Belgrade tram, The new distance, Ring & Demolition
by Tim Cumming
[ poetry - september 04 ]
Belgrade tram
City of scaffolding and violins, coffee
grounds under the statues of dictators
and voices on the party line, summer rain
drumming through the city of exhaust
into sheets of hail over the Western suburbs,
the panoramic hotel view,
the tropics fermenting in restaurant bins
and time running through the old calendar
with a new spring in the hills,
wild apple blossom and pine,
rock falls here, low rivers,
a slow freight train by the highway,
garlands over the gate, one man sewing
a field, one woman sewing a dress, the curiosity
of bystanders, strangers in the café,
grounds in the cup, baby in the cradle
hard rain between border posts,
distant fires on the plains, mountainous
rings of indigo, high cloud
and heavy freight burning into twilight,
blue exhaust over the roof of the toll booth,
brake lights through the city approaches,
streets of embassies and ruins,
the roadmenders erecting new barriers across town.
We're working at the edge of time
in the midnight café of the Hotel Balkans,
heavy wood, thick varnish, black bread
black tobacco and black exhaust,
white ash like sparks from some distant satellite,
old men with long memories
circling the city park like penitents,
carrying wire recordings of wild
clarinets from the hour glass,
sand across the floor, baby in the crib,
cones of passing time building in the foot
of every stairwell, laughter from the upper
floors, the relativity of transit,
the internally displaced lined up
on the airport road, footsteps on the party line,
the orchestra breaking up,
smoke pouring from party headquarters.
The hotel doormen stand like secret police
as attentive as nurses or torturers,
men whose eyes have seen too much,
an old man's sweet high voice keening over
the hum in the wires, the sting in the tale,
the lover on the ramparts an excellent mimic
of the waxing moon flushing the glass door
to the courtyard, age beyond his years,
police uniforms flapping on a line in the wilderness
gangsters with red cheeks and eyes
the colour of twilight legislating as far
as the eyes can see from here.
The new distance
Ucello in the business park, the old master
walking the meridian line to Waltham Abbey,
in his pocket pictures of those parts of the world
that will be gone in our lifetime. New worlds throw
fresh paint over old walls. Seven centuries have passed,
puffing their cheeks through the history books.
Ucello in the business park buckling
in the throws of the new perspective,
modern wars, an almost industrial quality
to the line of collapse. The old master
surveys the atrium of the self-build self
storage facility, fire flies with their code books
high in the business park floodlights,
the power station addressing itself over and over,
trembling in the web of poetry by numbers
cabled across greater London. Ucello watches
the workings of the universe unfold,
its figures receding like a powerful new drug,
the old master's body buckling under the weight
of the new distance, the slow recession of figures
into the crowd at the back of every century, jostling
at the turning point, examining the damage,
clouds of gas obscuring the faces of
medieval figures in the old books
and no clear signal beyond this point.
Ring
That man with a torch
bobbing away at the top of the lane there
looking for his lost wedding ring
looking for his vanishing wife
hoping his children would forgive him
for being born for it surely
wasn't their fault he should've
been more careful and where
could he have lost it
what position would he find her in
the constellation of Cassiopea
its W like ouija lettering over the chimney pots,
and would he could he
pick and pin down
a time or a place
to say then or thereabouts
the dice rolled short
and pulled the carpet from under his feet
returning him to third person
singular and getting the name wrong
as everyone did.
Demolition
Kneading the flesh of the lower back,
the soft white dough between this life
and childhood, and there the old school
being torn down, the girl she was,
birthmark on the shoulder, the boys
in perishable socks and pants swinging
on a bronze age hinge, the past is legless
after hours and the trains have stopped,
everything seems to be falling into place,
images leaping from screen to screen,
the girl he liked in a friend's bedroom
thirty years ago, this is your childhood
and everything is going to be real
the playground bell and boys in the field,
their fathers under the earth, agonies grey
at the temple, voices twisted out of shape
as if the air was blown from them, gasoline
in the finger joints, one of them pulls
his childhood from the skip by the legs,
breathing heavily, catching up and never
getting even, lights punched out like windows
in a demolition, farflung figures on a twilit pitch,
mud and chaos at both ends of the game,
slippage of the main frame into darkness below,
arms trapped at the shoulder by the weight
of the past, grown men pull at their childhood straps,
stiff linen, cold toes, the claxon of authority,
period touches like the whip of the wind
on the cross country track, last train coming,
boys caught fast by the upper shoulder.
The legs twist away in his hands.
He begins to weep uncontrollably
the next big thing doesn't interest him,
can't close the door on his past,
his forearm filling up her side of the bed.
The mothers back away with their young
between their jaws, the women knitting
at the foot of the scaffold where he stands accused
of his childhood face to the wall shimmering
like a bay flecked with golden letters,
the spirits of tiny animals pooling
on the brilliant surface of this minute
and the next time he was caught, terrified
of bright lights, kneading the soft white dough
of the past, legs in the skip, a matchbox
of his lover's skin in his suitcase, too many
questions blight the roses mother said,
order me up the Scrabbleboard tombstone,
doesn't understand a thing about him,
small crowd on the polished staircase,
rope thrown down from the rotary club balcony
as the emergency signal starts to get louder,
the skeleton rising into his face, hands sticking
out of the windows of the Rapid Results College
this area closed for further demolition.
