tramp over the slats
where the pavement’s torn up.
One of them’s telling a joke.
They swing on under a banner
for a play by Harold Pinter –
stretched linen, four metres wide
and at least two workmen tall,
spread on a ten-metre wall –
the play’s The Dumb Waiter .
They go on past a kindergarten
which is tipping out children,
past banks with bullet-holes in them,
past an industrial shoal
of tower-block homes
to the second-right turn
where the pulse of street-life picks up,
where there are people and shops.
Ahead, a queue forms
as a café rattles itself open
and starts to serve out ice cream.
Inside his treacle-brown frame
a young man flickers and smiles
as he fans out the biscuit-shells –
already half the ice cream’s gone
and the waiter teases the children
with cold smoke from a new can.
Seeds stick to their tongues –
gooseberry, cloudberry – chill,
grainy and natural.
Shoving their caps back
the workmen join on
and move forward in line
for what’s over. Tapping light coins
they move at a diagonal
to a blue, skew-whiff ditched Trabbi.
Brown coal
The room creaked like a pair of lungs
and the fire wouldn’t go
till we held up the front page for it.
All the while the news was on
that day they wired up the Wall
while I was swimming on newspaper –
a cold rustle of words
to the wheezing of my sister.
I caught the fringe of her scarf
in winter smogs after school
as she towed me through the stutter
of high-lamped Ford Populars
and down the mouth of the railway tunnel
into water-pocked walls
and the dense sulphurous hollows
of nowhere in particular.
It was empty but for smog.
Coughing through our handkerchiefs
we walked eerily, lammed
at the brickwork, picked ourselves up.
I walked through nowhere last April
into a mist of brown coal,
sulphur emissions, diesel
stopped dead at the Wall,
the whiff of dun Trabants
puttering north/south
past a maze of roadworks,
leaving hours for us to cross
in the slow luxury of strolling
as the streets knit themselves up
to become a city again.
By instinct I kept my mouth shut
and breathed like one of us girls
in our “identical-twin” coats,
listening out for rare cars,
coal at the back of our throats –
it was England in the fifties,
half-blind with keeping us warm,
so I was completely at ease
in a small street off Unter Den Linden
as a fire-door behind wheezed
and Berlin creaked like two lungs.
Safe period
Your dry voice from the centre of the bed
asks ‘Is it safe?’
and I answer for the days as if I owned them.
Practised at counting, I rock
the two halves of the month like a cradle.
The days slip over their stile
and expect nothing. They are just days,
and we’re at it again, thwarting
souls from the bodies they crave.
They’d love to get into this room
under the yellow counterpane
we’ve torn to make a child’s cuddly,
they’d love to slide into the sheets
between soft, much-washed
flannelette fleece,
they’d love to be here in the moulded spaces
between us, where there is no room,
but we don’t let them. They fly about gustily,
noisy as our own children.
Big barbershop man
Big barbershop man turning away,
sides of his face
lathered and shaved
close with the cut-throat
he always uses,
big barbershop man turning away,
helping the neighbours
make good, sweating
inside a stretched t-shirt
with NO MEANS YES on the back of it,
waltzing a side of pig,
taking the weight,
scalp like a glove
rucked with the strain,
big barbershop man turning away
trim inside like a slice of ham
big barbershop man
hoisting the forequarter,
fat marbled with meat
stiff as a wardrobe,
big barbershop man
waltzing a side of pig
striped like a piece
of sun awning, cool
as a jelly roll,
big barbershop man waltzing the meat
like a barber’s pole on yellow Main Street.
The dry well
It was not always a dry well.
Once it had been brimming with water.
cool, limpid, delicious
where the pavement’s torn up.
One of them’s telling a joke.
They swing on under a banner
for a play by Harold Pinter –
stretched linen, four metres wide
and at least two workmen tall,
spread on a ten-metre wall –
the play’s The Dumb Waiter .
They go on past a kindergarten
which is tipping out children,
past banks with bullet-holes in them,
past an industrial shoal
of tower-block homes
to the second-right turn
where the pulse of street-life picks up,
where there are people and shops.
Ahead, a queue forms
as a café rattles itself open
and starts to serve out ice cream.
Inside his treacle-brown frame
a young man flickers and smiles
as he fans out the biscuit-shells –
already half the ice cream’s gone
and the waiter teases the children
with cold smoke from a new can.
Seeds stick to their tongues –
gooseberry, cloudberry – chill,
grainy and natural.
Shoving their caps back
the workmen join on
and move forward in line
for what’s over. Tapping light coins
they move at a diagonal
to a blue, skew-whiff ditched Trabbi.
Brown coal
The room creaked like a pair of lungs
and the fire wouldn’t go
till we held up the front page for it.
All the while the news was on
that day they wired up the Wall
while I was swimming on newspaper –
a cold rustle of words
to the wheezing of my sister.
I caught the fringe of her scarf
in winter smogs after school
as she towed me through the stutter
of high-lamped Ford Populars
and down the mouth of the railway tunnel
into water-pocked walls
and the dense sulphurous hollows
of nowhere in particular.
It was empty but for smog.
Coughing through our handkerchiefs
we walked eerily, lammed
at the brickwork, picked ourselves up.
I walked through nowhere last April
into a mist of brown coal,
sulphur emissions, diesel
stopped dead at the Wall,
the whiff of dun Trabants
puttering north/south
past a maze of roadworks,
leaving hours for us to cross
in the slow luxury of strolling
as the streets knit themselves up
to become a city again.
By instinct I kept my mouth shut
and breathed like one of us girls
in our “identical-twin” coats,
listening out for rare cars,
coal at the back of our throats –
it was England in the fifties,
half-blind with keeping us warm,
so I was completely at ease
in a small street off Unter Den Linden
as a fire-door behind wheezed
and Berlin creaked like two lungs.
Safe period
Your dry voice from the centre of the bed
asks ‘Is it safe?’
and I answer for the days as if I owned them.
Practised at counting, I rock
the two halves of the month like a cradle.
The days slip over their stile
and expect nothing. They are just days,
and we’re at it again, thwarting
souls from the bodies they crave.
They’d love to get into this room
under the yellow counterpane
we’ve torn to make a child’s cuddly,
they’d love to slide into the sheets
between soft, much-washed
flannelette fleece,
they’d love to be here in the moulded spaces
between us, where there is no room,
but we don’t let them. They fly about gustily,
noisy as our own children.
Big barbershop man
Big barbershop man turning away,
sides of his face
lathered and shaved
close with the cut-throat
he always uses,
big barbershop man turning away,
helping the neighbours
make good, sweating
inside a stretched t-shirt
with NO MEANS YES on the back of it,
waltzing a side of pig,
taking the weight,
scalp like a glove
rucked with the strain,
big barbershop man turning away
trim inside like a slice of ham
big barbershop man
hoisting the forequarter,
fat marbled with meat
stiff as a wardrobe,
big barbershop man
waltzing a side of pig
striped like a piece
of sun awning, cool
as a jelly roll,
big barbershop man waltzing the meat
like a barber’s pole on yellow Main Street.
The dry well
It was not always a dry well.
Once it had been brimming with water.
cool, limpid, delicious
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