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The companionableness of men and other poems

Margaret Wilmot

A Hot January

First publication: March 2007

http://badosa.com/p174

THE COMPANIONABLENESS OF MEN

They talk football in the train, cite names,

players’ moves, critical, appreciative; last night

there were no heroes, just the team. When I next

wake to their chat it’s mortgages, investment plans.

One knows far more than the other, yet the exchange

is not one-sided; it’s companionable; they share.

At Clapham Junction the sky has been washed clean.

Three men stand looking up at a great silver bird

slope gently downward toward Heathrow.

“British Airways,” one says. “Beautiful,” another breathes.

I think of two boys’ voices long ago as through

a plate-glass window they admired the perfect bike.

EAST FROM BISHOPSGATE, 10 A.M.

Past a noisy construction-site, and past

Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, its baroque curves

scrolled amid a vista of gables and right angles;

past signs in Hindi and a fried pastry called

a strange name which vanished sooner

than the sweet taste on the tongue, the streets

acquired homely names, Heneage, Chicksand.

Brick terraces lay back from the pavement.

One noticed the colours people chose to paint

their doors — pink, drab green, canary, smoke —

while an unfenced playground yawned

and stretched across the sunny width of a block.

DUCKS, GEESE

Ducks, geese call on their way to the reservoir,

and night. Branches rustle, stir, fall still. A late bird

sings. The draining light gathers us close as Eden.

We stand on the shoulder of something great

and whole. Please God, may it not crack. Rabbits,

voles, all the small creatures of the hedge creep forth.

They take their place around the belly of the vase,

join deer with curly horns, boar, griffins, snakes

as they forever flee. It is the animals who know

these moments break: that men will never simply stand

and be. Even as the fullness swells we must give chase,

with arrows consummate the longed-for intimacy.

SWEET COFFEE

I drink sweet black coffee thinking of a blue

evening far away and long ago, hitch-hiking south

in the back of a pick-up truck, with various

indigenous labourers all wrapped in their ponchos;

how cold I was, how deeply cold, not just on

the fringes but through and through, like hunger.

At dark we stopped by a low house. Someone brought me

sweet coffee in a mug, which was very hot in my hands,

each sip hot. A frontier was crossed that night.

I still took no sugar in my drinks, for years, but

I knew surely as if I’d had a vision and seen God:

one day there would be sweet coffee.

MARSYAS

“I’ve never seen space used in quite that way.”

The words send me into the Turbine Hall, where

Marsyas swoops beneath the bridge on which

we stand; there’s no perspective-space to view the whole

red sweep of Kapoor’s huge two-horned trumpet-keel.

The bridge has turned to rope — I am perched above

a force so big and so contained I realise I’m not

above it after all, like trying to stand outside

the universe, (and some claim that is trumpet-shaped).

I dig my heels in, become Marsyas’ flute against

a great god’s flow; lean at the small angle which still

proclaims me me. What else can we do before we’re flayed?

LEAVING PANGBOURNE

The river is wide and quiet. Moored boats, willows,

clouds reflect parallel worlds in an uncertain sun. Once

friends here took me rowing in a skiff. There were herons,

and we drank champagne to small water sounds. It was like

being young again, when there would always be another time.

One birthday evening when the kids were in their teens,

we drank champagne, played games and music, and music

games in a laughing bubble I remember for its seismic

burst the following day when I flew in to San Francisco.

The girls in the seat behind are rowers, talking

“cross-winds, waves near the island. Is he the one

who’s rowing with Mohammad?” They’ll be racing Thursday.

THINK OF THE FLAG

Think of the flag. Think of it stirring,

or gusting, or tugging at its halyard in

a slant of low winter sun; flapping its shadow

onto the wall, and dancing; then standing out

vivid against clouds darkening by the moment.

Don’t think of it blown up for a rally backdrop,

animated only by the figure in the foreground

posturing and gesticulating; the symbol kidnapped

and chloroformed, as it were, drained of all imagination

and ambiguity, its tension sold for a message.

Don’t think of it lost tiny in the forest of sticks

waved on cue by the party-faithful. Think of wind.

WITH ALL OUR SENSES

I hadn’t been to Eastbourne for a long time.

Sumfield and Day had gone. They were proper printers

with noisy presses; sold a range of stationary, useful

off-cuts too. The corner building got sun from both sides.

My step-father was a proper printer, apprenticed at 13.

His hands knew the touch and heft of things beyond

their look. He’d learned the job the way we learn

to ride a bike, with all our senses. Jobs seem

different now, less knowable, or more, grasped

in a week. This roundness that dies. The clatter

of a press for Lawton held different strands of sound.

Biking through the lanes I think of hedgers and ditchers.

LIGHT LEAKS

There are times I see my brain as a box

under stairs. The closet is dark but light leaks out.

Just an ordinary wooden box, rectangular;

the lid never wants to close. The light-leak

doesn’t spread back to the wedge-end of the closet,

just makes a glow. In the past it was more than

a glow — it was a wide soft ribbon, and trying

to stuff it back in was like trying to stuff cloud,

push against a billow of light. It doesn’t feel

that way so often now, though the lid still

never wants to close all the way. Creaks and bumps

on the stairs above distract. Light leaks out.

DUSK ON GREY GRANITE

Let us imagine that on his walk to St Just

Peter Lanyon meets the young Sebald. Never mind

that the writer is still a boy in the early Fifties;

all the more reason for him to listen wide-eyed to

the story of a mining disaster, or hear how tunnels

under the sea towards Lands End can suddenly flood.

He will grow up to perceive a planet of barren kingdoms,

weave old postcards into tales of frailty, loss and death.

The artist will scratch and layer loss and death into

his huge canvas of St Just not far below the fields,

figures, mineshaft, thorns. Walking along, they too

become landscape. Dusk descends on grey granite.