dendrophylax fawcettii sometimes though I just met youand in your look is everythingI want from life beginning now — I know now I just met youand start to picture everythingI scythe it to before our livesI mow it to extinction — and I had so hoped to save youfrom a world which didn’t have youand a life which didn’t have melook what I did to everything — next time I have just met youI promise it will be enoughfor me to die out with you.
Matron comes to tell them off again.The racket’s rocking all over the wing.Life would be so much easier if each octogen-arian wasn’t so convinced he could sing. Her brisk heels drum solo down the parquet floor.She checks the time. One thing of which she’s certain’sIf they give her Sisters of Mercy just once moreIt won’t be lights out: it’ll be curtains.
‘Two distincts, division none’ – Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle Dove’ I heard it again the other night, The owl whose call I used to imitate, Ooh-hoo, when you were dropping off – shrieks And giggles from you meant you didn’t hate The silliness I could still provide When so much else went down the tube Marked ‘surgical waste’. (I should have tried, I know, tried harder – drugs, contraptions, lube And other stuff I hated. Here’s to marriage-lite!
Every now and then, during my late-nighttussle with rhyme and metre, I glance upat the top flat opposite, wondering whetherits male occupant, silhouetted and backlit,is thinking, each time he raises his headand seems to gaze back, how excitingit is to overlook on the ground flooropposite an insomniac poet constantlylicking his stanzas into shape, and maybeeven including him in his latest poem. Much more likely he is totally engrossedin a detective novel by Ian Rankinor Donna Leon. Imagining which I downtools and instead head for the sitting-roomwith a cappuccino, confident that gettingstuck into a good whodunnit will moreeffectively establish us as kindred spirits.At which point, seemingly totally obliviousto my presence, the man opposite risesand, leaving his room, turns out the light.
It was too tight even then, as if he wishedme slimmer or to spill out erotically at every move. Now, as I rip strips for shoebuffing, the cockerel-red cloth pulls hard against me, held by its gristle of seams.The stitches resist, baring white teeth that grin all the way to where he loved best.An embroidered dragon gives a stuttering shriek as it releases lost passion, the rapture of silkbetween his palms and my thighs now worn to a gauze through which the pastriddles darkly – our mutual scent tumbled in so many cleans, beaten to oblivion, or perhapsblended as we could never be.
Or rather the ostrich, like the crocodile, swallows hard stones such as quartz or granite which jostle in the gizzard to assist the slow work of digestion. Such was the work required to mill a wide diet of New Zealand vegetation that the enormous moas went miles in search of the right stones which can be found beside their skeletons or when the bones have long been broken down as phantom tracts, as cairns to their extinction, all immaculately polished and rounded.
Working from hammock in Mexico, Watching how far centavos go, The beer is cheap, tequila strong, Here you can sleep and all day long. Hola to holidays in the sun! Don’t want to do it – doesn’t get done. From sunset strip to sunrise glow History runs deep in Mexico. Sipping a cola, eating ice-cream, Loving the colours, living the dream, Working tomorrow for a better today, Procrastinators that’s what they say. Chilli con carne, San Miguel beer, Well worth the journey, wish you were here! Am and pm, what about them? Mañana we say and carpe diem. Loving the colours, living the light, Enjoying the bright stars shining at night. The sound of the waves smells of H2O And seawater’s warm in Mexico.
I close the door to his roomwhich had stayed propped openthroughout his illness, and behind itfind a few of his things.His heavy brown shoes angledas if he’s just taken them off,jacket and cap hung on the peg,walking stick against the wall.Mechanically,as a bulldozer collapses a site,we’d removed from the wardrobestacks of folded clothes.But here, behind the bedroom door,I’ve stumbled acrossthis tiny installation of his life –the space between the objectsprotected like a small urban park.
Nearly sucking up a woodlouse in the vacuum cleaner, an unseen finger taps me on the head. Surely, it says, you have the time to find a bit of card or an old envelope and move this little fellow to the flower bed? Plucked from the wall, it rolls into a ball and waves its legs towards the vast omnipotent above, as if to say I did not expect this of you.
I looked through the window and I saw a sunny day. I say sunny day, but the thing about sun is how it casts shadows. It draws the shape of the house across the patio, and what this shape is is a ghost house, here, creeping its way across these slabs, as the day lengthens, it’s a house completely in darkness, a house without words or windows, a house reduced to the shape of itself. And in this house and under this roof, drawn there on the patio, live and breathe these ghost selves, these versions of us, feeling their way through darkened rooms, gripping their stubby candles out in front of themselves.
I do not take you to be my husband or my fiancé, or even now my friend. I do not wish to have or to hold your head at the toilet’s rim. Nor keep you at arm’s length when you were other-him. I’ve had you better and the worst. I’ve certainly had you richer. As for poorer, that’s yet to be seen but you’ll be less for sure without me. How sick you might become? Only time will tell. I’ve paid my hospital ward dues. I loved and cherished you till almost-death did take me from my mortal self. As for God, I am not sure who bound my love in their law. In the presence of my own I make this final vow: no more.
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.