Islands, illusions,our dark wrecking spell,five twisted pins at St Warna’s Well.Islands, illusionsin a Bryher of mist,Bishop Rock Lighthouse serpent-kissed.Islands, illusionsfrom East to West Porth,seas without God, skies without north.Islands, illusionsnear this world’s edge,storm petrels circle the Tearing Ledge.Islands, illusionson lost sailors’ lips,the Dogs of Scilly devour their ships.
I was writing my doll’s name on the back of her neck when Mummy caught fire — a noisy distraction. She was wearing a loose blue flowered smock (an old maternity smock, I now deduce, from her pregnancy with my sister four years earlier, being used as an overall, not to waste it); the hem flapped over the hearth she was sweeping, and caught on a live coal from last night’s fire. I tore myself away from writing ‘Margaret’ to save her life. ‘Lie down, Mummy!’ I said, and helped to smother her flames in the hearthrug. So much is memory. The rest was praise: What a good girl, how sensible, how calm! But ‘how well-taught’ is what they should have said.
When we found them under the tree there were twenty-two men all dressed in white, packed in two boxes of rosewood, between ancient and brittle layers of yellow paper. We set them out in classic style, carrying their rigid bodies up and down, up and down, until the light began to fail; one motionless fielder forgotten in a corner of the room... After the years, what’s left? These wooden trays, brittle paper; more distantly, the smells of leather, linseed oil, mown grass, the batsman’s shout for one more run, the curving ball, diving catch, as if a bird was stopped mid-flight... Clapping hands. White numerals. High summer sky. All out. All out.
These mornings when he’s not rota’d on picket, he spends the shift he would’ve spent in darkness in the spare room, sawing, painting, making a doll’s house. His wife, in secret moments, sews bits and bobs of fabric into dolls’ dresses: twists of foil are jewellery, pages of old colouring books wallpaper. It’s for their daughter to imagine the stars into the sky above the roof.
after Harry South’s closing theme to ‘The Sweeney’ It blows through a scrapyard,through unstable towersof Capris, Granadas, Transit vans ... through yellow teeth and fingers,a clouded bar’s persiflagethen out onto the street to lift comb-overs, flares,wide lapels, facial hair –a balm for sore ribs, black eyes. In search of a decade’s soulit winds through a cemeteryof credits, beige stills of Regan, Carter and Haskins,deskbound, drained of smiles.They know nothing will change that the narks, the lewd one-liners,the tooled-up balaclavas...will be back next week and that such healing breezesblow for less than a minutethrough the scrapyards of our hearts.
We struggle to remember what we came up for – spaghetti or air – who our neighbour said was coming to fix what, the conifer we’ve just planted. We watch too much Netflix, play word games online when we should be asleep. We cast off covers, cast them on again, force ourselves to rest upright as the moon purrs on its orbit like our husband beside us. Out of sight is the name of our daughter’s best friend, in full view the moon sliding down the hill, the sun in the pill that rises each morning from its blister pack. We drop them into little boxes for days of the week, chalky with possibilities.
You did London early, at nineteen: the basement room, the geriatric nursing, cinema queues, modish fall-apart dresses, and marriage at Stoke Newington Registry Office, Spring 1955, on the rebound. Marrying was what we did in those days. And soon enough you were back in Wellington with your eye-shadow and your Edith Piaf records buying kitchen furniture on hire-purchase and writing novels when the babies were asleep. Somehow you’re still there, I’m here; and now Sarah arrives: baby-faced like you then, second of your four blonde Christmas-tree fairies, nineteen; competent; with her one suitcase and her two passports. It begins again.
Dull day. The Black Mountains in mist. The houses crawl up the lower slopes like rising damp. I wander the town devoid of purpose. November’s fallen leaves siliconed to the wet Monmouth Road. At five the streets eerily vacated as if there’s a curfew. Everything already now so last year. Weatherspoon’s beerhall empty but for one loud mouth who seeks a fight, proud as punch he won’t pay for his pint, as the young bargirl waits patiently at a watchful distance. Later in the Hen & Chicks the old men gather in the upstairs room. Warthogs shuffling to their waterhole. Battle lines set for the team from Caerleon, the chess boards placed out like dining tablemats.
Spring cartwheels down these country lanes, knocks fern and dock for six as frost exhumes with petrol fumes tar potholes leaves can’t fix, while bluebells smoke as downpours choke torrentially inside each rainswept flume of beech or broom chiffchaff and finch survive. Here pimpernel bedraggle a grass verge where, windblown, dog violets snitch through hedge and ditch, white tape and traffic cone; but owl and mole won’t tell a soul and ladybirds don’t grass on kids who picked wild flowers and nicked this jam jar for a vase; its lady’s smock, stitchwort, cowslip eavesdropping with harebell on what the crow or wren might know but isn’t theirs to tell.
What luck that Sweatenham’shad been flattened, its concrete baseremaining: the perfect spotto sit the works caravan on blocksand our paint shop beside it.Ern and Jud deftly navigatedthe Land Rover around dead tyres,mangled iron, sprouting steel rods,backing it into positionin full view of the Newcastle Street shops and the windows above them,all day traffic to Burslem or the A500:the security of countless eyesto save it being torched or toppled.Here we slump to the drumming rain, take turns to sleeve off condensation,watch the cars heading elsewhereoblivious to this Calor stove hissingon its one good ring, our used matchesdrowning in the tub of Swarfega.
Thinking about those nights Kindles a strange felicity: Drinking by candlelight In a pub off the Earls Court Road In the time of the Three Day Week, Because there was no electricity. Certainly we were political. Nothing, though, seemed as serious— Intimate and critical – As the play our shadows made, Taking their parts in the dance Of things made newly mysterious. As in a diorama Device of antique design, The scene flickered with meanings We never knew we possessed: Each stranger having a guest Role in the psychodrama.
Last night my wife and I went to Asda, And – among other things – spent eight pence on a Bag for Life. The bag is guaranteed to last us a lifetime. Every day we will look fondly at the bag, And recall that evening, All those years ago, When we held hands and strolled through Asda, Stocking up on milk, eggs and lightbulbs. The side of the bag has the legend: ‘If this bag breaks or gets damaged, We will happily replace it free of charge.’ These little gestures give us peace of mind. If I am involved in a horrific car crash or a dreadful fire, My wife will be able to take the tattered shreds of the bag, And return them to Asda, And the staff will give her a new bag, And they will do this with smiles on their faces.
For Rebecca and Hamish Along the dale to the wedding church the fields are fluffy with meadowsweet – ditches and verges foaming with it. Perhaps a tanker has overturned, and shed its load of banana milkshake? No, that’s not it; something more honeyed, more artificially confected; a familiar ingredient from your pantry at birthday-cake time: nothing to do with botany. You could sprinkle it over strawberries. I plunge my arms in, and then my face. Sniff this, I say to the wedding guests – as one by one I hand them a sprig, What does the scent remind you of? One by one, they fail to tell me, although on the table just over there is displayed the clue, three dazzling tiers of it.
I arrived in Lhasa by train in freezing weather. From what I’d heard, my father would be there. Outside the gaping entrance all was dark,snow falling quietly like owls’ feathers. In the bustling concourse, doubling as a market, just as I’d feared, my errant father was nowhere to be seen. I knew he was dead but that didn’t seem a proper excuse. I had in my pocket a bronze coin he’d given me from the reign of Tasciovanus, and his last letter telling me, while in Dublin, to visit and give his love to his old friend Joe Bewley ‘who ran a marvellous place on Grafton Street where they made jam and sold fine coffee and tea’. BEWLEY’S ORIENTAL CAFE, he’d scrawled in capitals.
Plate scrapers, scrap tippers, throw down your cloths. Raise your ruined hands to the sky. Rise up from the saunas of sunken kitchens. Squeeze soap in the face of progress. Pick up your brushes and take to the streets. Leave the dishes piled high. Point your thumb at the Chef de Cuisine Leave the suds to the Sous Chef. This is the day we come blinking into the light. We’ll thump our boots on the tin plugs of manholes and stand on our soapboxes. We’ll blow hot and cold beneath the taps of streetlamps. We are the damp, the harassed, the lackeys of haut cuisine; the rinsers at the Ritz, the dregs of the Dorchester. We flick truffles from tea sets and dish dirt where we like.
The beach magician’s vanished, gone home. Now it’s my sleeping cousins’ turn to disappear. Out of the creaking depths of old deckchairs their teenage spirits rise, drift down to the shore. The mackerel are in. Helen’s in blue, Cat in her yellow dress.
by Anna Akhmatova Somehow we pulled off becoming apart, Snuffed out our awful hot light. Perennial enemy, it’s time you were taught how someone can love someone right. I’m willing. To me it’s all fun, I’m game: At night, the easeful Muse careers Down to me here, and in the morning Fame Trudges in, rattles on in my ears. Don’t bother to keep me in prayers or mind Or turn to look at me when leaving. I’ll be lulled by the black wind, Gladdened by the golden trees’ unleaving. I’m taking our parting as a present, Give thanks for the memories lost. But tell me: should any more people be sent, In your eyes, on this Way of the Cross?
here come the billygoats down the track so heavily hung with dongs that dangle down in the dust and balls that swing from side to side to clonkerty bells that roll and toll on their necks the melody ripples into the stone pine fragrance cypress shadows the nannies plunging onward struggling big with milk so heavily hung with lolloping mammaries yobs go head to head engage in clouting rebuttals crashing the valley all afternoon and the goatherd Gerrero fords the ceaseless rivers of goatspiss shouting las cabras son malas.
I probed its crown with the tip of my tongue and it creaked like a bough a boy swings on. Then with the pincer of finger and thumb I plucked it from its loose bed like a bud and set it on this oak table now a desk. It was taller than I thought and like a blunted tusk, its ivory inlaid with colonnades and courtyards, and trees bearing the semblance of fruit — still but ever-moving like that temple frieze of rounded lovers wreathed around each other in tireless ecstasy — a work of art, thus by definition useless. And so the other, older teeth went back to their task of tearing the flesh of fowls and grinding wheat.
It might be a long, long time since I was christened Christopher And nicknamed Kit… but not so long ago As 1570, when was born my namesake, Who did his best to stage the Fireworks Show That nearly happened. Yet they blew their chance And came to grief, as which of us wouldn’t have done? Myself, I’d have been particularly useless, Managing of the manoeuvres only one: Cloaked and daggered, meeting my co-conspirators For a conspiratorial drink in the Duck and Drake Off Fleet Street. I’d have been first man at the bar. That part of the Plot I’d have found a piece of cake. But nothing involving mental or physical courage, Enduring the third degree, to the slightest degree.