Collected Poems, page 2
the Jack of Diamonds and, for this trick only,
you my Queen. Beware the Ace of Spades.
Her heart is broken and he fears his liver
will explode. Outside the world whimpers
and rumours bite like gnats in bloodless ears.
You have placed my small hand on your large penis.
This is an erection. This is the life. This
is another fine mess. Perhaps soup will comfort them.
To have only soup against such sorrow.
I cannot bear alone and watch
my hands reach sadly for the telephone.
Once someone asked if she was hurting him
and once a wonderful lass destroyed him
with a kiss. You’ve given me the benefit of your doubt.
We forgive them nothing. I want
a better part than this. He shuffles the pack
and tells her to wait. She thinks of the loved body
talked of like weather. She’s putting the ingredients
into the soup he likes. It’s true or none of it’s true.
Someone is cared for who is past caring. Somewhere.
Till Our Face
Whispers weave webs amongst thighs. I open
like the reddest fruit. Between the rapid spaces
of the rain the world sweats seas and damp
strings tremble for a perfect sound.
A bow tugs catgut. Something inside me
steps on a highwire where you search crimson
for a silver thread. A rose glows beneath
the drift of pine needles. I bite your lip, lost.
Come further in, where eyes stare inward
at the skull as the roof of the brain
takes flight. Your mouth laps petals till our face
is a flower soaked in its own scent.
The planets abandon us.
Lovebirds
I wait for your step.
A jay on the cherry tree
trembles the blossom.
I name you my love
and the gulls fly above us
calling to the air.
Our two pale bodies
move in the late light, slowly
as doves do, breathing.
And then you are gone.
A night-owl mourns in darkness
for the moon’s last phase.
Where We Came In
old lovers die hard, as in the restaurant
we pass the bread between us like a symbol
of betrayal. One of you tonight.
The habits are the same, small intimacies
flaring up across the table. They’ve placed
a candle in the middle over which
we carefully avoid our history.
How do you sleep? Something corny
like Our Song pipes out. I know
you’re still too mean to pay the bill.
Our new loves sit beside us guardedly,
outside the private jokes. I think
of all the tediousness of loss but, yes,
I’m happy now. Yes. Happy. Now.
Darling, whatever it was that covered
such an ordinary form with light
has long since gone. It is a candle
shapes the memory. Perhaps the wine.
I see our gestures endlessly repeated as
you turn to yours the way you used
to turn to me. I turn to mine. And
Free Will
The country in her heart babbled a language
she couldn’t explain. When she had found the money
she paid them to take something away from her.
Whatever it was she did not permit it a name.
It was nothing yet she found herself grieving nothing.
Beyond reason her body mourned, though the mind
counselled like a doctor who had heard it all before.
When words insisted they were silenced with a cigarette.
Dreams were a nightmare. Things she did not like
to think about persisted in being thought.
They were in her blood, bobbing like flotsam;
as sleep retreated they were strewn across her face.
Once, when small, she sliced a worm in half,
gazing as it twinned beneath the knife.
What she parted would not die despite
the cut, remained inside her all her life.
Alliance
What she has retained of herself is a hidden grip
working her face like a glove-puppet. She smiles
at his bullying, this Englishman who talks scathingly
of Frogs in front of his French wife.
She is word-perfect. Over the years he has inflated
with best bitter till she has no room. Je t’aime
isn’t in it. One morning she awoke to a foreigner
lying beside her and her heart slammed shut.
The youngest lives at home. She stays up late
to feed what keeps her with the father. England
ruined him and holds her hostage in the garden,
thinking of her sons and what they’ve cost.
Or dreaming in another language with a different name
about a holiday next year. He staggers in half-pissed
and plonks his weight down on her life, hates her
for whatever reason she no longer lets him near.
A Clear Note
1 AGATHA
Eight children to feed, I worked as a nurse
tending the dying. Four kids to each breast.
You can see from the photographs
my long auburn hair.
Kiss me goodnight – me weeping in our bed.
The scunner would turn away cold, back rigid,
but come home from work and take me on the floor
with his boots on and his blue eyes shut.
Moll, all my life I wanted the fields of Ireland only
and a man to delight in me
who’d never be finished with kisses and say
Look at the moon. My darling. The moon.
Instead, a move across the water
to Glasgow and long years of loathing
with the devil I’d married. I felt love freeze
to a fine splinter in my heart.
Again and again throwing life from my loins
like a spider with enough rope
spinning and wringing its own neck. And he
wouldn’t so much as hold me after the act.
It won’t be over till one of us is dead.
Out there in the streets there’s a corpse
walking round in a good suit and a trilby.
Don’t bury him on top of me. Please.
I had a voice once, but it’s broken
and cannot recall the unspoken words
I tried to whisper in his closed ear.
Look at the moon. My darling. The moon.
Who’d have thought to die alone on the telephone
wheezing at strangers? The snowqueen’s heart
stopping forever and melting as it stopped.
Once I was glorious with a new frock and high hopes.
Is it mad to dream then? What a price
to pay. But when hair bled colour
and the starved body began eating itself,
I had forgotten how to dream.
What laughs, Moll, for you and me
to swim in impossible seas. You’ve a daughter
yourself now to talk through the night.
I was famous for my hats. Remember.
Workmen whistled as I stepped out,
although I ignored them. I had pride. Remember
my fine hair and my smart stride
in the park with the eight of you spruced.
Please. From behind silence I ask
for an epitaph of light. Let some imagine.
Bernadette, little grandchild, one day
you must tell them I wanted the moon. Yes.
2 MOLL
Some hurts pass, pet, but others
lurk on. They turn up
like old photos and catch at the throat
somehow. I’m forty-nine in May.
Her death haunts me, almost
as I haunted her womb and you mine.
A presence inside me which will neither grow
nor diminish. What can a woman do?
The job pays well, but more than that
there’s the freedom. Your father’s against it.
He loves me as much now as he did
twenty-five years ago. More.
Sometimes I think I’ll walk out the door
and keep right on walking. But then
there’s the dinner to cook. I take her flowers
every year and talk to the tombstone.
You were a wild wain, with an answer
for everything. Near killed me containing you.
Boys are different. I can read you
like a book, like the back of my hand.
They call me Madcap Moll. I’d love to leap
on a bike and ride to the seaside
alone. There’s something out there
that’s passing me by. Are you following me?
I’ve been drained since twenty, but not empty
yet. I roam inside myself, have
such visions you’d not credit. The best times
are daydreams with a cigarette.
There was that night, drunk, I told you
Never have kids. Give birth to yourself
I wish I had. And your Dad, looking daggers
stormed off to bed. Laugh? I cried.
I can’t fly out to stay with you alone,
there’d be fights for a month.
He broods on what I’d get up to
given half the chance. Men!
Hardest to bear is knowing my own strength.
Does that sound strange? Yet four daft sons
and a husband handle me like gold leaf.
Me, with a black hole of resources.
Over and over again as a child
you’d be at me to sing
The stars at night are big and bright.
Aye. So still they are.
Here’s me blethering on. What laughs,
Bernadette, for us to swim in impossible seas
under the moon. Let’s away, my darling,
for a good long walk. And I’ll tell you a secret.
3 BERNADETTE
The day her mother died, my mother
was on holiday. I travelled to the seaside
with bad news. She slumped over the table,
spilling wine across the telegram.
Someone burnt the diary she wrote. It was
a catalogue of hatred and it was all
she had to leave. Extracts were whispered
at the wake and then it was forgotten.
Her mouth was set as though she was angry.
Kiss me goodnight. My mother went in.
She saw him bend over the coffin to kiss her
and half-thought the corpse had flinched.
I can’t remember much. Perhaps the smell
of my granny mingling with hers
in a gossipy bed. Them giggling. One sang
Hang down your head Tom Dooley in the dark.
Or assuming a virtuous expression
so they’d let you stay up late. Listening
as language placed its little markers
where the secrets were.
They buried him on top within the month.
I don’t want that bastard
rotting above me for all eternity.
What does it matter, they said, now she’s dead?
Can’t see the moon now, Moll.
Listen. The hopes of your thousand mothers
sing with a clear note inside you.
Away, while you can, and travel the world.
I can almost hear her saying it now.
W’ho will remember me? Bleak decades of silence
and lovelessness placing her years away
from the things that seem natural to us.
For we swim with ease in all
possible seas and do not forget them.
It’s spring again and just about now
my Granny would be buying a new hat.
And I have hair like hers. My mother
is setting off for work. An aeroplane
climbs up above her house. She imagines me
seeing it from my window later on.
As I imagine the simplest thing. The dreams
of women which will harm no one.
April in the graveyard sees new flowers
pushing out from the old earth.
The daylight disappears. Against the night
a plane’s lights come from somewhere else. For Moll
the life goes streaming back in tune.
For Agatha, from Bernadette, the moon.
Words of Absolution
She clings to life by a rosary,
ninety years old. Who made you?
God made me. Pearl died a bairn
and him blacklisted. Listen
to the patterns of your prayers
down the years. What is Purgatory?
The guilt and stain of Original Sin.
Except the Virgin. Never a drink
or tobacco and the legs opened only
for childbirth. Forgive me. With her
they pass the parcel. Don’t let the music
stop and me holding it. What do you mean
by the resurrection of the body?
Blessed art thou among women even if
we put you in a home. Only the silent motion
of lips and the fingering of decades.
How do we show that we love God?
Never a slack shilling, but good broth
always on the table. Which are the fasting days?
Mary Wallace, what are the days of abstinence?
Chrism, ash, holy water, beads
waiting for the end of nothing. Granny,
I have committed the Sin of Sodom.
How are we to love one another?
What are the four last things
to be ever remembered? I go to my reward.
Chastity. Piety. Modesty. Longanimity.
How should you finish the day? After
your night prayers what should you do?
Debt
He was all night sleepless over money.
Impossible scenarios danced in the dark
as though he was drunk. The woman
stirred, a soft spoon, and what had emerged
from them dreamed in the next room, safe.
He left himself and drew a gun he didn’t own.
He won the pools; pearls for her and ponies
for the kids. The damp bedroom was an ocean liner
till the woman farted, drifted on, away from him.
Despair formed a useless prayer and worry an ulcer.
He bargained with something he could not believe in
for something he could not have. Sir . . .
Through the wallpaper men in suits appeared.
They wanted the video, wanted the furniture.
They wanted the children. Sweat soured in nylon sheets
as his heartbeat panicked, trying to get out.
There was nothing he would not do. There was
nothing to do but run the mind’s mad films.
Dear Sir . . . his ghost typed on. He remembered
waiting for her, years ago, on pay-day
with a bar of fruit-and-nut. Somehow consoled
he reached out, found her, and then slept.
Add this. Take that away. The long night leaked
cold light into the house. A letter came.
You Jane
At night I fart a Guinness smell against the wife
who snuggles up to me after I’ve given her one
after the Dog and Fox. It’s all muscle. You can punch
my gut and wait forever till I flinch. Try it.
Man of the house. Master in my own home. Solid.
Look at that bicep. Dinner on the table
and a clean shirt, but I respect her point of view.
She’s borne me two in eight years, knows
when to button it. Although she’s run a bit to fat
she still bends over of a weekend in suspenders.
This is the life. Australia next year and bugger
the mother-in-law. Just feel those thighs.
Karate keeps me like granite. Strength of an ox.
I can cope with the ale no problem. Pints
with the lads, a laugh, then home to her.
She says Did you dream, love? I never
dream. Sleep is as black as a good jar.
I wake half-conscious with a hard-on, shove it in.
She don’t complain. When I feel, I feel here
where the purple vein in my neck throbs.
Whoever She Was
They see me always as a flickering figure
on a shilling screen. Not real. My hands,
still wet, sprout wooden pegs. I smell the apples
burning as I hang the washing out.
Mummy, say the little voices of the ghosts
of children on the telephone. Mummy.
A row of paper dollies, cleaning wounds
or boiling eggs for soldiers. The chant
of magic words repeatedly. I do not know.
Perhaps tomorrow. If we’re very good.
The film is on a loop. Six silly ladies
torn in half by baby fists. When they
think of me, I’m bending over them at night,
to kiss. Perfume. Rustle of silk. Sleep tight.
Where does it hurt? A scrap of echo clings
to the bramble bush. My maiden name
sounds wrong. This was the playroom.
I turn it over on a clumsy tongue. Again.
These are the photographs. Making masks
from turnips in the candlelight. In case they come.
Whoever she was, forever their wide eyes watch her
as she shapes a church and steeple in the air.
She cannot be myself and yet I have a box
of dusty presents to confirm that she was here.
You remember the little things. Telling stories
or pretending to be strong. Mummy’s never wrong.
You open your dead eyes to look in the mirror
which they are holding to your mouth.
Human Interest
Fifteen years minimum, banged up inside
for what took thirty seconds to complete.
