Poems 4

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I was speeding across Europe I was coming to sit on the blue chair / as you lay sleeping on the blue bed / lay there behind a curtain with no freedom to rise / unable to speak the dreams in your head / and though your eyes are closed I whisper / it’s freezing, it must be dark everywhere but here / this ward where no one will ever switch off the lights / but listen, the little wooden booths are back on Broad Street / electric cables running between them, generators whirring to fuel the stoves to heat the gluwein / and chandeliers blaze in college rafters / it’s almost Christmas / hares hang upside-down from hooks in the butcher’s, and mistletoe masses on market flagstones //

and you are still sleeping when I say goodbye, and board a train in London / and see through dirty windows at dawn the pale architecture of Liège / light snowfall outside Aachen / and in the mall at Brussels, where chocolate shops glitter and jewellery shops sparkle, I squirt a sample of Max Factor into my palm—a thrifty trick to hide tired eyes—and buying a cheap galette and coffee in a paper cup I ride the lift to quai 16 / I give directions in French to an elegant woman from Tokyo / the route doesn’t change, though the journey is now more urgent / stepping on and off trains, on and off trams / watching streetlamps flicker on in towns whose names I’ll never know / and I cross a bridge and the sound of my suitcase changes behind me / as if it too speaks a new language // 

and I who promised never to fly again have been at 40,000 feet looking down on clouds / I have made and missed a hair appointment / I have kissed strangers thrice on the cheeks in greeting, once or twice on the lips but my lips are sealed / I have climbed to the old tower, I have swum upstream / I have sold books in several currencies, and posted them to Longyearben, Washington, Berlin / I have lost long evenings in restaurants where candles gutter under bell jars / I have decorated the lamps in my study with ivy and the ivy leaves grow brittle but do not fall / I have written about snowflakes and shadows and the colour white and how the snow angel is best seen in raking light / Did you know that snow sometimes looks purple, yellow, blue like the bruise upon the arm you cannot move?