Free Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock Page B

prayer.

Syringa
    The syringa’s out. That’s nice for me:
    all along Charing Cross Embankment
    the sweet dragging scent reinventing
    one of my childhood gardens.
    Nice for the drunks and drop-outs too,
    if they like it. I’m walking to work:
    they’ll be here all day under the blossom
    with their cider and their British sherry
    and their carrier-bags of secrets.
    There’s been a change in the population:
    the ones I had names for – Fat Billy,
    the Happy Couple, the Lady with the Dog –
    have moved on or been moved off.
    But it doesn’t do to wonder:
    staring hurts in two directions. Once
    a tall man chased me here, and I ran
    for no good reason: afraid, perhaps,
    of turning into Mrs Toothless
    with her ankle-socks and her pony-tailed skull
    whose eyes avoided mine so many mornings.
    And she’s gone too. The place has been,
    as whatever office will have termed it,
    cleaned up. Except that it’s not clean
    and not really a place: a hesitation
    between the traffic fumes and a fragrance,
    where this evening I shall walk again. 

The Thing Itself
    Dry Spell
    It is not one thing, but more one thing than others:
    the carved spoon broken in its case, a slate split on the roof,
    dead leaves falling upon dead grass littered
    with feathers, and the berries ripe too soon.
    All of a piece and all in pieces, the dry mouth failing
    to say it. I am sick with symbols.
    Here is the thing itself: it is a drought.
    I must learn it and live it drably through.

Visited
    This truth-telling is well enough
    looking into the slaty eyes of the visitants
    acknowledging the messages they bring
    but they plod past so familiarly
    mouldy faces droning about acceptance
    that one almost looks for a real monster
    spiny and gaping as the fine mad fish
    in the corner of that old shipwreck painting
    rearing its red gullet out of the foam.

The Soho Hospital for Women
    1
    Strange room, from this angle:
    white door open before me,
    strange bed, mechanical hum, white lights.
    There will be stranger rooms to come.
    As I almost slept I saw the deep flower opening
    and leaned over into it, gratefully.
    It swimmingly closed in my face. I was not ready.
    It was not death, it was acceptance.
                                   *
    Our thin patient cat died purring,
    her small triangular head tilted back,
    the nurse’s fingers caressing her throat,
    my hand on her shrunken spine; the quick needle.
    That was the second death by cancer.
    The first is not for me to speak of.
    It was telephone calls and brave letters
    and a friend’s hand bleeding under the coffin.
                                    *
    Doctor, I am not afraid of a word.
    But neither do I wish to embrace that visitor,
    to engulf it as Hine-Nui-te-Po
    engulfed Maui; that would be the way of it.
    And she was the winner there: her womb crushed him.
    Goddesses can do these things.
    But I have admitted the gloved hands and the speculum
    and must part my ordinary legs to the surgeon’s knife.
 2
    Nellie has only one breast
    ample enough to make several.
    Her quilted dressing-gown softens
    to semi-doubtful this imbalance
    and there’s no starched vanity
    in our abundant ward-mother:
    her silvery hair’s in braids, her slippers
    loll, her weathered smile holds true.
    When she dresses up in her black
    with her glittering marcasite brooch on
    to go for the weekly radium treatment
    she’s the bright star of the taxi-party –
    whatever may be growing under her ribs.
                                   *
    Doris hardly smokes in the ward –
    and hardly eats more than a dreamy spoonful –
    but the corridors and bathrooms
    reek of her Players Number 10,
    and the drug-trolley pauses
    for long minutes by her bed.
    Each week for the taxi-outing
    she puts on her skirt again
    and has to pin the slack waistband
    more tightly over her scarlet sweater.
    Her face, a white shadow through smoked glass,
    lets Soho display itself