Poems 1960-2000 (19 page)

I wish to apologise for being mangled.

It was the romantic temperament

that did for me. I could stand rejection –

so grand, ‘the stone the builders rejected…’ –

but not acceptance. ‘Alas,’ I said

(a word I use), ‘alas, I am taken

up, or in, or out of myself :

shall I never be solitary?’

Acceptance fell on me like a sandbag.

My bones crack. It squelches out of them.

Ah, acceptance! Leave me under this stone. 

Less like an aircraft than a kettle,

this van, the way the floor buzzes

tinnily over its boiling wheels,

rolling me south.

                           Sounds flick backwards

in a travelling cauldron of noise. I lie

on the metal floor, hearing their voices

whirring like mechanical flies

over the seething burr of the engine. 

They won’t hear if I talk to myself;

whatever I say they can’t hear me.

I say ‘Illness is a kind of failure.’

I say ‘Northumbrian rose quartz.’ 

The accidents are never happening :

they are too imaginable to be true.

The driver knows his car is still on the road,

heading for Durham in the rain.

The mother knows her baby is just asleep,

curled up with his cuddly blanket, waiting

to be lifted and fed: there’s no such thing as cot-death.

The rescue party digging all night in the dunes

can’t believe the tunnel has really collapsed:

the children have somehow gone to their Auntie’s house;

she has lent them their cousins’ pyjamas, they are sitting

giggling together in the big spare room,

pretending to try and spill each other’s cocoa. 

I’m still too young to remember how

I learned to mind a team of horses,

to plough and harrow: not a knack

you’d lose easily, once you had it. 

It was in the Great War, that much

remembered age. I was a landgirl

in my puttees and boots and breeches

and a round hat like a felt halo. 

We didn’t mind the lads laughing:

let them while they could, we thought,

they hadn’t long. But it seemed long –

hay-making, and apple-picking, 

and storing all those scented things

in sneezy dimness in the barn.

Then Jack turned seventeen and went,

and I knew Ted would go soon. 

He went the week of Candlemas.

After that it was all weather:

frosts and rains and spring and summer,

and the long days growing longer. 

It rained for the potato harvest.

The front of my smock hung heavy

with claggy mud, from kneeling in it

mining for strays. Round segments 

chopped clean off by the blade

flashed white as severed kneecaps.

I grubbed for whole ones, baby skulls

to fill my sack again and again. 

When the pain came, it wouldn’t

stop. I couldn’t stand. I dropped

the sack and sank into a trench.

Ethel found me doubled up. 

Mr Gregson took me home,

jolting on the back of the wagon.

I tossed and writhed on my hard bed,

my head hunched into the bolster, 

dreaming of how if just for once,

for half an hour, the knobbly mattress

could turn into a billow of clouds

I might be able to get to sleep. 

In the interests of economy

I am not going to tell you

what happened between the time

when they checked into the hotel 

with its acres of tiled bathrooms

(but the bidet in theirs was cracked)

and the morning two days later

when he awoke to find her gone. 

After he had read her note

and done the brief things he could do

he found himself crossing the square

to the Orthodox Cathedral. 

The dark icon by the door

was patched with lumpy silver islands

nailed to the Virgin’s robes; they looked

like flattened-out Monopoly tokens, 

he thought: a boot, and something like

a heart, and a pair of wings, and something

oblong. They were hard to see

in the brown light, but he peered at them 

for several minutes, leaning over

the scarved head of an old woman

on her knees there, blocking his view;

who prayed and prayed and wouldn’t move. 

The ones not in the catalogue:

little sketches, done in her garden – this

head of a child (the same child

we saw in the picnic scene, remember?)

And trees, of course, and grasses,

and a study of hawthorn berries.

Doodles, unfinished drafts: look

at this chestnut leaf, abandoned in mid-

stroke – a telephone-call, perhaps;

a visitor; some interruption. 

She may have been happier,

or happy longer, or at least more often…

but that’s presumption. Let’s move on:

grasses again; a group of stones

from her rockery, done in charcoal; and this

not quite completed pencil sketch of

a tiger lily, the springy crown

of petals curved back on itself

right to the stem, the long electric

stamens almost still vibrating.

They asked me ‘Are you sitting down?

Right? This is Universal Lotteries,’

they said. ‘You’ve won the top prize,

the Ultra-super Global Special.

What would you do with a million pounds?

Or, actually, with more than a million –

not that it makes a lot of difference

once you’re a millionaire.’ And they laughed. 

‘Are you OK?’ they asked – ‘Still there?

Come on, now, tell us, how does it feel?’

I said ‘I just…I can’t believe it! ’

They said ‘That’s what they all say.

What else? Go on, tell us about it.’

I said ‘I feel the top of my head

has floated off, out through the window,

revolving like a flying saucer.’ 

‘That’s unusual,’ they said. ‘Go on.’

I said ‘I’m finding it hard to talk.

My throat’s gone dry, my nose is tingling.

I think I’m going to sneeze – or cry.’

‘That’s right,’ they said, ‘don’t be ashamed

of giving way to your emotions.

It isn’t every day you hear

you’re going to get a million pounds. 

Relax, now, have a little cry;

we’ll give you a moment…’ ‘Hang on!’ I said.

‘I haven’t bought a lottery ticket

for years and years. And what did you say

the company’s called?’ They laughed again.

‘Not to worry about a ticket.

We’re Universal. We operate

a Retrospective Chances Module. 

Nearly everyone’s bought a ticket

in some lottery or another,

once at least. We buy up the files,

feed the names into our computer,

and see who the lucky person is.’

‘Well, that’s incredible,’ I said.

‘It’s marvellous. I still can’t quite…

I’ll believe it when I see the cheque.’ 

‘Oh,’ they said, ‘there’s no cheque.’

‘But the money?’ ‘We don’t deal in money.

Experiences are what we deal in.

You’ve had a great experience, right?

Exciting? Something you’ll remember?

That’s your prize. So congratulations

from all of us at Universal.

Have a nice day!’ And the line went dead.

Here is a hole full of men shouting

‘I don’t love you. I loved you once

but I don’t now. I went off you,

or I was frightened, or my wife was pregnant,

or I found I preferred men instead.’ 

What can I say to that kind of talk?

‘Thank you for being honest, you

who were so shifty when it happened,

pretending you were suddenly busy

with your new job or your new conscience.’ 

I chuck them a shovelful of earth

to make them blink for a bit, to smirch

their green eyes and their long lashes

or their brown eyes…Pretty bastards:

the rain will wash their bawling faces 

and I bear them little enough ill will.

Now on to the next hole,

covered and fairly well stamped down,

full of the men whom I stopped loving

and didn’t always tell at the time – 

being, I found, rather busy

with my new man or my new freedom.

These are quiet and unaccusing,

cuddled up with their subsequent ladies,

hardly unsettling the bumpy ground. 

Eat their own hair, sheep do,

nibbling away under the snow, under their bellies –

calling it wool makes it no more palatable. 

What else is there to do in the big drifts,

forced against a wall of wet stone?

But let me have your hair to nibble 

before we are in winter; and the thong

of dark seeds you wear at your neck;

and for my tongue the salt on your skin to gobble.

The young are walking on the riverbank,

arms around each other’s waists and shoulders,

pretending to be looking at the waterlilies

and what might be a nest of some kind, over

there, which two who are clamped together

mouth to mouth have forgotten about.

The others, making courteous detours

around them, talk, stop talking, kiss.

They can see no one older than themselves.

It’s their river. They’ve got all day. 

Seeing’s not everything. At this very

moment the middle-aged are kissing

in the backs of taxis, on the way

to airports and stations. Their mouths and tongues

are soft and powerful and as moist as ever.

Their hands are not inside each other’s clothes

(because of the driver) but locked so tightly

together that it hurts: it may leave marks

on their not of course youthful skin, which they won’t

notice. They too may have futures. 

You see your nextdoor neighbour from above,

from an upstairs window, and he reminds you

of your ex-lover, who is bald on top,

which you had forgotten. At ground level

there is no resemblance. Next time you chat

with your nextdoor neighbour, you are relieved

to find that you don’t fancy him. 

A week later you meet your ex-lover

at a party, after more than a year.

He reminds you (although only slightly)

of your nextdoor neighbour. He has a paunch

like your neighbour’s before he went on that diet.

You remember how much you despise him. 

He behaves as if he’s pleased to see you.

When you leave (a little earlier

than you’d intended, to get away)

he gives you a kiss which is more than neighbourly

and says he’ll ring you. He seems to mean it.

How odd! But you are quite relieved

to find that you don’t fancy him. 

Unless you do? Or why that sudden

something, once you get outside

in the air? Why are your legs prancing

so cheerfully along the pavement?

And what exactly have you just remembered?

You go home cursing chemistry.

There was never just one book for the desert island,

one perfectly tissue-typed aesthetic match,

that wouldn’t drive you crazy within six months;

just as there was never one all-purpose

ideal outfit, unquestionably right

for wearing at the ball on the
Titanic

and also in the lifeboat afterwards.

And never,
a fortiori
, just one man;

if it’s not their conversation or their habits

(more irritating, even, than your own –

and who would you wish those on?) it’s their bodies:

two-thirds of them get fatter by the minute,

the bony ones turn out to be psychopaths,

and the few in the middle range go bald.

Somehow you’ll end up there, on the island,

in your old jeans and that comic dressing-gown

one of the fast-fatteners always laughed at,

with a blank notebook (all you’ve brought to read)

and a sea-and-sun-proof crate of cigarettes;

but with nobody, thank God, to lecture you

on how he managed to give them up.

This is the front door. You can just see

the number on it, there behind the piano,

between the young man with the fierce expression

and the one with the axe, who’s trying not to laugh. 

Those furry-headed plants beside the step

are Michaelmas daisies, as perhaps you’ve guessed,

although they’re not in colour; and the path

is tiled in red and black, like a Dutch interior. 

But the photograph, of course, is black and white.

The piano also sported black and white

when it was whole (look, you can see its ribcage,

the wiry harp inside it, a spread wing). 

The young men are playing Laurel and Hardy

(though both are tall, and neither of them is fat,

and one of them is actually a pianist):

they are committing a pianocide. 

It wasn’t really much of a piano:

warped and fungoid, grossly out of tune –

facts they have not imparted to the wincing

passers-by, whom you will have to imagine. 

You will also have to imagine, if you dare,

the jangling chords of axe-blow, saw-stroke, screeching

timber, wires twanged in a terminal

appassionato. This is a silent picture. 

Laurel and Hardy will complete their show:

the wires, released from their frame, will thrash and tangle

and be tamed into a ball; the varnished panels

will be sawn stacks of boards and blocks and kindling. 

Later the mother will come home for Christmas.

The fire will purr and tinkle in the grate,

a chromatic harmony of tones; and somewhere

there’ll be a muffled sack of snarling keys.