Chris Preddle
Bed (19 January)
In this put-you-up with too much give
in the mattress, this chickenwire hammock
and antipodean hummock,
we gravitate to the bottom like lumps of flour in a sieve,
side by side
in an upside-
down grave mound or long barrow.
This unfortunate bed
is in the bedroom I had in childhood. Tonight and tomorrow
(and tomorrow is the feast of Saint Paula the Bearded)
we shall hear the suburban trains at the end of the road
that I heard in the nineteen-fifties.
Already the classificationist,
I logged them as ups or downs, goods or fast.
This body bag of a bed
is in Mortlake, supposedly lake of the dead
where martyred bodies
from Tyburn were washed up by the Thames,
or else where the plague victims
of London were buried. They must be packed like hardcore
under the living room floor.
Risen from the bed
I walk with my mother and father to the churchyard,
beside the railway opened in the eighteen-forties.
And I hear, as if at a sickbed,
that in this spot
they too have reserved a put-you-down or burial plot.
The trains of Mortlake need them for the trackbed.
Page(s) 45
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