Baulk

i         refuse to go on

          are you coming? – no, I won’t come.

the sign in the window, red felt-tip, don’t come in.

the double-glazed door double-locked

for the last time. the tempting text from Beijing:

am still in China, still married,

otherwise OK. tales of defection and escape.

one runs a B and B in Conway after the courtcase.

another in Bangkok with a website,

his second mail-order divorce, a plum

teaching job with swimming pool.

ii        hesitate

I was going to bring flowers,

call in your office on the way home,

leave them with you. the moment passed.

yours to me: amaryllis, deepest red,

already breaking the bounds of decency

on the window sill. beyond,

the back of the seal’s head again, midstream,

a small dog’s head with whiskers, bobbing

up with the tide and the shoals

that thrive in the river now. then he dives

and is gone.

iii       thwart, hinder. disappoint.

pick up the phone. where are you. sick

of talking to a recording. decide

I’m the one too busy. then relent.

how do you know you are human. try

email. no reply. decide to hang

on to your forwarded letters. but you hate

getting requests and junk and bills and reminders.

so you baulk us. all of us must adapt

to your confusions and decidings not to.

reasons why not to. forcing us to admit

you are not second fiddle but the soloist.

iv       miss, let slip (a chance, etc.)

a corner of the old wharf was choked

with rubbish: blue twine, plastic bottles, jettisoned

from ferry and Thames Clipper and building sites.

a massive timber pierced with forged nails

lay across less distinguished flotsam.

baulk, you said. it lay there, a piece of art.

a thing made with obsolete tools by a man

whose calling is long gone. the same craft

we saw in the roof of Ely Cathedral, spared

by the Luftwaffe when they used it

like this jigsaw curve of river

as landmark. to walk

down to the beach on green river stairs

and drag it into the present seemed

impossible.

v        ignore, shirk

a row of broad male backs at the bar.

the band struggle to persuade them. what’s brought about

this stand-off? the local faces thrust

into their pints of Murphy’s, shoulders hunched.

some half-cut wag shouts half a cat-call,

then subsides. a small terrier clicks

across the flags, deposits its load. a scream

from the women’s table, laughter, a crisp-packet scoop

to clean up the mess. the band packs up and leaves

early on the basis

they don’t need this.

vi       n. a hindrance, stumbling block

the bedroom, early morning. they have opened

the balcony doors. he walks in from the shower

and sits heavily on the bed. she is out of shot

or out of sight: dawn is pale grey

shading pink. Canary Wharf steams

from its pyramid pinnacle. police sirens

whoop, with Doppler fade. bin-lorry reversing bleeps,

insisting. she moves across, talking, talking,

phone to her ear. the city is full

of people talking to people somewhere else.

below, a suit with a trolley-case lets the door slam

behind him.

vii      a roughly squared timber beam: a tie-beam of a house.

in the early days the rooms were derelict.

no-one could be bothered with rebuilding

after the war. they changed shape as the children

made their appearance. uncomfortable

furniture, shabby, well-used. in dream sequence

they became finer, shared spaces, populous.

dogs came and went, were fed, and buried.

once, as in a vertical tracking shot,

we moved into the attic for safety.

it was in Petty Cury, the street that leads to the market.

a building steeped in age. (in real life pulled down long ago.)

monastic land, between Trinity and the Backs

where cows grazed. sometimes sheep.

in the security of the space under the roof

something was conceived, but not written down.

under my hands I remember

the adze-cuts were rough, and an iron bolt

holding the beam in place

felt cold. it did its job.

another night, a block fell from the fly floor

on to the deck of the Bounty. the musicians

carried on playing. management said

they would not pay for an extra man

for the rig. that was the point

at which I turned away. an inch further

would have been curtains.

viii     in snooker etc., the area on the table from which a player begins a game.

and there would have been no victory

but for the stolen ship Temeraire,

her decks red from many amputations.

sunset blazes in the painting

although Turner as any local will tell you

had the directions all wrong.

tugged to her dismantling at the mouth of the canal

where the pub stands now,

it seemed victory for progress, but the game

was hardly begun. Beatson took her apart.

ix       a strip of earth left between excavation trenches for the study of the complete stratigraphy of a site.

by grace of corporate expansion, holes are left

in the underspaces of office blocks

like the relic of the Rose under Bankside

now something in insurance.

hide from the firestorm down here

in the bronchioles of the city.

study the strata that geophysics

can never show. you have to dig

to get this picture, these layers.

you can always fill them in again,

earth on a coffin, plough anew next year.

was it a hypocaust that tesserae

fell into? was there an under-dream

warming the levels with its damp heat,

crumbling at last when nostalgia

for empire was not enough?

x        a ridge left unploughed between furrows.

night. a moon and its owlish light

across ledges of cycle tracks in mud

in Stave Hill Park.

nothing can be divined from these

palm-creases leaving pads of tissue

and skin as islands, sanctuaries.

how could we know you with your instinct

for reticence, or what you might want

for us or from us?

a frown line between brows might mean

anything. mother became the diviner.

so we trod carefully in the ruts your tyres

had made and did not ask where you had been

that weekend after the fight. 

 

I was going

to bring you flowers. but after all                                                         

the moment passed. too long rehearsing the rite.

are you coming? – no, I won’t come.