If he were to ask me out for a meal,

  how would I feel?

  Would I grovel and kneel,

  aflame with atavistic socialist zeal?

  No, I’m sorry, he doesn’t appeal:

  he’s not quite real.

  In the House he sounds sincere,

  but over a candlelit table, I fear,

  his accents wouldn’t ring sweetly in my ear.

  Oh dear.

  I’d love to see him in No. 10,

  but he doesn’t match my taste in men.

  Festschrift

  Dear So-and-so, you’re seventy. Well done!

  Or is it sixty? It’s a bit confusing

  remembering which, of all my ageing friends,

  is the one about whose talents I’m enthusing.

  I’m getting on myself, a fact which makes one

  occasionally vague – as you may know,

  having achieved such venerable status;

  although in you, of course, the years don’t show.

  Anyway, I’m delighted to contribute

  to the memorial volume which your wife –

  or publisher – is secretly arranging

  to mark this splendid milestone in your life.

  As one of your most passionate admirers

  I’m glad to tell the world of my conviction

  that you’ve transformed the course of literature

  by your poetry – or do I mean your fiction?

  Oh dear. Well, never mind. Congratulations,

  from a near contemporary, on your weighty

  achievements; and you’ll hear this all again

  in ten years’ time, at seventy – sorry! eighty.

  Offerings

  A garland for Dame Propinquity, goddess

  of work-places, closed circles and small towns,

  who let our paths cross and our eyes meet

  so many times in the course of duty

  that we became each other’s pleasure, and every

  humdrum encounter a thundering in the veins.

  We place at the hem of her fluted marble robe

  this swag of meadow flowers, picked nearby,

  as much a bribe as a thank-offering,

  asking her to smile on our extensions

  and elaborations of what she began.

  And now, to be on the safe side, a recherché

  confection of orchids and newly hybridised lilies

  for her sister, Lady Novelty: not to leave us.

  Danger: Swimming and Boating Prohibited

  This tender ‘V’ of thighs below my window

  is one end of Kuba’s mother,

  sprawled for the May sun in her bikini.

  I hardly know her face. ‘Ku-baah!’ she calls,

  and scolds him drowsily in Polish.

  Kuba’s off with his bikie friends,

  the big boys, old enough for school.

  ‘Ku-baah!’ they shout. Their accent’s perfect.

  They bump their tyres in circles over the grass,

  towards and then away from the glinting water.

  In winter, I’m told, the swans come up

  and tap their beaks on the windows, begging.

  Today a lone brown female mallard

  waddles quacking forlorn parodies

  of a person doing duck imitations.

  Kuba tries to run her down.

  She flaps off, squawking, back to the Broad.

  It’s a rough male world down there;

  the drakes are playing football hooligans,

  dunking each other, shamming rape –

  well, what else is there to do

  while their sober mates are hatching eggs?

  Only one brood’s appeared so far.

  I count the ducklings every day:

  eight, five, four, still four (good!), three…

  I’ll go and check again in a minute.

  ‘Grow up!’ I’ll tell them. ‘Hang on in there!’

  Downstairs the front end of Kuba’s mother,

  a streaked blonde top-knot, pokes out of a window.

  ‘Kuba!’ she calls again. ‘Ku-baah!’

  Risks

  When we heard the results of our tests

  we felt rather smug (if worried);

  we said to each other loudly in public

  ‘Well, that’s it for space-travel;

  we mustn’t go up there again.

  We can’t afford to be bombarded

  with any more radiation, dammit!’

  No more risks: that was the policy.

  In which case what are we doing here

  scrambling along this rocky gorge

  with hardly a finger-hold to bless us,

  and the bridge down, and a train coming,

  and the river full of crocodiles?

  (I think I invented the crocodiles.)

  Blue Footprints in the Snow

  But there’s no snow yet: the footprints

  are made by a rubber stamp, a toy

  I daren’t give to a child. (Warning:

  ‘Ink not guaranteed to wash out.’)

  First the gale, and now the rain,

  and soon the sleet, and then the footprints.

  The TV weather map is stamped

  with rows of identical cloud-shapes,

  each dangling two white crystals

  and striding briskly south from Scotland.

  But the feet are close together, jumping

  kangaroo-hops on a white page.

  We thought we were stuck on Crusoe’s island,

  marooned in summer, dry and stranded

  under clouds that would come to nothing –

  or nothing anyone could want.

  Earth-based, earth-bound, paper-bound,

  we had to play with toy footprints.

  Now, though, prophetic silhouettes

  emerge from a computer to bless us.

  The clouds leap up; the crystals fall

  and multiply on roofs and gardens.

  The feet are lifting off the page

  to bite blue shadows into the snow.

  Su
mmer in Bucharest

  We bought raspberries in the market;

  but raspberries are discredited:

  they sag in their bag, fermenting

  into a froth of suspect juice.

  And strawberries are seriously compromised:

  a taint – you must have heard the stories.

  As for redcurrants, well, they say

  the only real redcurrants are dead.

  (Don’t you believe it: the fields are full of them,

  swelling hopefully on their twigs,

  and the dead ones weren’t red anyway

  but some mutation of black or white.)

  We thought of choosing gooseberries,

  until we heard they’d been infiltrated

  by raspberries in gooseberry jackets.

  You can’t tell what to trust these days.

  There are dates, they say, but they’re imported;

  and it’s still too early for the grape harvest.

  All we can do is wait and hope.

  It’s been a sour season for fruit.

  1990

  Moneymore

  Looked better last time, somehow, on a wet weekday

  from under an umbrella – rain

  blurring my lens and rinsing the handsome faces

  of the Drapers’ Company buildings, lights on early,

  golden glimmers in puddles, cars growling

  at each other over parking spaces –

  than on this mild and spacious Sunday afternoon,

  no car but ours parked in the High Street

  by the painted kerbstones – white, blue, red, white, blue,

  with lads loafing in front of the Orange Hall

  and an old woman, daft in the sunshine,

  greeting strangers: ‘How are you? How are you?’

  Oh, yes, and that parked van outside the Market House…

  but time’s up; I’ve a plane to catch.

  If we take the Ballyronan road

  we shan’t see Magherafelt, a town I’ve always

  wanted to visit; where ten hours from now

  another van will discharge its sudden load.

  The Voices

  The voices change on the answering-machines:

  not the friend but the friend’s widow;

  not the friend but the other friend.

  ‘I’m not here’ the machine tells you.

  ‘This is the job I never did –

  this fluent interface with the world.

  He/she did it; but I’m learning.

  Now all the jobs are mine or no one’s.

  There’s no one here. Leave a message.’

  Willow Creek

  The janitor came out of his eely cave

  and said ‘Your mother was a good swimmer.

  Go back and tell her it’s not yet time.’

  Were there no other animals in Eden?

  When she dives under the roots, I thought,

  an eel is the last shape she’ll want to meet.

  Her brother was the one for eels: farm-wise,

  ruthless about food. You roll the skin back

  and pull it off inside out like a stocking.

  He grew up with dogs, horses and cattle.

  She was more at home with water and music;

  there were several lives for her after the creek.

  In one of them she taught my younger son

  to swim in the Greek sea; and walked through Athens

  under a parasol, to buy us melon.

  Fruit for the grandchildren; nectarines and pears

  for the great-grandchildren; feijoa-parties…

  ‘There’s more of that to come,’ said the janitor.

  ‘But no more swimming. Remember how she plunged

  into a hotel pool in bra and knickers,

  rather than miss the chance? She must have been sixty.’

  I had some questions for the janitor,

  but he submerged himself under the willows

  in his cavern where I couldn’t follow –

  you have to be invited; I wasn’t, yet,

  and neither was she. Meanwhile, she’s been allowed

  a rounded segment of something warm and golden:

  not pomegranate, paw-paw. She used to advise

  eating the seeds: a few of them, with the fruit,

  were good for you in some way – I forget.

  Long life, perhaps. She knows about these things.

  And she won’t let a few eels bother her.

  She’s tougher than you might think, my mother.

  Giggling

  I mustn’t mention the hamster’s nose –

  it sets you off. You giggle like Auntie Lizzie

  forty-odd years ago, when she was your age:

  heading for ninety. Great gigglers,

  you and your mother and your aunt.

  They were white-haired and well-padded;

  you were too skinny for a mother,

  we thought, with our teenage angst,

  afraid of turning into you.

  ‘It just struck me funny,’ said Auntie Lizzie,

  ‘ – that old drunk in his coffin

  with all those flowers. I got the giggles.’

  Her comfortable shoulders heaved

  as yours do, now that you’re her shape.

  She lived to a hundred and three,

  blind and deaf at the end, but not to be fooled:

  when her daughter died, she knew.

  I hope you’ll be spared that extremity.

  Of course it wasn’t the hamster’s nose:

  that’s just shorthand. It was the fireman’s;

  he’d given it the kiss of life,

  and the hamster…oh, well, never mind –

  you know the story. You’re off again.

  I never guessed old age was so much fun.

  Trio

  Julia has chocolate on her chin,

  and isn’t getting far with the cut-out stick

  they’ve given her as a bow. It doesn’t matter;

  the music’s there, behind her serious eyes.

  Lily’s in her knickers and a sweater

  passed down from Oliver, who hated it,

  her shiny hair glinting above her shiny

  half-sized (or is it quarter-sized?) violin.

  Oliver’s playing his cello: he knows how;

  and that’s not all he knows about: he made

  the cardboard fiddle – bridge and strings and struts

  and curves, a three-dimensional miracle

  of Sellotaping – for Julia to play at

  playing like Lily, and for family harmony.

  Soon, after her birthday, when she’s four,

  she’ll have Suzuki lessons and the real thing.

  The Video

  When Laura was born, Ceri watched.

  They all gathered around Mum’s bed –

  Dad and the midwife and Mum’s sister

  and Ceri. ‘Move over a bit,’ Dad said –

  he was trying to focus the camcorder

  on Mum’s legs and the baby’s head.

  After she had a little sister,

  and Mum had gone back to being thin,

  and was twice as busy, Ceri played

  the video again and again.

  She watched Laura come out, and then,

  in reverse, she made her go back in.

  NEW POEMS

  (2000)

  Easter

  On the curved staircase he embraced me.

  ‘You’ve got a ladybird in your hair.

  Without hurting it, come closer,’

  one of us said, in a daze of dream.

  But I thought we were in Jerusalem?

  – That is indeed the name of this city.

  It would be difficult to wind down further

  below the ground than to this cave of birth.

  All the best dreams have a baby in them.

  Year after year I give birth to my son.

  Clutch him in h
is blanket, close in your arms;

  the chill from the walls burns colder than marble.

  30 March 1997

  High Society

  Here, children, are the pastel 50s for you:

  everything, even to Bing Crosby’s trousers,

  is powder-blue – if it isn’t petal-pink,

  like Grace Kelly’s cashmere sweater.

  The name of the song is ‘True Love’.

  We may have crooned it over your cradles.

  The name of the age was ‘Innocence Incorporated’.

  We bought it, along with the first LPs.

  Why do you think we turned out as we did? –

  We, your parents, that is. You turned out OK:

  you didn’t have to rebel against it;

  you were only just being conceived.

  We dressed you in pink or blue,

  popped nipples into your mouths (we were big on breast-feeding),

  and cigarettes into our own (same thing),

  then went to the next party. The jazz was good.

  Now you’re rebelling against our rebellions.

  You haven’t been married as often as us.

  Your kids have shrugged and taken to computers.

  We worry about them; it’s what we do these days.