Three Poems
Page 4
why he was dialysed, drained, pumped with albumin;
why he didn’t watch the television you paid for
how
it feels to staunch a neck with your thumb,
poking the gristle back in, how tricky it is;
how small hospital gloves are
if
he waited all night for the cornflakes and ice cubes
or had pleasure in anything
how the foetus lolls in the womb
swelling like a wine cork left out on the counter
dozing, growing its head hair …
how hospital car parks look at dawn,
how tiring pregnancy would be,
how you spent his last morning
not visiting, wandering between cafes,
looking for eggs fried not poached;
how he wasn’t himself
why the new waxwork lolls in the bed,
the colour of A4 rubbed with Nescafé,
the distressed colour of fake parchment;
blank, dismayed, the worn-off face
of a cloth doll a girl is bored by
that there is no necessary season for things
and birth and death happen on adjacent wards,
that both are labour, halting and starting;
that women are always the middlemen
finding the coins …
ave, morituri te salutant.
respice …
I felt I was being very brave, once the cramps started.
I tried to let my husband get his sleep.
I lay watching the streetlight through the shutters,
Finding nothing in the sky to listen to.
Even the air ambulance was still,
Squatting like a locust on the roundabout,
And the planes had not begun circling Heathrow:
They were still serving breakfast over Ireland,
Or spiralling like campfires from Treviso.
I thought of their shadows over the Alps;
I wanted to think of snow sifted on snow,
But I kept seeing sharp kneecaps of ice,
And loose pastures of gentians.
And then I was dreaming of a Red Cross plane.
My father was driving us through the chalk cut,
‘Look’, he said,
And the plane sang into the escarpment
Waggling where the red kites used to fly,
Pluck.
And then there were others, like pub darts,
Pluck. Pluck.
As soon as it was light, the cramps had gone,
And the baby was hiccoughing and the shower was on.
So I lurched downstairs for another bowl of pineapple.
I had finished the raspberry-leaf tea.
Outside the magnolia was getting rheumatism,
It tapped its swollen fingers on the fence.
Spring. Spring.
A little wren on the grass,
Pigeons stacking like Tupperware.
Think of the saltwater eel in the suburban restaurant.
It wants to be rid of the tank, the shriek of lobsters,
The monotonous view of leatherette banquettes,
The off-duty industry folk, greedily appraising,
‘Let’s do it half sashimi-style, half dry-fried-spicy’,
And also not to be rid of the tank, to remain forever
Chosen and not yet chosen, neither living nor dead,
Eddying between two walls of bubbling glass.
Learn something about indifference.
Think of the QE2, the hospital built like a ship,
With views of the waterworks of Edgbaston
And the tall dilapidated red-brick folly
That Perrott built – twin towers
To see his dead wife’s grave
Or spy the living woman
Bustling self-satisfied from another’s man’s hands,
Or both …
Think of your father explaining it,
How Tolkien twinned the towers in his mind,
Walking from his aunt’s house past the gasworks,
Through elm trees, elm trees whispering,
Thinking and not thinking of his mother dying,
Tapping on his teeth the Greek reduplicated perfect.
Think of the wizened nectarines on the windowsill
Like shepherdesses on a mantelpiece.
Think of the windowsill without the nectarines.
Here is the sound dying, and the ragged inhalation,
Here is the open vowel and the stop, om.
And here is the shriek at dawn from the other room,
The toddler’s quick crescendo of wanting.
Om, om.
His mouth is like a mussel prising open.
Here is the milk. Mamma.
Here is the salt you wanted on your tongue.
And then there is the broken shell with its frills and ribs,
The castanet bits in your palm.
In each calcified stripe of white,
A year in which something was living.
Om.
I lowered myself in my blue gown,
I submitted to being shaved. I had sent my last emails.
I felt mulish, like someone who has tidied too many drawers,
Aggrieved with myself and the world.
I was growing still larger, despite the two extra weeks,
And three sweeps, the midwife finicky,
And the foetus unmovable, indifferent.
I had, of course, begun to resent it,
And the insistence on it coming out.
So, surgery. But it was not an emergency.
It wasn’t even like cancer. It was more like adenoids.
The surgeon seemed too young,
The anaesthetist had something of the hockey team about her.
There was a cannula and they poked my legs.
It was as if I had been planning to fly to Greece,
But ended up on a coach, listening to the toilet’s slurry,
With only a third of a book left,
And a flat warm bottle of San Pellegrino.
I tried to close my eyes, to surrender to time’s mechanism,
And then I petrified: feet, knees, thighs, and further up
My hands pawing at nothing, my lungs
Crushed by the bump I felt nothing moving in.
It was like dying at the hairdresser’s, fingers
Fluttering soap in the grooves of your ears,
Exchanging pleasantries, in extremis.
The anaesthetist worked up my legs,
Tap, tap, swishing her braid: can you feel here?
Here?
I wanted to vomit but my body had no rotation, so I said,
‘I want to die’, quite loudly, and everyone was angry.
You’re not going to die, you’re going to have a baby.
Apothanein thelo, I am going to have a baby.
Afterwards we agreed I had not been very brave.
Under a tangle of capillaries,
A baby is dreaming of his old home.
The Sunday morning swimming pool
Of far-off children.
Then yellow glows in the curtains
And his mouth snapdragons open.
The unused breast is filled with pebbles,
The mouth finds its fish lips.
This is the world:
The street-cleaning machine
The slow lob of rubbish
And the binmen calling.
3. When the Egg Meets the Whisk
If you do not weep now, you may never weep.
Because when you return, there will only be a cubicle,
And the nectarines on the hospital windowsill.
Things slump, dirty themselves, become compound.
Mould forms its spores on bread, and sheep get shaggier.
Cherry blossom settles on cars like sunroofs.
Jumpers bobble.
You know all this
:
The look of meat minced or raw or browning in the pan,
The newborn baby’s eye like a poster of the Aegean,
And how the iris tans, brindles, picks up its sun-spots,
Spins colour like roulette.
And yet you always forget …
Like the sand from Petra, when the jar flies from the shelf,
Forgetting its layers …
Think of a children’s sandpit after rain,
Seaweed of twigs, blown Costa cups, a capsized sock,
The filthy abandoned homes of snails,
A spade. And beyond the sand, the municipal grass,
With its round fox turds and burrowed loose earth and pellets,
And the hairy scallion clumps that follow bluebells.
Think of the discretion of a bluebell;
Think of municipal grass.
Think of your back at twenty: a map of nothing, a Pacific.
And then the colonies of pain, the trigger points,
The knotty sheaths of fascia you pay people to pound,
The Balkanisation of the muscle groups …
Think of the reality of breastfeeding:
Your fingers gleaming like crab-claws under the tap,
The breast pump drying on its rack, the lip valve missing,
The full bottle tipping voluptuously into the carpet pile,
The freezer with its little packs of frozen pastry,
The baby alone in his basket, watching the shadows.
And think of the pop, like champagne, the first time you opened formula –
The magnum bottle, the baby sick as a wedding guest,
And then soft-pillowed with his dummy on your breast.
Think how suffering is, unanimated,
The iron filings of the laughter lines unmagnetised,
Blending with the bruises:
What Crayola, what an Ash Wednesday for a face!
Think of your father’s leather valet case,
The navy dressing gown you used to put your nose in.
You hadn’t seen them since childhood,
And there they were by the side of the bed, to take home,
The leather with its evenly polished grain,
The dressing gown mended on the shoulder.
Think of a children’s sandpit after rain.
This is the world and the entropy of things,
The plugged dyke and the sea coming in,
The emendation and the introduced error,
The floor before a toddler’s pasta dinner,
The smooth pool waiting for the novice diver,
The girl’s outfit for tomorrow and her mother’s,
The first I love you and the others.
So we remember the courage of street cleaners,
Because of the hopelessness of their work,
And house painters in seaside towns,
And the charity of shift workers in hospital car parks,
Because they sit drinking tea and smoking,
And do not care for fining the dying.
And the bonhomie of Manhattan psychics,
Squatting in their basements lit like brothels,
When the season refuses to turn,
And women spend Thanksgiving alone.
Everything is dry and dead and unclean,
And love spits for information.
So we remember our own teenage selves,
And their afterlives, and the soft nectarines
We didn’t want to buy, and why:
Because of the army veterans in the lift,
And morning sickness tight under the ribs
Like someone trying on a vintage skirt;
Because of the boy in open-wove khaki
With a face like a dollar-store Halloween mask,
Who mobilised the muscles of his chin, the sinews of his neck,
To approximate a smile – to be kind to us.
As we remember our own good enough mother,
Because she was anxious about doing things wrong,
And did things wrong, and loved us.
Because she sang of buses, out of tune.
Once they began, I was calmer,
I enjoyed the gush of the knife, and the sound of the scissors,
The slop of my bowel being set to one side,
The look on the surgeon’s face, his attentiveness and shock,
‘Can someone pass me the forceps please?’
And then almost too soon, he was looking away
At the ascension of the ‘enormous baby boy’,
Rising over the curtain, into the neon ceiling.
And the glowing plinth of green, twitching,
Hacked about …
The fish thrashing on the hook that happened to it.
Well, of course: who wants to be born?
And to be hauled out, in a windowless room
Somewhere near Paddington to Radio 5 Live?
To be born purple, your hair scrambled like eggs?
I have never heard a person so incredulous with rage.
And then they couldn’t stop the bleeding.
Everything was larger than they thought, they said.
The baby, the placenta, the vessels, even the womb.
So I lay on the table, haemorrhaging,
And the alarm bell rang and the consultant asked
‘What uterine tonics have been administered?’
‘Oxytocin, ergometrine …’
It sounded like a restaurant kitchen.
Someone was washing up the fish knives,
And my husband had a face in his hands,
Grave despite the monkey hat,
Benignant, black-eyed, magnanimous.
Late on summer Saturdays,
This is what the verger sweeps:
Ombre moons, pistachios, ash,
Hearts cut from upcycled maps,
Scalloped bits of Austen novels,
Hot pushed handfuls of white petals.
This is what the broom releases:
Acetate of Camel Lights,
Pheromones of human fear,
Public libraries’ unwashed armpits,
Sweet sweat like a pound cake rising,
Modern roses’ nothingness.
This is how things mix together,
Matter’s endgame of fawn-dun,
The inevitable greyish
Persil makes its money from.
So when something singular
Comes along, it is a miracle:
Hail tap-dances down the tarmac,
Skittering in its silver shoes.
The baby did not look like my father at all,
But there was a resemblance:
Our slight awkwardness with each other.
Neither of us was at our best, that first night –
There was the puff of the pump compressing my legs,
I was giddy from the intravenous morphine, my catheter wept,
And I was amazed – after watching so much arid dialysis –
By the heavy saddlebags of urine beside the bed.
And then there was our mutual Englishness.
We tried to ignore the UV lighting coming under the curtain,
And the hissing mother of the jaundiced twins.
I couldn’t reach the plastic crib,
So you lay, all nine and a half solid pounds, in my arms,
And we were both shyly pleased with each other,
A little snobbish with relief and recognition.
That it should be you, after all –
The voice you already knew, the limbs I had already felt.
Weep at the start of the journey, before boarding even begins,
Weep whortleberry tears, brighter than the eyes of swallows,
Deeper than ponds on your father’s clean yard,
If you do not weep now, you may never weep.
Because when you return, there will only be a cubicle,
And the nectarines on the hospital windowsill,
The itch of a lost quotation in a book you cannot find.
4. The Year of Getting Cards
Look at the mantelpiece with its tents.
My life is at a distance from my life
Like the Telegraph announcements column,
Not always as interesting as the weather, and certainly
Lacking the true frisson of pleasure
That the elderly take in the dying,
The jilted in the newly engaged.
Look at my breasts, they are school bells,
And there is that pins-and-needles moment
As the ugly distended nipple fills the flange
And then the pulling pulse of the first skimmed milk,
The huge relief of the sea as it reaches the beach
And sprays, and sprays,
Before the sotto voce of the filling bottle,
Cream falling quietly into milk.
It has been the year of life events.
All these things to get a card for.
So I make milk.
I have taken down the cards that were there before.
But they, like these, were full of the feelings I ought to be feeling,
So many Duchamp readymades of grief, so many white toilet fountains,
As these are so many readymades of joy, with bears on,
Capri to Cambridge blue and celadon.
Whether
They were deprived of life
Or died, like molluscs, in their own houses.
Whether
We knew them as president
Or only visit the mansions their descendants resent:
The vestibules smeared with lemon chiffon stone from Caen,