The Mystery of München
Submerged in the bath,
At ten years old
The orb light on the polystyrene ceiling
Burnt harmlessly inside;
I put my hand behind the bathroom curtain
Onto the crinkled moulded glass
Wet against the cold and dark
Like cubes of blackberry jelly,
Clutched my father’s tube of talc,
Avon Cosmetics
London, New York, Paris, München, Rome
Cities I’d located on a map
Except for one,
Unknown for years, until I learned
It had another name.
Trespassers
We drove over the wheat ridge
The fields in harvest, dry and white
Sprayed out from the machine,
And the sky of shepherd’s delight
The eight years of my living
Had just begun to fill
With anything worth knowing;
The three of us bound together
On the backseat of the Hillman Minx
Squabbling about our legroom;
And the place we were in,
And the length of the journey.
But we are somewhere else, my mother said,
As though she’d pulled me from her body
Beside a missile bunker near Stonehenge,
And left me undiscovered.
In a secret side road
Where the car waited
Chinking as it cooled,
As we drank orange squash
From white plastic cups
Which held the spools of evening sun
Illegally climbing the wire fence
Running towards the centre of the stones,
And my father said, look up,
Look up at the moon,
Which the sky men
Are about to transgress;
The first time in history
My father said.
Illegal trespassers
Staring at the trespassed sky,
The wheaty air,
The new car waiting out of sight
The journey through the dark on unfamiliar roads
The journey to the sea.
The long night road ahead.
*
We broke the break in the bank of earth,
The headlights lit the gable end
Where the engine died and the elements took us.
And waking in a wooden hut
In a disused quarry, banked with brambles,
My mother and father on a pull-down bed
A sliding door to my sister’s room
A lean-to kitchen at the back
And a door to the chemical loo
In an overgrown, cut-off shed;
Thick blue water spinning on a pan
And tipped into a hole.
We followed looping wire on poles
Under the disused railway arch
And shouted out the time and place
And a Cornish Blue flew by
Spinning as it died
Into the sea-shone sky.
