Poems

for Zoya (b. 1926) The past is an undigested meal. Small things  trap us, she says. How a girl can pop out  to search for bread and be gone for twelve years. That washing dead bodies becomes routine.  Dreams come thicker now, like smoke  from the transport train to Nazi Germany – rib-cage to rib-cage with fellow Russians,  pissing and shitting together. She indulges in petits fours, talks Putin, Ukraine –  her politics a jumble of loyalties. In her head  she walks with Palestinians over bomb craters, a ghosthood imposed by the dead who won’t lie still. Like Papa, missing in the Gulag,  appearing the night she gave birth to her son:  Zoyechka, be clear what you want, then do it.

She says, well you look great now you’ve lost so much weight, looking up the Lower Clapton Road where a black zigzag of a ravine stretches from the chemist on the corner to the doner where they sell rum baba, and she adds, you could even wear shorts,  while my bra strap bites into the nub of my shoulder bone newly appeared  and my astonished and astonishing baby also looks up the Lower Clapton Road,  wondering how the thirty-eight bus will cope with that ravine, as clearly there is no way around it, that’s for sure.

Here’s dominion, and the reek of borders. This is my walk alone behind the guard on the high, snow-bound edges of Iran,  the roads mud rivers thundering down drains. In the hot offices of Manila an unsmiling clerk from the Department of Immigration and Deportation takes my passport. I am lifting my face to a bright light, empty with submission, having been so often silently watched, so often pinned to the revolving chair. My father turns between the grains of sand on a small disc of beach, lying concealed from all eyes at the bottom of the cliff.

The streets looked foreign and the night was short And pointed to a situation tense, But how else can experience be thought When there is nothing else you could report Than empty boulevards where lights condense Where streets looked foreign and the night was short, When everything looked futile, nothing taught You that your driving round made little sense, But how else can experience be thought? And how else can experience be caught Except by making it a picture, whence The streets looked foreign and the night was short? Perhaps this methodology would sort Things out, reality being no defence, But how else can experience be thought?

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.

(for Sonia and Michelle, the gauche mystique) Liberty guides us on the narrow path her ponytail a torch for the groaning peoples. Someone has dropped a bead of pomegranate, I imagined Kore rapt in the act of eating in this shaded place of wild asparagus, the surface fissured where she was taken under.

Sometimes nothing would do but the jug band from the swamp stomping the dirt road down the bayou grunting bass and wailing mouth-harp chain-gang holler and low moon riding the cypress trees hauling along that long-time sorrow crying out in that strange joy sometimes nothing else  could hope to bring it home.

I wanted to be a writer, but instead of sitting down I strode out over the shingle ridge and saw the sun coming up pink, pushing the thick clouds away, and felt the cold wind forcing the morning’s door, hurrying everything along, even the tiniest stones, which rained down in little landslides no bigger than my hand. I walked parallel to the water and spied a dark object ahead. It was the foot-half of a boot – very large – the rest of it bitten away; no threads or laces; each seam neatly needled with deliberate holes; the stiff leather blown open. I hovered by it; pushed it with my toe; picked it up. Heavy: the wooden sole waterlogged.

The geometric universe reels beside the motorway – this Lammas night,  a measure on the harvest sway of ears, a murmured song, a lullaby from spheres  of leaf-green light,  breathes circles, petals, stars,  makes rough bristles collapse suddenly as one, and, while the lorries pass,  the pattern’s spun.

Time, Butcher’s Van, that I began    To hymn you panegyrically! When at your wheels the gravel pinged And tingled, no van, were it winged,    Could have arrived more lyrically! We marked the man vacate you, Van,    To hob and nob satirically With maid and cook, produce the book    To sign as proof, empirically,      Of how he’d made the drop     Of chuck and blade and chop. And so Goodbye to the shrilling of children, The honking of jovial women admirers; The pungent trays are re-racked  In the back of the motor.