Armada. Brian Patten
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Название: Armada
Автор: Brian Patten
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Поэзия
isbn: 9780007440177
isbn:
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 in a makeshift bed, feigning sleep.
Five years old. I hear her weep
As she drags herself up the wooden stairs.
Like a ball and chain her iron callipers.
She rejects all help, all love as I
In later years will learn to do.
Five years old. I cower from her authority.
Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
The sound echoes through my history,
And imprisons me.
This Street has grown stale.
The house in which the old Jamaican lived
has given up the will to dance.
The young lawyer and his lovely wife
have dug up his garden. Gone now
the remnants of his failed experiments –
the exotic blooms that never quite happened,
the plants that, like him, never wholly took root.
One by one the souls of these houses and their tenants
have been undone by the fingers of bankers.
Among the debris where the religious lady wept
now only a sprinkler weeps. Those refugees from
the way things are supposed to be – the mysterious Pole,
the Italian students, the immaculate prostitute –
all gone from number seven.
Behind the window of number forty
nothing moves any more. How suddenly
that house lost its tongue! Within a year of each other
the old maids who lived there
donated their observations to the grave.
Like them, this street has grown secretive.
Glimpsed behind car windows bored children
are ferried back and forth, and are eaten up by doors.
Neighbours slip from memory, all their battles
and secret torments melting so effortlessly away.
Rooms are repainted, lavish curtains appear in windows.
This street has suddenly grown staid.
On the wall of the alcoholic playwright’s house
a blue plaque has sealed its fate. Alarm bells ring
too late to be of use. The street’s soul, stolen long ago.
A child sitting on a doorstep looks up from his book.
In the room behind him a woman is writing a letter.
On the waste land across the street from him
a gasometer casts its shadow over a solitary lilac.
Like a little animal grazing over grass
he has been grazing over words,
stopping at the unfamiliar, the wondrous.
Over and over, as if it were a spell, he repeats the word cargo.
Out on an ocean phosphite clings to rusting propellers,
whales rise like islands, rain falls into nothing.
The shadow from the gasometer creeps beyond the lilac,
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