by Fleur Adcock
Our parents worried about our divorces
(so Hollywood!) and then embarked on their own.
But we’ve had enough of Technicolor;
after all, we were conceived in black and white.
For Meg
(i.m. Meg Sheffield, 1940-1997)
Half the things you did were too scary for me.
Skiing? No thanks. Riding? I’ve never learnt.
Canoeing? I’d be sure to tip myself out
and stagger home, ignominiously wet.
It was my son, that time in Kathmandu,
who galloped off with you to the temple at Bodnath
in a monsoon downpour, both of you on horses
from the King of Nepal’s stables. Not me.
And as for the elephants – my God, the elephants!
How did you get me up on to one of those?
First they lay down; the way to climb aboard
was to walk up a gross leg, then straddle a sack
(that’s all there was to sit on), while the creature
wobbled and swayed through the jungle for slow hours.
It felt like riding on the dome of St Paul’s
in an earthquake. This was supposed to be a treat.
You and Alex and Maya, in her best sari,
sat beaming at the wildlife, you with your camera
proficiently clicking. You were pregnant at the time.
I clung with both hot hands to the bit of rope
that was all there was to cling to. The jungle steamed.
As soon as we were back in sight of the camp
I got off and walked through a river to reach it.
You laughed, but kindly. We couldn’t all be like you.
Now you’ve done the scariest thing there is;
and all the king’s horses, dear Meg, won’t bring you back.
A Visiting Angel
My angel’s wearing dressing-up clothes –
her sister’s ballet-skirt, her mother’s top,
some spangles, a radiant smile.
She looks as if she might take off
and float in the air – whee! But of course
you’ve guessed: she’s not an angel really.
Her screeches when you try to dress her
make the neighbours think of child abuse.
She has to be in the mood for clothes.
Once, for the sake of peace, when she wouldn’t even
part with her soggy night-time nappy,
I took her to the shops in her pyjamas.
And what about the shoe she left on the train?
But then she sat like Cinderella,
serene and gracious, trying on the new ones.
Has she been spoilt? Her big sister,
no less pretty, gave up the cuteness contest
and settled for being the sensible one.
It’s tough being sister to an angel
(a burden I bore for years myself ),
but being an angel’s grandmother is bliss.
I want to buy her French designer outfits.
Madness. It would be cheaper and more fun
to go to Paris. So we all do that.
A special deal on Eurostar.
Halfway there, she comes to sit beside me
on Daddy’s knee, and stares into my face.
‘Fleur,’ she says thoughtfully, ‘I love you.’
Wow! That’s angel-talk, no doubt of it.
Where can I buy her a halo and some wings?
It’s Done This!
(for Mia, Kristen and Marilyn)
Help! It’s hidden my document,
and when I try to get it back,
tells me it’s already in use.
It keeps changing the names of my files.
Why won’t the Edit Menu appear?
It takes no notice of me. Help!
‘You have made changes which alter
the global template, Normal. Do you
want to save them?’ Oh, please, no –
what have I altered? The ozone layer?
Help! But Help refuses to help;
the message goes on glaring at me.
There are some things you can’t cancel –
or, if you have, you wish you hadn’t.
‘This may damage your computer.’
What may? ‘Windows is closing down.’
But Windows isn’t. Who can I ring
to rescue me, at nearly midnight?
Somehow, between us, we survive,
even though I’ve lost page 4
and all the margins have gone crazy.
What if I’ve bought the wrong scanner?
What if my printer’s rather slow?
I’m getting rather slow myself.
It’s nearly midnight once again,
and Windows isn’t closing down –
nor do I want it to, just yet.
We’re in it together. So be it.
I’ll sit here, at the end of an age,
and wait for the great roll-over.
Kensington Gardens
Droppings
Poetry for the summer. It comes out blinking
from hibernation, sniffs at pollen and scents,
and agrees to trundle around with me, for as long
as the long days last, digesting what we discover
and now and then extruding a little package of words.
Poetry Placement
They suggest I hold court in the Queen’s Temple
(hoping it doesn’t smell of urine).
Too exposed, I say; no doors or windows.
We settle for a room by the Powder Store (1805):
where else should poets meet but in a magazine?
Peter Pan
What was the creepiest thing about him?
The callousness? The flitting with fairies?
The detachable shadow? No,
that feature that was most supposed to entrance you:
the ‘little pearls’ of his never-shed milk-teeth.
The Fairies’ Winter Palace
Queen Caroline, I think, planted these chestnuts
with their spiralling ridged bark. In another world
Peter and his freaky friends claimed this hollow one,
capacious enough for several children, if they dare,
to stand inside, holding their breath. Don’t try it!
Heron
A seagull on every post but one;
on the nearest post a heron.
Is he asleep? Stuffed, nailed to his perch?
He hunches a scornful shoulder, droops
an eyelid. Find out, fish!
Handful
Now that there are no sparrows
what I feel landing on my outstretched hand
with a light skitter of claws
to snatch up a peanut and whirl off
are the coloured substitutes: great tits, blue tits.
Jay
A crow in fancy dress
tricked out in pink and russet
with blue and black and white accessories
lurks in a tree, managing not to squawk
his confession: ‘I am not a nice bird.’
*
Sandy
A cold day, for July, by the Serpentine.
She brings us up to date on her melanoma:
some capillary involvement, this time.
Just here is where her grandparents first met.
She still hopes to finish her family history.
*
Aegithalos Caudatus
Don’t think I didn’t see you in the apple tree,
three of you, hanging out with the gang, your long tails
making the other tits look docked; and in the roses –
all that dangling upside-down work – feeding, I hope,
on aphids. Come any time. My garden’s all yours.
*
Birthday Card
This Winifred Nicholson card for my mother’s birthday,
because she loves Winifred Nicholson’s work –
or did, when she had her wits. Now, if all that’s forgotten,
she may at least perhaps like it, each new time
it strikes her: ‘That’s nice… That’s nice… That’s nice.’
*
Polypectomy
‘You need a bolster,’ said the nurse, strapping a roll
of gauze under my nose, when my dressings threatened
to bleed into my soup. I sat up in bed
insinuating the spoon under my bloody moustache
and crowing internally: after all that, real life.
Butterfly Food
The Monarch caterpillars were crawling away,
having stripped bare the only plant they could fancy.
We raced to the Garden Centre for two more,
and decked them with stripy dazzlers – lucky to have hatched
in NZ and not in the GM USA.
Checking Out
In my love affair with the natural world
I plan to call quits before it all turns sour:
before the last thrush or the last skylark,
departing, leaves us at each other’s throats,
I intend to be bone-meal, scattered.
Goodbye
Goodbye, summer. Poetry goes to bed.
The scruffy blue tits by the Long Water are fed
for the last time from my palm – with cheese, not bread
(more sustaining). The chestnut blossoms are dead.
The gates close early. What wanted to be said is said.
Index of titles and first lines
(Titles are shown in italics, first lines in roman type.)
Abandoning all my principles, 82
Accidental, 89
Accidents, 177
A cold day, for July, by the Serpentine, 277
Acris Hiems, 74
Across the Moor, 142
A crow in fancy dress, 277
A Day in October, 105
Advice to a Discarded Lover, 29
Aegithalos Caudatus, 278
After they had not made love, 40
Afterwards, 40
Against Coupling, 49
A Game, 34
A garland for Dame Propinquity, goddess, 263
A Haunting, 243
A Hymn to Friendship, 214
Air-raid shelters at school were damp tunnels, 169
A letter from that pale city, 74
All my dead people, 76
All my scars are yours. We talk of pledges, 18
All the flowers have gone back into the ground, 25
Already I know my way around the bazaar, 80
Aluminium, 213
Amelia, 241
A Message, 89
Among the Roman love-poets, possession, 14
An Apology, 262
Ancestor to Devotee, 247
An Emblem, 137
An Epitaph, 176
Angry Mozart: the only kind for now, 129
An Illustration to Dante, 77
Anne Welby, 246
Another poem about a Norfolk church, 90
A Political Kiss, 262
A postcard from my father’s childhood, 195
Arranging for my due ration of terror, 94
A seagull on every post but one, 277
As if the week had begun anew, 204
A small dazzle of stained glass which, 157
A snail is climbing up the window-sill, 21
A splodge of blood on the oak floor, 251
A Surprise in the Peninsula, 38
At Baddesley Clinton, 251
At Great Hampden, 250
At Moa Point that afternoon, 64
At the Creative Writing Course, 92
A Visiting Angel, 274
A Walk in the Snow, 105
A wall of snuffling snouts in close-up, 201
A Way Out, 87
Barber, 242
Beanfield, 247
Beauty Abroad, 17
Beaux Yeux, 94
Bed and Breakfast, 260
Being Blind, 41
Being in Mr Wood’s class this time, 170
Being Taken from the Place, 176
Below Loughrigg, 118
Bethan and Bethany, 143
Bethan and Bethany sleep in real linen, 143
Binoculars, 119
Birthday Card, 278
Blue Footprints in the Snow, 265
Blue Glass, 143
Bodnath, 79
Bogyman, 35
Books, music, the garden, cats, 70
Boss-eye, wall-eye, squinty lid, 110
Briddes, 65
‘Briddes’ he used to call them, 65
British, more or less; Anglican, of a kind, 61
‘But look at all this beauty,’ 44
Butterfly Food, 278
But there’s no snow yet: the footprints, 265
Camping, 259
Can it be that I was unfair, 262
Carrying still the dewy rose, 17
Caterpillars are falling on the Writers’ Union, 156
Cat’s-Eye, 110
Cattle in Mist, 195
Central Time, 206
Checking Out, 279
Chippenham, 171
Choices, 184
Clarendon Whatmough, 36
Clarendon Whatmough sits in his chair, 36
Clear is the man and of a cold life, 103
Come, literature, and salve our wounds, 209
Coming out with your clutch of postcards, 156
Comment, 22
Composition for Words and Paint, 24
Corrosion, 130
Counting, 192
Country Station, 48
Coupling, 204
Crab, 135
Creosote, 206
Danger: Swimming and Boating Prohibited, 264
Dear Jim, I’m using a Shakespearian form, 68
Dear posterity, it’s 2 a.m., 136
Dear So-and-so, you’re seventy. Well done, 263
Death by drowning drowns the soul, 174
December Morning, 75
Declensions, 123
Demonstration, 188
Discreet, not cryptic. I write to you from the garden, 89
Don’t think I didn’t see you in the apple tree, 278
Doom and sunshine stream over the garden, 131
Double-take, 183
Downstream, 128
Drawings, 179
Dreaming, 141
Dreamy with illness, 134
‘Drink water from the hollow in the stone…’, 60
Droppings, 276
Drowning, 174
Dry Spell, 100
Earlswood, 169
Easter, 272
Eat their own hair, sheep do, 182
Eclipse, 135
Elm, laburnum, hawthorn, oak, 47
Emily Brontë’s cleaning the car, 203
England’s Glory, 163
Excavations, 181
External Service, 80
Failing their flesh and bones we have the gatepost, 236
Fairy-tale, 92
Festschrift, 263
Feverish, 72
Finding I’ve walked halfway around Loughrigg, 120
Fiona’s parents need her today, 212
First she made a little garden, 48
First there is the hill, 112
Flames, 242
Flight, with Mountains, 15
Flying Back, 80
Folie à Deux, 73
For a Five-Year-Old, 21
For Andrew, 21
Foreigner, 107
Forget about the school – there was one, 167
For Heidi with Blue Hair, 161
For her gravestone to have been moved is OK, 246
For Meg, 273
4 May 1979, 131
Framed, 234
Frances, 248
From the Demolition Zone, 209
Future Work, 84
Gas, 52
/>
Gentlemen’s Hairdressers, 186
Giggling, 269
Glenshane, 82
Going Back, 113
Going Out from Ambleside, 124
Goodbye, 279
Goodbye, sweet symmetry. Goodbye, sweet world, 190
Goodbye, summer. Poetry goes to bed, 279
Goslings dive in the lake, 86
Grandma, 42
Great-great-great-uncle Frances Eggington, 235
Half an hour before my flight was called, 95
Half the things you did were too scary for me, 273
Halfway Street, Sidcup, 166
Handful, 277
Happiness, 204
Happy Ending, 40
Hauntings, 28
Having No Mind for the Same Poem, 98
He gurgled beautifully on television, 132
He had followed her across the moor, 142
He is lying on his back watching a kestrel, 124
He is my green branch growing in a far plantation, 44
Heliopsis Scabra, 200
He looked for it in the streets first, 240
Help! It’s hidden my document, 275
Here are Paolo and Francesca, 77
Here are the ploughed fields of Middle England, 202
Here, children, are the pastel 50s for you, 272
Here is a hole full of men shouting, 181
Heron, 277
Her very hand. Her signature, 248
High Society, 272
His jailer trod on a rose-petal, 65
Hotspur, 148
House-martins, 200
House-talk, 107
How can I prove to you, 198
‘Hoy!’ A hand hooks me into a doorway, 243
I am in a foreign country, 81