with these never passed on, never used, dividers.
Changing at York
A directory that runs from B to V,
the Yellow Pages’ entries for HOTELS
and TAXIS torn out, the smell of dossers’ pee,
saliva in the mouthpiece, whisky smells –
I remember, now I have to phone,
squashing a Daily Mail half full of chips,
to tell the son I left at home alone
my train’s delayed, and get cut off by the pips,
how, phoning his mother, late, a little pissed,
changing at York, from some place where I’d read,
I used 2p to lie about the train I’d missed
and ten more to talk my way to some girl’s bed
and, in this same kiosk with the stale, sour breath
of queuing callers, drunk, cajoling, lying,
consoling his grampa for his granny’s death,
how I heard him, for the first time ever, crying.
Marked With D.
When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven
not unlike those he fuelled all his life,
I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven
and radiant with the sight of his dead wife,
light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,
‘not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie’.
I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame
but only literally, which makes me sorry,
sorry for his sake there’s no Heaven to reach.
I get it all from Earth my daily bread
but he hungered for release from mortal speech
that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead.
The baker’s man that no one will see rise
and England made to feel like some dull oaf
is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes
and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf.
A Piece of Cake
This New York baker’s bread ’s described as ‘Swiss’
though it’s said there’s something Nazi in their past.
But the cheesecake that they make ’s the best there is.
It’s made fresh every day and sells out fast.
My kids are coming so I buy one too,
and ask for a WELCOME frosted on the top.
I watch the tube squeeze out the script in blue.
It has my father’s smell, this German’s shop,
as he concentrates on his ice craftsmanship
that cost him weeks of evenings to complete,
a cake with V signs, spitfires, landing strip,
that took too many pains to cut and eat
to welcome home a niece back from the WAAFs.
Already I feel the cake stick in my throat!
The icing tube flows freely and then coughs.
The frosting comes out Gothic and reads: COD!
The Morning After
I
The fire left to itself might smoulder weeks.
Phone cables melt. Paint peels from off back gates.
Kitchen windows crack; the whole street reeks
of horsehair blazing. Still it celebrates.
Though people weep, their tears dry from the heat.
Faces flush with flame, beer, sheer relief
and such a sense of celebration in our street
for me it still means joy though banked with grief.
And that, now clouded, sense of public joy
with war-worn adults wild in their loud fling
has never come again since as a boy
I saw Leeds people dance and heard them sing.
There’s still that dark, scorched circle on the road.
The morning after kids like me helped spray
hissing upholstery spring-wire that still glowed
and cobbles boiling with black gas-tar for VJ.
II
The Rising Sun was blackened on those flames.
The jabbering tongues of fire consumed its rays.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, were mere names
for us small boys who gloried in our blaze.
The blood-red ball, first burnt to blackout shreds,
took hovering batwing on the bonfire’s heat
above the Rule Britannias and the bobbing heads
of the VJ hokey-cokey in our street.
The kitchen blackout cloth became a cloak
for me to play at fiend Count Dracula in.
I swirled it near the fire. It filled with smoke.
Heinz ketchup dribbled down my vampire’s chin.
That circle of scorched cobbles scarred with tar ’s
a night-sky globe nerve-wrackingly all black,
both hemispheres entire but with no stars,
an Archerless zilch, a Scaleless zodiac.
Old Soldiers
Last years of Empire and the fifth of War
and CAMP coffee extract on the kitchen table.
The Sikh that served the officer I saw
on the label in the label in the label
continuously cloned beyond my eyes,
beyond the range of any human staring,
down to amoeba, atom, neutron size
but the turbaned bearer never lost his bearing
and nothing shook the bottle off his tray.
Through all infinity and down to almost zero
he holds out and can’t die or fade away
loyal to the breakfasting Scots hero.
But since those two high summer days
the US dropped the World’s first A-bombs on,
from that child’s forever what returns my gaze
is a last chuprassy with all essence gone.
A Close One
Hawsers. Dirigibles. Searchlight. Messerschmitts.
Half let go. Half rake dark nowt to find …
Day old bereavement debris of a blitz
there’s been no shelter from, no all clear whined.
Our cellar ‘refuge room’ made anti-gas.
Damp sand that smelled of graves not Morecambe Bay.
Air Raid Precautions out of Kensitas.
A Victory jig-saw on Fry’s Cocoa tray.
Sandwiches. Snakes & Ladders. Thermos flask.
Sirens, then silences, then bombers’ drone.
Long whistles. Windows gone. Each time I’d ask
which one was the Jerry, which our own.
How close we were with death’s wings overhead!
How close we were not several hours ago.
These lines to hold the still too living dead –
my Redhill container, my long-handled hoe.
‘Testing the Reality’
I could count to a ragged 20 but no higher.
The flocking birds she taught me numbers by
so crammed church roof and belfry, cross and spire
their final taking off blacked Beeston’s sky.
There must have been 10,000 there or more.
They picketed piercingly the passing of each day
and shrilly hailed the first new light they saw
and hour after hour their numbers grew
till, on a Sunday morning, they all flew away
as suddenly as her 70 years would do.
The day that fledged her with the wings of night
made all her days flock to it, and as one
beyond all sight, all hearing, taste, smell, touch,
they soared away and, soaring, blocked the light
of what they steered their course by from her son,
the last soul still unhatched left in the clutch.
The Effort
‘The atom bomb was in manufacture before the first automatic washing machine.’
(Tillie Olsen, Silences)
They took our iron railings down to dump
on Dresden as one more British bomb,
but mam cajoled the men to leave a stump
to h
itch the line she hung the washing from.
So three inches didn’t end in German flesh.
It was the furthest from surrender when she flew
a rope full of white Y-fronts, dazzling, fresh
from being stewed all day with dolly blue
in the cellar set-pot. Her ferocious pride
would only let quite spotless clothes outside.
Washes that made her tender hands red raw
we do nowadays in no time by machine.
No one works so hard to keep things clean
so it’s maybe just as well she’d got to die
before the latest in bombardments and before
our world of minimum iron and spin dry.
Bye-Byes
The judder of energy when I jump
I laugh to see immediately pass
into the titmouse wired to a mossy stump
who taps his blunt beak on the dusty glass.
She wants me to leave ‘this minute’ but I won’t
drawn to the faded feathers in glass cases
where grown-ups see what toddlers like me don’t,
imposed on stuffed creation, their own faces.
Say bye-bye, our Tony, that’s enough!
We’ve got to buy some liver for dad’s tea,
Say bye-bye … sanderling, bye-bye … ruff!
I won’t say anything, and wriggle free.
Sensing her four-year-old’s about to cry
she buys me a postcard with the dodo on it.
43 years on this filial sonnet
lets the tears she staunched then out: Bye-bye!
Blocks
A droning vicar bores the congregation
and misquotes Ecclesiastes Chapter 3.
If anyone should deliver an oration
it should be me, her son, in poetry.
All the family round me start to sob.
For all my years of Latin and of Greek
they’d never seen the point of ‘for a job’,
I’m not prepared to stand up now and speak.
A time to … plough back into the soil
the simple rhymes that started at her knee,
the poetry, that ‘sedentary toil’
that began, when her lap was warm, with ABC.
Blocks with letters. Lettered block of stone.
I have to move the blocks to say farewell.
I hear the family cry, the vicar drone
and VALE, MATER ’s all that I can spell.
Jumper
When I want some sort of human metronome
to beat calm celebration out of fear
like that when German bombs fell round our home
it’s my mother’s needles, knitting, that I hear,
the click of needles steady though walls shake.
The stitches, plain or purl, were never dropped.
Bombs fell all that night until daybreak
but, not for a moment, did the knitting stop.
Though we shivered in the cellar-shelter’s cold
and the whistling bombs sent shivers through the walls
I know now why she made her scared child hold
the skeins she wound so calmly into balls.
We open presents wrapped before she died.
With that same composure shown in that attack
she’d known the time to lay her wools aside –
the jumper I open ’s shop-bought, and is black!
Bringing Up
It was a library copy otherwise
you’d’ve flung it in the fire in disgust.
Even cremation can’t have dried the eyes
that wept for weeks about my ‘sordid lust’.
The undertaker would have thought me odd
or I’d’ve put my book in your stiff hand.
You’d’ve been embarrassed though to meet your God
clutching those poems of mine that you’d like banned.
I thought you could hold my Loiners, and both burn!
And there together in the well wrought urn,
what’s left of you, the poems of your child,
devoured by one flame, unreconciled,
like soots on washing, black on bone-ash white.
Maybe you see them in a better light!
But I still see you weeping, your hurt looks:
You weren’t brought up to write such mucky books!
Timer
Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn.
Dad told me I’d to tell them at St James’s
that the ring should go in the incinerator.
That ‘eternity’ inscribed with both their names is
his surety that they’d be together, ‘later’.
I signed for the parcelled clothing as the son,
the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress –
the clerk phoned down: 6-8-8-3-1?
Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes!
It’s on my warm palm now, your burnished ring!
I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs,
sift through its circle slowly, like that thing
you used to let me watch to time the eggs.
Fire-eater
My father speaking was like conjurors I’d seen
pulling bright silk hankies, scarves, a flag
up out of their innards, red, blue, green,
so many colours it would make me gag.
Dad’s eldest brother had a shocking stammer.
Dad punctuated sentence ends with but …
Coarser stuff than silk they hauled up grammer
knotted together deep down in their gut.
Theirs are the acts I nerve myself to follow.
I’m the clown sent in to clear the ring.
then bring back knotted, one continuous string
igniting long-pent silences, and going back
to Adam fumbling with Creation’s names;
and though my vocal cords get scorched and black
there’ll be a constant singing from the flames.
Pain-Killers
I
My father haunts me in the old men that I find
holding the shop-queues up by being slow.
It’s always a man like him that I’m behind
just when I thought the pain of him would go
reminding me perhaps it never goes,
with his pension book kept utterly pristine
in a plastic wrapper labelled Pantihose
as if they wouldn’t pay if it weren’t clean,
or learning to shop so late in his old age
and counting his money slowly from a purse
I’d say from its ornate clasp and shade of beige
was his dead wife’s glasses’ case. I curse,
but silently, secreting pain, at this delay,
the acid in my gut caused by dad’s ghost –
I’ve got aerogrammes to buy. My love’s away!
And the proofs of Pain-Killers to post!
II
Going for pills to ease the pain I get
from the Post Office on Thursdays, Pension Day,
the chemist’s also gives me cause to fret
at more of my dad’s ghosts, and more delay
as they queue for their prescriptions without hopes
and go looking for the old cures on the shelves,
stumbling into pyramids of scented soaps
they once called cissy when they felt ‘themselves’.
There are more than in the Post Office in BOOTS
and I try to pass the time behind such men
by working out the Latin and Greek roots
of cures, the san- that’s in Sanatogen,
compounds derived from derm- for teenage spots,
suntan creams and lotions prefixed sol-
while a double of my dad takes three wild shots
at pronouncing PARACETAMOL.
Background Material
My writing desk. Two photos, mam and dad.
A birthday, him. Their ruby wedding, her.
Neither one a couple and both bad.
I make out what’s behind them from the blur.
Dad’s in our favourite pub, now gone for good.
My father and his background are both gone,
but hers has my Welsh cottage and a wood
that still shows those same greens eight summers on,
though only the greenness of it ’s stayed the same.
Though one of them ’s in colour and one ’s not,
the two are joined, apart from their shared frame,
by what, for photographers, would mar each shot:
in his, if you look close, the gleam, the light,
me in his blind right eye, but minute size –
in hers, as though just cast from where I write,
a shadow holding something to its eyes.
Three
Self Justification
Me a poet! My daughter with maimed limb
became a more than tolerable sprinter.
And Uncle Joe. Impediment spurred him,
the worst stammerer I’ve known, to be a printer.
He handset type much faster than he spoke.
Those cruel consonants, ms, ps, and bs
on which his jaws and spirit almost broke
flicked into order with sadistic ease.
It seems right that Uncle Joe, ‘b-buckshee
from the works’, supplied those scribble pads
on which I stammered my first poetry
that made me seem a cissy to the lads.
Their aggro towards me, my need of them ’s
what keeps my would-be mobile tongue still tied –
aggression, struggle, loss, blank printer’s ems
by which all eloquence gets justified.
Divisions
I
All aggro in tight clothes and skinhead crops
they think that like themselves I’m on the dole.
Once in the baths that mask of ‘manhood’ drops.
Their decorated skins lay bare a soul.