Meeting the Plane
The bark of the plane trees, some
parts a clean pale yellow,
others elephant-grey
with a hint of brown,
and the patches big and bold
like the leaves and the total
shape of the big trees,
and their abundance!
You didn’t go far
without meeting
a plane tree, there was one
waiting for you like a mum
just outside the school,
next to the barrier to stop
children from spilling out into
the road, the path of the cars,
and there were several more
plane trees on the walk
back along Turney Road
and into Croxted Road
to our house. There weren’t
any plane trees in Croxted Road
but there were some on Rosendale
Road which wasn’t far away.
The best ones were in Brockwell Park,
unpruned and free-standing like
gentle elegant friends.
The spiky seed-pods that dangle
from plane trees in autumn
look like horse-chestnut cases
or mediaeval maces, the spiked
cannonballs of a horror
made unreal and safe by cartoon
distance and a thousand years.
When my second daughter
was in the car with me
driving under the plane trees
on the South Circular, on
the road that crosses Clapham
Common, on the way to visit
her granny, me having
collected her from Heathrow,
I suppose, she called those
seed-pods pommes de sapin
de platane, ‘plane tree fir-cones’,
because she grew up in France
and knew all about fir cones
and not much about plane trees.
She said it once and I
reminded her of it every time
we went that way again,
just like my mother, until
she pointed out I was doing it
and she knew I was going to.
Did she even say it first
or had I put her up to it
anyway? Modelling the expression
on her other coinage, sauce
de tomate de salade, ‘yellow
tomato sauce for salads’
doesn’t quite catch it
but gives you a rough idea,
which is all poems can do anyway.
Page(s) 11-12
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