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Not the tower that Mary, his fourth, had built to contain his feral genius,
but where he shut his six-toed cats inside at night; instructed his protégée, Italian,
adoring, seventeen. Nor the pool where he watched Ava Gardner swim naked - told men
as they dipped, what the water had seen, touched; was entertained by their response.
Not even his weight-charts that never varied much, pencilled-in each day on the wall above the scales,
or his favourite chair or that lizard preserved in formaldehyde, who fought off cats – died well. Certainly not
the body-less trophies of dead beasts, their glassy gaze that dominates every room, their sleek pelts
stretched out under his horny feet; mighty hunter - old jade. None of these, but the typewriter, a portable Royal,
placed waist-high on a bookcase in the yellow- tiled room, where he stood each day to write, let his legs
tell him when it was time to stop. I would knock down the tower; drown the pool in earth, plant over it with fragrant
shrubs and trees: jasmine, magnolia, jacaranda; cremate what is left of the beasts, but that squat twin
to my mother’s battered machine; that I would keep; place it high enough to remind me when to stop.
She’s an old whore, ripe with experience dragging her soiled petticoats, through the moist dark.
The leather seats of her taxis are cracked by old trysts, the fenders dented by bodies from another time.
She side-steps around young girls in stilettos, out late looking for work finding it, their tawny legs
insinuated between the thighs of men who were weary just minutes ago,
but no longer, as their flies are fingered, their grizzled pates stroked by warm hands, their backs pressed tight
against rusty wrought-iron gates, leaving a filigree imprint that will remind them tomorrow
of rumba in Havana. The red light of her cigarillo moves, and with each inhalation,
flashes a tight Morse code: the sting of the smoke, the flare of her nostrils, more sensed than seen. She’s a lady dragon
and she’ll take them inside her hot tunnel mouth, sear their flesh with her cinnamon tongue, musky and wise with nicotine;
brown with the last smoke of evening, before lying down, and the first smoke of morning, before lying down again.
Smoke, she hums, gets in your eyes, and sly as the rising breeze brushing bare flesh, the palm leaves will croon the chorus.
The way you might look at the gap where a clock once hung in a former life, she looks back in time as she watches the Proms on television, the tip of her thumb nipped between front teeth
no longer her own, like a pensive child made solemn by the puzzles of a grown-up world. I can see her face from the door, intent in the Cathode flicker, her eyes that barely blink at the antics of the first-row violinists;
their bows at full-tilt gallop, the strands of horse tails that snap, catch the light like angel hair, the conductor who stabs the air with his baton again and again. She extracts ultimate joy from the roll of the kettle drums
to the entrance of the chorus declaiming Schiller, Freude schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, and the part of her that was once a refugee bride, too poor for a seat, when just being there was bliss,
reaches out for the hand of her man, the pair of them squeezing perfect joy from late trains, the walk through drizzle or moonlight, to tiny rooms at the other end of the world, or the tube line;
and she bats away the part of her that was young when storm troopers marched, inflamed by the same music, against the crash and chink of windows breaking; her parents huddled in the park to stay safe. Beethoven,
the Austrian they called the good German, whose deafness would have earned him a place in the camps, the showers. Locked in her own deafness she doesn’t hear me; sense me watching across generations. I don’t turn her head around to see.
Put up your dukes he chortles fists clenched feinting
Dad’s happy again got a new job keep moving he yells
Watch your feet Sugar Ray would win by dancing
You know I was semi pro once he tells her on a tramp steamer sailed
the world He was good kept his guard up tells her to do the same
Now she’s bunched up wards off blows, hears herself shriek wonders
why he doesn’t see her tears but thinks it beats the tickling
when she’s fending off his fingers when the gloves are off
in collection, Cuba in the Blood, Cinnamon Press, 2009; previously published in Smiths Knoll |
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