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(Monday night, 25 November 2013)
I’m
in a crowded railway station waiting room;
There’s a holdup or problem on the line;People throng out onto the platform to its edge,
Craning and disaffected for a sign
Of what’s to blame. Following behind them I try
To see through shoulders and complaining heads
With no success. A pretty, child-faced worried girl,
Trapped in the crowd, is crushed as the press treads
To right and left. I help her to resist the sway
And notice kindly that she’s big with child:
Her huge belly protrudes beneath a cotton top,
And warm on the belly curve I’m beguiled
To see a smudge of birthmark, hinting mustily
At that delighted passion and frank urge
Which made her gravid and uncertain on her feet.
She sees my glance; she’s at the very verge
Of giving birth and seems distressed; I give my arm
On which she leans, and pat her hand and say
She’s not to fear; so old, I’ve seen so many girls,
Troubled at term, who, through the aching fray,
Joy in the lusciousness of mothering their young.
Assured, she lets me guide her through the pack
To sit out in the waiting room our forced delay;
But in the cram she stops, taken aback
To find herself upon a ledge perhaps a yard
Above me. Reaching to assist her down,
I grasp her swollen waist, trying to lift her weight
Ruinously back to ground. With a cried frown,
Protesting from the first, she lands upon the platform,
Doubled in pain and clutching at her waist,
Sobbing in fear for her half-strangulated child.
I crouch above her, heart-struck at my haste,
Burning in the disapproval of the shocked crowd.
But worse, much worse, is the unfriendly surge
Of disabused dislike which floods from this young thing
To nullify my clumsy help and purge
All thought of manful competence at sixty-plus.
And then I woke into November dark –
Five-thirty on a freezing morning, pricked with sweat,
Blasted by loathing, pierced as by the mark
Of Cain: O friend, what self-contempt engulfed me then,
What gut-despair, that every scrupled act
Of kindliness, of self-evasive help to those
In woe, should end in misery, the fact
Of others’ scorn and brutal disavowal of
My anxious efforts to achieve acceptance
By binding someone's wounds. That self-demeaning knowledge,
Harvest of years, imposes countenance
That here’s a problem threading from my earliest days.
Even in primary school I recollect
A girl bullied and left alone to whom I clove
In helpfulness. Hands held, we made a sect
Of two, standing dejected in an empty yard,
The other children having fled inside.
And then an adult, eight years wed, I kept a corpse
Alive, loath to accept that love had died
Until the other filleted the marriage wardrobe
And decamped, leaving me to plunder streets
In search of company to warm a frigid ego.
There were of course affairs, the drying meats
Of other men’s refusing, but a maggot cannot
Hunker in stiffened tissue, parched of juices
Enabling it to thrive. Ignoring them I come
To one I dare not name; to do so looses
Black floods of memory like mud-thick waves devouring
River banks after storm and scouring through
The half-crop fields, churning both grain and tilth into
A filthy sludge which throttles all that grew
In hope of fruiting, leaving it a sour-stink wreckage.
O, she so close that chromosomes had kissed,
On whom I lavered willingly all that a halt
Stumbler could give, undreaming that a twist
Of Ariadne’s thread, frayed by the misdirection
Of another, would sunder our hearts'-ease,
Enraging her condemningly to flee round corners,
Abandoning my tutelage; the lees
Of love left smeared in the labyrinth like bitter spoor.
Rib of rib, even you I drove away
By too much wanting; what tearful knowledge is this!
In what dank earth skulk the roots of these grey
Glintings of self-abrading memory? I think
Of tales my mother told infrequently:
Myself a coddling in her troubled grip, she begs
My father pounding a door repeatedly,
To leave unharmed the terrified ex-trading partner,
Self-locked within, who’s bankrupted them both –
He’s threatening murder and to wrench him limb from limb:
What gruel of panic in a broiling froth,
And anguished need to calm all things to likingness,
Did I imbibe, crushed at my mother’s breast?
For eighteen years, working all hours to pay his debts,
His mortgage, and to keep us fed and dressed,
My knowledge of my father was his back turned to
Us all and hunched upon his desk. And then
One night, his final quittance made, (my self air-sniffing
At the nest’s edge), mid-fifties, his heart’s fen
Blocked, beaching him abed like some mute creature writhing
In travail. Helpless, I sat next him: O
Great God, who, unprepared, might hold his ground against
The sudden death rattle? The blackened crow
Croaks sweet compared. That pig-like snorting, clattering
Throat-deep and shuddering the open teeth,
Wide eyes rolled back like porcelain: that tool-subtle man
Become a braying animal, my grief
Was torn to terror, sitting side by side with death.
These torments burrow deep. What wonder then
I chose to spend my life in search of helpless cases,
Muffling my anxious restlessness again
And then again by being useful, all to all,
Only to find my grateful ones refused
Manipulation, life in the stock-still confines
Of a creature’s den, silent whilst a boot bruised
About the entrance; Lord, not one could cope with that!
So, grounded in the salt-sharp dunes beside
A sullen sea, alone, unloved and tatters-hung,
Chastened by dreams like damping spray, I chide
Myself with finger-thick incompetence when priming
The fuse of human liking, a skill that seems
Innate in other hunters of the littoral
Searching for mate and kind. And yet, the gleams
Of the steel-polished waves, crashing like metronomes,
Insist that men and women all, left long
Enough, fetch up like this; for Time, the carcass-man,
Cleaves loved ones, health, contentment, flinging among
The sands flesh-flakes of a lifetime’s ill-poulticed hurts;
So that an uncomplaining death seems best,
Quick and shipshape, an inconvenience to none,
Disposed of in a piled-up sea-stone chest,
Lopside among the dunes of this Illyrian strand,
As if the tearful-comic obsequies
Of some Shakespearian buskin-man with music strange
Had dissipated, leaving but the breeze
Whistling to him prostrate within the salty stones,
Remembrancing the tears which longing gave,
The frustrate struggle to be trustful face to face,
Now washed clean in the water-dripping grave.
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©
December 2013