Armada. Brian PattenЧитать онлайн книгу.
her iron callipers.
She rejects all help, all love as I
In later years will learn to do.
Five years old. I cower from her authority.
Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
The sound echoes through my history,
And imprisons me.
This Street has grown stale.
The house in which the old Jamaican lived
has given up the will to dance.
The young lawyer and his lovely wife
have dug up his garden. Gone now
the remnants of his failed experiments –
the exotic blooms that never quite happened,
the plants that, like him, never wholly took root.
One by one the souls of these houses and their tenants
have been undone by the fingers of bankers.
Among the debris where the religious lady wept
now only a sprinkler weeps. Those refugees from
the way things are supposed to be – the mysterious Pole,
the Italian students, the immaculate prostitute –
all gone from number seven.
Behind the window of number forty
nothing moves any more. How suddenly
that house lost its tongue! Within a year of each other
the old maids who lived there
donated their observations to the grave.
Like them, this street has grown secretive.
Glimpsed behind car windows bored children
are ferried back and forth, and are eaten up by doors.
Neighbours slip from memory, all their battles
and secret torments melting so effortlessly away.
Rooms are repainted, lavish curtains appear in windows.
This street has suddenly grown staid.
On the wall of the alcoholic playwright’s house
a blue plaque has sealed its fate. Alarm bells ring
too late to be of use. The street’s soul, stolen long ago.
A child sitting on a doorstep looks up from his book.
In the room behind him a woman is writing a letter.
On the waste land across the street from him
a gasometer casts its shadow over a solitary lilac.
Like a little animal grazing over grass
he has been grazing over words,
stopping at the unfamiliar, the wondrous.
Over and over, as if it were a spell, he repeats the word cargo.
Out on an ocean phosphite clings to rusting propellers,
whales rise like islands, rain falls into nothing.
The shadow from the gasometer creeps beyond the lilac,
over the bindweed, the sweet-scented camomiles, the stray thistles.
And now the child has abandoned his book.
He has become the captain of a great ship and its cargo of treasure.
Sailors who’ve lost their sight report to him
on how the stars have vanished.
In the house behind him a woman is packing belongings.
Another book, an encyclopedia of regrets, is banished to its own space.
The shadow from the gasometer creeps on; a slow, irrevocable flood.
It leaves behind the lilac, the bindweed, the sweet-scented camomiles.
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