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Thornfield Avenue
Tar-paper tool-sheds lurch
through the willow-herb
down to the railway
and the creosotic waters
of the Irwell.
In bags of damp soot the white
stiff cocks of rhubarb
rise like slow fish.
Between a rachitic bouquet
of peacock plumes
and the stilled pendulum
of a Second Empire
wall-clock hangs
Egypt: a bernoused Saladin,
a crouching slave girl, a frieze
of date palms and dromedaries
printed across the impossible
coming-together of
yellow and blue.
Beyond the aspidistra
the sky is a tattered floor-rag.
That you were a Singer of Amon,
aged between twenty-five and thirty,
is a matter on record. When
did you fritter away
into mythology? What were you
in my earliest snapshots?
Two shop windows.
In the first: a plaster head
with a birds nest
hat, its beauty-spotted veil
touching the chipped
retroussé nose,
and a three-foot doll,
its rubberoid body bound
in a miniature corset and brassiere—
complete with eyelets, hooks, and
strings. In the second:
trays of black-puddings,
potted meat, and tripe,
arranged around the half-face
of a pig, a sprig of parsley
stuck in its silk-fringed eye.
In the cobbled mill-yard
of the bleach-works, a ring
of barefoot boys gawk at an old man
who is sawing a violin in half;
his celluloid collar is brown
with blood. Heavier than air, smoke
slides down from the smokestack.
Deep in a labyrinth of baled
grey-cloth—shipped all the way
from Cairo—a girl shows me
her milk-white tits.
There is a cry in the streets:
Rag bone! Rag bone!
By Egypt Terrace the cart
goes by empty.
Baccigalupo the Barber
strokes his strop. Beardsworth
the Greengrocer opens
a brown banana. Ash the Butcher
tosses kidney-trimmings to the cat.
Singer of the Sun, the dawn
was born deep in your throat.
The ultramarine of your eye
was flecked with saffron. You
were all things foreign.
Half way down Thornfield Avenue—
between the Irwell
and the grammar-school—
there stands the dead
laburnum tree I painted green.
   
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