Olya
(Chernobyl, 1986)
Little woman the nurses called her –
for the way she brought a lifetime’s grace
to a child’s demeanour, how when she
danced she hardly parted those feet –
her small weight so subtle from ball
to arch, heels barely lifting for each
quick surge she sent up her spine to
fountain arms and sprinkle fingers.
Later she began to move like that doe
they filmed returning from the Reactor:
skinny and slowed into some other,
parallel time. I’d quarter fruit and she’d
refuse it. Near the end she drew nothing
but ballerinas. Beamed at visitors who
befriended her for articles and art
then never came back. Her sister says –
Two angels took her. One each hand.
I prefer facts to moondust. And yet
the intern shakes a methodical head, insists
that with her spine completely rotten
still the impossible happened. In that long
black sleep before she stopped – before
the machine’s insolent bleep – those
wasted toes stirred. Practised steps.
First Light
(Chernobyl, 1986)
I hear him. In that thin wash of dawn
when world is caught remembering
it ought to be real
and at the foot of your bed you glimpse
your night self spooling back its long trails
from each of the rooms.
That’s when he walks. Walks those stairs
in my head and I wake – remember
I have a house.
On yellow sand they walk me. Where
there’s as much sea as sky. I remember
there is no God.
I try to be water. What mostly makes us
makes us kin. Water can have a past.
Can remember.
A girl steps up. Says – I’ve finished my
homework. Unspoilt cheeks. Unnatural
blue eyes. And I raise
hands to a face sticky with myself. At last
I look through. Remember
I have a daughter.
If You Were To Come Back
I'd stand at the door like one bereaved:
Aghast and breathless,
With silence stretched between us
For a second
Before it snapped -
And my heart burst its banks
In belief.
Then I'd draw you in by both hands
I'd kiss you on the mouth, on the face
Wear out your name
with soft saying
I'd kiss you more than you would want
Until you'd have to draw back, breathless
As one wounded
To try to speak, to tell me
Why it was you came.
The Crystal Set
One matchbox. One sixpenny
crystal. One pancake coil
for coarse tuning. No
battery. A fortnight's
torture while the earphone's
mustard stopper dallied in the post.
The soldering iron sent up its
tiny smoke signals. Then
I slid a thruppenny bit
by bit across that coil
in a brass on lead eclipse
to reel in the Radetzky March -
those cymbal-happy ranks of
sound far-off behind static
that could pass as Time.
Blue Danubes trickled
behind watersheds of hiss.
All summer they looped those
same few Strausses over and
over - that champagne of
waltz and polka going
flat as I watched (with
one ear pressed) the shadow
of our apple tree sundial the lawn
until shadow began to dissolve
into dusk. Which only made
the Strauss grow firmer.
Closer. As if that music
were the very first to enter
a garden. As though some fresh-
created body of water were being
brought home wave upon wave
like an ocean to its shell.
Flowers Of Sulphur
Startle-eyed, me and
she, in the bun-shop
where fourth-formers tried on cool
like over-sized blazers, lipsticked
with doughnut sugar and jam.
I peered into the deep-pile of her mop,
saw white crumbs of scalp. Smelt sulphur.
First detention ever, for using perchlorate
to singe her initial in benchwood -
Mr Grant (pissy lab-coat, jaundiced
coot, grimace in a dough of face, thread
of custard forever stranded between
dummy lips): Use your loaf boy.
Too late. Hovering behind the homework
each night - that marooned complexion, those
small white teeth, the sulphurous perfume.
End of term. Her hand in my pocket
my éclair in the other, I blew it.
Three stupid words. I'm a Catholic.
The school - parked up now. The shop
a delicatessen. Yet, hanging round the drains
something still of her and Mr Grant
prodding memory to his nicotined lard
of finger and thumb, the delicious
yellow of the test-tube pinched between:
Make a note boys. Flowers of sulphur.
Ambient
Easy for me, your
son, youthful lungs trawling in one sweep -
cigar smoke, omelette,
the girl next door.
One day I told you
how in physics we'd calculated a cough holds
billions of atoms Galileo
inhaled. It took a full
week for your retort -
as always off the nail. Must be I've used
it all then - from
Siberia to Antarctica,
slack-pit to spire.
That's why each draw's so bloody hard.
Left me speechless.
Till, catching you
that night at the foot
of your Jacob's Ladder, ascending to the
one bulb of the landing
toilet, I told you how
I'd checked with sir:
You can't use it all, I piped, not in a hundred
million years. You'll get
better. Just wait and see.
Your mouth a slur
suspended over your chest. Fist white
on the rail. Don't hold
your breath, you said
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