on
scouting the coast home.
The pilot smokes a cigarette.
Its tip winks with each breath.
Winter 1955
We’re strung out on the plain’s upthrust,
bubbles against the sill of the horizon.
Already the dark folds each figure to itself
like a mother putting on her child’s overcoat,
or a paid attendant, who quickly and deftly
slots goose-pimpled arms into their stoles.
My own mother is attending to her daughters
in the Christmas gloom of our long garden
before the others are born.
A stream’s tongue takes its first courses:
in siren suits and our cheek-hugging bonnets
we put one foot each in that water.
Now standstill clumps sink and disappear
over the plate-edge of the world.
The trees hold up fingers like candelabra,
blue and unsure as the word ‘distant’.
Casually heeled there, we circle
the New Look skirts of our mother.
The attendant’s hands skim on a breast
fused into party-going ramparts of taffeta,
but he takes up his gaze into the hall
as if there’s nothing to be sorry or glad for,
and nothing in the snowy eternity
that feathers his keyhole.
Rinsing
In the corded hollows of the wood
leaves fall.
How light it is.
The trees are rinsing themselves of leaves
like Degas laundresses, their forearms
cold with the jelly-smooth
blue of starch-water.
The laundresses lean back and yawn
with their arms still in the water
like beech-boughs, pliant
on leavings of air.
In the corded hollows of the wood
how light it is.
How my excitement
burns in the chamber.
To Betty, swimming
You’re breast-up in the bubbling spaces you make for yourself,
your head in the air, pointy, demure,
ridiculous in its petalled swim-cap.
You chug slowly across the pool.
Your legs trail. Your arms won’t sweep
more than a third of the full stroke,
yet when you look up you’re curling with smiles,
complicit as if splashed
with mile-deep dives from the cliff’s height.
In Berberâs Ice Cream Parlour
A fat young man in BERBERâS ICE CREAM PARLOUR
under a tiled ceiling the colour of farm butter
with a mirror at 45° to his jaw.
His moist jowls, lucent and young
as the tuck where a babyâs buttock and thigh join,
quiver a little, preparing
to meet the order heâs given.
A tall glass skims the waitressâs breasts.
He holds on, spoon poised
to see if the syrupâll trickle right
past the mound of chopped nuts to the ice-
white luscious vanilla sheltering
under its blanket of cream.
The yellow skin weakens and melts.
He devotes himself,
purses his lips to wrinkling-point,
digs down with the long spoon
past jelly and fruit
to the depths, with the cool
inching of an expert.
Beside him thereâs a landscape in drained pink
and blue suggesting the sea
with an audacious cartoon economy.
Theyâve even put in one white triangle
to make the horizon. A sail.
Large creamy girls mark the banana splits
with curls and squiggles,
pour sauce on peach melbas,
thumb in real strawberries.
Their bodies sail behind the counters,
balloons tight at the ropes, held down
by a customerâs need for more clotted cream
topping on his three-tier chocolate sundae.
They have eight tables to serve.
With their left hands they slap out the change
and comets smelling of nickel
for kidsâ take-away treats,
and over on the bar counter thereâs room
for adult, luxurious absorption
of dark mocha ice cream.
Flowing, damp-curled, the waitresses
pass with their trays
doubled by mirrors, bumping like clouds.
Not going to the forest
If you had said the words ‘to the forest’
at once I would have gone there
leaving my garden of broccoli and potato-plants.
I would not have struggled
to see the last ribbons of daylight
and windy sky tear over the crowns
of the oaks which stand here,
heavy draught animals
bearing, continually bearing.
I would have rubbed the velvety forest
against my cheek like the pincushion
I sewed with invisible stitches.
No.
scouting the coast home.
The pilot smokes a cigarette.
Its tip winks with each breath.
Winter 1955
We’re strung out on the plain’s upthrust,
bubbles against the sill of the horizon.
Already the dark folds each figure to itself
like a mother putting on her child’s overcoat,
or a paid attendant, who quickly and deftly
slots goose-pimpled arms into their stoles.
My own mother is attending to her daughters
in the Christmas gloom of our long garden
before the others are born.
A stream’s tongue takes its first courses:
in siren suits and our cheek-hugging bonnets
we put one foot each in that water.
Now standstill clumps sink and disappear
over the plate-edge of the world.
The trees hold up fingers like candelabra,
blue and unsure as the word ‘distant’.
Casually heeled there, we circle
the New Look skirts of our mother.
The attendant’s hands skim on a breast
fused into party-going ramparts of taffeta,
but he takes up his gaze into the hall
as if there’s nothing to be sorry or glad for,
and nothing in the snowy eternity
that feathers his keyhole.
Rinsing
In the corded hollows of the wood
leaves fall.
How light it is.
The trees are rinsing themselves of leaves
like Degas laundresses, their forearms
cold with the jelly-smooth
blue of starch-water.
The laundresses lean back and yawn
with their arms still in the water
like beech-boughs, pliant
on leavings of air.
In the corded hollows of the wood
how light it is.
How my excitement
burns in the chamber.
To Betty, swimming
You’re breast-up in the bubbling spaces you make for yourself,
your head in the air, pointy, demure,
ridiculous in its petalled swim-cap.
You chug slowly across the pool.
Your legs trail. Your arms won’t sweep
more than a third of the full stroke,
yet when you look up you’re curling with smiles,
complicit as if splashed
with mile-deep dives from the cliff’s height.
In Berberâs Ice Cream Parlour
A fat young man in BERBERâS ICE CREAM PARLOUR
under a tiled ceiling the colour of farm butter
with a mirror at 45° to his jaw.
His moist jowls, lucent and young
as the tuck where a babyâs buttock and thigh join,
quiver a little, preparing
to meet the order heâs given.
A tall glass skims the waitressâs breasts.
He holds on, spoon poised
to see if the syrupâll trickle right
past the mound of chopped nuts to the ice-
white luscious vanilla sheltering
under its blanket of cream.
The yellow skin weakens and melts.
He devotes himself,
purses his lips to wrinkling-point,
digs down with the long spoon
past jelly and fruit
to the depths, with the cool
inching of an expert.
Beside him thereâs a landscape in drained pink
and blue suggesting the sea
with an audacious cartoon economy.
Theyâve even put in one white triangle
to make the horizon. A sail.
Large creamy girls mark the banana splits
with curls and squiggles,
pour sauce on peach melbas,
thumb in real strawberries.
Their bodies sail behind the counters,
balloons tight at the ropes, held down
by a customerâs need for more clotted cream
topping on his three-tier chocolate sundae.
They have eight tables to serve.
With their left hands they slap out the change
and comets smelling of nickel
for kidsâ take-away treats,
and over on the bar counter thereâs room
for adult, luxurious absorption
of dark mocha ice cream.
Flowing, damp-curled, the waitresses
pass with their trays
doubled by mirrors, bumping like clouds.
Not going to the forest
If you had said the words ‘to the forest’
at once I would have gone there
leaving my garden of broccoli and potato-plants.
I would not have struggled
to see the last ribbons of daylight
and windy sky tear over the crowns
of the oaks which stand here,
heavy draught animals
bearing, continually bearing.
I would have rubbed the velvety forest
against my cheek like the pincushion
I sewed with invisible stitches.
No.
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