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CUMBRIA, 1983
I
With a lesson dormant for once,
the mind in its relief visits
places seen long ago,
in a place still more remote
than that region itself,
scorned by bus, rail and money,
forever lost somewhere between
the motorway and a coast of rust,
bulging into the Irish sea,
like a growth from Sellafield.
It is - this lost region - a place
of dark waters showing dark skies,
of forests, of tarns on hilltops;
the wind among the grey rushes;
the sole sound a kestrel’s screech;
with the town as distant as this
memory of mine is from the present;
a cloud, darker than all the rest,
scudding westwards like an emblem
of all that was there and is lost.
II
The steel mills, with their gates
like mouths empty of any teeth,
showed me a town inaptly named,
and, God, even tumbleweed in
the street, like something out
of an Oakie’s memory, floated
across cobbles begrimed by soot
from the same closed places
whose denizens, whether
workers in mills or underground
the Irish sea, clicked in hobnails
down streets of dole, past me and shops
with sodden boards for windows,
past weird woods with railway workings
filthy and soiled amid all that green,
past me, past a tattered poster
showing a distant bitch in pearls,
past bus stops of solitude, where
Glaswegians heading south raged,
past poachers with their catch, past me.....
III
Memory’s most precious present,
because most vivid if hateful,
sits in his room, far from Workington,
in a valley of lakes and grey skies,
his hands soft and waxen
after their vaseline
as if to savour his knuckles’
force on my mother’s lower jaw
some time at night while we abed
lie like cowards, trying to dream.
A fluke to say the very least -
this stepfather who forgot his own age
but could just recollect his days
in the French Foreign Legion and some
business in Las Vegas with
brothers as mad as he; this stepdad
both nuts and demented who taught
me the pathos of adult men,
sobbing at breakfast, his vaselined
hands resting useless and astringent.
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