– 158 –

Taking Leave

(in memory of Patrick Hayman)

Flat footed, exempt from war,
he sailed through the Suez, and felt
an unfurling, a stretching towards light.
As though a rusty-headed fern grew inside.

Crossing the dateline, he forgot
to be meticulous; wore a crumpled shirt,
let salt crust his skin. Arriving,
I would like to think he drank tea,

amber in the glass, a sugar cube
between his teeth, that his relatives wore
yamulkes and side locks. But they'd long
since taken leave of religion and Europe.

Tea, cloudy with milk, was served
in thick railway china. His cousin's hands
were furious with nerves; incessantly
scribbling lines of verse or smoothing

silk handkerchiefs that rose,
pale tulips, from his breast pocket.
A man more comfortable in motion;
knapsack on back, tweed trousers rolled up,

paper and ink in case an idea struck.
In photographs the poet-cousin looks austere.
And Patrick, a man with small padded hands
sleepy eyes turned down at the corners.

– 159 –

Moving north, he conceived my mother
with another's wife. But didn't stay.
Eleven years away, he returned to England
with a country behind his lids; wind-frayed trees,

long pale coasts ready to unroll into paintings.
In the foreground a plane with his own bearded face
and sometimes a rabbi striding in a tall hat.
Pieces of self, airborne, unfettered by location.

Residue

Sometime in the eighties my father cut his hair,
bought false teeth, gave away his homespun jerseys.
Our hitchhiking days were over.

Yet there was residue: an insistence on chopsticks,
barely known guests: a playwright from Dundee
who never bathed, a woman trapeze artist

who smoked a pipe, others who slept
on the floor, talked into the night.
My father sat in bed and wrote, typewriter on lap.

Above, a child's drawing of an armless woman,
a painting of two men kissing;
one blue, the other pink and white.

Hardly a less peripheral existence than before,
only now we were anchored by a house.
Then Alice; slim and pale as a stem of wheat

– 160 –

stepped into the disorder of our lives.
There were fewer guests.
Alice wore red, sat cross-legged,

a row of polished stones at her throat,
voice filling the rooms as she called
my father's name from the garden.

The last guest, my mother returned
from Paris. She lay with a fever
as my father juiced chickweed and carrots.

Alice's pressed cotton shirts, bobbed hair
emanated capability. My mother, stubbornly, a child.
At dinner all three sat as if at a bus stop,

raising their implements in unison.
I sat opposite, thought of Alice's inheritance:
our past unchosen by her, spoken in gesture,

in the scrape of chopsticks on china.
Swathed in memory I leant against the rose-papered
wall and it collapsed, sodden against my back.

– 161 –

Composition

Ana's first composition tells of her near death at birth;
a rib cage wanting to collapse, skeleton-leaf fragile.

A spine more flexible than most, bones that flaked
like shale. Body traitorous, refusing to absorb calcium.

Afternoons returning home, I hear her voice:
lapsing into Spanish, a shrug in every utterance.

She sits with Alexi from the Canary Islands.
His eyes ganja-dreamy, skin speckled as a bird's egg.

Always, one of them is suffused with sleep.
I watch her droop, shimmering blue across her lids.

Waking at the end of class, Ana grasps
my wrist, says she dreamt a dress;

that I was lying on the ground and she drew
around me. Her fingers tickled; I could not keep still

as she cut the cloth. A dress; sea green
with jagged edges. On the floor, a girl's shape

in tailor's chalk. I listen yet keep returning
to her composition, bones outlined

beneath her skin, gradually filling in.
Gained in density they'll contain

a wet English summer, beers with Alexi,
Covent Garden, a fox's bark on Wandsworth Common.