London calling
The cold of this season blanks the trees, the sap curls
catlike in the roots. On the panes, a map of ice unfurls;
I read Its longitude uncertainly, a foreigner lost
in foreign spheres, breathless on my brittle axis.
Growing up English, my daughters thrive: the provost,
bully climate ensures useful, Anglo-Saxon praxis.
London made me: along the platforms underground
the soot from tube trains settles on the tourist,
the slipstream dishevels the banker’s clerk, wasp wrist
weighted with a circus watch, pip-pip pip-pip - the hour
of mercy for the homeless run aground.
The posters promise paradise, for postcodes in Sloane Square.
I dream of hot sands, imploding colourwheel of sky,
the whizzing fuse of hours cast through surf,
palette-splash of water brightening, brightening
and the taut sails’ blaze. The city’s wet slate, turf
sodden with a month of rain, and shoe leather wrung dry
in daily ritual: these artefacts eclipse the tropic lightning.
Mornington Crescent’s rank, dissembling lift
disappears with one long kiss, and hawkers drift
back to Camden town, or to rictus haunts wherever
for the deal. Watery sun finetunes the city’s pallor.
I learn to prosper In this kingdom, swallow rage
the English way, pretend to speak the language.
My face stares back in standing pools of rain,
breaks up the waves where taxis pass, a Cubist lithograph
lost in diesel percolations. The contrails fade
into the middle distance: you looking back, again
the smile, the blowing kiss full profile, half
remembered in the twenty years of vows we made.
The Archangel of True Love queues for Blackfriars,
bareheaded, wings tucked ragged in a tattered mack
As our faces disappear, paraclesis, man and wife
together coalesce. London burns perfectly, back to back
to back, a Serpentine vignette of still more perfect life
we trust to willowy, pre-Raphaelite daughters.
Page(s) 8-9
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