This is East Finchley
I
What are you doing over there and why?
Walking treading slipping gripping stamping:
Why have you done that, and for whom? For whom?
Not for anyone, anything, not for!
Gravelly gravel grates grinds grins,
Just replying lying lying on floor.
But it is the street; it is not the floor.
It is the street where cars frolic and bins
Hiss to one another as if seashells.
It is the street where willows simper, stutter,
Inhale fairy dust from the dishwasher.
On this street will be a windy pell-mell
When the tires kiss your lips as the men,
The canary-men, greeted once their shells,
When the whale spouts and the bee shouts and the
Grasshopper sings and the passerby rings.
II
Are you still as you were? Fancy me, hilariously?
Wish we were one as if in a pod we were peas?
Kisses hissing, phone calls missing, missing as you missed me?
Not at all, not at all, not at all, him;
You’re with him, and that is all.
Do you ever think about it?
No…
Well, do! Do. Think about it, about it…
As if what were, were not and what would be
Could be, and what was once was once again.
Okay! Trilling: I have, I have, I have!
Boughs shiver and muffle as they tussle.
III
But the King of France has a growing crop!
And the pollen count in Normandy is
Lower than in Rennes or in Sanctaphrax.
She gasped and groaned and guffawed and gurgled.
But logically speaking, Hampstead Garden
Suburb and this area of East Finchley;
It should be described South Finchley, it should.
There is no King of France; does not exist!
So sweetheart whether he is bald or not…
This is East Finchley.
This is East Finchley.
This is East Finchley Village,
This is what it has always been, he said;
And anyway, the cabbie said,
All these places they’re all made up.
IV
And settling across the airy
Room a silence. A silence with
The stench of death and disarray
Where both forgot last words.
Last words like the flailing clasping
Gossamer hanging from
The railway bridge and traffic light.
Last words incanted from
The hovel of the grunts and gasps
Somehow rising over
The clatter of retches and rasps.
The stripling recalls it behove
To dig for what was said, said last,
To cling to what was meant,
To reach, to live, to breathe the past:
So must her mind be bent.
V
Japanese lights, Korean semiconductors,
Purple English fog leaping past caricatures:
Disney and Universal and Pixar mixtures,
Into woollen jumpers. Chinese nylon ruptures
As mist persists through and up the blouse’s fissures,
The fissures in which Helen was found, they assure.
The smell of sparklers and dew fuse and as in lore
Helen’s face is in neon light, bright, tight, white, pure.
Paris looks up, the crowd just came, shakes his shadow.
Sky glitter glimmers, shimmers as rain in wet grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass: clink, wham, squeal, roar –
Roars and sighs above the wailing of the widow.
Congregated the smoke mingles as if in mass;
The bonfire extinguishes and the clouds pour.
VI
Tyres trundle over tarmac
As the daughter whimpers.
He didn’t see him on the road!
Be reasonable – this was
Not part of hazard perception.
Of course, madam but the Aston
Was pushing fifty-five
And this road is marked a thirty.
Ask that passerby; she’ll tell you:
Well, I naturally
Rang the ambulance when I heard
His shin splinter; horrid –
He was trying to evade it,
Not minded, closed eyelids!
I tried to say but not a bit
Not a bit, not a bit
Of it would he have, lazily
Lying, lying on the floor.
Not watching the traffic, sleepily
Putting himself on the door
Between silence and noise.
Silence as when those men,
Hearing so much noise
That all noise was silence.
Silence to them in the ditch and furrow and
Silence where the picric acid and
TNT and children wailed.
VII
Did you run over someone, father?
You wouldn’t want to describe it that way,
My lovely. Impetuously, she cried,
Why not? That’s what you did going so fast,
You saw the sign but you did not abide
Mummy said with your new car it won’t last!
It’s what we said about the King, dear.
What are you saying? The cabbie demands.
Most people approach my subject with fear –
I teach about a person called Russell.
When we say that ‘the King of France is bald’,
That sentence, so simple, has more muscle.
It says that exists a man who is called
The King of France, and there’s NOT! There is not.
So when you say I ran someone over
You are making more claims than you realise –
People think I’ve killed a man! Knocked his shin,
A few stitches and anaesthetic and
No rugby, dissolution of the band
That’s all doctor said – nothing out of hand!
VIII
But what has changed, she frowns and asks:
We are glimpsing only our masks.
Never never anything more!
Nothing like how was it before.
Grimacing, swigging her hip-flask.
Darling you found me in a cast!
Head bent, scrutinising the cask.
You left him; me who you sprung for.
But what has changed?
What are you looking for? She asks.
It is as when when you saw me bask
On the street. You thought me a bore
With my absurd ideas. For
Now as then you put me to task.
But what has changed?
IX
Just then the grasshopper brushes the lintel
As dying’s hoarse whisper begins to fade.
Its a meretricious madcap minstrel
That claims that he’d be better off in shade.
But so the hoary woman does; quibbles,
More stultifying than the large brocade
Entombing curtains that kill the drizzle.
No you did not hear what he said, at all!
He asked me to live the days he was owed
And to, ‘Breach the gap twixt silence and noise’.
You have always liked silence! Contempt and
Spite humming as when the whales fume below.
Noise is narrative, noise is the n plus
The noise that makes the silence.
Not the silence of my father;
Not the silence of mere fireworks;
Not the silence of meek frost
Or mild fear or mizzle and fog.
I like those silences.
The silencing of the silenced;
I do not like those silences.
I like the silence, Dover Beach.
I like the silence, Guy Fawkes Night.
I like the silence of Canute.
I don’t like the cahoots
That the noisy cabal are in.
She can say South Finchley; fuck the village!
X
Gushing sunlight and the walls are crinkled;
So the brocade curtains reveal. The man
Steps out, out the front, and buys a single.
‘I like stupefaction’. He starts to plan
How he’ll leave his girl dumbstruck and brittle.
She will never guess, and he’ll never tell.
Since the tarmac he’s been ‘giving her hell’.
But he knows (though he won’t say) she admires
Him because like her father he inspires
Gobbledegook in her frail little head.
That’ll keep her going, going till dead.
The great fun of it all is in the right
Sounding wrong. That’s all he plays for, the fight
To which he’s subscribed. She’ll never say East
Finchley without panicking about the least
Pressing of problems, his pet ‘Imposition
Of Narrative Discourse’. To which physician
Does a gal go for that gristle and grime?
