The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley

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The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 11

by Silkworms Ink Anthologies

iv

  Ground Floor between Fiction and Poetry.

  The second time in as many days. It comes at me.

  The smell from where she sits between Travel

  and Crime is enough make browsers wrinkle

  features in ‘what is that ?’disgust. She stinks.

  Because clothes for sleeping rough, layer upon

  layer, are being walked in, underneath the visible

  leather-sheen great-coat and cap. Auschwitz ?

  That liberation shot at the wire ? No, here, beneath

  the 3 For 2 CD offers in the Borders Summer Sale.

  The truth is, she impregnates every last page of verse:

  the entire Carcanet list, the brand new Armitage,

  the Collected Muldoon, the Selected O’Hara, the new

  Billy Childish, 101 Poems That Will Change Your Life --

  you name it. We all track on by, join a queue

  to pay by plastic. She exits into Market Square, freeing

  up from under the cap her long streak-grey hair,

  making her way beyond us. I keep finding her

  days later, unremitting, unbearable still, in page

  after page of Paul Celan or Miklós Radnóti.

 

  v

  I’d made it-- broken the back

  of ‘Anna Karenina’ on a three day week

  of eight hour shifts, barely conscious

  of the world out there: the lines at Grunwick,

  the National Front, the exiled Shah. All done

  in top floor digs on the Lensfield Road, a room

  with a view over a carpark and a criminal

  Edwardian fire escape. Oliver’s army was here

  to stay. Talk over the chicken chow mein

  was of ‘narodnost’, commitment to the cause.

  Then to the place of labour: working flat out

  on bed or floor, a production line of borstal specials

  and Maxwell House brews from the communal tin.

  Snow drifted through

  the second night;

  an easterly wind jittering the string

  of the primitive extractor fan. History

  was one vast steppe. By dawn, water

  at Hobson’s Choice was laminated in ice.

  My classic set in Linotype Pilgrim fell apart

  at the death– individual leaves came away

  in my hands from the creased black spine.

  The only thing to stick was an image of Kitty

  and Levin under the Milky Way before the run

  of blank sheets you get at the very end.

 

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