Poems 1960-2000 (24 page)

She'll never be able to play the piano –

well, not properly. She'll never be able

to play the recorder, even, at school,

when she goes: it has so many little holes… 

We'll have her taught the violin.

Lucky her left hand's the one with four

fingers, one for each string. A thumb

and a fleshy fork are enough to hold a bow. 

Before the calculator – the electronic one –

there were beads to count on; there was the abacus

to tell a tally or compute a score;

or there were your fingers, if you had enough. 

The base was decimal: there had to be

a total of ten digits, in two sets –

a bunch of five, another bunch of five.

If they didn't match, your computations went haywire. 

Leafy lanes and
rus in urbe
were the thing

for a sheltered childhood (not that it was for long,

but parents try): the elm trees lingering

behind the coach factory; the tense monotonous song 

of collared doves; the acres of bare floor

for learning to gallop on in the first size

of Start-Rite shoes; the peacock glass in the front door;

and the swift refocusing lurch of the new baby-sitter's eyes. 

The Duke of Edinburgh stance: how cute

in a five-year-old! She doesn't do it much

when you're behind her; then it's hands in armpits

or pockets. School, of course, would like to teach 

that well-adjusted children don't need pockets

except for their normal purposes, to hold

hankies or bus-tickets. She'll not quite learn

what she's not quite specifically taught. 

I didn't exist till I thought that;

then God invented me and made me

the age I am now (nearly eight); 

perhaps I was someone else before,

and he suddenly swapped us round, and said

‘You can be the girl with two fingers

and she can be you for a change, instead.' 

‘Give us your hand – it's a bit muddy here,

you'll slip.' But he's on her wrong side: her right's

wrong. She tries to circumnavigate him

(‘Watch it!' he says), to offer him her left –

and slips. It comes out. ‘There!' she says. ‘You see!'

‘Is that all? Fucking hell,' he says, ‘that's nothing;

don't worry about it, love. My Auntie May

lost a whole arm in a crash. Is it hereditary?' 

‘Some tiny bud that should have split into four

didn't, we don't know why' was all they could offer.

Research, as usual, lags. But suddenly, this:

‘A long-term study has found a positive link 

between birth defects and exposure to pesticides

in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy…the baby's

neural crest…mothers who had been present when

aerosol insecticides…' Now they tell us. 

She has not got multiple sclerosis.

She has not got motorneuron disease,

or muscular dystrophy, or Down's Syndrome,

or a cleft palate, or a hole in the heart. 

Her sight and hearing seem to be sound.

She has not been damaged by malnutrition,

or tuberculosis, or diabetes.

She has not got (probably not got) cancer. 

Date of birth and all that stuff: straightforward;

likewise, now that she's stopped growing, height.

But ah, ‘Distinguishing marks': how can she smuggle

so glaring a distinction out of sight? 

The Passport Office proves, in one of its human

incarnations, capable of tact:

a form of words emerges that fades down

her rare statistic to a lustreless fact.

She's seeing stars – Orion steady on her left

like a lit-up kite (she has a window-seat),

and her whole small frame of sky strung out

with Christmas-tree lights. But what's all that 

behind them? Spilt sugar? Spangled faults

in the plane's window? A dust of glittering points

like the sparkle-stuff her mother wouldn't let her

wear on her eyes to the third-form party. 

Does less mean more? She's felt more nearly naked

in duffel-coat and boots and scarf

with nothing showing but a face and her bare

fingers (except, of course, for the times 

in fur gloves – mittens – look, no hands!)

than here on a beach in a bikini:

flesh all over. Look at my legs, my

back, my front. Shall I take off my top? 

Shoulders like horses' bums; an upper arm

dressed in a wobbling watermelon of flesh

and a frilly muu-muu sleeve; red puckered necks

above the bougainvillaea and sunsets 

and straining buttons of Hawaiian shirts;

bellies, bald heads, a wilting grey moustache

beneath a hat proclaiming ‘One Old Poop'.

The tour guide rounds them up: his travelling freak-show. 

‘There will be twenty telescopes in the crater

of Mount Albert.' White-coated figures man them,

marshalling queues in darkness: not the Klan

but the Lions raising funds for charity.

$2 a look. No lights – not even torches;

no smoking (bad for the optics); no moon

above the tree-fringed walls of this grassy dip.

Nothing up there but stars. And it, of course. 

A glow-worm in a Marmite jar

like the one her mother brought her once:

‘I dreamt you woke me in the night and showed me

a glow-worm in a Marmite jar.' 

So these wee kids in dressing-gowns

will remember being woken up

for honey sandwiches and cocoa

and a little light in a ring of glass. 

‘It's not like anything else, with its stumpy tail:

just a fuzz, really, until you get up close –

but of course you can't. With binoculars, I meant,

or a telescope. Actually the tail's fading.' 

Higher than Scorpius now, higher than the Pointers,

high as the mid-heaven, she's tracked it nightly,

changing. ‘I'm not the only one, but I'm once

in a lifetime.' As for close, that's something else. 

Landing at Gatwick on a grey Sunday when

the baggage handlers seem to be on strike as

they were at the airport before last (but no,

it's merely Britain being its old self ) she's 

her old self – a self consisting also of

more hand-luggage than she'd thought she was allowed

plus her at last reclaimed suitcase: all of which,

however she may dispose them, hurt her hand.

Rise above it! Swallow a chemical:

chuck down whisky, Valium, speed,

Mogadon, caffeine; bomb it or drown it.

But wait! If chemicals did the deed 

pandering to their ways compounds

the offence. Resist: you know they lead

to trouble. Find another obsession.

Face a healthier form of need. 

Saving the world is the only valid cause.

Now that she knows it's round it seems smaller,

more vulnerable (as well as bigger, looser,

a baggy bundle of dangerous contradictions). 

There's room for such concerns in student life,

if you stretch it. So: Link hands around the world

for peace! Thumbs down to Star Wars! Hands off

the environment! Two fingers to the Bomb! 

‘Of course you'd have a natural sympathy…

I always thought it was quite sweet, your little hand,

when we were kids; but we don't want other kids

walking around the world with worse things… 

I'm not upsetting you, am I?' No, she's not,

this warm voice from the past, this candid face.

‘Right. See you tomorrow. The coach leaves at 8.

Oh, and we've got a wonderful furious banner.' 

The fountain in her heart informs her

she needn't try to sleep tonight –

rush, gush: the sleep-extinguisher

frothing in her chest like a dishwasher.

She sits at the window with a blanket

to track the turning stars. A comet

might add some point. The moon ignores her;

but dawn may come. She'd settle for that. 

There was a young woman who fell

for someone she knew rather well –

a friend from her school: confirming the rule

that with these things you never can tell. 

The person she'd thought a fixed star –

stuck on rails like a tram, not a car –

shot off into orbit and seemed a new planet,

and a dazzler, the finest by far. 

She wants to see what it looks like on

a breast. She puts it on a breast –

not the one she has in mind

but her own: at least it's a rehearsal. 

Three weeks later, the first night:

a nipple, darker than hers, framed

in a silky, jointed bifurcation.

There is also dialogue. And applause. 

And she never did learn to play the violin.

So it will have to be
Musica Mundana
,

‘the harmony of the spheres' (coming across a map

of the southern skies cut out of some Auckland paper) 

or the other kind: what was it?
Instrumentalis

and – ah, yes –
Humana
. (Listen: Canopus, Crux,

Carina, Libra, Vela choiring together. She

has glided right off the edge of the star-chart.)

That’s where they lived in the 1890s.

They don’t know that we know,

or that we’re standing here, in possession

of some really quite intimate information

about the causes of their deaths,

photographing each other in a brisk wind

outside their terrace house, both smiling

(not callously, we could assure them),

our hair streaming across our faces

and the green plastic Marks and Spencer’s bag

in which I wrapped my camera against showers

ballooning out like a wind-sock

from my wrist, showing the direction

of something that’s blowing down our century.

What shall we do with Grandpa, in his silver

frame? And why is he in it, may we ask?

Why not Grandma, still shyly veiled in her

tissue paper and photographer’s cardboard? 

Of course, there’s his moustache: we can’t miss that;

nor would he wish us to. It must have taken

hours and all his barbering skills to wax

and twirl the ends into these solemn curlicues. 

We can’t keep that in a drawer – or he couldn’t.

But Grandma, now, in her black, nervously smiling,

one hand barely poised on the same ridiculous

Empire chairback: what a stunner she was!

Why did he not frame her? After all, her looks

are what he married her for. He fell in love

with her portrait (not this one) in a photographer’s

window, and hunted down the woman herself. 

She was a dressmaker’s cutter (cool hands);

he was an extrovert – a talker, mixer

(the Lodge, the Church, the Mechanics’ Institute,

the Temperance Movement). And it all came true: 

seven years of engagement, fifty more

together. You can almost map their marriage,

decade by decade, through the evolution,

flourishing and decline of his moustache. 

At twenty, not a whisker; at thirty or so,

this elaborate facial construct. In Manchester

it throve; then what did he do but export it

to droop and sag in the bush at Te Raua Moa, 

on his dairy farm (how those cattle depressed him –

was New Zealand not such a bright idea after all?).

But it perked up for his passport in the 30s,

with a devilish Vandyke beard, for their last trip Home. 

Not a handsome man, he must have decided

to take a bit of trouble and pass for one;

while Grandma, with the eyes and the bone structure

and that tilt of the head, decided to be plain. 

She took to bobbed hair and wire-framed glasses,

and went grey early. He never did (unless

there was some preparation he knew about?)

Here they are in a 50s Polyfoto – 

she with her shy smile, he with a muted version

of the moustache, wearing his cameo tie-pin

and a jubilant grin, as if he’d just slammed down

the winning trick in his favourite game of ‘Sorry!’