Poems 1960-2000 (17 page)

You’re glad I like the chiffonier. But I

feel suddenly uneasy, scenting why

you’re pleased I like this pretty thing you’ve bought,

the twin of one that stood beside your cot

when you were small: you’ve marked it down for me;

it’s not too heavy to be sent by sea

when the time comes, and it’s got space inside

to pack some other things you’ve set aside,

things that are small enough to go by water

twelve thousand miles to me, your English daughter.

I know your habits – writing all our names

in books and on the backs of picture-frames,

allotting antique glass and porcelain dishes

to granddaughters according to their wishes,

promising me the tinted photograph

of my great-grandmother. We used to laugh,

seeing how each occasional acquisition

was less for you than for later disposition:

‘You know how Marilyn likes blue and white

china? I’ve seen some plates I thought I might

indulge in.’ Bless you, Mother! But we’re not

quite so inclined to laugh now that you’ve got

something that’s new to you but not a part

of your estate: that weakness in your heart.

It makes my distance from you, when I go

back home next week, suddenly swell and grow

from thirty hours’ flying to a vast

galactic space between present and past.

How many more times can I hope to come

to Wellington and find you still at home?

We’ve talked about it, as one has to, trying

to see the lighter aspects of your dying:

‘You’ve got another twenty years or more,’

I said, ‘but when you think you’re at death’s door

just let me know. I’ll come and hang about

for however long it takes to see you out.’

‘I don’t think it’ll be like that,’ you said:

‘I’ll pop off suddenly one night in bed.’

How secretive! How satisfying! You’ll

sneak off, a kid running away from school –

well, that at least’s the only way I find

I can bring myself to see it in my mind.

But now I see you in your Indian skirt

and casual cornflower-blue linen shirt

in the garden, under your feijoa tree,

looking about as old or young as me.

Dear little Mother! Naturally I’m glad

you found a piece of furniture that had

happy associations with your youth;

and yes, I do admire it – that’s the truth:

its polished wood and touch of Art Nouveau

appeal to me. But surely you must know

I value this or any other treasure

of yours chiefly because it gives you pleasure.

I have to write this now, while you’re still here:

I want my mother, not her chiffonier.

Their little black thread legs, their threads of arms,

their mini-miniature shoulders, elbows, knees –

this piquant angularity, delicious

after that rippling smoothness, after nothing

but a flow of curves and roundnesses in water;

and their little hands, the size of their hands, the fingers

like hair-stubble, and their clumps-of-eyelashes feet…

Taddies, accept me as your grandmother,

a hugely gloating grand-maternal frog,

almost as entranced by other people’s

tadpoles as I once was by my own,

that year when Oliver was still a tadpole

in Elizabeth’s womb, and I a grandmother

only prospectively, and at long distance.

All this glory from globes of slithery glup!

Well, slithery glup was all right, with its cloudy

compacted spheres, its polka dots of blackness.

Then dots evolved into commas; the commas hatched.

When they were nothing but animated match-heads

with tails, a flickering flock of magnified

spermatazoa, they were already my darlings.

And Oliver lay lodged in his dreamy sphere,

a pink tadpole, a promise of limbs and language,

while my avatars of infancy grew up

into ribbon-tailed blackcurrants, fluttery-smooth,

and then into soaked brown raisins, a little venous,

with touches of transparency at the sides

where limbs minutely hinted at themselves.

It is the transformation that enchants.

As a mother reads her child’s form in the womb,

imaging eyes and fingers, radar-sensing

a thumb in a blind mouth, so tadpole-watchers

can stare at the cunning shapes beneath the skin

and await the tiny, magnificent effloration.

It is a lesson for a grandmother.

My tadpoles grew to frogs in their generation;

they may have been the grandparents of these

about-to-be frogs. And Oliver’s a boy,

hopping and bouncing in his bright green tracksuit,

my true darling; but too far away now

for me to call him across the world and say

‘Oliver, look at what’s happening to the tadpoles!’

When you dyed your hair blue

(or, at least, ultramarine

for the clipped sides, with a crest

of jet-black spikes on top)

you were sent home from school 

because, as the headmistress put it,

although dyed hair was not

specifically forbidden, yours

was, apart from anything else,

not done in the school colours. 

Tears in the kitchen, telephone calls

to school from your freedom-loving father:

‘She’s not a punk in her behaviour;

it’s just a style.’ (You wiped your eyes,

also not in a school colour.) 

‘She discussed it with me first –

we checked the rules.’ ‘And anyway, Dad,

it cost twenty-five dollars.

Tell them it won’t wash out –

not even if I wanted to try.’ 

It would have been unfair to mention

your mother’s death, but that

shimmered behind the arguments.

The school had nothing else against you;

the teachers twittered and gave in. 

Next day your black friend had hers done

in grey, white and flaxen yellow –

the school colours precisely:

an act of solidarity, a witty

tease. The battle was already won.

‘To Fleur from Pete, on loan perpetual.’

It’s written on the flyleaf of the book

I wouldn’t let you give away outright:

‘Just make it permanent loan,’ I said – a joke

between librarians, professional

jargon. It seemed quite witty, on a night 

when most things passed for wit. We were all hoarse

by then, from laughing at the bits you’d read

aloud – the heaving bosoms, blushing sighs,

demoniac lips. ‘Listen to this!’ you said:

‘ “Thus rendered bold by frequent intercourse

I dared to take her hand.” ’ We wiped our eyes. 

‘“Colonel, what mean these stains upon your dress?” ’

We howled. And then there was Lord Ravenstone

faced with Augusta’s dutiful rejection

in anguished prose; or, for a change of tone,

a touch of Gothic: Madame la Comtesse

’s walled-up lover. An inspired collection: 

The Keepsake
, 1835; the standard

drawing-room annual, useful as a means

for luring ladies into chaste flirtation

in early 19th century courtship scenes.

I’d never seen a copy; often wondered.

Well, here it was – a pretty compilation 

of tales and verses: stanzas by Lord Blank

and Countess This and Mrs That; demure

engravings, all white shoulders, corkscrew hair

and swelling bosoms; stories full of pure

sentiments, in which gentlemen of rank

urged suits upon the nobly-minded fair. 

You passed the volume round, and poured more wine.

Outside your cottage lightning flashed again:

a Grasmere storm, theatrically right

for stories of romance and terror. Then

somehow, quite suddenly, the book was mine.

The date in it’s five weeks ago tonight. 

‘On loan perpetual.’ If that implied

some dark finality, some hint of ‘nox

perpetua’, something desolate and bleak,

we didn’t see it then, among the jokes.

Yesterday, walking on the fells, you died.

I’m left with this, a trifling, quaint antique. 

You’ll not reclaim it now; it’s mine to keep:

a keepsake, nothing more. You’ve changed the ‘loan

perpetual’ to a bequest by dying.

Augusta, Lady Blanche, Lord Ravenstone –

I’ve read the lot, trying to get to sleep.

The jokes have all gone flat. I can’t stop crying.

Red-tipped, explosive, self-complete:

one you can strike on the coal-face, or

the sole of your boot. Not for the south, where

soft men with soft hands rub effete

brown-capped sticks on a toning strip

chequered with coffee-grounds, the only

match for the matches, and any lonely

stray (if they let them stray) picked up

from a table or found loose in a pocket

can't, without its container, flare

fire at a stroke: is not a purely

self-contained ignition unit. 

‘Security' proclaims the craven

yellow box with its Noah's ark,

‘Brymay' Special Safety's trade-mark

for southern consumption. That's all right, then:

bankers can take them home to Surrey

for their cigars, and scatter the odd

match-head, whether or not it's dead,

on their parquet floors, without the worry

of subsequent arson. Not like here

where a match is a man's match, an object

to be handled with as much respect

but as casually as a man's beer. 

You can't mistake the England's Glory

box: its crimson, blue and white

front's a miniature banner, fit

for the Durham Miners' Gala, gaudy

enough to march ahead of a band.

Forget that placid ark: the vessel

this one's adorned with has two funnels

gushing fat blue smoke to the wind.

The side's of sandpaper. The back

label's functional, printed with either

holiday vouchers, a special offer

on World Cup tickets, or this month's joke. 

Somewhere across England's broad

midriff, wanderingly drawn

from west to east, there exists a line

to the north of which the shops provide

(catering for a sudden switch

of taste) superior fried fish, runnier

yogurt, blouses cut for the fuller

northern figure; and the northern match.

Here England's Glory begins; through all

the vigorous north it reigns unrivalled

until its truce with Scottish Bluebell

round about Berwick and Carlisle. 

The landscape of my middle childhood

lacked factories. There had been no

industrial revolution in Surrey,

was the message. Woods and shops and houses,

churches, allotments, pubs and schools

and loonie-bins were all we had. 

Except, of course, the sewerage works,

on ‘Surridge Hill’, as we used to call it.

How sweetly rural the name sounds!

Wordsworth’s genius, said Walter Pater,

would have found its true test

had he become the poet of Surrey. 

Yorkshire had a talent for mills

and placed them to set off its contours;

Westmorland could also have worn

a few more factories with an air.

As for Surrey’s genius, that

was found to be for the suburban. 

There they were around the wireless

waiting to listen to Lord Haw-Haw.

‘Quiet now, children!’ they said as usual:

‘Ssh, be quiet! We’re trying to listen.’

‘Germany calling!’ said Lord Haw-Haw. 

I came out with it: ‘I love Hitler.’

They turned on me: ‘You can’t love
Hitler
!

Dreadful, wicked – ’ (mutter, mutter,

the shocked voices buzzing together) –

‘Don’t be silly. You don’t mean it.’ 

I held out for perhaps five minutes,

a mini-proto-neo-Nazi,

six years old and wanting attention.

Hitler always got their attention;

now I had it, for five minutes. 

Everyone at school loved someone,

and it had to be a boy or a man

if you were a girl. So why not Hitler?

Of course, you couldn’t love Lord Haw-Haw;

but Hitler – well, he was so famous! 

It might be easier to love Albert,

the boy who came to help with the milking,

but Albert laughed at me. Hitler wouldn’t:

one thing you could say for Hitler,

you never heard him laugh at people.

All the same, I settled for Albert.

‘We did sums at school, Mummy –

you do them like this: look.’ I showed her. 

It turned out she knew already.