Poems

Parkinson’s My left arm, apt and agile, has the knack Of swinging with a youthful nonchalance. My right is stiff. My right hand shrinks and claws, Reluctant to lift cups or open doors. It’s the deft fingers of my left that dance Over the keyboard, while the right hangs back. My left side’s young, my right is getting old. The two time periods are not meant to meet And yet these hands can touch. My different ages Are like a photo album’s facing pages. The right side feels the theft of what was sweet. The left cannot ignore what is foretold.

So much steam and shaftsof sooty light. The porterslook like Laurel and Hardyand I like the train driver’sleathery smell, the glowof hot coals, the crowdedplatforms. Our mumsand dads are on the move,escaping wars, seekinglost weekends, travellingsomewhere sad alongwith the dead. WhenI blink whole epochsare shunted off. Onthe holiday specialwhere I once satthere’s a dazed, aged man. He’slooking lost as landscapeshurtle past. All thosehills and fields and cowson stilts, no wonderhis mind is never at rest. Perhapsan old Punch and Judy Showstill waits, as promised,at the very next stop?

Life begins, everlastingly, with light.A cloud-green chaos, the creator’s tear,that crystal deluge breaks to disappear.Rich oil, soft ochre-black, becomes a heightof stone, to pierce, amid the wilderness,our Virgin Mother’s deep azure and gold.Her fingers, hesitant as blood, unfoldto bless the child above the last abyss. Land’s End. Nanjizal Bay at low tide formeda cratered Armageddon where the wrathof castellated quartz and mica blazedlike God. But then I saw the granite archwhere tourmaline and haematite gashed blue,through which, to carve the earth, the ocean stormed.

Slowly the slow train pulls away To run beside the river bed With everything I long to say To people who are long since dead.

The house I hatedhated me, gave mea precariously narrow landingat the top of stairs, so I fellinto intensive carefollowed by Neuro-Rehabilitationresidence where I pay little attentionto double vision, double incontinenceand a wheelchair, focusing on the dizzinesswhich suggested that brain and Imay not be keeping company. Occupational Therapists –Nonulia watches me make a cup of tea.She wants me to make a meal with herand I refuse.  Why risk a pasta saladaccident in an unknown kitchen?A brain may disregard its instructionalpathways, yet common sense was there.Was it my refusal to play the gamewhich removed the security of a wheelchairto reach the exit on liberation day?I must stay upright and walk there.

Only I was allowed to sit on the Golden Bidet of Lerici. Lord Byron sat on it as well as Percy Bysshe and Mary. D.H. Lawrence swung by and perched there like a demigod – as well as Frieda von Richthofen. Virginia Woolf sat on it in 1933 knocking out a beautiful sentence – Max Beerbohm banging at the door. Henry James dropped his drawers to sit on that glittering throne, his buttocks pale and tragic. I bestraddle the cosmic rocket. Five, four, three, two, one...

i.m. The ‘Discovery’ Tree, c. 609-1853 5 September 1876, Calaveras Big Trees State Park, four miles northeast of Arnold, California – At the Calaveras Grove there stood a tree which the guidebook says took 5 men 25 days to cut down, the work being performed with pump augers. Upon the stump which measures 25 feet across a pavilion has been erected in which 32 persons danced 4 sets of cotillions at one time.(From the journal of Victor Emmanuel Smyth) In winter small sequoia flowers bloomed turning the green crown golden in cold sun – pollen falling on snow in yellow clouds  dusted each bough and needle as it fell. The Miwok saw this as they hunted game,  Miwok meaning people in the Miwok tongue.

There was a train in the distance.Comforting to know the train was coming.Comforting to know it was a long way off. One day I stood on the platformtrying to imagine the train lolloping in.It rushed by and kicked up a wind.And – figure this? – it knocked off my hat.

Patricia – Pat – was dumpy, with a curling lip, Pat was in fact the Office Bitch. Every night she walked (stridently) home along our beautiful meaningless beach. I sometimes saw her from the car, an umbral figure with an itch for grey skies, pavements and — she told us this — ‘some decent human misery’, which of course was never to be: the sun was unstoppable, relentless the rapture of the sea. So Pat went ‘home’ to London and lived alone, unhappily.

One day a man forgets a sea, a continent, a planet he forgets the features on his father’s face the prints of his own hand he forgets the flash of his eyes in another’s and the sound of water in his head he forgets the timbre of his own voice and the noise of his dreams that wakens everyone, but him he forgets the suit and the house he lived in the street and the city that forgot him forgets love, revelations, death: the mirror that no longer redeems his image A man will forget himself one day forget he has forgotten.