Poems 1960-2000 (28 page)

In the dream I was kissing John Prescott –

or about to kiss him; our eyes had locked

and we were leaning avidly forward,

lips out-thrust, certain protuberances

under our clothing brushing each other’s fronts,

when my mother saw us, and I woke up. 

In fact I’ve never kissed an MP.

The nearest I got was a Labour peer

in a telephone box at Euston station

(one of the old red kiosks –

which seemed appropriate at the time).

But I don’t suppose that counts, does it?

Can it be that I was unfair

to Tony Blair?

His teeth, after all, are beyond compare;

but does he take too much care

over his hair? 

If he were to ask me out for a meal,

how would I feel?

Would I grovel and kneel,

aflame with atavistic socialist zeal?

No, I’m sorry, he doesn’t appeal:

he’s not quite real. 

In the House he sounds sincere,

but over a candlelit table, I fear,

his accents wouldn’t ring sweetly in my ear.

Oh dear. 

I’d love to see him in No. 10,

but he doesn’t match my taste in men.

Dear So-and-so, you’re seventy. Well done!

Or is it sixty? It’s a bit confusing

remembering which, of all my ageing friends,

is the one about whose talents I’m enthusing. 

I’m getting on myself, a fact which makes one

occasionally vague – as you may know,

having achieved such venerable status;

although in you, of course, the years don’t show. 

Anyway, I’m delighted to contribute

to the memorial volume which your wife –

or publisher – is secretly arranging

to mark this splendid milestone in your life. 

As one of your most passionate admirers

I’m glad to tell the world of my conviction

that you’ve transformed the course of literature

by your poetry – or do I mean your fiction? 

Oh dear. Well, never mind. Congratulations,

from a near contemporary, on your weighty

achievements; and you’ll hear this all again

in ten years’ time, at seventy – sorry! eighty.

A garland for Dame Propinquity, goddess

of work-places, closed circles and small towns,

who let our paths cross and our eyes meet

so many times in the course of duty

that we became each other’s pleasure, and every

humdrum encounter a thundering in the veins.

We place at the hem of her fluted marble robe

this swag of meadow flowers, picked nearby,

as much a bribe as a thank-offering,

asking her to smile on our extensions

and elaborations of what she began. 

And now, to be on the safe side, a recherché

confection of orchids and newly hybridised lilies

for her sister, Lady Novelty: not to leave us.

This tender ‘V’ of thighs below my window

is one end of Kuba’s mother,

sprawled for the May sun in her bikini.

I hardly know her face. ‘Ku-baah!’ she calls,

and scolds him drowsily in Polish. 

Kuba’s off with his bikie friends,

the big boys, old enough for school.

‘Ku-baah!’ they shout. Their accent’s perfect.

They bump their tyres in circles over the grass,

towards and then away from the glinting water. 

In winter, I’m told, the swans come up

and tap their beaks on the windows, begging.

Today a lone brown female mallard

waddles quacking forlorn parodies

of a person doing duck imitations. 

Kuba tries to run her down.

She flaps off, squawking, back to the Broad.

It’s a rough male world down there;

the drakes are playing football hooligans,

dunking each other, shamming rape – 

well, what else is there to do

while their sober mates are hatching eggs?

Only one brood’s appeared so far.

I count the ducklings every day:

eight, five, four, still four (good!), three… 

I’ll go and check again in a minute.

‘Grow up!’ I’ll tell them. ‘Hang on in there!’

Downstairs the front end of Kuba’s mother,

a streaked blonde top-knot, pokes out of a window.

‘Kuba!’ she calls again. ‘Ku-baah!’

When we heard the results of our tests

we felt rather smug (if worried);

we said to each other loudly in public

‘Well, that’s it for space-travel;

we mustn’t go up there again.

We can’t afford to be bombarded

with any more radiation, dammit!’ 

No more risks: that was the policy.

In which case what are we doing here

scrambling along this rocky gorge

with hardly a finger-hold to bless us,

and the bridge down, and a train coming,

and the river full of crocodiles?

(I think I invented the crocodiles.)

But there’s no snow yet: the footprints

are made by a rubber stamp, a toy

I daren’t give to a child. (Warning:

‘Ink not guaranteed to wash out.’) 

First the gale, and now the rain,

and soon the sleet, and then the footprints. 

The TV weather map is stamped

with rows of identical cloud-shapes,

each dangling two white crystals

and striding briskly south from Scotland. 

But the feet are close together, jumping

kangaroo-hops on a white page. 

We thought we were stuck on Crusoe’s island,

marooned in summer, dry and stranded

under clouds that would come to nothing –

or nothing anyone could want.

Earth-based, earth-bound, paper-bound,

we had to play with toy footprints. 

Now, though, prophetic silhouettes

emerge from a computer to bless us.

The clouds leap up; the crystals fall

and multiply on roofs and gardens. 

The feet are lifting off the page

to bite blue shadows into the snow.

We bought raspberries in the market;

but raspberries are discredited:

they sag in their bag, fermenting

into a froth of suspect juice.

And strawberries are seriously compromised:

a taint – you must have heard the stories.

As for redcurrants, well, they say

the only real redcurrants are dead.

(Don’t you believe it: the fields are full of them,

swelling hopefully on their twigs,

and the dead ones weren’t red anyway

but some mutation of black or white.)

We thought of choosing gooseberries,

until we heard they’d been infiltrated

by raspberries in gooseberry jackets.

You can’t tell what to trust these days.

There are dates, they say, but they’re imported;

and it’s still too early for the grape harvest.

All we can do is wait and hope.

It’s been a sour season for fruit.

Looked better last time, somehow, on a wet weekday

from under an umbrella – rain

blurring my lens and rinsing the handsome faces

of the Drapers’ Company buildings, lights on early,

golden glimmers in puddles, cars growling

at each other over parking spaces – 

than on this mild and spacious Sunday afternoon,

no car but ours parked in the High Street

by the painted kerbstones – white, blue, red, white, blue,

with lads loafing in front of the Orange Hall

and an old woman, daft in the sunshine,

greeting strangers: ‘How
are
you? How are
you
?’ 

Oh, yes, and that parked van outside the Market House…

but time’s up; I’ve a plane to catch.

If we take the Ballyronan road

we shan’t see Magherafelt, a town I’ve always

wanted to visit; where ten hours from now

another van will discharge its sudden load.

The voices change on the answering-machines:

not the friend but the friend’s widow;

not the friend but the other friend. 

‘I’m not here’ the machine tells you.

‘This is the job I never did –

this fluent interface with the world. 

He/she did it; but I’m learning.

Now all the jobs are mine or no one’s.

There’s no one here. Leave a message.’

The janitor came out of his eely cave

and said ‘Your mother was a good swimmer.

Go back and tell her it’s not yet time.’ 

Were there no other animals in Eden?

When she dives under the roots, I thought,

an eel is the last shape she’ll want to meet. 

Her brother was the one for eels: farm-wise,

ruthless about food. You roll the skin back

and pull it off inside out like a stocking. 

He grew up with dogs, horses and cattle.

She was more at home with water and music;

there were several lives for her after the creek. 

In one of them she taught my younger son

to swim in the Greek sea; and walked through Athens

under a parasol, to buy us melon. 

Fruit for the grandchildren; nectarines and pears

for the great-grandchildren; feijoa-parties…

‘There’s more of that to come,’ said the janitor. 

‘But no more swimming. Remember how she plunged

into a hotel pool in bra and knickers,

rather than miss the chance? She must have been sixty.’ 

I had some questions for the janitor,

but he submerged himself under the willows

in his cavern where I couldn’t follow – 

you have to be invited; I wasn’t, yet,

and neither was she. Meanwhile, she’s been allowed

a rounded segment of something warm and golden: 

not pomegranate, paw-paw. She used to advise

eating the seeds: a few of them, with the fruit,

were good for you in some way – I forget. 

Long life, perhaps. She knows about these things.

And she won’t let a few eels bother her.

She’s tougher than you might think, my mother.

I mustn’t mention the hamster’s nose –

it sets you off. You giggle like Auntie Lizzie

forty-odd years ago, when she was your age:

heading for ninety. Great gigglers,

you and your mother and your aunt.

They were white-haired and well-padded;

you were too skinny for a mother,

we thought, with our teenage angst,

afraid of turning into you. 

‘It just struck me funny,’ said Auntie Lizzie,

‘ – that old drunk in his coffin

with all those flowers. I got the giggles.’

Her comfortable shoulders heaved

as yours do, now that you’re her shape.

She lived to a hundred and three,

blind and deaf at the end, but not to be fooled:

when her daughter died, she knew.

I hope you’ll be spared that extremity. 

Of course it wasn’t the hamster’s nose:

that’s just shorthand. It was the fireman’s;

he’d given it the kiss of life,

and the hamster…oh, well, never mind –

you know the story. You’re off again.

I never guessed old age was so much fun.

Julia has chocolate on her chin,

and isn’t getting far with the cut-out stick

they’ve given her as a bow. It doesn’t matter;

the music’s there, behind her serious eyes. 

Lily’s in her knickers and a sweater

passed down from Oliver, who hated it,

her shiny hair glinting above her shiny

half-sized (or is it quarter-sized?) violin. 

Oliver’s playing his cello: he knows how;

and that’s not all he knows about: he made

the cardboard fiddle – bridge and strings and struts

and curves, a three-dimensional miracle 

of Sellotaping – for Julia to play at

playing like Lily, and for family harmony.

Soon, after her birthday, when she’s four,

she’ll have Suzuki lessons and the real thing.

When Laura was born, Ceri watched.

They all gathered around Mum’s bed –

Dad and the midwife and Mum’s sister

and Ceri. ‘Move over a bit,’ Dad said –

he was trying to focus the camcorder

on Mum’s legs and the baby’s head. 

After she had a little sister,

and Mum had gone back to being thin,

and was twice as busy, Ceri played

the video again and again.

She watched Laura come out, and then,

in reverse, she made her go back in.