ORGAN RECITAL
A heart can beat only so many times,
Jane’s dentist announces, probing her gum,
and, while it’s in mind, lists other organs
none of us ought to take for granted.
Jane and her dentist don’t notice for now
the warmer than average morning in March
persuading hesitant horse chestnut buds
to open and let some sunshine in,
and a carpet delivery van parallel
parking, and Keith outside K. C. Carpets
asking it where it was yesterday.
His carpet-buyers don’t know about Keith,
next Monday’s appointment, because that’s the way
he plays his cards (i.e. close to his chest,
which happens to be the focus for Monday),
but if he sat where Jane’s sitting he might
elaborate on his woes to the dentist,
whose green dental scrubs are impersonal enough
to invite confidences from even Keith.
Well, every organ’s days are numbered,
the dentist would tell him: pancreas, liver,
kidneys, oesophagus, gallbladder, spleen –
any or all might keel over tomorrow.
Meanwhile, he’d say, let’s attend to that tooth.
Soon the van has delivered and gone,
more buds have opened, more patients are waiting,
and twelve hundred heartbeats, more or less, have been
pumping blood through Jane, Keith and the dentist.
0° (FEELS LIKE -5°)
Instead of warming cold fingers this morning,
these gloves are warming a cold memory
of a Saturday where there’s a golf course now,
when the pond in Joe Watkinson’s second field
was still iced over at past dinner time,
but under the long grass and through the ice
the two of us spotted frogspawn jelly
at edges and in corners, and wanted some.
Not having bothered with wellies (or gloves),
we cracked the ice with a nearby thick stick,
raised it off the surface in wedges
and skimmed them onto the green and white grass.
Then we knelt, sank our hands, grabbed, and realised
we’d chanced on unusually home-loving frogspawn
which elongated itself so far and then
flubbered back into the water at speed.
How we detached any I don’t remember.
What I remember is cradling it
over Watkinson’s field and along the lane,
and how the cold we’d thought we could deal with
numbed our cupped hands until they turned violet,
and not knowing whether to weep, yell, or faint,
and aching to throw the frogspawn somewhere.
Except that this wasn’t the point. Then reaching home
and tippling it into an old zinc bucket,
and running inside, where the fire wasn’t lit,
and frozen hands burning with heavy heat.
We diagnosed full-blown cases of hotache,
for which the traditional cure was to shudder
until blood flow resumed normal service,
relief filtered through from inside the shirt cuffs,
and lifting a biscuit looked feasible.
Feels like minus five has set in for the day.
These same ten digits aren’t suffering yet
from symptoms of hotache, but tingling enough
to waken the recollection above –
not that it cuts any ice, obviously.
Still, here they all are, in gloves with fleece linings,
about thirteen miles from where the pond was.
And here’s a winter, preparing for frogspawn.
DECEMBER SKY AND A NOISE
Clouds like a watercolour
of clouds are hanging
over the fields. Somewhere
a loudness throws its voice
across the layer of mist.
Two magpies flap and glide
to one side in a race to finish
second, and wood pigeons
fly indirect to a tousle
of ivy. Perching birds call
on their knowledge of storms,
but find no reference
to post-Christmas thundery
booming at zero degrees.
Still, they’re unruffled
by all the commotion,
which, passing over,
sounds less like thunder
and more (as surely
as needn’t matter)
like two Typhoons
adhering to schedule
at speeds a pigeon
or magpie derides.
Then the planes fade,
the clouds are hanging,
and birds hold their peace
before the next sound.
AUNT CLARA, PAT AND BILLY FURY
Last summer Pat helped us carry our cases
up to the bedrooms at Aunt Clara’s house
in the far-end terrace on Finningley Road,
but now she leaned on her front wall next door
swishing gnats with a rolled-up Jackie.
I hadn’t seen her in jeans before.
I asked if the shop still sold penny ice lollies
and had she caught many sticklebacks yet.
She lifted her eyes to Doncaster’s heavens,
which seemed to advise that she shouldn’t answer.
I knocked after tea, and her mum’s voice called,
‘She’s watching Emergency Ward 10 now.’
Aunt Clara said, ‘Yes, well, Pat’s always busy.
It’s … I don’t know how long since she dropped by.
But you can walk Tinker without Pat, can’t you?”
Tinker walked me through alleys with dustbins
and hot clouds of dust on the Great North Road.
Elmfield Park took a whole afternoon,
and when we came back Pat was opening their door
to a tall boy in bronze jeans, who laughed.
Aunt Clara said, ’Him? Oh, that’s Billy Fury.
He stacks the wood at the wood yard. Pat, you know –
sometimes I see her go past, and I ponder.’
But Tinker didn’t bother to ponder
and led me in search of new alleys and bins.
If Aunt Clara meant to explain, she forgot.
Billy and Pat ignored Tinker and me.
They sat on the wall in the long, violet dusks,
and their talking and laughing rose and fell
at the open window before I slept.
Robert Etty