Girl, Got

I didn't know myself. Two point-like heels
Raised me high. I'd pointed lashes, tits,
A pointed smile. (Were points the point of it?)
I didn't have much money, but the Sales
Had started. I was target. Girl to wife
In Moments! Hook that man! I bought the hooks,
Hook, line and sinker. Staggered by my looks,
I tripped, drowned in the gene-pool of my life.

Direct Train

The North Wales coast looked desirable in passing:
it always does. 'What a lovely seaside,' two
shy elderly travellers remarked. And I wanted to say,
'it's not, when you're beside it!'
and point out the proximity of railway to beach,
not to mention the A55 and the miserable concrete walkways,
not to mention the typical prom, with its burger café and shelter…
I merely glanced at the lovely illusion (to feel
nostalgic already would be ridiculous),
and noted the sullen herds of flat-topped caravans flowing
the sea-less side of the tracks at Abergervele.

There was the usual hubbub of 'Change at Chester.'
after that, settling into the painless curve,
the steady, southerly glide, I could soften a little,
and say to myself, 'England, utterly England,'
suddenly wishing it summer, so London would still lie cradled
and canopied in a safety-net of daylight:
(there's something sad in arriving alone, at night,
and for a stay so short, a long weekend's-worth
I'll hardly notice, sitting at the computer
or pushing myself out to embarrassing literary soirees).

And as usual I felt that the place I truly desired
lay only within that inconsequential series
of miniature, minimal places which are the sum of travel,
and yet it was no solution to keep on leaving
one country for another, since this gave too much importance
to place, worked up a lot of un-needed sensations
hard to resist or out-grow, despite the years of practice
dividing my time, as they say. I don't want my time divided:
I want it always to be three o'clock, that most
indivisible time, in a field whose bushy, brown horizon
moves so much slower than the impatient embankment,
with terraced houses nearby, and a horse, and a grubby canal
- a time that not even December can spirit into nightfall.

And I want to be saying 'England, utterly England'
in a voice that doesn't imply I have locks and keys there:
rather, I'm gliding like blood, in complex circles, sensing
London down on my left like a gritty boot,
and the North Wales coast at my right shoulder-blade
with its little fleece of waves, stuck out like a curious wing
I sprouted once by mistake, imagining I could fly.

December in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

Grasshopper Park - a lake about to burn,
So everything must fly, or try to learn

Quickly: trees, bearing their double cross
Of silvery leaded paint and Spanish moss,

Satsumas in Satsuma-pyramids,
Cartoon carollings, felice navidads

From tinny radios, fog and blue beats
Of light from streams of Detroit-metal sheets,

Balloons in a mass movement to launch their sellers,
Fridges on wheels, with pin-wheels for propellers.

When the side-saddle optimist on the Witch's Hat
(A child, or the child's maid) squeals a scarlet

butterfly into the air,
it's a tiny heart set free, or the brilliant last idea

that Montezuma whispered to his sage.
Design, he said, a hopping grasshopper-cage:

Make it from Huitzilopochtli's golden turds
- the mad Christ-Nailers love such odds and sods.

Dotage

Old age will surely be much like an only child's
Childhood, its preoccupations the body's,
Each act of bodily care a sacrament,
Though you yourself are the heavy ministrant:
And beyond the body, the tabula rasa: snores
In toy-cupboards, mysteries of a small outdoors:
The pillow wild with disobedience,
The book, smelling deliciously of its contents,
Where you are pictured travelling, enviable,
Among the animals, the younger people.

^

Biography

CAROL RUMENS was born in London in 1944. She has published twelve full-length collections of poetry and has won various awards, including the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (with Thomas McCarthy), a Cholmondeley Award and a Prudence Farmar Prize. She has held a number of university residencies including Poet in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Arts Fellow at Newcastle and Durham, and British Council Writer in Residence at the University of Stockholm. Her plays have been produced in London, Manchester and Newcastle. She has also published a novel and edited several poetry anthologies, as well as the selected poems of Elizabeth Bartlett. Her translations from the Russian (with Yuri Drobyshev) are included in several collections, including After Pushkin (2001) and Selected Poems by Yevgeny Rein (2002). She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Wales, Bangor. Her Collected Poems will be published in 2004.