A Strange Packet [1991]Tom Roder
Poetry
1962 - 1997
<< Back
A Strange Packet [1991]
- The Benefits of Silence
- Ocean, Landscape and Sky Sequence:
- On a Paul Klee Postcard, Image D'hiver
- The Trial
- Distances
- Eyebrow
- Memories of Death
- Last Memories of My Grandfather, "Bob"
- Eleven Hungarian Songs
- Two Tree Songs
- Victory
- The Emperor
- Look and Learn
- Watermelon Seed
- Blue glove
- Radio
- Kinch
- Hush baby in your boozy sleep
Also illustration: Roder takes A Cup Of Tea by Antoinette Myers
Also text from back page of collection.
To travel in space you must leave the old verbal
garbage behind; God talk, country talk, mother talk,
love talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no
religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to be
alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not
there.
-- Daniel Odier, The Job: Interview with William Burroughs (London, 1970), p.6.
In order
To be seen, stand up.
To be heard, speak up.
To be appreciated, shut up.
-- (notice affixed to kitchen cupboard)
Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.
-- Emily Dickinson
Jek tolila id
duble ta ra
tina*
Like damp flannels swaying in a damp room; silence,
feathery and ornate as fretwork in the skull
of a bird which flaps in a sound-proof box.
Let's creep to the small square window
and astound its peregrinations
(but bend your eyelids to a blink).
A tuft of hair, a spore, a pinned leaf
enact our excitement and within
the Musée des Beaux Arts
is Chardin's smooth boy, the palest cherub
of a pirate, with a desk like a cornfield.
My Canadian Aunt fixed the twitter
and whirr of a future of birds
in a block of Perspex
and used it as a key fob.
And here's the hot tooth of an invalid
(pain is also silent
before it finds its tune)
running amuck as a simple sin in
search of configurating flesh.
It moons me out; a packet of Lucifers
swimming on black coffee in a French
restaurant; and even the waiters use
semaphore, the chef flicks his pan
with a silent wrist - a whistle-limbed
fellow.
Round and round we merrily go
plip, plop, ploo.
Like the padding equerry whose every powdered blush
is a noise, who races to the end of each corridor
in search of the paper-Queen, the Quisling-in-Arms,
I ran to the end of your hairy avenue and glued
the rattle of your leaves, taped the fingers of your clock,
and sat in the springless armchair, watching each grain
of the egg-timer fall with a slush.
*If you lift up her skirt you'll see her knickers. Sung by
the
Maltese, during the second world war, to accompany British
Military marching bands.
Ocean, Landscape and Sky Sequence
Against my bandaged memories my head
-
my ear an interfusion of whispers
rocking howls sheltered like a boat licked red
by a falling sun concerned with oceans.
In the fast depths were silver fish playing
light music round titanic headdresses
winking at funnels and iceberg display;
site of a knees up in the captain's mess.
So work me down, dark lady, into pulp
on the ridged ocean floor where a worm
in alabaster furrows through, in turn,
fascinated mouths in breach of promise.
Thunder in my ears - tintinnabulations
of cross-eyed heaven, skew-whiff and dreamy,
the rumbling of lorries, hill-high explosions,
your cage of rubber diving so darkly.
Mark my pearl eyes with your twice-coral lips,
capture each splash of each single wave's curl,
then make me a present of your tongue's lick,
rise to the surface, leave my sense hurling.
It’s the sure-sighted fellow who ends
up with the useful dog-ends and sits
with the rabbit stew flinching in its
pot. Outside his window the soft shore-line
which dips and rinses its arc of sand,
sings a division of sea and land.
Is there an unworkable simplicity?
The traumatic edges of a flower say
no. He proves he can live this needlepoint
loneliness; every moment a half-life,
a half-death, a music extreme as sawdust
and ebony; a hard flickering lust.
He has two candles and walks between
in pace with a boat which scuttles the ocean,
and grabs a meaning from each small object
which lies on the table giving its lesson.
His wife and daughter lie under the sand,
crab-meat, while the deep sands shift unseen.
Sometimes ghosts seem to drop from the roof,
and hang outside the window diaphanous,
fired intermittently with the light-house blink,
their mouths unfleshly tunnels, sore-eyed,
they mutter the might-have-beens, the undones,
on and on, unlike our bones, continuous.
I held my fingers into the sunshinee
and saw them strangely brown, desirable;
curling in tune with a shadowy line,
creaking to wind which blew through the stable.
So patterns of straw flew to the asphalt,
trigonometries of glistening veldts.
There is no work on the cockatoo's day,
the angel troops have packed their deep knap-sacks,
sun-walker's doff their caps as if to say
the fleet harvest is brave behind their backs.
The husbands knock a grand tattoo of nails,
clattering wood-piles are circled by snails.
A leaf has turned on a bed of fixed leaves
which rattle their involutions till Spring,
each one of us hides in our shattered sheaves
tinkling along until the last ringing.
The wives prime their beauties into the page,
the heaven held sparrow falls in its cage.
On 14 July, 1990, the poet
laureate informed me
he had never experimented with hallucinogenic
drugs. However, he said, a friend had once
presented him with Fly Agaric mushrooms
which he stored in a freezer together with a haul
of mackerel. Unfortunately, during a power-cut
the mackerel and mushrooms congealed and
putrefied.
*
Between two boundaries your face so cool
has collapsed into an inquisition;
a pale moon circle by a river's bank
folds all its meaning into my sad fool.
There is no more pleasure, no higher means
than your slow lying in soft position,
a bubble rises and the skimmed stone sank;
press your cheek to the white mane of your dreams.
Here's a strange path, a path without violence,
hold to its white-washed walls; break your language,
eat your Fly Agaric, turn your mackerel
on your fork; we're mortal in this silence.
Roll me that coughball into my landscape,
it seems so massive I'm alone, no gauge
will tell the first job for tomorrow, tell
how I might make the present the escape.
And a galloper with a great felt hat
reaches us with signs of comic fury,
holds out the charter of all our badness,
waves before our noses the fat brown rat.
Your lips, your eyes and your nose un-wrinkle
as you lie in the playgrounds of no hurry,
the sun has cast its hook, floats in sadness,
feeling that the night will hold just twinkles.
I'm trying, by degrees, to move away
from a misery, an indefinite
memory, which tantalises every
part of me which still holds on to something.
It's a searchlight that throws our winter fields
into relief of earth and stone which break
against my sight like elementary tricks
learnt from an older cousin at playtime;
leaving the larger landscape blackened, thrust
into an ocean of black ocean dust.
Like smiles and winks that break from a corner
of a circus submerged in tangs of hay,
draped in a festering tarpaulin full
of discrete movements and adultery.
So the tatty tiger leaps to a roll
of tatty thunder and the torn up man
lifts his whip to spin the eye of the world.
On a Paul Klee Postcard, Image D'hiver
for Emily M.
A black balloon
like an inverted tear
is poised in a winter sky.
Spindly trees
nourish themselves
on a horizon of snow.
Only the technicians
tending a fallen space-rocket
can read this music.
My eyes shallow as a half-hearted grave
begin their spinnings with simple meanings
behind the tightening lids which press to sleep.
A swift man with a summons called for me,
told me of a carefully found decision
which meant my movements had to be prescribed
within certain boundaries, certain walk-ways
all in sight and sound of the village clock.
His thin armed span showed my likely rangings,
he tagged mly legs with forged rings of cold brass,
and he explained in simple, measured tones
I could be found with an electric gauge.
I (who've lived so long behind leaded panes
looking after a narrow house, mother
who creaks and groans to her private goblins
while I cook, tend, keep and feed, sweep and clean),
have never in my pinched life done no thing
wrong. Who'll amuse the old blackbird's cheepings
if they take me in a wagon away
to the hard and fabled court house where men
in grey and powder distribute meanings,
deliberate the fate of single souls?
I would not last one year in that confinement
with no thick soup, no garden wall to walk.
For when you feel like this the hedge is green
venom. You wish the soft bellied spring birds
to fall from nests and lie as white and dead
as you are. The knifes and forks are there
to cut and prod you, hanging drapes to hang
you. The spoon of pudding in your mouth turns
bitter and all the dreams you have are dreams
of torture. So if I pull myself up
a heavy tower, each and every step
pulling from lungs a breath of this life,
you'll know my joy of reaching the summit,
of tripping round the parapet. Hurling.
Of course, I never threw myself that time
these moods hardly last, like falling petals,
but Mother dropped to fairy-land one night
leaving me to steer the battered life-boat.
I've scraped the rind from the cheese, sorted out
the papers, polished the living room brass,
let the ice drip from the fridge and now I'm
ready for justice. If it turns out well
I could be back here in a week, in time
to pick the last plums, trim the wanton growth
from the hedge and scrape the moss from the cracks
in the path; a good life holds out, perhaps.
To rearrange the distances between
us; to fiddle with the springs and pulleys
that hold us exact distances apart
is not an easy task, you might well know.
Let's take love. A table full of glass,
and in one glass dish two horse chestnuts lie;
they rub their brown bellies, one 'gainst the other
on the cut glass dish which used to hold pears.
I'm thinking of one in especial,
once I walked through a French cemetery,
and there, near Ingres, above Victor Hugo
I found two chestnuts, placed them on a slab.
"This one's me, and this one's you." Her lips moved -
"This one's me, and this one's you." So put them
in your pocket, let them touch their bellies."
And she dropped them one by one. Deep, soft, down.
Everything is sheared away eventually, everything,
and I say this with some feeling - I'm as human
as a dying one too - by degrees sliding through
the brave forest which is no brave forest, slipping
through the web that's bound to listen awhile.
I bite through the food you offer explosively,
my mouth's on a short fuse tonight, I want
to taste all I might, rip away the cardboard
divisions between our portions.
I watch you wriggle and curl like a great
white bend of paradise away from me.
What will you offer me tonight?
What will you offer me tonight?
I ask this question in a thousand different ways
as I huddle with misery around my hot coffee,
my precious biscuit on its shiny plate,
I'm thinking of a circlet of flowers dangling
and what we can make them to mean.
In the dark I lick your eyebrows against
their true direction, then back along their
line of growth. They're longer in the dark,
as big as my brain, and speckled with salt.
If I hold on to you, a sad naked twin,
tightly enfold you, feel the rub and smell
of another creature, I might dissolve with this other
creature and dream as the world goes spinning.
(The chair gently holds our mingled clothes.)
The thin unlabelled limbs of a woman;
the small feet of a pinched princess.
And in memory two small naked boys
capering around a gas fire both loved
by great-aunt Edna who pronounces their
growing feet perfect.
She had grey bright eyes
and a line in kindness
one patch of grey hair
was golden and ornate.
The paper is thick with war;
neat representations in a grinning grid of a
world without a grid and I'm glad
to be in a room with square openings
that gives onto a shaded square,
pollarded trees garnishing their fists
with light.
We must concur the dotted line we draw
around our crazy spurts and twinklings
is a dotted line.
Last Memories of My Grandfather, "Bob"
(born, 24 March, 1904; died, 3 July, 1990)
I don't want to lose this, my grandfather dying in his bedroom,
dying, ebbing, in shallow soft breaths of ending,
diagonal across the bed like a tired athlete,
and his eyes unflinching, staring, bright blue fixed
as his breath came and went in distant waves
and I held his hand tight and rubbed his side.
And I said to his closing ears "Bob, Bob,"
but nothing could keep the breathing
which was going into nothing, slowing.
The ambulance men took him down the stairs dead
in a special chair. My grandmother
held her face at his still warm face,
shocking white hair, and everything too new
for me to comprehend any grief which only came later
in flashes, as half-asleep I caught him
with exact movements driving in a nail,
mixing printer's ink.
At the time I found my face in the bathroom mirror
ashamed, asking myself how I should respond.
His cap still hangs on a long nail in the kitchen
and his blue cardigan drapes the back of his chair,
the clock is wound for him but the calendar stays on July.
For four days his ashes rested on a round table
in my grandmother's living room, screwed tight
in a gold plastic jar;
a wreath of flowers round the jar.
I tipped it slightly and was disturbed
by the stupid weight of this reduction.
this sifted silence.
for Nagyi
I
Peach blossom lodges itself
between the ear and the head
of every young girl that
works in the textile warehouse.
II
At fourteen I felt too
young to admit my age
to the Work's manager.
At twenty-eight I felt a
little too old (I should have
been married.)
III
The world was created with
the letters of the alphabet:
some letters were more
slipshod […..]
* * *
* i.e. poison
IV
I love the garden
that goes round your house.
I love the silk
which wrinkles against your skin.
I love the flowers
that wave from your window-sill.
And I would like to enfold you
with the whole wide world.
V
My darling mother
put on your head-scarf,
go to the end of the village,
say to the prettiest girl:
Will she be my bride?
My dear son, forget her;
she doesn't deserve your love,
she doesn't deserve the love
of your heart and soul.
A richer and handsomer man
has already asked for her hand.
My dear mother, my heart
breaks for her.
VI
The wedding is over
the bride is sad.
"don't be sad in your
little white house,"
said the groom, "Because
I am sad in mine."
VII
When I went to Budapest
a peasant girl said to me:
"Will you bring me from Vienna,
from the Viennese pharmacist,
some stomach strengtheners,
made by the match factory*".
* i.e. poison
* * *
VIII
There was a fair-haired maiden
white as a rose,
her kisses were dangerous.
For her I weep,
every night I cry
because I trod her happiness under foot.
For this I have to pay;
O fair-haired one
on my knees I beg your forgiveness.
IX
If I were rich
I would come to your house
in a carriage
drawn by four horses.
For your snow-white neck
I would buy many twinkling
twonkling precious stones.
If I were rich
I would buy you a prayer-book
with a diamond encrusted lock.
On feast days I would go to Mass,
embrace you,
holding your tiny hands.
I would ask the priest
to bless us so that even God
in his Heaven would be happy.
X
The city is full of acacia flowers
and the city is full of the scent
of the acacia flowers.
I wander beneath the trees
daydreaming as if every single flower
is blooming just for me.
O! I ask myself,
Where is my dream,
the dream, I have sown
under the acacia trees?
Just a sweet dream
before my eyes?
XI
Fly, fly seven-dotted ladybird
on to that maiden's snow-white shoulder.
Tell her that she was my true lover
and kiss her snow-white shoulder for me.
I
A Japanese gigolo
kept a pickled tree
near his wood-burning stove.
A maid in the country
beat her walnut tree
to make the fruit
that much bigger.
A philosopher by his chimney
fell asleep one supper,
dreamt of depleted forests.
A tree-lover one spring
planted a brand new tree
near another brand new tree
by some older trees.
Two trees separated by
a road
ached their boughs across.
The cherry is the finest tree
said a man no longer
who now can't even
look at the pear.
A young boy went up a tree
but couldn't climb down;
his plaid scarf was found days later.
When Capability Brown imagined
his biggest oak his young wife
skidded into
a clump of nettles.
A Gay Hussar with a
frisky envelope of seedlings
threw them in a river.
II
Trying to find one more fallen, broken,
haphazard I brushed against the hard scent
of a tree cascading its lonely meanings
over a meeting of fields. Like all magic
the tree held its sky like a trick and I
displaced five leaves with a stick, uncovered
one eye; My Darling Hid Between Branches.
There is no honey which trickles down trees
at times like these but let's say there might be.
The talks were constructive but nothing
concrete had emerged.
(6 o'clock news, Radio 4, 10.v.91)
Re-creation at two o'clock
sand-castles like spinets
fall between our fingers.
The radio ticks its
apocalypse, a frustration
at the end of the ocean
where men of tin
clink to the top of hills
and plant a square of cloth.
*
A dynamic bloke had no time
for minor ructions. His brow
too broad to register these
seismic fluctuations except
as wrinkles.
(after reading Seamus Heaney's North)
All hail our emperor of stones and glass
his few bones curled round the curve of the land;
thin fingers guard his expression, a scented
detail in his back pocket, a thread of purple
caught in his pelvis.
But wait on; he's trying to totter to a meaning;
he flexes a dry fibula, grinds a powdery ball
in its socket. And now he stands erect and lean
as an Odilon Redon, and, under the nearest mulberry bush
beneath a wisp of heaven (the sky as blue as the drenched
silk panties of a young Cleopatra) twists and shakes
like an advertiser's dream..
Taking the nearest abandoned supermarket trolley
he rattles round the glinting estate clawing up
each clod of green grass, each coral stone
with mewing delectation; then bends each blade,
packs each stone, spoons each morsel of earth,
deep into his hollow bones
until he's quite substantial.
Compacted he sings a line of doggerel;
as bindweed spouts from his eye-holes
small children line up to present
him with garlands.
His elbows poke east and west.
Insect breath is hard
to find my sweetest:
What else would you like?
*
There is a plodding gravestone in my life
carved by a girl with insubstantial tools.
Her flesh is soft as daisies; touch it please,
then let your whips ravel on my bent back.
*
A song of disturbed angels
their puckered brows against
the wind forever.
Three steps forwards and three
steps back with wave-break
of sadness.
The angels find their smiles
with ashes in a bucket
amongst other bones.
Rush towards me darling,
rush towards me darling,
up the dampest paths.
We will collide in the
softness of leaf-fall
our eyes turning Chinese white.
It said Look and Learn on her chest
and her breasts swayed with a strange
gravity above me. The nipples
scrunched petals gliding.
And I am king of all I see
the fountain and the water-flea,
trailing flashguns of delight
small and spangling in the blackness.
The buckled shoe
the water shrew
the small apartment
wardrobe.
These things can
delight us.
My baby ate watermelon
so thoughtlessly that night
that the juice ran down
her chin and stained
her frock watermelon
colours. A harvest of
dark seeds landed
on her pale lap.
*
She pulled her frock
off over her head
with one swift jerk
and the seeds scattered
everywhere. "Take me
from behind," she said.
Turn a blue glove on a lonely blue table
then admit to yourself it isn't really lonely.
Turn a blue glove on a blue table
then admit to yourself they aren't blue.
Turn a glove on a table
then admit yourself to an asylum.
These are days of high panache
of iridescent monkeys
of sailors with cotton gabardines
jazz jazz jazz jazz jazz
(Nob'dy dies till they dies)
When the poet Jonathan upped and offed to Brighton
leaving me to grind out some subtle meaning in the pub
he gave me his old transistor radio.
It’s a beautiful leather, wooden and plastic radio
teetering on the brink of some sort
of sexuality. I tune it in and it starts
to tremble, some unknown tune; a tune
which plays with my sense of taste.
I'm poised over peas and mackerel.
Kinch the sailor eats
asparagus on his toast.
It makes his belly warm and
satisfied with the hot life
he has to endure; what with sea-salt
and mucky sea-stories, the shanties
which rage interminable on the cross-channel
crossing in the black prow-star-light.
He's glad to get his feet on terra-firma;
flatten the holly-hocks with his size elevens.
Oh yes, YES!
he's glad to be back; you make no mistake
Madame light-house dweller.
Hush baby in your boozy sleep;
I will protect you
like I'm supposed to
from the daffodil wars
and dreams that creep up on you.
The weight of your head breaks
the wave of the pillow, nothing
can touch you here on this ocean.
I'll take all precautions, sweep down
the decks, heave down the anchors.
You're breathing gentle now sweet silent creature,
making your own sense of the drapes
and the billows, the waves and the water.
The boat that we're on is cutting the sea,
completing its night trip.
Hush baby in your boozy sleep, etc.
Did you love the dark trombonist who pushed
his slide across our table making you tremble
as one drink kissed another and you talked
a drear rainbow of day-dreams and wishes?
I know you can't answer me darling.
Another slow fantasy disperses as the window
breathes its winter meanings, catching the steam
of our dreams which wash themselves together
under a crisp fountain of whiskey and ice
until with a night-turn we fall into each other.
Hush baby in your boozy sleep, etc.
I stood in the florists and held the carefully wrapped flowers; pinks and
blues, pinks and blues, tiny wrinkled bright heads which jostled amongst small
crisp leaves as my grasping hand trembled on the wettening paper tight around
the cut stems. I realized that this was not an intelligent thing to do and had
little hope that she might respond. I gulped the air and felt a great waft of
sanitized flower smell fill me.
Handed my change I quickly left the shop.
It was monstrously bright outside and the strange
varieties of life that pushed and harried on the busy pavement sickened me. A
youth seemed to turn his lip up when he saw my outstretched arm clasping the
flowers; his overall was spotted and streaked with white and red paint and in
his skinniness and cockiness I thought him a particularly bright malignant weed,
one that would love to suffocate me and my delicate pinks and blues. I met the
eyes of a jolly fat lady dragging a child and expected some sympathy but her
eyes held nothing but a narrow hell. I increased my pace, faster and faster.
Past the fish-monger's. Past the baker's. Past the vintner's. Nearly home. Home.
I jammed the key into the door, turned the lock and was in the hall. As usual Betty was there to greet me. Not a hair out of place. Betty. A well made girl. Betty. I held the flowers out into the centre of the airy hall. Betty moved forward. "For me?" I nodded. She whipped them out of my hand, scrunched the paper into a tiny ball and put it in her apron pocket then placed the flowers in an empty vase on the hall table. She separated the individual stems and made them fall outwards from the centre. I felt a knot of bitterness form in my throat.
"Why did you pull them from me so quickly?" I asked.
"Oh I'm sorry, I must learn to slow down, you've
told me about that before." She moved over to where I stood and with an arched
arm patted me on the head. It was useless.
We sat opposite each other for dinner. Lamb
casserole. She ate slowly. A neat cut with the knife. Careful prodding of a
piece of meat,
piece of crust, bit of potato on the fork; a small circular wrist action as she
mopped up a little gravy; then the whole assemblage quickly transported to her
open mouth. Regular chewing. Silent swallowing. We didn't talk.
While she was doing the dishes I walked up behind her an wrapped my arms around her. Pulled her gently towards me. Her yellow kitchen gloves slowly dripped sudsy water on to the linoleum.
"Are you seeing Partridge?" I made up the name.
"Of course not" she replied, "I stay in doors all
day."
"Answer me truthfully," I repeated, "Are you seeing that bastard Partridge?"
"Of course not, I stay in doors all day."
We were getting nowhere like this. I ran my hand up her skirt and pushed a small button near the top of her left leg. Her face started to turn red, redder and redder.
"Why are you blushing then?"
"Its true I am seeing Partridge, but he's nothing compared to you. You make me feel so good." I pushed another small button on her right leg and the red colour in her face retreated. Pale again.
"Are you going to carry me up to bed?"
"Yes darling," she said. She's somewhat stronger
than the average girl.
I write as one addicted to love, although, and you know this so well that you
might shiver with a private contempt, I must be lying in quite a large way. "A
delirium … does not exist unless one wakens from it (there are only
retrospective deliriums)"* and quite comprehensively love does not exist unless
one wakens from it. I feel privileged to be able to thrust the platter which
holds the diagram of my heart towards your palpating finger-tips, and I say this
calmly, coolly and confidently because I do not expect to suffer from this
radical surgery. I no longer inhabit my love space. I hold to an empty,
word-edged, cork-lined space that holds all the reverberations of a parallel
arrangement of incidents I will call love, and will, no doubt use as a
template for some future adventure; this being their only use. Follow this
letter. I include it with a certain shame.
Tuesday, 6 November
(dead fireworks in the garden)
Dear E,
You are someone who has acquired a special size, depth and
feeling in my imagination. Someone who tickles me with certain mis-apprehensions, unknowns, unsaids, indefinite dimensions; and whether it is simply a combination of your absence together with your eloquence. I don't know, but I rather think it might be the soft wastelands between the little I know of you, and the fluid unknowns of you. I should say my girlfriend G. is very lovely. The distance between us is very small, a thin band of air warmed by our little, sometimes explosive, meanings; everything at close quarters. Anyway, E, I felt the need to write to someone and thought of you; I hope you don't mind me unravelling myself in your room. I remember having a flurried correspondence with you before and I was thinking (I hope you don’t mind) that it might be good to revive this. I feel I can only say certain things by letter.This morning, I read about a woman who sometimes feels her soul to be as thin as a playing card. Whilst eating lunch yesterday I was only once disturbed by a girl who asked very gently whether she could use my vinegar. My friend has met a philosopher with a dove-grey hat who goes around saying "Words are painful … Words are painful." She sometimes wears her hair up and sometimes down.
Do you ever go in for hand holding E?(And Freud wrote to his fiancé: Yet I don't want my letters to keep remaining unanswered, and I shall stop writing altogether if you don't write back. Perpetual monologues apropos of a loved being, which are neither corrected nor nourished by that being, lead to erroneous notions concerning mutual relations, and make us strangers to each other when we meet again, so that we find things different from what, without realizing it, we imagined.)
Yours with love, etc.
Of course, realizing I'd said too much I did not
send my letter I am, though, moving ahead of this unique love I was in,
or just out off. At the time my hair was bunched and flattened into a Chinese
cotton hat and I lived about the twist of stairs which separated me from some
uncomfortable neighbours. They would peer up the stairs sometimes as I walked
down to collect my mail from the hall and whisper about me being a love-bird, a
pop-in-jay. They were German or Italian. I mention the twist in the stairs
because of an early memory which I would like to tell you about.
It was the first time I saw strange adult castles
melt. If I hadn't seen them melt I might not have lasted till now. I learnt what
else they might be one night on dark stairs before the turn into the attic. I
spied down the laughing well. The rods skeltering down. The banister winding
down to a fat round knob. People round the knob splitting their sides, jiggling
their glasses, peering and looking at eyes, in eyes. Could they see deep in? Was
it milky, or like the bright brown buttons the family of foxes have in the
museum? And I heard father laughing like all the rest and saying, "A cigar … my
lady … a cigar," and laughing again. Never heard those words before. Did the
lady sell him cigars in a kiosk? Was he giving a lady a cigar, or could the
cigar be called Lady. But it was the laughing that got to me. I wondered
if it was like any laugh I would ever make but that seemed impossible.
A little later a lady ran up the stairs like she
had a bus to catch. I could see her knees which were pink and strong. Put my
hand out and touched the middle of her knees. She stopped dead. It felt rough,
rougher than mine and I felt sorry I'd done it. She was gazing down smiling.
Took a hand to my hair. Ruffled. Smoothed. Her rings sagged in my hair.
"Your dad's a naughty boy, I bet you aren't a
naughty boy." And as she said this her eye-lashes met and tangled. Father got
smaller and smaller and grubby. His face melted, shifted into mine. I could see
the tiny red hairs in her armpits. A smell of ruses and mustard fell down to me.
Dizzy.
And this is a second, much more recent (and
indecent) incident:
It took place in a University canteen standing in the queue behind a |Metallurgy
student. I can't blame myself. His hair was very clean and ended with an
indefinite line shading into the nape of his neck. His shirt collar was clean
and white, and in between hair and collar was an inch expanse of cool white
clean pale neck with a small freckle (one only) to the right. I hoped to
distract myself with the details of the Meal of the Day, scripted in thick ink
on fluorescent green card; Chicken Burger in a Bun, Chips and Tossed Salad
but my eyes knowingly veered back to the thin strip of scented flesh very still
beneath slightly flushed ears. The beauty and arrogance of that neck. His hand
held a folder with the words Metallurgy; Methods and Materials finely,
neatly stencilled in black marker on the fuzz of the fawn cardboard; the letters
with perfect loops, straights and breaks. And then I did it; bending slightly
from the waist, my lips pouting I gave that strip of neck the softest, most
gentle breathing kiss right between the two frisky plaits of muscle, in the soft
downy cool shady hollow of his neck.
His head cracked back almost banging my nose and then shot forward in a quivering, tense reaction; he rounded on me, perhaps expecting to see one of his friends, and preparing to laugh at an unexpected joke but he saw a stranger. His jaw was tense and unhelpful, his face not nearly so attractive as the back of his head. I felt like telling him this. His eyes were like chips of millstone and there was a mossy damp softness on the lids and overworked grey pouches which circled his eyes. His lips were pale and alcoholic and a twitch at the corner kept flashing irregular teeth, his nose was hard, straight, unsympathetic. It became unbelievable that this calculating, ugly face had such a beautiful obverse and I could almost believe it was a set up; how many others had been tempted by that Janus neck?
I silently articulated the words I expect him to
say: 'What's your game mate?' 'What the hell …!', but all my attempts to give
him words seemed pitiful and I was facing his jaw movement with the slight salt
aftertaste of his neck on my lips. I had a terrific urge to lick my lips, to
swallow that taste but I realised the sight of my tongue might be taken as
further provocation. He seemed to have re-composed himself and staring steadily
seemed happy for me to make a move, offer an explanation. This was unnerving, I
didn't want to be locked here in silent unmoving combat any longer. I slowly
sucked my lips inside my mouth and gave them a brisk lick,
"You could have been a girl," I said. This seemed to confuse him. "I mean I
didn't kiss you because you're a bloke. Sorry. It was your skin …"
Anyway, I'm sure you don't wish me to give mere
irksome nibbles of my various encounters, but to draw some generalizations, and
I will try to make these useful. As I have told you, my hair was bunched and
placed in a Chinese hat; she was tall and pale and, of course, if there is to be
any point to my narrative she is unable to refuse my offer of ice-cream in a
public place. She arrives slightly late
up a steep path, and I, who have been sitting anxiously on a log have already
noticed a pleasant dampness rise from the log and collect in the seat of my
trousers. I rise to meet her, and she smiles asking me about my journey to this
meeting point and pointing out how strange it is that people in fact meet
anywhere at all and how fortuitous it is that the sun is out. She draws my
attention to a fairy-circle and explains she has been very good in Biology. She
is all potential and sighs and there is no resistance when on her exposed back,
which has peeled in other days of sun (it is strange that she has this blatant
biological, medical past). I echo the fairy-circle with circles of my tongue on
her exposed back. She explains that with it being a hot summer's day she can
feel the circle of spittle drying in the breeze and that this reminds her of
spilling perfume on her fingers. The park is on a steep bank and we walk up and
down, up and down finding different locations to kiss and she agrees that each
place is as interesting as the last but in a
different way. I agree about this universal terrorism interest has and would use
the words "all-encompassing" but now she is gulping air like a large upright
fish; and this is, somehow, exactly as it should be. And we managed to locate a
place that sells ice-cream and have arranged somewhere new to meet.
I am unable to generalise.
-------------------
* Roland Barthes, A Lovers'
Discourse, p. 183
Yesterday was interesting. It was grey in Rotherham but I had a visit. Hello, a knock at the door, I said to myself. Rat-tat-tat-tat. It must be my daughter, my seed, Sarah. I'll open the door, leave my lawn-mower repairs for later. Dampness can ruin a good electric lawn-mower and might have ruined mine. Dampness is a great distress, an evil. It ruins whole bay-windows in the Brinsworth area, makes the magazines abandoned behind bushes mouldy, attacks the underseal on my car, and now the lawn-mower. It must be Karma. Open the door.
Yes it was my seed, my Sarah. I last saw her when she cut my hair short in Meersbrook, and now here she was on my Rotherham doorstep. Her hair is long, so, so long. And behind her a man, a young man. She apologizing: "Hope you don't mind dad, I brought along Mike. He asked if he could come." He shook my hand and then I was inviting them in. They smell of fried egg and are both taller than me. Is she wearing high heels? No, they're flat; she's tall like her mother's side. I'll take them into the kitchen.
Yes, she's a fine girl, my seed, Sarah. They sat together on my breakfast bench, looking around. He picked up my bargain, Chinese, Three Rams clock. I'll tell them the story of that bargain one day. I wonder how her friends are? Not dolly birds. Nothing wrong with dolly birds; I followed one home once after my divorce; she let me buy her a drink but they don't like you to get serious. But Sarah's friends weren't dolly birds. Only fifteen years old but nice girls, serious, with minds of their own. I wonder how Jenny is? She has long wavelets of hair. And Sue? I asked her out when Sarah was out of the room. Black hair and freckles. She said no, and there was a fuss but it was worth a try. I'm pretty young looking for fifty-one.
Sarah took over and made three big cups of tea and I told them about all the things I'd found in the woods. There's always something new in the woods. The other day I found two bikes, mountain bikes, expensive, behind a bush but I didn't take them; they might have been stolen. I found a video once but it was damp and ruined my machine. Machines are ruined by dampness. I got some musical cassettes from the woods, some magazines, and of course lots of chestnuts in November. I had barrels full of chestnuts but they went bad in the damp. You can't keep barrels of chestnuts. I'll roast them next time; that will keep them. They're small but sweet. I can't eat salt at the moment, I'm on potassium. Bought a pound of liver for forty pence. That will last me. Liver hasn't any salt in it. I won't get arthritis. The fish and chip shop knows I don't like salt at the moment but sometimes there are granules of salt on the counter and they get caught in the folds of the newspaper. I can taste it; I'm alert to salt, I can taste a speck a mile off. You've got to keep The Balance. Sodium: Potassium. Potassium: Sodium. That's the key. The key all the doctors know about but won't admit. He spent a lot of time looking at my Three Rams clock. I've got three giant packets of peanuts in a cupboard; unsalted.
At work they call me Digger. I went to Australia when I was a young man. I might retire there. I was born in Yorkshire. Captain Cook was born in Yorkshire and he went to Australia. Re-incarnation. We were born to suffer. Suffering is good for you; but I don't want varicose veins and I don't want arthritis. Keep The Balance. Sodium: Potassium.{Potassium: Sodium. I should be all right. I wondered if they wanted to hear about my Central Heating. They were looking at each other and smiling about something. I remember the smile on her mother's face when I turned up in a big polished Volvo. It was a strong car and it made her smile. Later on when I had a smaller car and gumboils she divorced me. Women live longer than men. It's part of the Karma.
They said something about double egg and chips and a drowned cat a man told them about near the Sewage Works. Double egg and chips with a coffee for ninety-nine pence after two-thirty in the afternoon. That's not bad, that's good. Rotherham's cheap and friendly. It's small. Sheffield's too big. I exhausted myself walking up and down London Road looking for a spare part. Spare parts don't come cheap. My clock was cheap. It’s a big clock and made of metal. Her boyfriend held it. Its not round but like an egg on its side. He liked it. He stroked its casing and looked at the different knobs on the back. I told him it was £3.45. I could have made him guess but there's no way he'd have come near.
After tea I gave them a toffee each and told them
they could take another but one was enough. Then I ran them home stopping off at
the cemetery to show them her grandmother's plaque. They cost a hundred pounds
and then, after twenty years, you have to pay again or they unscrew them and put
them somewhere safe.
Roder Takes A Cup Of Tea by
Antoinette Myers
Published by Physiology of a Fly,
50 Clifford Road Sheffield S11 9A0
Printed by Kall-Kwik, Sheffield
Copyright (c) Tom Roder 1991
ISBN 0 9513998 5 3
by the same author:
A lever her twinkle (poems 1986-1988);
The game of O;
Special Weather (Mainly Love Songs);
Henry's Dog's Poems
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 No. 75
"Very entertaining poems . . . I enjoyed them a lot." Mike Imiah
"Poems with an amazing treasury of unexpectedness in which you can rummage." Peter Redgrove
Cover illustration: A Poet Receives His Birthday Horse by Antoinette Myers
An Invitation to the Reader
Bring your machines over
to my machine, garrulous
as trombone music;and we will make
a pact to be a
groovy orchestra full
of sights and scrapesuntil the sheet slips
and leaves our feet
cold as morning.
ISBN 0 9513998 5 3
£2.50
|
Please check back soon as this site
is updated on a regular basis. For further information about this web site, or permission to utilise any of the copyrighted material on this site, please email ask@tomroder.org.uk Site compiled, hosted and designed by Simon Huggins |