My Family and Other Superheroes (4 page)

dosey doe. She makes a bloke a bloke

who's sitting in a coffee shop and waiting.

*

Who's thinking he's been stood up, actually,

so what he is is getting up and leaving,

thinking his thoughts – that's not your thoughts,
his
thoughts –

though if you saw his face now then your thoughts

would be
Poor bloke.
Listen, that's his best

brogues he put on just for her this morning,

after his best socks (he finds that order

sensible), making the noise they make,

as he moves to the door. What do you call that,

clomping
? Forgive me: rarely could a pair

of brogues have generated quite so much

pathos. At the door, he stops to light

one of the cigarettes she doesn't like,

puffing it so violently, you'd think

he's thinking – ooh – of puffing it at her.

The rain, you say? He's getting wet? He's under

the awning, ain't he? Shows what you know, reader.

So now the bloke in the coffee shop's the bloke

outside who's looking north towards The Dog,

shuffling, smoking and not going there yet.

*

Meanwhile, the lady walking down the street

is in the street and walking. She's what, a hundred

yards away and can't see our man yet,

what with the crowds, the brollies hovering

like we said they were hovering before.

And so we come – huh
hum
– to the dramatic

part of the poem: here's our protagonist,

our love interest. It's not for me to say

which is which, things being what they are

post-feminism, post-structuralism, pre-

the Big Question. The Big Question is,

will these two meet? Now let me answer that:

watch this. The lady walking down the street

is rushing, look, so quickly to her date,

she trips and lands at the feet of our bloke

and in that instant she's thinking two things –

Aaaahhhh
and
What a lovely pair of brogues.

He helps her up, into the coffee shop,

to meet the bloke she's meeting – someone else,

some chukka-booted bloke in the coffee shop.

*

Now our bloke makes his way towards the pub

and doesn't see
his
girl again or sees her

and gives up coffee at New Year, or switches

to decaf for a bit, as his brogues slowly

wear or sit unworn in his wardrobe

and the weather brightens up or, more than likely,

doesn't. All that's in the future. Now

our lady sits recovering with a latte,

chatting to the bloke she's there to meet.

She isn't thinking of our man at all,

or is she? Is she? Not my place to say –

as I sit with espresso and a pen

and look out through the window at people passing,

so close they could reach out and touch each other –

not my place to say if she'll buy her man

a lovely pair of brogues for his next birthday,

or in this hour before the café closes,

if she'll look out at the rain and think this,

or something like this, brushing her grazed palm:

The touch. His hand. The warm touch of his hand.

Aquafit

Mondays. 7pm. The ladies

sink into the pool,

chat of their parents' health, their daughters' work.

Their bathing suits are holding something back.

Squat thrusts and shuttle runs:

they walk in the water.

The instructress stands above them like a billboard,

mimicking them: ‘And right, and left, and...'.

In the men's changing room,

a boy in council uniform

sweeps the dregs of shampoo to the drain.

From the pool come love songs.

4

Bookcase Thrown through Third Floor Window

It has
The Complete Jane Austen,

The Nurse's Dictionary of Medicine,

and here it comes, crashing through the window.

It has
The Collected Shakespeare, The Holy Bible,

and as it falls, books tumble from its shelves,

open out, use themselves as parachutes.

Then it hits the road.

Noise and dust everywhere.

It's tall as a dead man, a toppled sentry box.

My neighbours, my friends,

in a circle, are wielding

frying pans, rakes, brushes and mops,

closing in on the bookcase.

I grab a dustbin lid and maintain eye contact.

Restaurant where I am the Maître d' and the Chef is my Unconscious

I put through an order for
spaghetti aglio e olio
.

He sends out a soup bowl full of blue emulsion.

A regular asks for lamb shank with rosemary.

Out comes a beetroot served with a corkscrew.

Someone I suspect of being a restaurant reviewer

orders the baked rum and chocolate pudding.

A mermaid rides a horse out of the kitchen.

He locks himself in there for days.

All I get are incoherent mumblings,

often in French. Some nights after closing time,

we sit down together with a glass or two,

get on famously, see eye-to-eye.

Next day he sits in a deck chair all through service,

wearing a paper hat and a tie-dyed surplice.

‘That's it,' I say, ‘I'm speaking to the owner.'

That night, he shakes me awake,

takes the lid off a serving dish:

an actual star he's taken out of the sky

and put on a plate. I know it's only a dream,

but next evening I'm bright and early at the restaurant,

shouting the orders, shaking the customers' hands,

picking bits of gold out of my teeth.

Rilke at War

The smallest uniform they make buries him

and after three weeks of paying lip service

to the parade ground's language

of grunts, its dactylic

Hup-two-three,
the days of marching to

nowhere, slowly, mocked for his nancy's

middle name, the army find

the perfect place in war for him:

the archives. His office hours are nine till three

and he has the freedom of Vienna, an apartment

with window boxes, a genial

First Lieutenant. In days,

they've had to bump him down from propaganda

to card-filing, page-ruling,

but even that leaves him so exhausted,

he's in bed by eight each night and writing

nothing. Meanwhile, Europe is becoming

mud; my grandad comes back from the Somme

without a brother. Meanwhile, Rilke

sits in a patron's summer garden, drinking tea.

Tomorrow, he'll ask again about a full discharge,

but this afternoon he has his portrait painted

by a girl he cannot stand who shares his bed.

Now the china tinkles. His eyes dart up.

Seal

His eyes are deeper dark within his dark.

Corkscrewing, dipsy-doing,
allez-oop,

he loops the loop, the water his slow-motion

world, this swimmer synchronised with himself.

He floats on his back, lying in the hammock

of his body. This is his gift, his talent: head

over heels, tail over head, unfolding,

barrel-rolling, forgetting which end of him

is which, now all is circle, all is swim.

He surfaces to bark
This rock is mine
,

lies there, breathing into November air,

smoking the Havana of himself,

munches sprats, mulling over his dance,

offers his stink, his easy-to-please hands.

The Hippo

is solo, hobo, incognito,

two boulders curving out of Dettol-murk,

in a zoo his photo advertises,

doing a sponsored sitting-still all day.

Stop being a cliché, hippo, or I won't

write a poem about you. Then you'll be sorry.

What is your body but the verb
To wallow
?

What is the water but a part of self?

Google says you can crush a Ford Sierra

between your jaws. They don't say how they test this.

Candyfloss-high boys crowd your glass, betting

they could hold their breath underwater longer,

they could leap from one boulder to the other.

I abandon you

for the giraffes, stupid as window cleaners,

the lions, sunshine with teeth,

but keep coming back:

if you were to rise, show your eyes, your mouth,

would you have Martin Sheen's mud-crazy face,

breaking smoke-water in
Apocalypse Now
?

Closing time. One last go. O please, hippo,

don't be so self-effacing, so tight-fisted.

Come on out, don't you know

we love you? Wait. Is that a flash of flesh,

a hippo peepshow, or are you still snoozing?

A little girl says,
Dad, that island's moving.

Flamingos

Who spray-painted the swans? You dilly-dally,

shilly-shally in the shallow end

on Meccano legs, your day a foot massage,

curve your neck into a clothes hanger

for your rose-hue tutu and your feather boa.

You're every little girl's dream, a shock, a flock

of neon signs, advertising candyfloss.

Why do you blush so much? Each time you eat,

you have to kiss the you-shaped bird who floats

in the lake surface, steal food from its throat.

February. Outside's a place of grey

line managers, timetabled rain, the bus.

But with your silly-billy, Vegas waitress,

camouflage-for-a-world-of-joy body,

Fuck that
, you say,
let's all be fabulous.

Cheerleaders

They cartwheel, high-kick, hair-flick on, all sing-song,

all pom-poms, exclamation marks at the end

of whatever their hands are saying. They're all angles,

uniformed as superheroes, in their star-spangled

skirts, their belly buttons. They drop into a huddle

to
Ra-ra-ra,
make their bodies jumping stars,

now doing the splits, now falling to their knees,

or touching cowboy boot toes to their cheeks.

Their synchronised smiles say nothing can be wrong.

A final, faultless somersault and they're gone.

In the bleachers, we sit on. A tinny tannoy. Wind

plays the tuning forks at either end of the pitch.

We make ourselves bigger with giant foam hands.

Now, here come the men with their metal helmets,

their little ball, their protective shoulder pads.

Bouncers

Undertakers' coats buttoned to their throats,

they applaud their own performance to keep warm.

Like teenage girls they shift from foot to foot,

cheeks rouged by neon signs:
The Velvet Room.

Misers' hands buried in their pockets,

the guest list's folded up next to their wallets.

They have the miraculous visions of a prophet

over the shoulder of whoever they're talking to.

They'll drive home at three or four and wake at noon

with no hangover, wrap their fists around

the kettle, make tea for their tiny girlfriends.

But for now, it's ‘Pal, there's no trainers allowed,'

as this child, leaving the theatre, points at them:

‘Mummy, look at the unhappy men.'

Nun on a Bicycle

Now here she comes, rattling over cobbles,

powered by her sandals, the gentle downhill

and the grace of God. Now here she comes, her habit

what it was always waiting to become:

a slipstream. Past stop signs, the pedestrian

traffic at rush hour, the humdrum mopeds,

on a day already thirty in the shade:

with her robe fluttering like solid air,

she makes her own weather. Who could blame her,

as the hill sharpens, she picks up speed and smiles

into her future, if she interrupted

the
Our Fathers
she's saying in her head,

to say
Whee,
a gentle
Whee,
under her breath?

O cycle, Sister! Look at you now, freewheeling

through the air conditioning of the morning –

who's to say the God who isn't there

isn't looking down on you and grinning?

The Bloke Selling Talk Talk in the Arcade

He's got the patter, the natter, the gift

of the gab. He's got all the flattery

you can stand, different routines for madam

and sir, all that self-help book, cod amateur

psychology, the professional

bullshit, the
Hey, how's it goin', my man?

He's got you eating out of the palm

of his hand. He's got the Prince Charming,

the
How are you, darlin'?,
the body language

training, the feints, the moves. He knows

the moment to run a hand through his smooth,

smooth hair, when to nod sagely, as if he

cares, understands. He's got the world

in his mobile and the pen in his

hand. He's got the opening line, the spiel,

the feel for people, knows the time

to look into your eyes, touch your

arm, to hang back, play it calm,

to open up about his life, to ask about

your children, your wife. He's got your future

waiting for you: just reach out and

take it. His brunette student sidekick

advertises herself but our man's got the pen,

the pen, an afternoon of chatting up

men, and when, at five, he packs up

his tongue for the day and walks into the world,

just like you, like me, like anyone,

he's got the air, the night, the setting sun.

Starbucks Name Tag Says
Rhian