Poems 1960-2000 (6 page)

You recognise a body by its blemishes:

moles and birthmarks, scars, tattoos, oddly formed earlobes.

The present examination must be managed

in darkness, and by touch alone. That should suffice.

Starting at the head, then, there is a small hairless

scar on the left eyebrow; the bridge of the nose flat;

crowded lower teeth, and a chipped upper canine

(the lips part to let my fingers explore); a mole

on the right side of the neck.

                                             No need to go on:

I know it all. But as I draw away, a hand

grips mine: a hand whose thumb bends back as mine does, whose

third finger bears the torn nail I broke in the door

last Thursday; and I feel these fingers check the scar

on my knuckle, measure my wrist’s circumference,

move on gently exploring towards my elbow…

It was gas, we think.

Insects and reptiles survived it

and most of the birds;

also the larger mammals – grown

cattle, a few sheep,

horses, the landlord’s Alsatian

(I shall miss the cats)

and, in this village, about a

fifth of the people.

It culled scientifically

within a fixed range,

sparing the insignificant

and the chosen strong.

It let us sleep for fourteen hours

and wake, not caring

whether we woke or not, in a

soft antiseptic

silence. There was a faint odour

of furniture-wax.

We know now, of course, more or less

what happened, but then

it was rather puzzling: to wake

from a thick dark sleep

lying on the carpeted floor

in the saloon bar

of the Coach and Horses; to sense

others lying near,

very still; and nearest to me

this new second self.

I had one history until today:

now I shall have two.

No matter how nicely she may contrive

to do what I do

there are two hearts now for our identical

blood to pass through.

Nothing can change her. Whether she walks by my side

like a silly twin

or dyes her hair, adopts a new accent,

disguises her skin

with make-up and suntan, she cannot alter

the creature within.

She sees with my imperfect vision, she wears

my fingerprints; she is made

from me. If she should break the bones I gave her,

if disease should invade

her replicas of my limbs and organs,

which of us is betrayed?

How was she torn out of me? Was it the

urgent wrench of birth, a matter of hard

breathless shoving (but there is no blood) or

Eve from Adam’s rib, quick and surgical

(but there is no scar) or did I burgeon

with fleshy buds along my limbs, growing

a new substance from that gas I drank in,

to double myself ? Did I perform the

amoeba’s trick of separating into

two loose amorphous halves, a heart in each?

Or was my skin slipped off like the skin of

a peanut, to reveal two neat sections,

face to face and identical, within?

Yes, we had better say it was like this:

for if it was birth, which was the mother?

Since both have equal rights to our past, she

might justly claim to have created me.

It is the sixth day

now, and nothing much has happened.

Those of us who are

double (all the living ones) go

about our business.

The two Mrs Hudsons bake bread

in the pub kitchen

and contrive meals from what is left –

few shops are open.

The two Patricks serve in the bar

(Bill Hudson is dead).

I and my new sister stay here –

it seems easiest –

and help with the housework; sometimes

we go for walks, or

play darts or chess, finding ourselves

not as evenly

matched as we might have expected:

our capacity

is equal, but our moods vary.

These things occupy

the nights – none of us needs sleep now.

Only the dead sleep

laid out in all the beds upstairs.

They do not decay,

(some effect of the gas) and this

seemed a practical

and not irreverent means of

dealing with them. My

dead friend from London

and a housemaid from the hotel

lie in the bedroom

where we two go to change our clothes.

This evening when we

had done our hair before dinner

we combed and arranged

theirs too.

Saturday night in the bar; eight couples

fill it well enough: twin schoolteachers, two

of the young man from the garage, four girls

from the shop next door, some lads from the farms.

These woodenly try to chat up the girls,

but without heart. There is no sex now, when

each has his undeniable partner,

and no eyes or hands for any other.

Division, not union, is the way we

must reproduce now. Nor can one think with

desire or even curiosity

of one’s identical other. How lust

for what is utterly familiar?

How place an auto-erotic hand on

a thigh which matches one’s own? So we chat

about local events: the twin calves born,

it seems, on every farm; the corpse

in a well, and the water quite unspoiled;

the Post Office reopened, but with no

telephone links to places further than

the next town – just as there are no programmes

on television or radio, and

the single newspaper that we have seen

(a local one) contained only poems.

No one cares much for communication

outside this circle. I am forgetting

my work in London, my old concerns (we

laugh about the unpaid rent, the office

unmanned, the overdue library books).

They did a good job, whoever they were.

Two patterns of leaves above me: laurel

rather low, on my right,

and high on my left sycamore; a sky

pale grey: dawn or twilight.

Dew on my face, and on the gravel path

on which I am lying.

That scent of wax in the air, and a few

birds beginning to sing.

My mind is hazed by a long sleep – the first

for days. But I can tell

how it has been: the gas caught us walking

on this path, and we fell.

I feel a crystal, carolling lightness.

Beside me I can see

my newest self. It has happened again:

division, more of me.

Four, perhaps? We two stand up together,

dazed, euphoric, and go

to seek out our matching others, knowing

that they should be two, now.

My partner had been walking, I recall,

a little way ahead.

We find her. But there is only one. I

look upon myself, dead.

This is becoming ridiculous:

the gas visits us regularly,

dealing out death or duplication.

I am eight people now – and four dead

(these propped up against the trees in the

gardens, by the gravel walk). We eight

have inherited the pub, and shall,

if we continue to display our

qualities of durability,

inherit the village, God help us.

I see my image everywhere –

feeding the hens, hoeing the spinach,

peeling the potatoes, devising

a clever dish with cabbage and eggs.

I am responsible with and for

all. If B (we go by letters now)

forgets to light the fire, I likewise

have forgotten. If C breaks a cup

we all broke it. I am eight people,

a kind of octopus or spider,

and I cannot say it pleases me.

Sitting through our long sleepless nights, we

no longer play chess or poker (eight

identical hands, in which only

the cards are different). Now, instead,

we plan our death. Not quite suicide,

but a childish game: when the gas comes

(we can predict the time within a

margin of two days) we shall take care

to be in dangerous places. I can

see us all, wading in the river

for hours, taking long baths, finding

ladders and climbing to paint windows

on the third storey. It will be fun –

something, at last, to entertain us.

Winter. The village is silent –

no lights in the windows, and

a corpse in every snowdrift.

The electricity failed

months ago. We have chopped down half

the orchard for firewood,

and live on the apples we picked

in autumn. (That was a fine

harvest-day: three of us fell down

from high trees when the gas came.)

One way and another, in fact,

we are reduced now to two –

it can never be one alone,

for the survivor always

wakes with a twin.

                              We have great hopes

of the snow. At this moment

she is standing outside in it

like Socrates. We work shifts,

two hours each. But this evening

when gas-time will be closer

we are going to take blankets

and make up beds in the snow –

as if we were still capable

of sleep. And indeed, it may

come to us there: our only sleep.

Come, gentle gas

I lie and look at the night.

The stars look normal enough –

it has nothing to do with them –

and no new satellite

or comet has shown itself.

There is nothing up there to blame.

Come from wherever

She is quiet by my side.

I cannot see her breath

in the frost-purified air.

I would say she had died

if so natural a death

were possible now, here.

Come with what death there is

You have killed almost a score

of the bodies you made

from my basic design.

I offer you two more.

Let the mould be destroyed:

it is no longer mine.

Come, then, secret scented double-dealing gas.

We are cold: come and warm us.

We are tired: come and lull us.

Complete us.

Come. Please.

‘Drink water from the hollow in the stone…’

This was it, then – the cure for madness:

a rock with two round cavities, filled with rain;

a thing I’d read about once, and needed then,

but since forgotten. I didn’t expect it here –

not having read the guidebook;

not having planned, even, to be in Antrim.

‘There’s a round tower, isn’t there?’ I’d asked.

The friendly woman in the post office

gave me directions: ‘Up there past the station,

keep left, on a way further – it’s a fair bit –

and have you been to Lough Neagh yet?’ I walked –

it wasn’t more than a mile – to the stone phallus

rising above its fuzz of beech trees

in the municipal gardens. And beside it,

this. I circled around them,

backing away over wet grass and beechmast,

aiming the camera (since I had it with me,

since I was playing tourist this afternoon)

and saw two little boys pelting across.

‘Take our photo! Take our photo! Please!’

We talked it over for a bit –

how I couldn’t produce one then and there;

but could I send it to them with the postman?

Well, could they give me their addresses?

Kevin Tierney and Declan McCallion,

Tobergill Gardens. I wrote, they stood and smiled,

I clicked, and waved goodbye, and went.

Two miles away, an hour later,

heading dutifully through the damp golf-course

to Lough Neagh, I thought about the rock,

wanting it. Not for my own salvation;

hardly at all for me: for sick Belfast,

for the gunmen and the slogan-writers,

for the poor crazy girl I met in the station,

for Kevin and Declan, who would soon mistrust

all camera-carrying strangers. But of course

the thing’s already theirs: a monument,

a functionless, archaic, pitted stone

and a few mouthfuls of black rainwater.

British, more or less; Anglican, of a kind.

In Cookstown I dodge the less urgent question

when a friendly Ulsterbus driver raises it;

‘You’re not a Moneymore girl yourself ?’ he asks,

deadpan. I make a cowardly retrogression,

slip ten years back. ‘No, I’m from New Zealand.’

‘Are you now? Well, that’s a coincidence:

the priest at Moneymore’s a New Zealander.’

And there’s the second question, unspoken.

Unanswered.

                      I go to Moneymore

anonymously, and stare at all three churches.

In Belfast, though, where sides have to be taken,

I stop compromising – not that you’d guess,

seeing me hatless there among the hatted,

neutral voyeur among the shining faces

in the glossy Martyrs’ Memorial Free Church.

The man himself is cheerleader in the pulpit

for crusader choruses: we’re laved in blood,

marshalled in ranks. I chant the nursery tunes

and mentally cross myself. You can’t stir me

with evangelistic hymns, Dr Paisley:

I know them. Nor with your computer-planned

sermon – Babylon, Revelation, whispers

of popery, slams at the IRA, more blood.

I scrawl incredulous notes under my hymnbook

and burn with Catholicism.

                                              Later

hacking along the Lower Falls Road

against a gale, in my clerical black coat,

I meet a bright gust of tinselly children

in beads and lipstick and their mothers’ dresses

for Hallowe’en; who chatter and surround me.

Over-reacting once again (a custom

of the country, not mine alone) I give them

all my loose change for their rattling tin

and my blessing – little enough. But now

to my tough Presbyterian ancestors,

Brooks and Hamilton, lying in the graves

I couldn’t find at Moneymore and Cookstown

among so many unlabelled bones, I say:

I embrace you also, my dears.