APRIL 1912
Fred Wright teaches squash in the ship gymnasium.
In his time off he strolls the deck alone, appreciates
the air, the view, the noise of women (in particular).
Men’s brutality, he knows, comes in many disguises.
He avoids contact, except where necessary, on court
for example, when a grip needs to be adjusted, or
a stance relaxed. He takes no alcohol, lest it render
him vulnerable. He was promised to a girl long ago
but she asked to be released from what she called
the obligation of marriage. Love, she told him, had
intervened. He walked in the Alps for the summer,
went south for winter, rented a house in the hills
outside Rome, lived on next-to-nothing. Love, when
it came again, was platonic, lasting, complex, sad.
He chose to leave it in the warmth of memory where
it protects him still from the dangers of loneliness.
He saw the advert, knew the sport from Cambridge,
felt it did no harm to apply, was the only candidate.
As he strolls the deck, he watches men give orders,
take orders. In the evening chill, up in the bright
artificial light of First Class, the orchestra launches
into a waltz. He returns to his quarters, rests with
his dull book, The Way Of All Flesh, tries to sleep.
Does he survive the night? Sadly not.
CROW
I lean on a gate by woods,
watch a crow warn off a kite
above its nest in a tall ash.
The crow swoops, veers off,
swoops again, its raw voice
broadcasting violent intent.
The kite drifts on thermals,
pleads innocence. The crow
will have none of it, dips,
rips beak into tail, chases
the kite over the buttercup
meadow, the sheep field,
the A-road towards town.
LOCKSMITH
The locksmith’s heart leaps as the door, unopened for centuries, creaks.
Unlocking the door is enough, watching it move, slowly, heavily.
Now he steps back, lets those who need to see behind it get on with their seeing.
The locksmith has not felt love. Children, well, yes, three of those;
Routine events, like a mug of tea to start the day, rent to be paid.
A pint or three on a Saturday. The rest isn’t ours to know.
DETACHMENT
The prisoners, who will never be tried, lie shackled, blindfolded, in their own excrement.
Voices crowd in, crowd us out. Someone even asks me about how I control all the voices in my poems. I say I don’t know, I can’t fight them off.
He was in something commercial, colonial, perhaps. Self-made? Oh, I doubt that. He wasn’t bright, I could see him in an office, a clerk, but not running things, not building a business. A war criminal? No, no. He might have planned the cultural purges, perhaps, an execution or assassination here and there, but only in a vague way.
My son said to me Let me take you out to dinner, mother.
He said I hear the new Italian in town is very good.
Well, I told him It’s no use trying to expand my life experience with spaghetti at my age.
I see Frank Ifield is dead. I did use to like him. What was it he sang?
And that actress, you know, I think she was in East Enders. Or was it that soap
that was set in Liverpool, you know, the one that had the two girls kissing?
A rat runs across the path in front of a lad going to school. He watches it take cover beneath a hedge, then saunters on, ear phones playing goodness-knows-what. His sister follows a minute or so later, hurrying down a breakfast bar. She looks up at the heavy sky, pulls her coat close. The first few spots of rain.
The poet writes a first draft:
“And in the late spring sun, hedges spread across a future impossible to see.
Out there somewhere, the dead in rows, bundled into white sheets, tragedies unknown
To us sitting here, sipping diet-cokes, windows open to let in breeze, pondering
The row of unpaid bills, the tow of the mortgage, insurances, and the rest of the mess.”
Your eyes in the photo are not the eyes I know.
These are blue enough but cold, pupils dilated
as if the flash of the camera has startled you.
A small shadow beneath your nose, the curve
of your mouth, playful, as if you know I’m staring
at you while I wait for the postman to deliver
the letter you said you posted a few days ago.
It’s raining. There’s nothing I can do about that.
A man in a sensible raincoat rides along the road into town
as if he’s stuck in the 1960s, bicycle-clipped, mild-mannered,
impossible to fathom. Haunted? We all are. Harmless? Yes,
generally speaking. Even if cornered, unlikely to react? Ah…
Do you want the truth? Or just facts?
The woman next door swings her expensive four-by-four in a wide sweep, reverses on to her immaculate drive. She has dropped her son at school. Now she will change and rush to the gym, delayed perhaps by a van delivering the twice-weekly food shop.
The roving camera named Curiosity is sending back images of the surface of Mars.
I’ve already forgotten the exact number of children they just said on TV have been killed in the genocide.
Sudden memory: My father calls me independent, as if it’s a shortcoming, says my weakness is that I try to think for myself, instead of trusting faith. I sit in the polished Strict and Particular pew watching the mad pastor with ten children rant and go red in the face spouting about hellfire and the evils of Rome. He doesn’t frighten me any more.
Sudden memory: The train to freedom passes a couple sitting and kissing beneath a high stone aqueduct across which a canal boat moves in its own time.
Thousands of people killed, exiled, wandering lost in places they have no knowledge of. Thousands. Begin at one. See the face, look closely. Eyes. Lips. Hair. Are they smiling or is fear more obvious? Now go to two. Concentrate. It’s a person separate to all of the others, all of us, you. Three. Four. Keep going. Go on. Don’t stop. Each one – look into his face, her face, their face. Eyes. Lips. Hair. Try to think who they are, how much their mothers love or loved them. How hard they work at school. What dreams they have. One after the next. See them, see them. Close your eyes and still see them.
Of course families matter. Where you come from matters. If you’re ever going to find out who you are, ancestors matter.
I sit in the cemetery. Great-grandad Tom Harding is in here somewhere, among the tall weeds, the broken stones, the angels toppling to the side, propped by stubborn elders. Nettles show the soil is rich. Sometimes specifics are necessary to concentrate thought. Sometimes specifics are impossible to pin down. I suspect each visitor here, if they stay long enough, finds a kind of loneliness, a little fear. I doubt they find peace. A weak light now between crowded yews and willows. I can’t find his grave. Maybe for the best. What would I feel, sitting on the grass, maybe talking to the image I have, white-haired before his time, studying the horses on a Sunday afternoon in the parlour in readiness for another mis-spent week, asking for another slice of Gran Bessie’s delicious cake, who assures him with a straight face she’s used butter, not lard. There’s a photo of him in a charabanc with half a dozen others, off for a day in Weston or Burnham. Stories, too, of how he neglected his first wife, Great-Grandma Rosina, spent too long in the pub, too little in their damp, terraced home, where after four children she was dead of TB at thirty. And of how he’d pick a fight on a bus back from town. Who be’est thee lookin’ at? he’d say if he caught some young man glancing at Bessie. Dead from cancer at 61, though the age is wrong on the memorial card she sent out. And she lived for another thirty-odd years, lost touch with the children she’d raised for him. Is buried somewhere else.
Someone messages me: I love how sometimes you find strange, unexpected ways to end your poems. How do you do it?
WINE CRITIC POEM
Rich, smooth, packed with spicy plum and juicy blackcurrant fruit.
Sumptuous, luxurious, deep, soulful, spiced raspberry and damson.
Such complex flavours. Good body. Easy to drink, full of sunshine.
You’ll notice evening aromas of fig, thyme, fennel and black olives.
Immense, deep flavour and silky, vibrant texture. Top notch vintage.
Aromatic, creamy, peachy, loaded with lemon, lime and gooseberry.
Dark blackberry notes, chocolatey spice, ripe, mature, toasty cedar.
Lovely evolution, layered with tobacco, patiently aged in lavish oak.
Bob Mee poetry and more 