CC Vulture
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Posts: 62
(2/3/06 8:18 am)
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Midwinter
The finished poem...
MIDWINTER
***
In the bleak midwinter,
frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
long ago.
Christina Rossetti, 1872
***
1. Coping
When I first ran the shower jet
over my cold, filthy skin again
I could only just still smell her there.
Later my hair dried in curls
which brought to mind my childhood days
when everything was new,
not straightened by the marching years.
Standing naked, unemployed –
I knew my job had been refilled;
you can’t leave a glass empty so long –
I bundled up the pillows I had puked on,
the duvet I had chewed,
shook off her leftover dust.
---
Children we dreamed of making –
their names, their games.
Savings we planned on staking:
a little pine kitchen
on the bank of the River Itchen,
with space to fit a fridge in;
shiny new handles to embolden,
make golden our inside doors;
tealight candles for a midnight balcony
in the house by the harbour,
where boats come in;
the bedroom,
a shell without a pearl.
---
I’ve bought a book, “Coping With Suicide” –
I’m keeping the page with her last letter –
and I work at the buffet on a Virgin train,
so I can go over and over those tracks,
her tracks, pick up her pieces.
A man comes by with the last of his change,
sees the title,
quickly I cover it
But he looks with loss in his sparkless eyes,
smiles at me and spends his savings.
Maybe, I wonder, he wrote the book,
maybe he can still smell her there.
Or maybe he’ll just write me a poem
while sipping his can of orange.
2. Collecting
Last year’s graffiti tags are mould
necrotising the cutting’s buttresses;
decaying carriages shake
outside the train care depot,
never to be allowed back in;
an ATM doesn’t pay out,
though you pound its sticky keys…
This is a friendless place for collecting.
Alert, chirpy platform managers try their best:
revising the day’s delays before their shift,
polishing whistles with an employed pride,
eagle-eyed at the turnstiles for ticketless prey.
A friendless place for collecting her.
But I’ve come into Southampton’s iron harbour
what? I’ve lost count how often;
reassured by the curving track,
I’ve watched from the window
the front of my train grasping for home,
the future pulling the present out of its lightless tunnel.
I’ll be a friendly face collecting her.
These days, I tell myself
she bought a meal deal on the way from Winchester,
a Thai chicken wrap, a diet cola, a Grab Bag of salted crisps,
which she left unfinished,
or gave to the Big Issue Man collecting down the aisle.
3. Housemartins
When the housemartins’ bungalow fell from her attic,
cradling its four pink, helpless children,
and she recognised the owl
whose screech woke them up,
the four winds plotting from a secret cell;
because she couldn’t predict the timing
of the explosions which haunted her,
or plan the fate of a rush-hour tube train,
four children and their unseen bosses
dreaming of burning crosses,
of parental losses;
while I flew across oceans with old warriors,
sharing new quests,
repairing the wrong nests;
when the small chunk of Earth she owned
crumbled through her tight fingers,
melting on the damp patio,
she cried all the keys of her grand piano,
and the housemartins scratched in the eaves,
trying for more helpless, pink children.
4. Impacts
The driver was an old salt, a 55 year old from a
football town – Portsmouth, he told me in a
fragmented, distant way. It was like
watching a Virgin Pendolino cross a
valley from far upstream, listening to the
echoed rattle from an ancient bridge.
I kept up the emails, for a little while
reminding him of his faultless killing.
Then he changed his username and home and
dissolved somewhere into the sea.
I wrote a short letter, well I typed one, to
her mother in Frasseto, Corsica, the little
hill-village with the single bar, islands away
from the one where her husband stays asleep.
She wrote a long note back in ink:
there was no blame, only regret;
no pointed finger, just warm old arms reaching to be
reached for. But she wouldn’t, couldn’t come
to the party: she didn’t know her daughter
any more than she knew which font I’d used.
Here are some people from the 18:05 from Waterloo:
3 whiplash injuries from the braking, one severe,
taken care of by an internet accident law firm;
a small team of marine palaeontologists, who
missed the former Institute’s first annual conference,
including a tapas lunch at the Que Pasa,
but they claimed the tickets back, on expenses;
a local press photographer, off-duty, able to
clamber from the window, snap the train’s face.
Later I bloodied his while the timetables redrew theirs.
I want to hug thanks to the forensics guys, though:
They worked all night, hushed in sterile white
body bags, asexual, setting up the night cameras
with detached professionalism, stroking my shoulders.
They helped orange police to herd the platform,
like stern, smart sheepdogs they turned two boys away,
who stumbled off, laughing into their new journey.
I didn’t open my mouth to scream at those kids,
or thank the guys because, as someone has
told me since, now I only speak in lines from poems.
5. Memory
Guiltily wracking myself for evidence
of six years’ love, six years’ loss,
finally I embellished us, which was wise –
none of it was wholly false, just minor lies
like everyone tells; like horoscopes advise:
pheromones released, conquering
jaded cigarette hair, honey light of candle
adding waxy shine to sawdust fringe;
drugs consumed together keeping us
up through the bruise of night
from first purple flush through black sprawl
to the leveling tide of pink dawn,
eye-salts drying on the dewy sand;
chlorine gazes, Listerine kisses,
the nitroglycerine of our embraces,
voices she cried at us, tears on closed ears,
raindrops bouncing off rock;
millennial fireworks, seen stacked
on my shoulders, jostling a space
among the million other couples,
becoming just as important as
rockets, sprayed silver into virgin dark;
hard hints of marriage pressed against her
when we crushed each other at ballroom class -
her in cobalt chiffon blouse,
saved from before we first met
for after we had; I in wet suit
holding her close to my thunderbolt;
drowning together in a slow dance.
6. Furnace
Poems were being read -
an Irish valedictory, anonymous;
a translation of some Latin about
monuments to her beauty;
something whimsical by Wendy Cope.
I felt locked inside the box, sweating,
so left the chapel for some air,
guzzling it down with a plastic cup of chocolate,
and studied wrought-iron place-markers,
their fine flourishes, sign-offs of solid black ink.
The clouds sighed and splashed a thousand
tiny goodbyes on other people’s flowers,
sweet pollen swept into the gut of Earth.
Now a girl stood by me while, inside,
the taped organ swelled to the clutching furnace,
a girl from another dark party,
trying to escape the constricting.
She said “I don’t know these people;
can I stay here with you for a while?”
I held her a moment, erasing the foxgloves
of her lapsed mascara with cocoa-hot thumbs,
kissed her forehead whose every line I could translate,
then said “They’re your family now.”
and we turned away from each other,
I to the endless cold, she to the final fire.
7. Letter
She scribbled it quick on a blank sheet
from the back of her current book –
it was that, I suppose, or a serviette
from the paper bag of food.
I’m glad she chose the book:
we used to save napkins
for sketching our dream homes on,
for saying ‘never goodbye’.
The hand was shaky. Blame it on nerves or uneven track.
She said:
… such choices seem sudden but people don’t know,
they don’t always see the under-skin split…
And
… a family in the seats across the aisle:
Daddy returns with their favourite drinks,
he knows them like his own best jokes;
Mummy teaches teens to bluff at cards
and they’re already very good at it;
Baby’s asleep on the table,
next to the Fanta...
And
… think they’re going to the New Forest,
that lodge near the golf club…
And
… we had a wonderful @#%$ there,
but they don’t know that, and nor did you…
And
… everything – almost – I wanted,
but you don’t, not with me,
stuck in this quiet car…
And
… not with you.
8. First
She touched me on the thigh with a magic finger:
I became a bolt of lightning
forged on a mountain afternoon.
I think it shook her:
shocked hand leapt away,
but eyes betrayed the electrical transfer,
skin shone, blazed.
We traded potted histories on small green Rizlas,
pencilled scribbles shouting over music:
hometown topographies, tomorrow’s ambitions,
mobile numbers and favourite colours.
Our answers differed but, luckily,
reached out from each helix,
magnetising together.
I borrowed a friend’s children and we practised:
a game of Buckaroo, a chip fight,
the dog we temporarily adopted
eating pieces of cold potato and plastic toy.
We taught them the aiming of a dart,
not to drink the red wine until you can,
how to approve of strangers.
She touched me on the eye with her magic tongue:
my pupils learned a sense of taste,
my lashes sparkling, revitalised.
Later, much later, I graduated,
taught the hyperthesis of her love.
It strikes me now, that same lightning,
this same place, again, again.
9. Night
After her ashes set off on their separate roads
I thanked the Town Mayor for granting access
to the abandoned tower where we waved them off,
let it return to its eight centuries’ sleep.
I lived her life for a month of night:
locked in my own box, the outside air
excommunicated like a disgraced priest,
like when we used to kiss, breathing for each other.
I choked on filaments of her perfume, thinking
if they stayed licked they’d stay lit, oiled,
thinking: if they stay oiled, lit,
there will still be her perfume, in filaments.
I kept the half-pack of Marlboros she forgot
or bequeathed, each night taking one out,
holding it to lamplight then sleeping,
its filter at my lips, dressed in our dried sweat.
I pinned my jumper that she liked to wear
in cruciform under the clay spaniel’s head,
its eyes, unable to shed a tear, modestly turned
ceilingward while I clawed what would be her hands.
I packed away my plugs, books, gloves, coat-hooks,
cushions, and the iron tablets I had
for the dizzy early love we pretended was anaemia,
my glasses; replaced all with those she left me.
But I was keeping alive something gone,
squeezing the fruit till it slipped from its skin,
which I’d done enough of already,
scattering her pips to the stone of the floor.
After the tower had relaxed eight centuries
I had a shower, shaved, then turned a key,
I’d lived her life for a month of night
and thanked the Town Mayor for granting access.
10. Hills Of Lough Currane
You cannot see the summits,
even in the height of August:
too much mist knits padded flat caps
for their spiny crowns.
But you can plan the ascent on a frayed map –
the stone roads to the clouds have never changed,
sheepdogs have learned protective outbursts
litter on litter, master following master.
People have built their nest here
hewn of sandstone and the gales of ages,
their city of rock, their taxi a pair of
stout boots and a withered stick.
Water comes invisible from ocean,
from black lough and irrigation farm,
sherbert lifted on heat waves, blown by
the petulant Atlantic wind;
salmon have always expanded their kindom,
raised catches for farmers, for holy-men, and
returned for death here, their ancestral home
in the hug of mossy shoulders.
It will take you a day to circle the shore,
more if your strides are careless –
saturation slides out from under the path
in places you forgot to expect.
But pay heed to the seniority of mountains,
while remembering you were born to walk,
and you’ll never be far from a steady footfall,
a well-paved boulevard in the boulder yard.
***
What can I give Him,
poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man,
I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him:
give my heart.
Christina Rossetti, 1872
***
(c) Stuart Ryder 2006
Edited by: CC Vulture at: 4/1/06 5:29 pm
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