iv
Ground Floor between Fiction and Poetry.
The second time in as many days. It comes at me.
The smell from where she sits between Travel
and Crime is enough make browsers wrinkle
features in ‘what is that ?’disgust. She stinks.
Because clothes for sleeping rough, layer upon
layer, are being walked in, underneath the visible
leather-sheen great-coat and cap. Auschwitz ?
That liberation shot at the wire ? No, here, beneath
the 3 For 2 CD offers in the Borders Summer Sale.
The truth is, she impregnates every last page of verse:
the entire Carcanet list, the brand new Armitage,
Billy Childish, 101 Poems That Will Change Your Life --
you name it. We all track on by, join a queue
to pay by plastic. She exits into Market Square, freeing
up from under the cap her long streak-grey hair,
making her way beyond us. I keep finding her
days later, unremitting, unbearable still, in page
after page of Paul Celan or Miklós Radnóti.
v
I’d made it-- broken the back
of ‘Anna Karenina’ on a three day week
of eight hour shifts, barely conscious
of the world out there: the lines at Grunwick,
the National Front, the exiled Shah. All done
in top floor digs on the Lensfield Road, a room
with a view over a carpark and a criminal
Edwardian fire escape. Oliver’s army was here
to stay. Talk over the chicken chow mein
was of ‘narodnost’, commitment to the cause.
Then to the place of labour: working flat out
on bed or floor, a production line of borstal specials
and Maxwell House brews from the communal tin.
Snow drifted through
the second night;
of the primitive extractor fan. History
was one vast steppe. By dawn, water
at Hobson’s Choice was laminated in ice.
My classic set in Linotype Pilgrim fell apart
at the death– individual leaves came away
in my hands from the creased black spine.
The only thing to stick was an image of Kitty
and Levin under the Milky Way before the run
of blank sheets you get at the very end.