Familiars [1991]
Tom Roder
Poetry
1962 - 1997
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Familiars [1991]
- Edna
- 1 Murray Road
- Grandfather
- Walking, 1969
- Christmas, 1967
- A Family Photograph
- 55 Upper Albert Road
- The Ice-Cream Pleasure
- The Cherry Tree
- For Him
- In the Death of a Room
- Nagyi
for my parents
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
- Shakespeare, Trolius and Cressida, (3.3. 175)
You always meant to send that real letter,
a letter stripped to nothing, without
any style, bereft of an awareness
of its precious, painful honesty;
like looking in eyes without realising
its your eyes that are doing the looking.
But that's impossible so you begin
another, anecdotal sort of letter
to tip your fine friend into your landscape.
You tell how two young Mormons called one day,
you let them in and gave them orangeade,
then, ever so humanely, burrowed a way
through the portals of their curious faith.
(They sat calm with their Bibles on their knees.)
You go on to write this and that have been
happening in your life, careful not to sound
as though you've negotiated wonder
with throw-away words. You're neither sad
nor happy, but a lens to the world,
and these are the facts of your recent life.
You're signing your name before you know it,
(with love and kisses), scanning up the page
to see how ink striates and clusters,
and saying, that's okay, that will do.
Its strange to find you have these friends hardly
known - who before you ever know the angles
of their face enough to blunt them, wear them
down into familiarity - will
dredge out whole a small piece of their soul
and ask if you have seen its like before.
Over coffee (and, perhaps, a pastry)
you examine it, turn it over and over
in your hands, sigh - you hope in sympathy.
They usually point out you've not got it
right, are holding it all wrong. ("For fuck's sake
man, keep it out of the pastry, at least,"
their eyes seem to say.) And you feel ashamed,
at your mis-management and say:
"Well, I better toddle off, its been nice."
Opposite a fire station lives my friend
with his metallurgy textbooks alone
and a phallic pot he made in art class
years ago, marked: 1976;
that hot summer when he put his pet slugs
in a tin which he called their home. But they
fried one day when he forgot to move them
to the shade. He regrets it still and now
lives in Stocksbridge, steel-works town, and every
day walks down a black lane to work, with his
lunch box and a flask of tea.
I should say
now he's moved away.
When two do the same thing, it is
not the same thing after all.
- Publilius Syrus, Moral Sayings
When she doesn't trust you
and her hair falls down
her head from its collected
pile you wonder what you can do;
her eyes are pink with tears.
You hold the first joint
of your thumb to your nose
and rub so the fresh bristles
growing on your lip - which feels
cool with after-shave- creak.
You mention the brilliant
beginning - but then all
beginnings are brilliant -
you can't deny this stubborn
sparkling fact; it lodges hard.
So you say things will work
themselves out into a new
flower, a new colour, flavour,
which will hold both your interests
and keep you together.
But now you have to go
for life has its demands,
its direction, its flow.
The pleasure rituals -bright
bird-song counterpoints there.
I sit in the built-up street in the car
listening to another poet read
Elizabeth Bishop on the radio -
the words hushing dark the air of night
confirming my richness in the new scents
of a new car - its crisp plush plastic forms
uncluttered by maps and sweets, damp-start sprays,
and rags to wipe the windows clear of mists.
Not yet silvered by bird-droppings, not yet
blistered by summer; tyres unacquainted
with the smell and the swim of tar; so deep
your treads still blushing black and show-room clean -
I imagine your outside from within.
I place my head within the deep cavern
of the glove compartment - let it feel out
the exquisite yielding space.
After Wuthering Heights
As she cried in our dark parlour
I fed upon her tears which swept
her cheek and held them on my tongue
unto her tongue so she could taste
her grief. Eventually her blubbing
ceased and in the draught of our dark
habitation her face cooled dry
as mica with fragments of salt
left in the valleys where the rivers
of her sad eyes had taken
their course.
"Don't blub little angel,"
I told her, "Daddy has taken
his glinting axe and will bring
fresh green logs for the fire."
*
The sap spurts from the crackly logs
and makes wet islands in the ash,
smoke then licks the chimney's breast
and Daddy warms his crude red hands
by the blaze, his tweed hat dripping
forest rain. "Mother is digging
her grave," he said, "Mother is
digging her grave; I see the world
in dust."
Licks of flame enlivened his face
as he glowed on the corner stool
sending broken goblin shadows
lurching round the living room.
"Daddy is bad," she said to me,
"He won't leave Death alone; my brain
feels like the cramped jugged hare,
my brain pounds in an aspic light.
A wet wild wind and fissured sky
sets me in a awful mood,
the trammelled wagons slosh about
in ruts of earth right through my soul."
She stood and moved to the stove
distracted. After a while
she tipped the elements of a
rice pudding in a deep pan.
"Mother is digging her grave,"
said Daddy as sister ladled
milky luminosities
of pudding on our earthen plates.
"Oh eat your pudding! Let its
fluids and solids syrup your pain.
You brought the logs, here is the food
you miserable, back-bearing-man."
The meal was concluded in silence.
The girl, she young, she bent over herself
when she dream like the scheming bride, drawer
full to busting of all sort of white dress
like a river banging 'gainst the rocks.
She scared, she lost, no lover around no
more as she walk in the bower, shower
of rain hit her hard on the shoulder
exposed to the cloud above her.
She fine, the girl, she plenty full of fear
as ocean smacks itself into a pier.
I know she watch for something not me I
know that I know that its not me.
She eye her love he thrust behind coppice
without denial she knows him only
not well as me the third and second
fiddle who stand with gun disappointed.
High air flower red fountain spring he fall
shot gaping for air like jolly ill man
she falls she tends her dress turns red too
amazed |I act as if I'm not the one who.
Not real the dream but false she twists her hair
which pushes the pillow into black from
pale. No blood lay I lied to involve you
like hair implicit on shoulder involved.
The dead are folded in their pine boxes
cleansed of all mischief, scrubbed of each smile.
Only the stillness of a distant birth
flickers through the dusted paper skin.
to the memory of my great-aunt Edna,
also known as 'Liz'
(born 13 October 1905; died 18 December 1989)
I'm trying to write your brooch of paste,
a filigree remainder of the past;
place it on your dress, a small brass dish of
smoky mellow coloured beads which capture
all the light that enters them beneath your
bright grey eyes. Around the brooch your dress
which always fell in wrinkles beneath your
lined face smudged with rouge and powder. Around
your ears a brassy curl made with iron
tongs which you heated on the gas fire ring,
then twisted mindfully amidst your hair
taking care not to singe or burn your face.
Your broken, mended, patched, orthopaedic
shoes with swivel hells knocked in with a nail
beneath your grey beige tights which you would pull
down to delight us, to the knee, to show
your perfect mottled thighs that seemed so young,
once helped you make it as Belle of the Ball,
and won you trips with Tommy Harrison,
in an early car, to the Rising Sun.
But I was faintly disturbed to think
that face and legs could drift apart in years
and that such unflawed flesh could form distinct
from an age-worn head that seemed nearer death.
Hear all, see all and se nowt,
and if you do owt for nowt
do it for thi sen.
You came triumphant, stately, laden down
with a big brown, plastic-shopping bag crammed
with day-old bread, specked fruit, cracked eggs, cheap fags,
bacon bits, old tomatoes, broken biscuits,
unlabelled tins of food and damaged spice
from Castle Market, where you stood and queued
and haggled over bits of fish with some
very posh folks. We would be made to test
your bread: "Feel it, feel it! Now, doesn't it
feel fresh as your Mother's? Its only half
the price. Wouldn't you like a slice? And if
we took one, daubed it with jam, admitted
it was just as good as fresh she would bask
in its reflected glory for a while.
(Waste not, want not; that's the way to win.)
No one was keener with vegetables
than you. You would hoick and scrape the eyes out
of potatoes, place them bobbling
in a clear dish of cold water. You'd hold
the carrot peel to a bulb and ask us
to gather round and see how thin it was;
an orange strand flared before the light
and we were nudged to admit that we might
(if we tried) almost see right through it,
as though it wasn't there. You always liked
these slow jobs of preparation; meal times
gave you some pride to recollect these sprouts,
cabbages, onions, leeks, had been dealt with
by an expert hand.
When we were young you let us climb your back,
cling to your flanks and ride you like a horse -
between a Western and a wild-life film -
we spurred you round the carpets and the rugs;
you were the ancient friend we could enjoy.
At bedtime, near the fire, we would undress,
and show off with our dancing by the hearth,
two near naked boys nimbly capering
for you our perfect audience. And you
would commend our perfect growing feet,
predict for us some glittering career,
tell us that no one could help but love us.
And later on we'd shout you from bed,
"Nena, Nena," until we heard you climb
up stairs. Here you would remake your childhood;
a world lost in a distant loop of time
at once would break to life before our eyes.
It seemed a world of greater fear, more bright,
more dirt, more smells, more death, more life, than ours:
A girl stormed out then drowned in Public Baths;
a cousin had a timid cat she whipped
so it would wipe its paws on the door mat;
a Jewish friend who took you down some stairs
where chickens ran round and round without
their heads; where boys filled water pistols
with wee-wee and fired at girls hopping
stepping stones; and in the Blitz buildings burned
and fell to the ground killing those who thought
they were most safe; a bag of tiger nuts,
pot herbs, liquorice lace might fill your bag
and give you change from an old penny -
enough to see the Pictures later on.
And sometimes we would hide beneath the beds
pretending we were crocodiles or frogs,
and you would enter into the twilight
of pretence, make out you didn't know,
so when we hopped or slithered from the dust
you'd always feign surprise at our old tricks.
Sometimes you would hold out your pink wet teeth,
like something from a joke shop, in your palm,
to please and capture us and we would plead
with you to speak so we might laugh at windy,
smacky sounds made by a fallen face,
to gum your way through hard bright apples,
tell us how your mouth was hard as iron.
The dentist hadn't wanted to pull them
but you'd insisted so in the end each
perfect tooth from its neat bed had been wrenched.
Afterwards you roared, "He nearly pulled me
eerd off." But then you just fancied false teeth.
And when you 'd put your teeth back in you'd light
a fag, between yellowed fingers pinched,
trim off its growing ash in a small dish
as we calmed down from your delicious show.
And my mother used to say:
If you're forty and under my roof
you'll do as you're told.
You were a slipping glimpser of the facts;
and what a strange sort of fun it was
to trip you up into easy passion
about the biscuits that our friends once took
from the side-board dish in my mother's house.
You'd count each biscuit as it disappeared
into hands and mouths - your surreptitious-
obvious eyes watching each deft movement
until with outrage-dam-burst in your face
you would should: "Carole, the bugger's on
his third!" And my mother would enter in
a gentler complicity with us, and say
"They're only biscuits, Liz." And this provoked
a tight-lipped slowly shaking head as she
swung the biscuits round to read the price. "Its
wicked! Why can't they eat their own in their
own homes? Their mothers wouldn't allow it."
And sometimes you'd remake our lives for us
and give us back our smaller, unique selves;
recount how once I stood with long grey socks,
crying, shivering in the kitchen door,
my legs slapped by my mother for something
I had said or done. And Paul followed you
out the door, to the gate, and asked: "Nena,
do you love me as much as you love Tommy?"
And you bent down and said to him, "I love you
both the same. "He clapped his little hands,
said "Goody, Goody," and disappeared.
And when I'm dead
and in mi grave
tha'll wish th'd never called me.
*
She had grey bright eyes
and a line in kindness
one patch of grey hair
was golden and ornate.
*
(A few dry eyes of cold grass, a few tears.)
I cast the winter earth and felt it hit
against your coffin lid, deep in soil, then turned
and made my way through few flowers leaning
on the path where family stood sombre,
hushed, black so every winter detail might
unwind itself before my living eyes.
And I knew I could stride up the path, out
the gate, make muscles project me into
space. And frightened, I could glimpse the sheerness
of everything.
for my grandmother,
Olga Bowen, née Primrose, now Neal.
Zen student: Master, I wish to understand the way.
Zen master: Go and jump in the hedge at the bottom of the garden.
*
The back-yard held its huge topography
and the small square of grass with a green bench
to one side, was enchanted with purpose
as I balanced, with care, my lemonade
glass on a folding table wondering
what new force would enter these dimensions
if, deliberately, I tipped out the drink,
watched its clear wetness spring off blades of grass,
then, dashed to smithereens the tumbler
on a stone. This was a dream of violence,
never carried through, that made the heart thump
within the strange clothes of early child-hood.
I sat there on the bench looking down
at my sun-shining limbs; felt erotic
in awareness of bare legs which stretched down
away from me, but were me; this moving
body is mine. I kept it still till it
all seemed to breathe its own life, and charted
with my eyes the dark stars of tiny moles
on my thighs.
I had been told the flower near the wall
was a wall-flower; language made some sense
after all, and something so obvious
(that you might have guessed it) made me laugh.
The world could be a fun-fair of naming:
dandelions were dandy lions;
buttercups were cups for butter, the smooth
enamelled dish smeared rich with sun-melting;
grass was like glass, its blades sharp and cutting.
And my word-games shifted in and out
of nursery rhymes; the authentic language
of adults who spoke above your head
dropping tones, grimaces, whispers and threats;
and time with friends who'd bring their toys
to play with in the yard, or colour in
a book, cross legged on the lawn, under
the real sun which never kept itself
to a corner of the world sending rays
of dotted orange crayon.
When it had rained I'd sometimes trail my hand
along the glistening privet which bordered
two sides of your private plot; so privet
meant private, especially if you were small
and couldn't see above the tangled wood
and vicious green of small leaves that sprang pearls
of rain when you knocked the branches down.
I looked deep in the hedge expecting other
secrets where the tangle made dark shadows
on itself; and sometimes saw a spider
creep on its tremulous bright creation
to a meal of quivering flies, or the rage
of a wasp, its bristling striped body
indelicately caught in an end-game.
But it seemed to be another truth I
was after, not the death of insects;
I thought the hedge might hold its meaning deep
inside itself, but all it could divulge
was more the same. And adults with their brains
and mouths and height were little better.
The low wall of the garden led my sight
to a small garage, down below, where one
old petrol pump, like a thin man, rigid,
with a withered arm, stood oily and dead.
A fat mechanic dwelt amongst the fumes
of work, lying on his back under cars,
tinkling and banging their engines into shape
until he emerged flustered and black-faced,
brandishing a spanner, an unlit fag
drooping from his mouth. And this seemed the world
as it should be lived by those brave enough;
miles away from this spic-and-span garden,
the polished dustbins of my grandmother's
yard, ("Fit to drink my soup from missus,"
said the dust-bin man), the line of pristine
washing strongly flapping in the wind.
Sunday tea-time inevitably came
and we would sit around the great wood table,
its dark varnish giving back every face
and fork and spoon and dish. And grandma
would come in with a pink ham, its tangy,
dense meat wrapped in white fat; golden breaded.
While serviettes opened like flowers I
glanced to the cottage side-board where a ship
made of wood and leather, sailed between two
big brass jugs, as a nutcracker fashioned
like a lady's legs, hinged towards the waist,
twinkled to star-board on a wave of lace.
Then the colours of the table would shift
about as new potatoes, celery,
hard-boiled eggs, salad, found plates and mouths;
a kaleidoscope which fell, each pause,
into patterns, which I held silently,
as predictable music went on:
the tinkle and scrape of cutlery, "Pass
the salt", "Nice weather", "Where's the pepper?",
"Isn't he getting big?" So I learnt to eat
as adults do and wondered where their joy was.
Until, along came quivering castles
of blancmange and jelly like the great breasts
of some seaside, postcard lady and I
watched the perfect, lean cut made by my spoon
as it sheared and sculpted this soft dessert.
to the memory of Thomas Bowen,
born January 1904; died January, 1970,
a maintenance engineer at English Steel
I remember him coming home from work,
a suitcase full of sticks for the fire held
firmly in one hand, put down near his chair;
and I thought this might be his job, to chop
up wood into six-inch lengths and get paid
with the surplus of his labour. I never
could surmise exactly what he did; felt
too shy to ask from him his purpose in that world.
On Saturdays he sat watching wrestlers
on the telly. A happy snap shows him
walking jaunty, arms locked with his daughter
and his wife, down a sea-side promenade,
a pipe to the corner of his mouth.
After he died I remember grandma
crying, pointing to his chair.
I went down to the white-washed cellar
and there on a slab, neat, were all his tools:
a jig-saw, a screwdriver, a hammer,
a bradawl, a dish of tacks, a chisel.
And, as I'd never touched these things before
I left them in their order and went back
to one Christmas when he'd made a monkey
out of wood.
Walking with our Grandma, through Endcliffe Park;
knowing that we'd turn for home at Forge Dam,
knowing that we'd feed the ducks scraps of bread,
knowing that we'd get a bacon sandwich.
And perhaps, she'd buy, one for each of us,
a barley-sugar stick.
You knew you should leave out a long carrot
for the reindeer, on the window-sill;
and for Father Christmas some Christmas cake,
in a dish, with a very special spoon.
And, the trick was not to twitch the curtain
for he could see every secret peeping,
and every secret thought. Even thinking
of peeping might make him pull the reins
and jerk his reindeer along other paths
away from where you lived. Then, your careful
letter - written with five colours of felt-tip,
your pictures of what you wanted, needed,
your name, six times underlined, and many
kisses, (so many kisses,) in yellow,
red, black, green and blue, filling half the page -
would be no use. You only had one chance
to show how good you could be.
And yet you
didn't believe a bit of this, (the carrot,
somehow found itself chopped up in your soup;
you saw your father eat that piece of cake
on a different plate, with a cup of tea).
But that made things just sad; so you told Paul
not to pull the curtain, peep, or think.
The family are asked to congregate;
they pull themselves up from a heavy meal
and slowly find positions on the cut
and bevelled lawn. Some are helped, some stumble,
others yawn, until we have everyone
poised before a fir-tree gently swaying.
You cajole into better position,
as the sun slides, this family party,
so, eventually, a fine zig-zag
of heads is before you staring, each eye
for the camera's clear eye; as they hoist
smiles on their lips so everything colludes
to be happy. And if in the future
someone turns to this group they won't be
at a loss for a phrase, "Look, together,
a family, they're enjoying each other.
for my grandmother, "Nagyi"
and to the memory of my grandfather, "Bob(by)"
(born 24 March, 1904; died 3 July, 1990)
55
And when I was a child I wondered if
the double of that number meant something,
like two pot-bellied men with flat, peaked caps,
and whether it would be a different world
if Nagyi and Bobby lived in fifty-three
its Siamese twin. Would it have been a mirror
world simply or an entirely other
life, a Southern sun for a Northern light;
different accidents and grumbles, different
attitudes and consequent evasions?
Did these matched numbers mean a harmony,
two ageing people still lying in bed
in the same direction, knees bent behind
knees, breast to back, arms thrown over head twined
together, fingers latticed in fingers?
Well, its hard to believe, I don't think so,
though age, perhaps, brings other closenesses.
Now, Nagyi feeds me every Sunday night.
In early years it used to be chicken breasts,
Vienna schnitzel, cabbage rolls stuffed with lamb,
vinegared cucumber, sugared lettuce,
plums in soft balls of potato flour,
pancakes rolled with soured cream and sweet currants,
and special soups; tomato, caraway,
bean and carrot, mushroom. Then, when I
became a sort-of-vegetarian,
much to her dismay, incomprehension,
she gave me breaded fish, fried eggs and chips.
At times she would smuggle fragments of meat
into my soup that I might not yet starve,
and I would point out these alien, brown
wisps of chicken.
You have to imagine Nagyi though, she's
there in her kitchen of fire and water
where first I found the elements were bound
yet free. I took a stool to the high sink
and in its deep stone trough filled a tub, poured
water into water like a deluge,
sparks, spirals, whirls, bubbles, waves that re-made
themselves years later in a Leonardo
drawing. Fire consumed in the cramped iron stove,
and after water-play I'd clamber down
from sink to fire and heat a rusted wire
so it flushed from bronze to lipstick red,
then orange bright fit to stab and laser
the worlds of wood which smouldered with fire-fly,
and plastic which bled hot tears in droves.
The skill was always to do it when her
back was turned but so she knew about it;
then you had the safety with the knowledge
you were a lone explorer finding things
unheard, flexing power over the world.
When in the attic Bob pushed his fingers
around a drawer, turning over old wire,
plugs, switches, fuses, in an attempt to
find that thing he needed, I wondered if
it was a different world that I could see;
almost abstract forms turning in their bed
of polished scented wood - a bulb, a coil
of metal glinting in a shaft of sun.
Bob felt pure annoyance, ("Damn and blast it!"),
that what should have been there, a certain tool
(now forgotten), was no where to be found.
And I delighted in the way he seemed
to feel his way about this world without
the cloy and dross of pretending thoughts;
he never said a thing he didn't feel.
And when I now open this same drawer
you are aware of one who touched it last
and try not to occlude those fingerprints.
On his last night Bob climbed the stairs, step
by step, pausing every three or four to hold
his pain at bay while Nagyi stood behind,
two steps down, and waited as he waited,
catching his breath, until he might resume.
Eventually he made the top and stood
before he turned along the passage-way,
in through the bedroom door, and slowly fell -
like a tired athlete, bright eyes fixed elsewhere -
down to the bed, diagonally stretched.
He let go gently all his life, waving
weakly away the smelling salts, Nagyi
held before his face.
And later Nagyi would play-back this last day:
The fact he shaved, put on his smarter clothes;
that he felt strange as if something was to
begin; his meagre meal, his loss of taste for food;
his unfamiliar face, expectant, flushed -
the way he threw his arms up to the air
and said, "Good! Good!" at some happy fact.
He said he'd never had the skill to draw,
and copying a school-friend's horse-and-cart
was as near as he ever came; he'd been
told off - he should have drawn his own.
And where Bob's head was once, up to the left,
is a narrow shelf, a spread of old Drives,
("RUST: It's orangey-red and really looks
quite pretty. But it's ruining your car"),
and Readers' Digest stretching back before
I ever knew I'd know this place; covers
with cherry boughs, Impressionistic scenes,
purple daubs of Spring; a photographic
winter landscape, submerged black wood fencing
dividing snow from snow. Here he would read,
(and so would I), about the beauty
and the value of certain treasured jewels;
the startling bravery shown by Bronx fire-men;
"To Race the Wind" about a young blind man,
and how, in a college dance, he was steered
into the soft arms of a willing girl
who helped him through his tiring law degree.
Then there was "I am John's Thorax, "I'm Jane's
Abdomen", "I'm John's Adam's Apple"; strange
fantasies where organs, limbs, bits of bone
were given voice, enabled to declare
their mystery, their complicated jobs.
I remember hunting through back issues
for those features where private parts might be
given their own words to speak. A whole day
spent, searching for the place where that other
hairy mouth might be opened up to chant
its secret physiology, erase
all its dangers by self-explanation.
Let's slow
down now, let's honour this place
as we should; feel all its tremors and ghosts.
When you put on the stair light it means
you can rise through the house, through its dust,
its sadness, photographs, paintings, clutter
of clothes, hand-bags, and half-made picture-frames.
Where are you Bob? You must reside here dead
or not - if death holds one percent of life -
let me see your faint out-line down stairs,
mist the clock-face and ask "Coffee ready?
(I only ask for the thinnest whisper.)
Do you know your Panama waits so cold
in the hall alongside your working cap?
Wouldn't you like to take it up again, tilt
it slightly forward on your brow instead
of surrendering to a patina
of dust and age? The hat-band's feather still
looks dandy.
You sometimes talked of the white tunnel seen
by those "Back From Death" in coloured pages
of Sunday magazines; the bright tremendous
angel-trip which cured the fear of grave thoughts.
You asked what we thought - we gave the clever
answer, "Who can tell? And, anyway, these people
did not die, their reports were from life not
death, however near they felt they came;
neural tricks of hallucinated brain."
We delighted in our sad construction
and Bob said "Oh well, its still quite hopeful."
Do you know Nagyi sits in the kitchen
watching the American detectives
alone? The Kojak repeats still entertain her,
she says, but I don't know, you never know
how people's faces fall when you're not there,
into different patterns, different faces.
At other times, through the sound of the clock,
she says they're just distractions from other
thoughts which rage tears in her eyes as she looks
across the room at an empty chair, abyss
that was populated once with so much.
And I hold her real, old hand before I
leave for other things.
One summer I remember in the bright
circle of the sun, a car sweltering
on a village hill-side, and Bob inside,
his elbow resting on the window frame,
an ice-cream cornet in his hand. He took
long delicious licks off the soft whipped head
till it was rendered to a slender peak
and you could feel the cool pleasure suffuse
his face, a band of perspiration vivid
in the shade beneath his hat. I watched his
face and wondered if his thoughts were all for
ice-cream - a present pleasure entirely
without the shrapnel of a history,
without the balance-book of loss and gain,
without the counter-measure of a pain.
And as I watched him then I chose to think
that each lick sent ghosts hurling into space,
each lick reduced him by one year until
you could see the young-boy face completely.
One winter you hacked down the cherry tree
to make some light for other plants to grow;
to me it seemed a harsh economy,
a fire of logic hard to comprehend;
to make space was an absence to engage,
not rational but complicated loss.
And when I saw the branches in a pile.
the twigs shorn off, for tinder, in a box,
I re-imagined, sad, the fire of buds
that now would not re-make themselves in Spring.
Years later, to the right of that same tree,
I took a picture of you holding hands,
standing fragile on the top mossy step
leading to the path that threads the garden.
I asked you, in the twilight, to keep still
whilst my mind fled forward to an age
when I might half believe this photograph
was all that did remain.
I never could believe I would be one
of those people in the family car
following a hearse, slowly, slowly, as
if those contents must not be disturbed;
thinking the weather is cloudy or fine
and feeling how that is appropriate.
It couldn't have been different - you knew
everybody's world comes to a fine point
(and still life's turns and twists try to deceive).
You knew it. And that is it for him.
Let's place ourselves in the death of a room;
lean hands to the cold breast of the chimney,
feel fingers fall between loose bricks, withdraw,
and find a ghost of white dust kissing nails
This remembrance of a long dead sister,
a sepia print in an oval frame, looks
towards a corner in a spider spittle swathed,
damp flowers growing like a slowed-down film
where foxed and dog-eared paper falling hangs.
The paintings by their tilts commune a grief;
unrescued sense that all their separate
strokes are condemned to resonate within
a fore-closure. On the settee the dolls,
legs akimbo, faces for a future
painted ("We can please you. We will please you.")
over-spill their plastic bodies which hold
out their flounces, their curls, like silent whores.
From the mantelpiece you take the skeleton
plastic key-ring down. Place it in a drawer.
She hadn't known exactly what it was.
Remember crawling down the stairs for grapes,
eyes too bitter pressed for tears,
knees against my face.
"Why did you do it Adam?
I could have been happy always
in this dusty house with Nagyi.
Tom Roder was born in 1962. He lives in Sheffield.
About previous collections by Tom Roder:
"Tom Roder looks at the world in an odd, one is tempted to say original way . . . he invests the ordinary with a sense of the extraordinary . . . I'm impressed by Roder. I like his style." Peter Sansom, Review in Orbis 75
"Very entertaining poems . . . I enjoyed them a lot." Mick Imiah.
"Poems with an amazing treasury of unexpectedness in which you can rummage." Peter Redgrove.
pf
Physiology of a Fly
ISBN 0 9513998 6 1
£2.50
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