The house
from Finding my father (The 1901 census)
I am trying to fit you at four months,
your father, a draper's traveller on his own account,
your mother, your brother David who was twelve,
also Samuel Silverman, a tailor,
his wife, their three children and the boarder,
Woolf Chonen, a boot machinist -
I am trying to squeeze all of you into
that small house, 87 Nelson Street
in the parish of St. Philip Stepney, London.
Ninety years later among the re-built
and re-numbered buildings I found
a clutch of narrow terraced dwellings
which hadn't been felled by the twentieth century.
Peering into the dim of a bald brown room,
I made out its black range. Everything tallied
with the one up, one down and basement,
the lavatory and pump in the back yard,
which I'd put together from your stories.
Now it's as if you've returned in full voice
to expound inked facts I've never heard before.
I read them over and over, visualise
how cooking, eating, washing, sleeping,
Yiddish, the Shabbas candles, voices, thoughts,
must have scratched along together, elbowed
for pockets of space, jumbled hopelessly.
And I see how easily it could have happened:
a hand jogged when it was reaching
for the steaming kettle, the spout
tipping water over six-year old Judith,
the unbearable red pain, the scald
of voices. Your sister's name, absent
from the form, is written inside me.
your father, a draper's traveller on his own account,
your mother, your brother David who was twelve,
also Samuel Silverman, a tailor,
his wife, their three children and the boarder,
Woolf Chonen, a boot machinist -
I am trying to squeeze all of you into
that small house, 87 Nelson Street
in the parish of St. Philip Stepney, London.
Ninety years later among the re-built
and re-numbered buildings I found
a clutch of narrow terraced dwellings
which hadn't been felled by the twentieth century.
Peering into the dim of a bald brown room,
I made out its black range. Everything tallied
with the one up, one down and basement,
the lavatory and pump in the back yard,
which I'd put together from your stories.
Now it's as if you've returned in full voice
to expound inked facts I've never heard before.
I read them over and over, visualise
how cooking, eating, washing, sleeping,
Yiddish, the Shabbas candles, voices, thoughts,
must have scratched along together, elbowed
for pockets of space, jumbled hopelessly.
And I see how easily it could have happened:
a hand jogged when it was reaching
for the steaming kettle, the spout
tipping water over six-year old Judith,
the unbearable red pain, the scald
of voices. Your sister's name, absent
from the form, is written inside me.
Page(s) 8
magazine list
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- Cannon's Mouth, The
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- French Literary Review, The
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- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
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- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
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- North, The
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- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
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- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
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