Armada. Brian Patten
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You never went to a ball, ever.
In all your years sweeping kitchens
No fairy godmother appeared, never.
Poor, poor sweetheart,
This rough white cloth, fresh from the hospital laundry,
Is the only theatre-gown you’ve ever worn.
No make-up. Hair matted with sweat.
The drip beside your bed discontinued.
Life was never a fairy-tale.
Cinders soon.
Long long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now, I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond and to the far bank launched a child’s armada.
A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons, the waterlogged branches of submarines – all came to ruin and were on flame in that dusk-red pond. And you, mother, stood behind me, impatient to be going, old at twenty-three, alone, thin overcoat flapping.
How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes, reach out across forty years to touch once more that pond’s cool surface, and it is your cool skin I’m touching; for as on a pond a child’s paper boat was blown out of reach by the smallest gust of wind, so too have you been blown out of reach by the smallest whisper of death, and a childhood memory is sharpened, and the heart bums as that armada burnt, long, long ago.
By the time I got to where I had no intention of going
Half a lifetime had passed.
I’d sleepwalked so long. While I dozed
Houses outside which gas-lamps had spluttered
Were pulled down and replaced,
And my background was wiped from the face of the earth.
There was so much I ought to have recorded.
So many lives that have vanished –
Families, neighbours; people whose pockets
Were worn thin by hope. They were
The loose change history spent without caring.
Now they have become the air I breathe,
Not to have marked their passing seems such a betrayal.
Other things caught my attention:
A caterpillar climbing a tree in a playground,
A butterfly resting on a doorknob.
And my grandmother’s hands!
Though I saw those poor, sleeping hands
Opening and closing like talons,
I did not see the grief they were grasping.
The seed of my long alienation from those I loved
Was wrapped in daydreams.
Something I’ve never been able to pinpoint
Led me away from the blood I ought to have recorded.
I search my history for reasons, for omens. But what use now
Zodiacs, or fabulous and complicated charts
Offered up by fly-brained astrologers?
What use now supplications?
In the clouds’ entrails I constantly failed
To read the true nature of my betrayal.
What those who shaped me could not articulate
Still howls for recognition as a century closes,
And their homes are pulled down and replaced,
And their backgrounds are wiped from the face of the earth.
From my vantage point on the top stair
of a house that no longer exists,
I sat like a cabin boy who listens in secret
to the crew of a great, creaking ship,
and eavesdropped on the adults below me.
A dial searched through the static
of radio wavelengths. Band music.
A fug of voices. Light. Comfort.
Soporific sounds cotton-wrapped the heart
and sent me, a little spy, sleepwards.
I do not know what happened while I slept,
Nor how long I slept. I cannot say.
But waking, I peered down into darkness.
No voices. Silence. In a blink it seemed
Familiar objects had become antiquated.
Whatever secrets I had hoped to uncover
were never uncovered, and now
are covered by gravestones or burnt to ashes.
I cannot blame that child his lack of attention.
He would have understood their secrets
no more than I can understand why, once again,
I attempt to eavesdrop on them,
and move down, stair by stair, towards them.
With arthritic hands and red-varnished nails
She drags herself up the wooden stairs,
The frightening heartbeat of the house
Is made by her iron callipers.
The bomb-crushed legs, the bolted bones,
The hands that scrape like talons on the stairs,
The damned-up pain, the hate, the grief;
The soul crushed by iron callipers.
Beneath grey government-issue blankets I
Lie