Poems 1960-2000 (15 page)

Someone has nailed a lucky horse-shoe

beside my door while I was out –

or is it a loop of rubber? No:

it’s in two sections. They glide about,

silently undulating: two

slugs in a circle, tail to snout. 

The ends link up: it’s a shiny quoit

of rippling slug-flesh, thick as a snake,

liquorice-black against the white

paint; a pair of wetly-naked

tubes. It doesn’t seem quite right

to watch what kind of love they’ll make. 

But who could resist? I’ll compromise

and give them a little time alone

to nuzzle each other, slide and ooze

into conjunction on their own;

surely they’re experts, with such bodies,

each a complete erogenous zone – 

self-lubricating, swelling smooth

and boneless under grainy skin.

Ten minutes, then, for them to writhe

in privacy, to slither into

position, to arrange each lithe

tapered hose-pipe around its twin. 

All right, now, slugs, I’m back; time’s up.

And what a pretty coupling I find!

They’re swinging from the wall by a rope

of glue, spun out of their combined

mucus and anchored at the top.

It lets them dangle, intertwined, 

formally perfect, like some emblem:

heraldic serpents coiled in a twist.

But just in case their pose may seem

immodest or exhibitionist

they’ve dressed themselves in a cloud of foam,

a frothy veil for love-in-a-mist. 

In her 1930s bob or even, perhaps,

if she saw something quainter as her fashion,

long thick hair in a plait, the music student

showed her composition to her tutor;

and she aroused, or this enhanced, his passion. 

He quoted from it in his new concerto,

offering back to her as homage

those several bars of hers the pianist plays

in the second movement: part of what she dreamed

re-translated, marked more with his image. 

But the seven steady notes of the main theme

are his alone. Did the romance go well?

Whether he married her’s recorded somewhere

in books. The wistful strings, the determined

percussion, the English cadences, don’t tell.

Your villa, Katherine, but not your room,

and not much of your garden. Goods trains boom

all night, a dozen metres from the bed

where tinier tremors hurtle through my head.

The ghost of your hot flat-iron burns my lung;

my throat’s all scorching lumps. I grope among

black laurels and the shadowy date-palm, made

like fans of steel, each rustling frond a blade,

across the gravel to the outside loo

whose light won’t wake my sleeping sister. You

smoked shameless Turkish all through your TB.

I drag at Silk Cut filters, duty-free,

then gargle sensibly with Oraldene

and spit pink froth. Not blood: it doesn’t mean,

like your spat scarlet, that I’ll soon be dead –

merely that pharmacists are fond of red.

I’m hardly sick at all. There’s just this fuzz

that blurs and syncopates the singing buzz

of crickets, frogs, and traffic in my ears:

a nameless fever, atavistic fears.

Disease is portable: my bare half-week

down here’s hatched no maladie exotique;

I brought my tinglings with me, just as you

brought ragged lungs and work you burned to do;

and, as its fuel, your ecstasy-prone heart.

Whatever haunts my bloodstream didn’t start

below your villa, in our genteel den

(till lately a pissoir for passing men).

But your harsh breathing and impatient face,

bright with consumption, must have left a trace

held in the air. Well, Katherine, Goodnight:

let’s try to sleep. I’m switching out the light.

Watch me through tepid darkness, wavering back

past leaves and stucco and their reverent plaque

to open what was not in fact your door

and find my narrow mattress on the floor.

‘You’ll have to put the little girl down.’

Is it a little girl who’s bundled

in both our coats against my shoulder,

buried among the trailing cloth? 

It’s a big haul up to the quay,

my other arm heavy with luggage,

the ship lurching. Who’s my burden?

She had a man’s voice this morning. 

Floods everywhere. Monsoon rain

syphoning down into the valley.

When it stops you see the fungus

hugely coiling out of the grass. 

Really, in such a derelict lane

you wouldn’t expect so many cars,

black and square, driving jerkily.

It’s not as if we were near a village. 

Now here’s the bridal procession:

the groom pale and slender in black

and his hair black under his hat-brim;

is that a frock-coat he’s wearing? 

The bride’s as tall as his trouser pocket;

she hoists her arm to hold his hand,

and rucks her veil askew. Don’t,

for your peace of mind, look under it. 

The ceremony will be in a cavern,

a deep deserted underground station

built like a theatre; and so it is:

ochre-painted, proscenium-arched. 

The men have ribbons on their hatbands;

there they are, behind the grille,

receding with her, minute by minute,

shrivelling down the empty track.

‘Oblivion, that’s all. I never dream,’ he said –

proud of it, another immunity,

another removal from the standard frame which she

inhabited, dreaming beside him of a dead

woman tucked neatly into a small bed,

a cot or a child’s bunk, unexpectedly

victim of some friend or lover. ‘Comfort me,’

said the dreamer, ‘I need to be comforted.’

He did that, not bothering to comprehend,

and she returned to her story: a doctor came

to identify the placid corpse in her dream.

It was obscure; but glancing towards the end

she guessed that killer and lover and doctor were the same;

proving that things are ultimately what they seem.

Pink Lane, Strawberry Lane, Pudding Chare:

someone is waiting, I don’t know where;

hiding among the nursery names,

he wants to play peculiar games. 

In Leazes Terrace or Leazes Park

someone is loitering in the dark,

feeling the giggles rise in his throat

and fingering something under his coat. 

He could be sidling along Forth Lane

to stop some girl from catching her train,

or stalking the grounds of the RVI

to see if a student nurse goes by. 

In Belle Grove Terrace or Fountain Row

or Hunter’s Road he’s raring to go –

unless he’s the quiet shape you’ll meet

on the cobbles in Back Stowell Street. 

Monk Street, Friars Street, Gallowgate

are better avoided when it’s late.

Even in Sandhill and the Side

there are shadows where a man could hide. 

So don’t go lightly along Darn Crook

because the Ripper’s been brought to book.

Wear flat shoes, and be ready to run:

remember, sisters, there’s more than one.

He had followed her across the moor,

taking shortcuts, light and silent

on the grass where the fair had been –

and in such weather, the clouds dazzling

in a loud warm wind, who’d hear? 

He was almost up with her

at the far side, near the road,

when a man with a blotched skin

brought his ugly dogs towards them.

It could have been an interruption.

And as she closed the cattle-gate

in his face almost, he saw

that she was not the one, and let her go. 

There had been something. It was

not quite clear yet, he thought.

So he loitered on the bridge,

idle now, the wind in his hair,

gazing over into the stream

of traffic; and for a moment

it seemed to him he saw it there.

Bethan and Bethany sleep in real linen –

avert your covetous eyes, you starers;

their counterpanes are of handmade lace:

this is a civilised country. 

If it is all just one big suburb

gliding behind its freezing mist

it is a decorated one;

it is of brick, and it is tidy. 

Above the court-house portico

Justice holds her scales in balance;

the seventeenth-century church is locked

but the plaque outside has been regilded. 

Bethan and Bethany, twelve and eleven,

bared their eyes to the television

rose-red-neon-lit, and whispered

in their related languages. 

Guess now, through the frilled net curtains,

which belongs here and which doesn’t.

Each of them owns the same records;

this is an international culture. 

The yobs in the street hoot like all yobs,

hawk and whistle and use no language.

Bethan and Bethany stir in their sleep.

The brindled cat walks on their stomachs.

The underworld of children becomes the overworld

when Janey or Sharon shuts the attic door

on a sunny afternoon and tiptoes in sandals

that softly waffle-print the dusty floor

to the cluttered bed below the skylight,

managing not to sneeze as she lifts

newspapers, boxes, gap-stringed tennis-racquets

and a hamster’s cage to the floor, and shifts 

the tasselled cover to make a clean surface

and a pillow to be tidy under her head

before she straightens, mouths the dark sentence,

and lays herself out like a mummy on the bed. 

Her wrists are crossed. The pads of her fingertips

trace the cold glass emblem where it lies

like a chain of hailstones melting in the dips

above her collarbones. She needs no eyes 

to see it: the blue bead necklace, of sapphire

or lapis, or of other words she knows

which might mean blueness: amethyst, azure,

chalcedony can hardly say how it glows. 

She stole it. She tells herself that she found it.

It’s hers now. It owns her. She slithers among

its globular teeth, skidding on blue pellets.

Ice-beads flare and blossom on her tongue, 

turn into flowers, populate the spaces

around and below her. The attic has become

her bluebell wood. Among their sappy grasses

the light-fringed gas-flames of bluebells hum. 

They lift her body like a cloud of petals.

High now, floating, this is what she sees:

granular bark six inches from her eyeballs;

the wood of rafters is the wood of trees. 

Her breathing moistens the branches’ undersides;

the sunlight in an interrupted shaft

warms her legs and lulls her as she rides

on air, a slender and impossible raft 

of bones and flesh; and whether it is knowledge

or a limpid innocence on which she feeds

for power hasn’t mattered. She turns the necklace

kindly in her fingers, and soothes the beads.

Tricks and tumbles are my trade; I’m

all birds to all men.

I switch voices, adapt my features,

do whatever turn you fancy.

All that is constant is my hair:

plumage, darlings, beware of it.

Blackbird: that’s the one to watch –

or he is, with his gloss and weapon.

Not a profession for a female,

his brown shadow. Thrush is better,

cunning rehearser among the leaves,

and speckle-breasted, maculate.

A wound of some kind. All that talk

of the pelican, self-wounding,

feeding his brood from an ever-bleeding

bosom turns me slightly sick.

But seriousness can light upon

the flightiest. This tingling ache,

nicer than pain, is a blade-stroke:

not my own, but I let it happen.

What is balsam? What is nard?

Sweetnesses from the sweet life,

obsolete, fit only for wasting.

I groom you with this essence. Wash it

down the drain with tears and water.

We are too human. Let it pass.

With my body I thee worship:

breast on stone lies the rockdove

cold on that bare nest, cooing

its low call, unlulled,

restless for the calling to cease.

Mary Magdalene sang in the garden.

It was a swansong, said the women,

for his downdrift on the river.

It sounded more of the spring curlew

or a dawn sky full of larks,

watery trillings you could drown in.