Poems

She dings the bell, a muffled chime from the gut of number twenty-nine, and both of us step off the step, survey. This place was quite a schlep from where we parked behind the bar we’d called ‘our future local.’ Ha! A couple emerges, whips past, and a suited lad is left; one hand grips an iPad, the other keys. He holds a smile, says ‘This way, please’ and leads us down a mildewed hall. She mutters ‘I think we’ve seen it all’ but, being English, we poke about. Two more stand ready as we file out. Two more stand ready as we file through the gate of number fifty-two which backs against the prison. Wire coils above the back yard, higher than anything the listing caught on film somehow, it seems. Abort!

They’re trying to hold the shapeof their smiles while wrestling with their darlings who, it seems,would rather be anywhere than planted on their knees: mum and thunderous son,dad clutching daughter, as she flails towards something in flight.The photographer clicks anyway. They’ve made an effort: the knitsare new and ties are properly knotted. Poor parents. These are the cuckoosthey let into their cherished nest.

If I still remember the termsprotasis and apodosisfrom Latin grammar days at school, why can’t I exchange this knowledgewith its minimal relevanceto my subsequent life, in which sentences trot along quite wellunparsed and without their clausesneeding precise designations, for instant access to the namesof acquaintances approaching,all smiles, at social gatherings?

Not regret at what could have been said              but regret, half way down, at what was said  (… this will be called the fifth tread of ten). Not only regret at what was said but that it was said before it knew it was said (… this will be called the sixth tread of ten). Not only regret at what had been said but that it will cause other things to be said by way of reprisal for what was said and by way of knowing will be said again and so much regret is a foot mid-stride on what will be called the tenth tread of ten.

Enough to walk –  enough to walk, untied enough to move together side- by-side, to let the words occur to let the world occur around. Scrap  the table in between, the stare and all  it means, enough to brush a shoulder, let a misstep cause two hips to touch.  Enough a glance, a glancing off at what a plane can teach, what  might be learnt from an edge.

When he was a young reporter, writing  for the Straits Times on the Korean War,  my brother-in-law was based in Japan. His girlfriend, Itsuko by name, taught him  certain refinements concerning hygiene  that had not been part of his upbringing: for example, to dry between his toes. Sometimes I embarrass friends by asking  if they include this in their own routine – although that implies a further question:  do they, in the first place, wash between them?  Apparently not everybody does.

Under the lamp of childhood, the atlas of the world is open to the man: his fingers travel continents, stroke the blue seas, cross their blood red lines to America — to that inevitable page, with circles where his father had set down his whisky glass on the Nebraska plain, with pencilled names of strangers and train times: the whole damn Western in which the hero flees, reduced to its director’s scribbled notes of a young man on a train, hurrying to some future from an unforgiving past.

How much space was it really taking upat the back of the garage? Flipped open,on the lid’s underside, a handsawand a brass-backed tenon saw held fastby swivel pegs; two shallow box drawers with gimlets, awls, that yellow cylindrical tinfor the bricklaying plumb line, slid apartto get at the bigger stuff, any old howat the bottom: chisels, the brace and its bits,that rod like a devil’s tail – the soldering iron.Hand tools for absolute precision.Nothing electrical. Grandad’s kit,that had skipped my father, hardly neededby me in the city, that top floor flat,so I drove them to the auction place.No more lugging around, making space.Never sell your tools, he always said.

Campus trees, grown tall, shadow this forgotten place. In one small room, The Birds of Europe rage, awaiting Judgement’s storm and fire. That day, released from their engraver’s burning cage, red breast, white wing, gold eye will light the dust-grey shelves, as each one flees through broken windows, hinge-sagging doors, to settle, call and sing in the unlettered trees.

for Wendy So time, for one of us, will carry onin chilly rooms where either you or mewill linger for a while after we’ve gonein silences on worn upholstery,in orange paperbacks we’ll never readby crooked lamps, the shadows they still thrownow falling where, for once, we’d both agreedthe lucky one would be the first to goand in their rush, perhaps, leave keys and coat,a just popped out, back soon that comes unstuckto curl up in a yellow Post-it notewith two small kisses clinging on for luckand, trembling on the fridge, collecting fluff,the love for which there’s never time enough.

For three days now it has been possiblereading the letters and looking at photographs,to tell myself there is no differencebetween this and your just being somewhere else. I’ve been philosophising like a foolsupposed resemblances, absence apart:memory, other minds and the rest of it.Nothing resembles the fact that you are not. Rarely knowing what I’d come up with nextor how it would turn out, I never didsee how you always got there first- and lessby dint of progress than by standing still. Tonight we’re having our first conversationsince you died. It proceeds, as usualbut minus the element of surprise – the elementthat was you. Have I caught up at last?