Please do not touch the poem

From the Harvey B Gantt Center for African-American Arts

 

 Please use your polite "inside voice".

 Be careful and considerate of others.

 No food, drink, candy or gum are allowed in the galleries.

 Please do not touch the artwork. Special care must be taken to preserve the artwork and maintain the presentation of each exhibition. The oils on your skin will damage the surface of a painting, discolor bronze or rust steel. Please help us to preserve the art for other visitors and for future generations.

 

Please do not touch the poem

 

Please do not touch the poem.

Even the cleanest hand

may bring minuscule shavings of meaning

into contact with its surface.

Please do not breathe on the poem.

Even the gentlest of temperature changes

may affect the warmth of my words.

Please do not look at the poem.

Even the mildest of glances

may add weight to one of the abstract nouns.

Please do not move the poem.

It's at its best behind glass

and may become unbalanced

if encouraged to alter its viewpoint.

 

You may

of course

allow the poem

to touch, breathe on, look at or move

you.

 

Blue sky thinking

For once there is no writing in the sky.

 

The cloud above us is of glass, they say,

so today the air is crystal clear

and we can see the blue

without our world's calligraphy.

 

Tonight the moon is lying down,

watching the progress made.

The humans of the northern world

are ants in turmoil, baffled

by a twig across their path.

 

Will they turn it round

and float it like a primitive canoe?

Or will ferry-masters up the price,

and seize the profits of the day?

Will those who won first hold

fend off the lately come

to struggle in melt-water?

 

For once there is no writing in the sky.

 

Can they not see the writing on the wall?

wonders the moon

as she sways tonight in her hammock

in the clearest of glass skies.

RESCUE

Lying in the darkest dark, torn from my children by my eyes, I get to know the woman in the other bed. She is old and wise and she has seen the firestorms of Dresden. Her voice saves me as we tell each other stories through the night. We cannot read, we must not move, we may have no visitors. By the weekend, when her son comes to collect her, we know each other well.

Ludwigshafen has little to commend it. There is the unmistakable smell of metal and sulphur, chemicals drifting into the hospital over from the BASF – the Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik, which made dyes, munitions and fat men's fortunes.

As she speaks of her escape, her young son on her knee, riding on a tractor away from a phosphorus hell where thousands die in cellar refuges, I smell the burning. Behind my bandages I see the sky catch light.

She too is sightless these few days. Her son arrives: a cultured, lovely man he's grown to be. He is the conductor of Ludwigshafen's City Orchestra and brings the family car to rescue her. His music's one good thing about that soulless city. The other is the firenight rider of the storm.

The ping of a small brass gong pulls us gently back up through limbic layers. The breathing deepens, the sound of chanting still echoing, to the exclusion of all bothersome thought.

Limbs return to slow life. Folding back the blankets of our chrysalis, we draw in sticky wings and then roar like charging lions and our yogamama has us shake out fingers, wrists and tingling forearms and wave our hands in the air like Good News Mexicans. Someone murmurs hallelujah. Yogamama tells us of the class she runs in the Jewish care home.

Vital signs all but extinguished, cast-off human carapaces line the walls in ticking-over silence.

Words may all have seeped away, everything tastes of stale toast, voices are a jumbled blur and shapes and lights flicker and confuse, but the touch of a hand still comforts and music will lift the heart's puppet-strings. They wave their hands as the music gathers speed and memories surge into fire - wedding dances, stamping, clapping, skirts whirling, Hava Nagila swaying, desert nights, starlight, youth, hope and freedom, futures of their collective pasts.

Shakers, bells and rattles are pressed into arthritic claws and the eager percussion section swells to fill the Albert Hall. Steadied by third world carers, first world detritus stirs from chairs and throws lost decades into the corner. The music swifter now and ever more compelling the shaking and the stomping and the Zimmering.

The eminent visiting psychiatrist from New York looks around for an instrument and settles back, a bed-pan drum to hand. Besuited, bespectacled and bearded, he is won over by the moment of communal awakening. Not a single soul is untouched by the vibrations and the rushing blood.

The tall black cook leads a kitchen conga through the hall, Black and White Marigold hands glistening aloft.

Brief therapy

 

Nearly twenty years ago a short term memory was suddenly lost as the aftermath of an operation.  The hospital saw us every few weeks. He had had a problem but Everything Was Better Now.  The Maudesley Head Man said, "Actually, it's you who is having to cope with thi. You could benefit from the talking therapy."  So I arranged some Brief Counselling.  Thought it sounded just the ticket, so that I wouldn't be spending the rest of my life trying to unwind and unravel.  Just ten sessions, secretly, in my lunch hour.  The best thing, in my eyes, was that the therapist was German, so I didn't have to explain about the husband, the mother in law, the past.  The sessions often made me Quite Cross.  But when she said goodbye she handed me a slip of paper that said If you do what you have always done, you will get what you always got.  I was a bit cross about that, too, but I stuck it on the wall and looked at it for a week or two. 

Then I took off my fawn raincoat, put an ad in the paper, and started a new life.

EASTER SUNDAY

Stationary, East Finchley. All trains go via Bank. Except this one, which likes the view from here. Everybody on the tube is wearing black. Mind the doors, please. One girl is wearing black but has red ballet pumps. One is all black but with silver earhoops and shopping. Mind yours, please. One bloke with a guitar case is all black except for a red T-shirt. He is with Ballet Shoes. Mine, yours, please. Nobody at all has an Easter Bonnet. Vegan in black is eating birdseed and cleaning plastic forks with baby wipes. Mind the jaws, please. Three Italian men, one with no dress sense, one with tiny feet and one balding, good-looking one with deep-set eyes and with hands that do ballet. Mind the floors, please.

 

Shoes and ships and milking sheds

 

Scissors from a carpet bag. Crackling, a leopard-skin coat comes off. On a wooden stool at a disadvantage I look up at the mirror. Her reflection, the same age as mine, stands behind me, aggressively sophisticated, rhubarb and custard short hair and darker roots, fingernails as sharp as the scissors, long skirts, ankle boots, jangling bangles and beads. I am in awe of her, as always, my hair limp and overlong. It's thirty years since I wore mascara and there's nowhere for my face to hide.

 

The bright glare of cold light pools on me from ceiling fitments and is answered from the mirrors. We talk about things we wouldn't in a salon: The menopause, regularly. Lodgers, sporadically, Spanish films, always. I sit on my own kitchen stool in my own shiny unkind bathroom and she cuts my hair. Trust, potential humiliation and very sharp edges - everything is in her hands. Who else ever has their fingers in my hair?

 

 

She tells me there is now a man in her life and the scissors move a little faster, then stop in mid-snip, her voice trailing. She's listening to the city sound of evening birdsong. "It always makes me think of milking."

 

She's not in my bright cold bathroom, she's not talking to the man she's met on the Internet, she's not wearing her long London fashions and she has no scissors in her hand. She's brought home the cows with sisters one and two. They are laughing and singing on low wooden stools in a dark shed, their heads pressed against the warm sides of twelve cows in Kerry. And the birds are singing like tonight, like always.