I can see your teeth clench with rage at the gift I have pressed on you, which manoeuvres you into the role of grateful recipient of my unctuously offered, expensively wrapped and poisonously unwelcome offering. It’s hard to say if you are smiling or snarling as you turn to extol the wrapping paper.
I don’t know why it’s become important to me: the idea of a theatre supper at home? Maybe it’s a methodology for life that after decades of practice we can make it what we wish it to be: modest yet appetising, practical yet with an element of excitement pending? After so many supermarket visits made on foot or online, when the whole scene palls, and there are queues at the local eatery and we feel we are just jades pecking at the window… then our new-found theatre supper gives us a clue via an authentic half-bottle and Jansson’s Temptation. We might actually go to the theatre this time. Or not. But at least we’d be homely, sitting in the kitchen, dazed by our handiwork, speculating on our next project.
I made the mistake of getting in touch with him twenty years after – invited him to stay. He was almost alcoholic, had lost his front teeth, told endless anecdotes and, worst of all, was allergic to my dog. You’d think that’d be a cure or antidote to all those years of unrequited love spent yearning and longing, that I could forget that time — was I seventeen? — when he asked me to go with him to the States, could forget that moment years later when, at long long last he proposed, could forget that because I was young and fearful and he was wild, arty and penniless, I kept saying no. Less easy to forget how, ever since, I’ve wondered...
Forgive the figure curled like a question mark in the corner no one speaks his language He tried to read a newspaper and failed, print swimming like tadpoles in a jar At night he speaks to Napoléon of empires and dying horses in the day-room he recalls his wife She comes as ghosted as a footballer’s memoir, her face a jigsaw puzzle he can’t resolve In Occupational Therapy he’s made a basket, a crazy weave to hold his ashes; he doodles poems On toilet paper when no one’s around, the paper splits words sliced and snowing on the pissy tiles.
On these long, fruitful days, the Rioja which captures the sun of other Julys, is relaxing us, as is the summer, into this unwinding and earthy wine, into sex on the hoof, on the sofa, the Persian rug on the sitting room floor, in the hall, the kitchen by the cooker, up against the fridge, by the cupboard door, so I turn down the steaks as they sizzle and prevent potatoes boiling over, just as we turn up the heat, then simmer, get down to some sugar-icing drizzle, as if the baby we’re trying to make were spontaneous as a lemon cake.
I am your memories. They are not me. So it feels strange to be remembered by These relics of my personality. Although you mourn me, is it really me You mourn, or thoughts of me that make you cry? I am your memories. They are not me. Ridiculous, such immortality! To live like this, to hope they might not die, These relics of my personality. To be inside your head, where things you see Are seen the way I saw them. Where I sigh: ‘I am your memories. They are not me.’ They are not me and so can’t ever be Other than what they are, much as they try, These relics of my personality. I have no future any more, you see, Except in you. And that’s the reason why I am your memories. They are not me, These relics of my personality.
When she thinks (if she does) of the first James it is of a six-year-old who died when she was fourteen, of meningitis. His spirit, like a trespassing sprite, flew into his parents’ marriage bed and lurked there as they comforted each other. A month later, conspiring with the genie of ovulation and the hormone fairies, it implanted itself in a fertilised egg, to be born in July 1890 and loaded with the same eight syllables: James Arthur Dickson Eggington. He didn’t resemble his first avatar or any of his incarnate siblings at Eva’s wedding, this gladsome imp with his long chin.
While in the mirror I’m an aging face More or less the same day after day, In the mind’s darker space There are these handles to enticing doors Of occasional abrupt transition, Doors of entry, doors Of intercommunications Obeying the same laws. So many rooms! Such impatience!
All spring the scattered bands gathered, the People, the Human Beings, all those like themselves on this earth — Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho. Movement and magnetism, wildness in the air, the power of the buffalo and the People swarming and flowing north to the sweetness of the old land and the old ways, up on the Powder River, out along the Rosebud and Greasy Grass called by whites the Little Big Horn. The great leaders come: Low Dog, Two Moon, Touch The Clouds, Rain In The Face, Gall. Wise men and leaders, young warriors, all come.
On our anniversary, you drag the sofa-bed into the old conservatory. The January moon swells to cliché and under a ten-tog duvet we shiver. Frost plays havoc with the view. Years slip, sheets cool, the roof weeps and timber withers in its frame. We are unhinged, the window slides, the stars keep their distance, and we, still lovers of the moon, cling to landings, wipe the rime. A mist of words mixes up the messages between us. You step outside to clear the glass, your uncertain face fills the pane and I see man and marriage eclipse and pass.
Living up to its fabled buzz, the Kop roared and rose even before kick-off. Down in the main stand I watched; John Barnes adjusting his captain’s band on the hallowed turf. Waves of red in rows and rows – a kid in that season’s kit, I swelled with a kind of borrowed pride, belonging without belonging; my dad and brother craning to see McManaman darting, how Fowler propelled strike after strike. Half-time over, and a crashing header left the keeper without a chance … the place erupted.
Nothing I write will be as durable as the rhyme for remembering the genders of third declension nouns, stuck in my head ever since Miss Garai’s Latin class. Masculini generis I used to fancy I shared it with generations of English schoolboys, the colonial servant dispensing justice under a tree in the African bush, are the nouns that end in -nis the wakeful subaltern in the trenches before the Somme; but now I discover the rhyme was originally German, as was Miss Garai. The vision shifts: and mensis, sanguis, orbis, fons, the solar topeed official sits not in Nigeria, but in Kamerun; the soldier is on the other side of what looks very much like the same barbed wire, collis, lapis, piscis, mons, writing to his girlfriend.
Intimacy these days discomforts. More our style is the park or the pub, or three-minded chess with young Kasparov. A bracket-dash-colon smile implies we have no longings to confess. Always, though, I’ll text a bunch of preset flowers on the eve of her six-month scan. ‘Thank you, dear heart, for remembering.’ Then come the hours of worry (agony for her) before the all-clear. Valentine’s the patron saint of squirm for us both, love’s wafer on the tongue a poisoned biscuit. The troubadour-lover worth his sugar composes a romantic effusion of the kind she’d be loath to wipe her derrière with. Dare I risk it? I text her a preset pint pot, foaming with roses.
Scarborough 1939 Mum’s slipping on her see-through dress. Outside our council house a chauffered Rolls is waiting. It’s a beautiful summer. There’s been so much yearning. At the Floral Hall violins are fainting and the black-and-white minstrels have ripe red lips. I’ve won third prize for my Bluebird sand- carving. Soldiers are wrapping barbed-wire round the beach. Mum’s smoothing down her new silk stockings. This time, she says, love will be for keeps.
the english foxhound likes to bay his enemy is the wind instead of grief he feels relief at every innovative gust.
Two poems in memory of Mick Imlah 1. ‘Hardy and Housman lived round here,’ I said, slumped in an armchair in your flat. ‘Compared to those two, we’re small beer — Hardy and Housman, geniuses crowned here! No blue plaques for us, who’ve gone to ground here... We’re pygmies, compared to giants like that, Hardy and Housman, who lived round here,’ I said; slumped. In an armchair. In your flat. 2. I don’t remember, Mick, if ‘Ca the yowes’ Was one we listened to together, Long after closing time, in your small flat With the almost-derelict sofa, the bows Of our boat heading into heavy weather (How so?
I was in love for a whole week after Episode One: Your voice so tender, so knowledgeable, your slender hands and feet. In Episode Two, doubts crept in. Were you hogging the camera or was it just that the camera loved your profile, your man-of-the-people T shirts, your breeze-ruffled hair? Episode Three opens with you on a hill top, gesturing. Sighing with relief, I know it’s over, because you now remind me of that Irishman I met in Soho, and we know how that turned out.
Lapwing leans against the wind, First hint of changing season Come to turn the soil to stone And bring the blanket snow. Until the gentle snowdrops show In the hedgerows, And the fields grow green again, In the warm summer days.
As I make my way to the greenhouses a seagull kills me in its pure white throat. Quiet in the tomatoes. Quiet among the beans. Soft dark patches where the rain leaks in. Can I come home? Has it been too long? Tall weeds growing through the coils of hose.
He was there again in the small hours: not this time in a dream, but in a dream of dreaming. Even so the two of us looked aside, stuck for something to discuss that was not a matter of life and death, so we fell back on football and the elections. Then suddenly he started talking: talking as he’d never talked in his life. He knew it wasn’t wise to take up cigarettes again at the wedding the day before; and driving back the engine misfired once, or twice. And then I started talking too. I told him about two other recurrent dreams: the first that I was smoking again too, but it was all right because I knew I could give up. Stranger than that, my twilight dream of the car headlights failing — but that too was all right because I knew they’d work again.