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THE SUMMER-HOUSE BURIED BY SNOW

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There were girls asleep on the beds, upstairs and down.

I was living in the dreams of Paul Delvaux.

When they woke up, it was slowly, slowly, and then

One hit another on the head for wanting to throw

A party.  “I’m the one who does that,” she said.

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When I went to Chinatown with Clemency

It was like going down the escalator next to a Botticelli.

That pallor – the girl was a manner of being,

Didn’t eat meat though, suffered from migraine,

Unlike the one like the wild honey on Capri

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Who drove a Cortina and took me to dinner.

Later she lay on her stomach, a pillow beneath her,

While out on the court, a girl with the loveliest legs

(Clad in my turquoise running shorts)

Tossed up the ball to serve an ace.

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Girls wrapped in towels, glimpsed on stairs,

Humming beneath their thick white turbans,

Girls in gym-slips, wedded to trapezes,

And tall African girls loping down corridors,

The flashing of their soles persisting

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After their bodies have merged with the shadows.

Crinolines rustle and skirts with many sashes

Bob together in private like whispering bells,

Fans with ivory spines bicker in parlours,

But still the one in the boots tramps on down freezing streets.

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She needs no applause.  It doesn’t matter to her

What people think, and she is quite indifferent to the fact

That she smells of gardens, nuts in May, the creaminess of spring.

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LOSSES

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That crystal goblet – it had stood on my mother’s bedroom

Chest-of-drawers for ever, as Brigid had, her wooden cow

Kept since she was a child, head chewed by a dog though,

Body daubed with big red spots; gone, as have the Arnesby Browns:

The small one of the windmill, last seen in a storm across a field

Of corn, the larger one of cows in a sun-fumed pasture.

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Gone, gone, as have the zoological volumes, ages old,

Illustrated with wood-cuts, the Senna kilim taken from my

Flat in Islington, the cricket bat with autographs of Hobbs and

The rest of the team, given me by Uncle Paul, who must

Have gone up and asked for them at the end of some long

Afternoon at Lords. Gone, along with his father’s Sandhurst

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Sword of honour. Stolen, lost, or simply forgotten.

Absences that lose me sleep, as does that magnificent oak

Felled by some farmer who begrudged the shade it cast on his crop.

Not the death of my father, since that is simply an idea:

He had been killed before I was born, so never someone

Missed the way I missed my intellectual cousin Jean,

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Found collapsed on the floor of her flat, and Clemency

Who stole my heart without intending it. She phoned me up

Years later, after I was married, then committed suicide,

As Nick did, as did Graham; and my tiny daughter Storm

Who crawled away delighted by my chasing her and then was gone,

Gone like the ball I watched at four float away down the Hudson.

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To the memory of Clemency Clift, a wonderful dancer with the Royal Ballet back in the sixties. I was very much in love with her.