Of Hospitals, Otters, Tramlines: (24poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.Half-Hourly Observation, Casualty Dept

This is the waiting room for wounds
A joiner's rip- sawed hand
A golfer with his heartbeat in his mouth
A knitter who's dropped her stitches

A child wails like a whistling kettle
Boiling with weariness
A drunk wallops a vending machine
That refuses to vend
Latex gloves, like flowering hanging gardens
Drop their pastel fingers from a box

The central heating hums its little tune
Doors and bloodied patients show hard knocks
An old man's mouth is a line
Red as a scar. He is slumped back
Watching long seconds
Crawl round the moon faced clock

Flip flop, the nurses' shoes
Are going somewhere.
Lucky shoes, their destiny's decided.


2.A Stair of Porcelain Roses

I am shaking the living daylights out of a dream.
In it, there was a stair of porcelain roses, sharp cupped petals
I knew I'd have to ascend
Thorny china treads of leaf and cream

No shadow filled the briers.
The slab of sun framed by the bedroom window
The checkpoint, where real roses filled with dew


3.An Incremental Poem

She slept with men she barely knew
Gay moth men chased. They often caught her
Strangely, she always looked brand new
An Embro girl. A sixties daughter

She slept with men she barely knew
Shepherding them, lambs to the slaughter
Her increment of conquests grew
I thought some satyr must have taught her

She slept with men she barely knew
A siren, when they thought they'd got her
Their pledge of love she would eschew
The more she spurned, the more they sought her

She slept with men she barely knew
My frowning church said hot and hotter
Would be the hell flames she'd go to
Free spirit. No-one bound nor bought her

She slept with men she barely knew
The Angel with the inky jotter
Totting up sins as Angels do
Barely had time to change his blotter

She slept with men she barely knew
Fashioned by some licentious potter
Yet she was fresh as April dew
Graceful's an evening star on water

She slept with men she barely knew
Met Dan, who said he'd always love her
How he would beat her! Black and blue
Pure evil, a psychotic rotter


4.On the Ethnic Cleansing of Vermin in the Humane Buddhist manner

I am taking the mouse for a walk
Where Summer is painting the woods,
His squirrel brush, loaded with leaves and shadows.

Like Captain Oats, the mouse will not return.
A postcard may arrive from a far country
'I never liked my husband', it will say
'I do, however miss the carrot cake.'


5.Donkey Easel

I sat at the donkey easel. The class, a Celtic torc
Awaiting the model's coming.
He shuffled in, peeled off his greasy coat
Tied with a rope. Stripped to a g-string
Grey's the city road.

A human toad, he slumped into his pose.
His bulbous nose, seed bed of warts and scratches.
He stank of mouldy bread, dried pee and ditches.

Three days' stubble darkened his hedgehog chin.
His eyes were lead, brain dead from drinking Brasso
To please the student boys.
They'd pay to see how far one life can sink.

I pencilled in his nails of horn and grime
The pitted grooves at his shoulder, a rusty hanger
Creased skin that hung in folds.

His life poured onto the page through his charcoal face
I sat at the donkey easel, a young creator
Sketching a life the model had lived to the lees


6. Jaipur

Jellied, a dog's dead eye assembles flies
A monkey troupe hop-skips along a wall

It's noon. Strange fruit, a basket lid conceals
Predatory cobras by a market stall

Under the trees, red dust mells into mud
Rain thunders down a hard Hebraic flood


7.City by the Grey North Sea

For one whole week I walked out blind in beauty
In a far town, in a country over the tides
Like a woman who can't see her lover
For looking at everyone else's

Forgetting my own city, lying by the sea
Tide washin his lovely hair, birds in his eyes.


8.Cold Snap

The Municipal crematorium incinerates the unfestive dead
Trees flap the leafless semaphore of February
Frost bitten gulls make heavy weather of flight
Hills have a white cleavage. Birds on the wire are black
Not bobbing, a sparrow coddles a cold perch.

From last year's picnic season, six empty beer tins
Lie like chopped tin logs beside a fir.

An old man layered in clothes like an onion
Shuffles home from the shops
Stockpiling goods which may quite well outlive him


9.The Piano

The piano sat in the best room in the house.
'It's not yours, ' my mother said.
'I bought it for your brother'.
She polished it like a shrine.

He moved away, never returned.
The piano gathered dust.
My mother grew old.

Bloody Piano
Bloody Piano
The metronome counted the drips
That fell from her heart


10.Tramlines

My father marched fresh milk around the fridge
Oldest was highest, newest, bottom shelf.

Tins kept his order in the spotless larder,
Regimental rows of prunes and ham,
Beans' garish heraldry, pink livery of spam.

Double lock on the door, like belt and braces polished every Friday.
Ten times round each cheek his razor hummed,
The household clocks all wound at 9pm.

Time wasting made him fume
Clocks wouldn't dare.

He died the very day he'd changed his sheets
And not one stain or mark left on the bedding
His old, safe, rituals gone, their tender tramlines lost.


11.Persephone Sails off with Captain Bly

Tired of being unwed, a plum ripe for the bite
She rolled into the bed of Pluto, anyman.

There was a wedding. Vows.
A veil was lifted
The usual sweaty honeymoon Olympics
Children, . to wear his face and bear his name.
Orgasms came and went. He'd watch TV
She's walk out with the moon.

Drink, gambling, hate,
The usual household things turned sour and stank
The pomegranate flung behind the grate.

She mutineed, sailed off with Captain Bly
Rigged up a clean sheet
Set for the maiden freedoms of gold days.

Not till the mountebank cancer hugged him close
Did she consider her dark Lord at all
How she'd short changed him in those years of wedlock.
I love you. Say it too
Hed wrung the lie from her lips
Of course I do.

She should have been the bread upon his table
She should have been the sweet wine in his cup
She should have lain by his side, a trembling rose
She had been none of those
Her mouldy kisses, dirt strewn on his bed
Such as the minister throws on a long coffin

There is a time when the ripe plum aches to fall
He had walked underneath the fruit tree as it happened
Had lifted his hand. Had caught her.
That was all.


12.Meeting the Otter

I met an otter once, by invitation
A school friend's family kept him in their city garden
His local zoo enclosure, still unbuilt.

They gave him his Gaelic name
He didn't answer it.
His short term memory
Skidded around the cage.

A rug was spread upon the summer lawn.
We sat in our short white socks, holding triangular sandwiches.

You could eat the sun off the plates they were so clean,
Everyone talking as if the otter was really
The bearded girl at the fair
Waiting for him to perform, to entertain

His mouth was a rasp of teeth
His head an inky lightbulb.
He lolloped up two red bricks into a chipped tin bath
Water muddy as treacle, festering grass.
Faced with the stagnant muck he just went bang
An exploding crackerjack.

And everyone bored now,
Saying professor so and so had recently got a chair
And who composed that sonata
Had you met the writer from Yale?
A queer old buffer..
Me, like the otter completely out of my depth

Mum mangled clothes each Monday rain or shine
Trudged to the shops for mince
Our sandwiches were square.

I crept to the otter's cage
As they talked on of composers, and weird philosophers
Whose names I couldn't catch.

He stopped careering round the horrid mesh
That boxed him in.
We had a private moment.
He dreaming of lost horizons
Me, dreading those to come.


13.Late Wake

Today, brother, I'll take a turn in your shoes
Now that the suns we orbited, like two small raging planets
Have ceased to burn.

First born and male, all the parental hopes were in your basket.
The second birth of your manhood
Didn't descend. Genes stuck in the dead-end slipway.

Much later, the surgeon hollowed from your back
An incubus of teeth and flesh and hair.

A year you lay on the rack
A human saltire, stretched on the curative bed
An attempt to train a true from a twisted vine.

I did not hammer those nails into your hand
Do you hear, do you understand?

I wasn't the limp that tipped you as you walked
To your love each day, face shining,
To the piano where you played out all your hurts.

Bad birth. Not mother's fault.
But not mine either.

Self-exile meant you died before your time
A seedless, twisted, bitter bush of thorns
I found I could not water with my tears
This is as close to keening as it gets.


14.Snap Shot

Snap shot of a former army soldier
Born in Cam-Ranh, South Vietnam
Resident and voter of New Deer

White shirt, white teeth, black hair
Smile like an easy chair
When did he decide to be a Scot?
The snap shot doesn't state.
What's his Achilles spot?
Does he still dream in Vietnamese, or not?


15.Visitors

Once in a blue moon
The china came out of the press,
Like a jack in the box going boo.

You didn't quite like it.
You knew that something was up
There was a definite smell of visitors in the air...

Linoleum polish, brasso, bleach, the works.
The table's legs were extended.
They always creaked

After the laying on of the leather square
(Bare linen would have gone against the grain)
Baking commenced,
Fairy cakes, so light they levitated.
The apostle spoons beamed in their heavenly saucers.
The clock chimed in its tuppenceworth, unasked.

'They're late, ' my father muttered, ominous.
The welcome was like joining up the dots
Politely filling in the 'how d'you do's? '

A shoal of fish paste sandwiches
Followed weak tea down the collective throat.

Whipping the plates away after they'd left,
The dog allowed back in to scratch and fart,
Still in her Sunday voice my mother said
'Once in a while it's nice to entertain.'

The clock ticked faster, like a frightened heart.


16.Responsibility

An ox brought young to labour
The yoke of my father's workload never lightened,
The bright one, the one with brains.

His father, drunk in a ditch,
Whisky-soused might sing like a lark all summer
Knowing his quick, dark son would hold the reins
Would guide the mule to market
Would milk the red-haired cow

Running late to learn his ABCs.
Class photographs show furrows on his brow

Ten years old and trained to follow the plough
To pull his weight, save leather,
Would do for his younger brother.
He carried them tied to his neck like a milkmaid's pails.
Grew calluses till others filled his shoes
Cobbled together with poverty and nails.

Other kids had fun.
And he could have it too,
If he carried the coal;
If he swept the byre with the broken handled broom
If he faced his father's rage and hid the bottle
Too tired to lie awake and count the stars

He rocked the cradle, like the Holy Trinity
Father, Son and Spirit, all in one.

He drove at life full throttle all his days
Head of the home where I made daisy chains.
Death wiped his cross-lined forehead smooth as glass
Like a young colt, released to feel the grass.


17. Darning Day

The tail shouldn't wag the dog
The darn must never upstage the cuff or jacket
Make do and mend
The repair must blend with the tear

Every Friday morning, after she'd twisted the papers,
Lit the consumptive fire,
Grandmother lifted the lid of her wicker basket
Wool lay sleeping like a cobra's nest.

She'd take a sock on her knee, one heel clean gone
Usually grey, the colour of the road
She'd build a bridge, keeping the perfect tension
Darn the damage, neatly span the gap
You'd never know there'd been a hole at all.

After her funeral, we fought and spat like weasels in a sack.
The family mortar groaned. Its hue was black.
We'd lost the art of mending broken bridges.
The cobras hissed inside the wicker basket
We lacked her skill to cover up the crack.


18.Resurrection

At Cock Crow when the Wife of Usher's Well
Climbs from the crypt with Sir Winston Churchill
Puffing on his cigar

When Lady Di and a butcher's dog from Troon
Walk the grave cat-walk
They'll need a marquee as large as the Milky Way
To cater for all those folk on Judgement Day

Truckloads of soldiers from Ypres and Verdun
(German and British) rattling into the sun
From the boneyards over the channel
Would they opt for angel's wings or military flannel?
Time will stand on its head
If a son aged sixty meets a father who died
Just two years wed...

If my dust should suddenly sprout new skin and hair
I'd rise aged ten, go looking for grandma's lair

But how'd I feel if granny was nineteen
Proud and splendid's a medieval queen

And how'd it be if she didn't know me from Eve!
How fortunate then, this poem's just make-believe!


19.Methuselah's Plate

What would be on Methuselah's plate
A pterodactyl stew?
With a tipple of Irish dew?

On Sunday he'd have mammoth ribs
And mermaid's nipples fried,
A dodo's toes with a radish or two,
Sliced unicorn cut and dried.

For when you're as old as Methuselah,
A Brontosaurus egg
To start the day is the perfect way
To help you shake a leg!


20.On my Way to the River

On my way to the river
A black slug reached the peak of a fallen log
A clump of dandelions bowed to Mecca

A neighbour spat on a cloth to clean his shoe
A heron tried to chart the unchained current
To popular acclaim, a rainbow formed
21.Two by Two

Two by two they pass me by,
Lovers walking in the park,
The young, the old, the bold, the shy,
Paired like the beasts in Noah's ark.

A singleton, I watch the swans,
Mated, they swim the pond together.
The air turns chill. I hug my coat,
Old bones ill thole inclement weather.

My pen's been lover, husband, friend
For years. Yet still the quill can quiver
Watching the buds of courtship sprout
On others' limbs beside the river

It's growing late. The stars come out.
I turn, there's no-one there to tell
But the soft wind that shakes the leaves,
And fills with shivers each harebell.

Love's like the shimmer on the corn
Of summer sunshine. It can burn.
I, too, was once a newly wed.
Now, it's one mug, one plate, one bed.


22.Side-Ward

Television's perched on a wall
Like a silver gull on a white cliff
Sitting on eggshells.

The clock is round's an orange
It turns in its orbit over the vinyl flooring

Patients are tumbleweed
Passing through this room
That's warm as Spain
The bed, like a giant cicada,
Crouches down on its haunches
Its sides tucked in,
Ready to spring alert.

Machine and dials click
Like cricket's legs

Soap hangs in the dispenser A pink drip at its nose.
A patient lies in a web of tubes
A headsquare hiding her baldness

Her terrible enemy squats behind her eyes
His paws, singed with chemo

Hungry to learn, imagining a future,
She bends over her books
Her young face smooth's
An apostle's spoon,
Seriously smiling.


23.Ways of Approaching a Loch

Walk quiet and alone
Follow the music of the hedge.
Approach with caution, as you would a bird
With wounded wings,
Huddling deeply into the healing nest of the hills.

It is not a pair of sheets,
Tugging a plastic line on indifferent trees.

It is not a worn brush,
Filling with sun in a doorway.

It is not a sweet white apple,
Safe in its own skin.

It is liquid smoke
That flows through your hand's crannies,
A mulch of yesterdays.
Fish and insects suck on its many nipples.
Trout give birth to its ripples.
Reeds poke through its skin,
Green spokes from a broken wheel.

If you get too close,
The loch will wrap you up
A muddy treasure.


24.Robin

Quiver-winged robin wears his pulse on his sleeves,
Plays peek-a-boo with leaves.
He eyes me round, bounds off on match-stick legs
Bounce bounce, his hopscotch pegs
Stop at a worm he'll spear with his Trojan beak

The peony rose of his breast
Is a song-store cupped in wings,
A paean in feathers.
He is the red clock ticking
Through Winter's cold white days.