Refuge (2 page)

‘Anything you need, Molly?’ ‘Larder’s stuffed,’

her stock answer, waiting for me to leave

before she lurched off with giant strides,

jaw and stick thrust out, for odds and ends

or bargain Scotch for Eddie’s safe return,

her silvered head with its skull-tight skin

so frail and intent, her frame that yawed

like a rudderless yacht, and left me helpless,

watching and praying from a distant shore.

UNSUNG

First met Bill delivering by van and bike

for a greengrocer. Needed to keep busy.

Newly retired from top management

in a firm tied up with North Sea Oil.

But why the collared neck? ‘Cricked on the fairway,’

he said. Rumour was he’d mucked in

on the factory floor to dispatch a contract.

He’d nursed his wife into Alzheimer’s,

resolved to keep her home at all costs.

When they caravanned in places coloured

with best memories, she’d wander off.

Police returned her wrapped in a blanket over

muddy pyjamas she’d fought to keep on

with snarls, bared teeth and clawing hands.

‘Day Beth was taken in we’d been married

53 years. She scored 2 from a 30

aggregate of memory and response.’

Straight talk in a street encounter

while he looked beyond me as if to say

the broader picture must be seen, and added:

‘Sense of humour’s seen me through the worst.’

He’s just over a heart valve transplant

and a ward infection that walled him in

for two months. Twice weekly he tees off

at 8 a.m. on the toughest local course.

And he’s bought a compact caravan

to tour the coast of Scotland solo:

Stranraer, Durness, John O’Groats, Berwick.

I’m in open fields to lift the spirit

above self-created fret, and there he is,

striding out like a prospector,

his wilful little Scottie on a long leash.

Always one to seize the moment, this is

his bird day, delighting in rare flickers

of pairs and flocks in their spring passage.

VILLAGE BLACK SPOT

Double Z and nearly home, loaded

with seasonal gifts and looking forward.

Blind juggernaut like a crazed rhino

slews across and dumps its concrete pipes

on your one life in its egg-box shell.

What made you whole and loveable

cannot be prised from lacerated steel.

They couldn’t even move you into

the sun like Owen’s soldier with thoughts

of how its gentle touch once woke you.

Front page news between white on black

tributes to performance tires we need at speed,

your smile shy and modest above a catalogue

of family troubles that leave us at a loss.

Who were you? What lit up your days?

Then, full-spread, buckled, upended vehicles

as if some convoy had suffered a direct hit.

No hint of what is permanently shattered

and cannot be grassed over like bad bends

by-passed with three-lane dodgems.

NOTE: Wilfred Owen’s poem
Futility
mourns a young soldier felled by a bullet but apparently intact and unscathed:

‘Move him into the sun-/Gently its touch awoke him once...’

HARDENED

Pine: young head

on bleached, spindly torso,

bending up from burned-out,

greening slope, your feet stood

firm and defied the flames.

Now you split my wide

sky and, like it or not, unzip

my acquisitive camera.

So what will you do beside

this washed-out track?

Mark a lurking hunter’s path

that scurries into thorny scrub?

Let the odd passer-by pin

recurring hopes and fears

on your stooping trunk?

Look at me squinting up

at you, almost prayerfully,

my miniscule lens

capturing nothing much,

asking you to lose

no more plumage,

keep something back for

the next wave of lunatic fires.

FUSCHIAS

I fell for exotics like ‘Mrs Popple’

who drapes her puce pagoda over

purple belly through which she hangs

her luminous fluted stamens.

Then I heard Norwegian Saeverud

paint her diverse tribe in piano notes.

His ‘Drops of Christ-Blood’ dripped

coral fire, aery pendants, fallen heads.

Now even Popple’s plainer sisters

make me flirt. They’re inverted,

shrunk crocuses, violently pink;

ruminating bells rung by

monologues of serious bees;

seamstress heads poised over

delicate stitches, at one

with their needles, at ease

with every cut-throat breeze.

Below their dancing show

springs a girth that thickens

into hedge. They bud relentlessly,

bear berries hard as ebony.

SACRILEGE AT THÉATRE DES CHAMPS ELYSÉES

Paris, Spring 1913

The Rite of Spring rouses berserk rival

ballet whose cultivated sneers, fistfuls of loathing,

Gadarene rush for exits, leave Stravinski

fuming over empty stalls. A thwarted god

ready to turn these deaf and blinkered

imbeciles to a herd of rooting swine.

Fine tuning and experimental sweat

have fashioned the clay’s true guise

till nothing jars or niggles. Patterns

he wove to make the untuned hear

and taste the living earth, they tear

to shreds, piece by hated piece, shy

away from freaks and jackanapeses

writhing in mottled tights, birdsong

that scrapes like a rusty winch, cruel

thudding drum, jungle of fissured

string-play stampeding from the pit..

STASIS

Guitar held against long, white dress

you thread reluctant womanhood through

chords that waver in a question.

When time and tiredness beat you down

play back this moment. Listen for
Song

that lives inside you.

Across your few furnishings and comforts

July sun throngs its last. Skylights brim

blue eyes wide. Your very breath’s alert.

Fingers absently on strings whisper

over birdsong, flower, maze, water-

fall, ghosting in mind’s own garden.

A zone of innocence swathes you,

holds this instant pressed in leaves

of sunlight, fading into attic beams.

Up here clock and weariness will

beat you down. Turn aside,

let
Woman
in you sing.

MRS PRIMLEY’S LITERARY YOUNG MEN

(...
Comfortable accommodation for male students in the Arts Faculty
...)

Trunk and bags look lonely squeezed between

outsized bed and coffee-tinted wall

matched by threadbare floral counterpane,

starched and stiffened to withstand a fall.

Ladies in the bedroom not permitted!

insists Mrs P through pert and proper grin.

A nearly bald geranium in pitted

pot nods with dry dissent from sin.

O first-year hopefuls who unlock

cloudy-mirrored wardrobe doors, prize

open shallow mock-teak drawers, unpack

your dreams! Will this lumpy chair capsize

as you crouch to savour metered gas?

Can you feel the rug’s biscuit patchwork

prick through thin socks after lonely traipse

back to pristine texts and dim-lit hack-work?

Don’t miss High Tea at six

seasoned with Mrs P’s prying talk:

egg on toast, shiny ham, lurid cakes.

Then how to bow out cheerily, stalk

away from deadlines on Damoclean strings,

and out towards hallowed lamp-lit recess

where Flavia the Fair in gown and kinky stockings

might come flowing from her bow-front fortress.

NOTE Damocles praised Dionysius of Syracuse for his power and riches. During a feast the tyrant suspended a sword from a thread over his guest’s head to
suggest the instability of wealth and status and the imminence of disaster.

MR BUSY AND MRS: AN IDYLL

Mr Busy, oh so busy, up and down your drive,

past spruces well-spaced, tightly lopped and layered,

serene spires in glistening gravel...

off and back you drive, just for a little something...

(Busy are you, Mr Busy?

Lawn wants a trim, garage door’s peeling,

leaves are going to clog the drain...)

Mr Busy’s a mechanical man.

His paintbrush makes me dizzy.

So particular, so fussy:

Mr Busy’s a busy mover.

‘ `morning Mr B_____! Nice day. Almost summery...’

‘Keeping busy then? Just the day for jobs.

Sorting the compost heap, I see. Plenty of tealeaves?

Off again now!’

(Smoothly does it in your shiny Roverette!)

‘Prescriptions. It’s the wife, you see.’

‘Oh dear! Well...if there’s anything we can do...’

Mr Busy and his bungalow!

Busy bee keeping busy, making sure

the honeycomb’s rich and snug

about his central-heated queen.

And there she is! Pink butterfly specs.

(Nice and comfy, are you?)

Looks through conservatory triple glaze

on to shorn lawn, past Eight by Ten tool-shed,

over rolling fields ripe for sileage...and smiles.

‘Mr Busy’s mower’s his life-support machine!’

(Well that’s funny, Mrs Busy.

Better check what Prudence brought

through the puss-flap.)

Mr Busy’s snapdragons are well and truly visited by bees:

crimson, lemon, crimson, lemon, crimson, lem...

Everybody’s busy these days,

minding their own business...

THAT YOU GEORGE?

Too much it was,

George,

what with rippled footprints,

crushed lilies,

buckled larger cans,

and those glittery fragments

catching dawn under the east window.

Then the shattered stone,

shale... slivers of shale,

George,

bits of
Beloveds, Sons, Nieces,

tips of seraph wings,

vases full of shiny wrappers,

starlings raking through,

sparrows having a damn good chuckle.

As for the lytch gate,

George,

blooded all over with spray paint

and paving sledged apart...

Look on the bright side,

Eh George!

Friday night ringers at it again.

Hear that tun-up kid

taking a shortcut to hell,

thrush on his steeple tree

singing as if all were well.

And all that stone lying there,

like the stony dead:

think of that, George!

CLOISTER AND PROMENADE

Under sun canopy among

emptying tables, he reads and reads,

hunched over heavy A4 paperback,

cup, saucer and plate long forgotten.

Close-cropped, skeletal, hirsute,

all animation distilled into

his flickering, light-reactor

rimless spectacles. Enviably detached

from afternoon-long lunch party

in the teak-diner sanctum behind him,

aviary of jabbered opinions ignored

or gestured aside with ever-louder guffaws.

If he looked up would he notice

two little girls with no words in common,

sit side by side, strangership dissolved

in a shared pack of chip potatoes?

Or wonder if they might be sisters,

whose same brown, beady riveting eyes

and sticky fingers scour every inch and corner

where they happen to be this hot, sea-struck day?

Would he spot that silver-quiffed old gent left

by his burnished 50-something daughter

with a pick-me-up glass of white,

watch him cajole those heedless little darlings

with smiling, half-articulated warnings

that sound like final priestly blessings?

HALLOWED GROUND

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love

I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal
(I Corinthians, 13, 1)

1
. ON YOUR HIGH HORSE

Chapel’s celebrating four hundred years

of scripture translated. Committee so much

wants you to take part. Well-known piece,

please, and any version you like.

Delighted !
How could you refuse?

Parted tongues of fire light your way

to Pentecost. ACTS, Chapter Two.

Might even fill them with Holy Spirit,

to find there’s no foreign speech,

all words God’s from time immemorial.

Must be the
King James
mustn’t it?

Took unnumbered scholars eleven years,

rhetoric that rings with spoken sinew,

a voice for ever crying in the wilderness

to make straight the way of the Lord.

You’ll stroll from pew to brass Eagle wings

where rests heavy tome sanctified

by years of blackening thumbs and fingers.

Find the place with reverence while noses blow

throats clear and shuffling feet fall still.

2
. DAY OF RECKONING

Airy shibboleths must give way

to what to wear and whether to tuck