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Anthony Thwaite

Thursday

Anthony Thwaite

Oh dear

How many times these days I say those words, Muttering them quietly under my breath Or petulantly as the telephone rings Or shocked at some reported piece of news Or simply as a constant formula For things that pass by daily, and are gone Into the nowhere that life seems to be Day after day, as if unceasingly. Too soft to be an expletive, too repetitive To have distinction, more sigh than cry of rage, How many times these days I say those words And may well say them till the day I die When everything’s worn out and stiff with age And I have nothing else to say but ‘Why?

Thursday

Anthony Thwaite

Language

And when I landed in America, aged ten, I knew the language was the same. And yet At once the alien words confronted me Like tests I must perform before I passed: Gotten and cootie and the way they said ’erb, and the different gas, and turning on The faucet. That first Christmas, presents wrapped In something called excelsior, just bits Of wood-shavings.       I learned fast, but still baulked Later at sniggerings over those secret words Too bad to be explained: jamrag — a pad Of cotton-wool I saw, stained, on the road; And, inexplicably worse, the taunt Thrown at a boy just down the way from me — ‘He’s just a ferry — keep away from him.’ How could a kind of boat be a boy too, And one to be avoided?

Thursday

Anthony Thwaite

Time to Go

Feeling my age, too soon too tired, Whatever gifts I had no more required, I am a hireling called in to be fired. Time was I was ambitious, heretofore. Not any more, not any more. Ridding myself of papers, pots, coins, books, No longer vain about what had been looks, The broth boiled over by too many cooks. Time was I kept some goods held back in store. Not any more, not any more. Taking my time over this last short walk, Not hearing what I say, or how I talk, Pushing my knife against my trembling fork. Time was I knew when I’d become a bore. Not any more, not any more.

Thursday

Anthony Thwaite

The Colours of London

(after Yoshio Markino, 1911) Colours of women, a grey-veiled pink, a bloom Fading to yellow, stippled, dust-hung, flecked Soot startling white lace in summer gloom. Colours of trees, pavements sticky with leaves Trodden to blackened bronze, a patina Attached to every twig. The heart grieves, Colours the blood with fungus, smudges all Spires, bridges, waters, with its spores, Catches each raindrop as the bruised clouds fall. Colours — the names of them, the languages Seeping between — slip into sepia, Then steely white, as words freeze images. Colours of women, trees, blood, stone on stone Piled high, dismantled, crowded as a dream Night after night in London, and alone.

Saturday

Anthony Thwaite

The space between

Tonight I heard again the rat in the roof, Fidgeting stuff about with a dry scuff, Pausing in silence, then scratching away Above my head, above the ceiling’s thin Skin that separates his life from mine. So shall I let him be, roaming so narrowly In a few finger-widths of carpentry? The evening passes by. I sit and write And hear him skittering here and there in flight From nothing. Maybe he hears My scratching pen, my intermittent cough, Below the frail thin lath that keeps me off From harming him, as it too keeps him there, Heard but unseen in narrow strips of air.

Wednesday

Anthony Thwaite

Pity (for E, aged three)

I picked a beetle up and let it go,And that was pity;But not the pity that you could not goToday, as you’d been promised, to the ZooBecause you were too sick.So ‘What a pity’ were the words I spoke,And then you asked your question: ‘What is pity?’ I’ve searched and searched, but can’t find out the trickTo tell you what it is. My glib words chokeAttempting to spell out the different senseOf rescuing the beetle, and why youDid not go with us to the promised Zoo.What is the difference? How can I sayThat pity is a debt I cannot pay?