Susan Wicks

Dear Crane,


This morning I look up and you are in my kitchen window cutting up the dark, all fretted steel and open bleeding eye. Too high to move, too high to see your own feet planted in the clay. You look as if you plan to stay until these streets of red-brick terraces can crumble back to nothing, all of us long gone. You lean towards us, stretch your metal arm across the road that feeds us and the traffic stops, the people in the cars look up. It’s early. In an upstairs classroom opposite, a schoolboy reaches out and tries to stroke this craning what, this craning yellow head the wind blows through. What are you thinking? What are you conceiving? Sheltered housing for the elderly, is what we hear. And we are getting old. So shall we be reborn and swing out on your beam, and shelter under you in you know where?


*


High Wind


It turns the air we breathe to other air,
tosses the glass trees
in the windows opposite, makes phone wires bounce,
our sashes shift and creak. Indoors
lights pull on their flexes like balloons.

Clouds turn to smoke,
leaving the sky cleaned out. This under-eaves wailing
has silenced traffic, children’s voices, planes,
till the world is uninhabited.
So much loud air

and no one here to breathe it. So much flying litter,
no one to pick it up. A shadow’s flapping wings
have lost their bird, an ageing fence caves in,
a boundary’s become
the stuff of thought. I could go out

and straddle it, one foot, the other foot.

 

*


Look!


He is so high up,
higher than tree or birds
above the barriers and temporary roads
and Portakabins, and whatever grows
under scaffolding and plastic.
High over what once was

the hospital, its rows of beds,
an echo fading in a closed ward,
he touches something, swivels,
makes his metal
beam swing out and hover
almost over us.

How tiny a man is
against clouds, and luminous
in yellow. Yet he sees you in your buggy,
sees me kneel,
and lifts his hand to wave –
miraculous.

You look away and frown:
you’ve no word yet
for ‘crane’ or ‘driver’ – you only squirm
inside your snowsuit till we reach the church
then run for the yellow digger,
sweep off a whole house.



*



Free Slew
(after Roy Fisher)


On mornings like this
when the sun is barely over the slate roofs

On mornings like this
when people walk these pavements eyes half-shut

When the giant crane’s in free slew
unmanned, its metal heart swinging

When another load of bricks will come to rest
and walls rise imperceptibly

behind scaffolding

 
*


Emergency


You hear them more distinctly than I can –
a helicopter circling above the M25,
a plane that’s coming in to land
at Gatwick, concrete mixer churning its wet load,
pneumatic drill a house
or two away. What do you make of them?

Today you sit on your spring-mounted fish
and rock, and give me that huff-puff of breath
that means you’re thinking of an ambulance,
and I supply the rest: how yesterday in this same place
we heard the siren, how today
we hope it comes again, that someone else’s
fright or toxic shock or clenching heart
will be a small exciting sound
that’s swelling in the distance, and then fades away.

 

9 Dear Crane
10 High Wind
11 For the Blind
12 Tamar
13 The Romance of Steam
14 Crane
15 Dear Crane
16 Feeding the Ducks
17 Driving to Dorking
18 Separation Anxiety
19 Free Slew
20 Dear Crane
22 Look
23 Emergency
24 Parable
25 Two Tractors
26 Perhaps
27 Dear Crane
31 Paint
32 Over the Old Station
33 Two Trains
34 Halfway
35 Explaining Snow
36 Dear Crane
40 Stacked Planes, 5.30 a.m.
42 Dicky Ticker
44 Midwich Cuckoo
45 M25
46 The Old Cemetery, Cove
47 Dear Crane
50 Clubbercise
51 Elderly Bathing Solutions
52 Rhubarb
53 Maine, End of Summer
54 After the Lobster Feast
55 Dear Crane
57 Sirinas
58 Reading Scott Fitzgerald at the Gorgona
60 Olive tree with Clothes-pegs
61 Leaving Alikí
62 Credo
63 Sunset at Karnagio
64 Marble Beach, with Crane
65 Dear Crane
69 After a Daughter’s Miscarriage
71 The Road to Bardigues
72 On the Day of the Royal Wedding
73 Lopped Trees
74 Windmill above Golfech
75 Dear Crane
78 The Sunday Hunters
79 Robert Singing

80 Notes