And when the lights come on and we turn to each other
who’s to say they won’t already be
in their dressing room, peeling off the layers,
wiping away that face we have loved,
unbecoming themselves to step out
into the pull and stream of the night crowds.
*
Stars
Our dead do not congregate
but appear to us, distinctly, as they were:
her sharp brilliant self, his gentleness,
that darling girl’s sly smile,
which could be why when I have them meet
in heaven or here at night in my room,
they make absolutely clear
in the way they don’t open their mouths
their disdain at my – what is it – it’s my hope
that in the enormous mutual oblivion
in which they find themselves,
they’ll all get on.
They always appear too proud or sad,
too detached in their deadness
like they’re trying to work out how space is measured,
like they want their distances back.
Oh, let them walk the six long miles to Shute Barton,
let’s watch as they swim their lengths of gasping spraying butterfly!
But they can’t. They can’t even move.
They’re just there, burning up the past.
*
Lifeguard
Of course I know he meant nothing to me
alive, why would he, a part-time lifeguard
at the local pool I’d only ever glimpse
slumped in a plastic chair or standing deep
in a cupboard leaning his chin on a mop.
The only thing that passed between us
was a look – almost cold from us both –
when I asked him for armbands, the hard kind.
He handed them to me as if I wasn’t there.
The day he died I drove past Skindeep
and saw him outside on the pavement, smoking,
squinting in the late afternoon sun,
his shaved head, his stumpy legs.
Yes, I remember thinking, that fits, that crew –
pierced, tattooed, the hair (too much or none), the bikes.
And glancing in the rear view mirror I saw
the line of his head almost golden in the dust.
A few hours later I walked into the pool foyer
and there, to one side – a sheaf of lilies
in a mop-bucket and a small table
where a few sweaty carnations were scattered
around three photos in a plastic sleeve:
one of him looking very small on his bike;
another he must’ve taken himself, it had that
mild looming look of a fish swimming up
to its own reflection; and one of him
hunched over a naked back, needle in hand,
with such a look of care and concentration
I almost felt his breath on the back of my neck.
People were walking past and buying tickets.
Someone was explaining about off-peak times.
It’d been one of those suddenly hot days
at the end of March and there was something high
and reckless in the air. I’d seen a woman
at the lights with huge long breasts in a low black top
and men with their tongues practically hanging out
and I remember thinking here we go again
and the kids in the back were squabbling and my thighs
sticking together and I wanted only to dive into the pool
though I’d never learnt how and wondered
was it too late and who would I get to teach me?
The road kept on before us, hot and black.
I thought of how big and smooth his face was
as if his features hadn’t quite finished forming
though already punched with studs and rings and chains
and his eyes seemed swollen and full of something
like he’d cried a lot as a baby, or not enough.
He never looked at us. I remember thinking
how could this man save us? How would he know
if one of us just stopped and slipped down
on to the tiled floor? He’d look out across
our blue bright shrieking square
but never at us. Not in the way he is now
like the dead do from their crowded lonely stations
and I’m looking at him in a way I never did
when we lived in the same time, same town
with its narrow streets and muck and diesel air.
Now, when he appears there on the pavement,
smoking and squinting in the light, I see
evermoving water, a slab pinned and still,
a body submerged, a body pierced.
But then, when the lights changed and I pulled away
(let me say this now and without pride) I had you
drugged and disaffected, unfucked and aimless
and I marvelled with some bitterness how someone like you
could ever be sleek and forgetful and strong
in the clear blue streams, could ever have the grace
or urge – however vague – to save a life.
How was I to know I’d just seen a man
in his last light, taking time out for a smoke,
a final look at old Fowlers’ smashed windows,
its drape of red ivy and dry weeping nests
an hour or so before he swung a leg
over the new bike, dropped the visor down,
wound his way out in the low evening sun
to the A28, the Little Chef bend, the lorry.
Contents List
11 The Curtain
13 Stars
14 Lifeguard
17 Lamb
18 Daughter
19 Deep Sea Diver
22 Voicemail
23 And here you are
24 ICU
26 All those turning
27 Interior
28 House and Train
33 This was us in Maths
35 Fallacy
36 Letter from Sido
39 Robin
40 What the Gardener knows
41 Poet
42 Wild Pear
43 Mud and sun and stone and rain
44 Spiders
47 Effigies
48 Space
50 Turning Earth
51 Show
52 The Line
56 Frame
57 Boy with Candle
58 Skull and Hourglass
59 Fire on the beach
63 Notes
Related Reviews
'Honest, observant poems from a collection which is both wonderfully unsettling and deeply life-affirming.’ – Costa Book award judges 2008
'These unnerving poems do not contemplate strangeness as much as embody it.' – Stephen Knight, Times Literary Supplement
'As a poet, Stoddart is not in the business of offering solutions; the closest she comes to doing so is obliquely, through the bright snap of the language in which she presents her dilemmas, the irresistible clarity of images so right they deliver an almost physical connection, joining poem and reader.' – Sarah Crown, Guardian [on Salvation Jane]
