Judy Brown

BROCKWELL PARK, SE24

Did they find what they craved in the park?
Those long-wheelbased mothers pushing ahead
with their sometimes bonny, sometimes bitter
sense of purpose. And those who were scattered
in daylight by night work, or just turned loose
into springtime by deleted jobs? Certainly, here
there was dogshit, a few trees and the workshy
(like me) and the world breathing easy under
its sweet wrap of grass. I held the earth's curve
as I ran as a Morgan, sitting safe on its frame
of wood, clings to the road. True, the reprieve
of a two-month sick note bore me in air.
In this place all of us were mapped straight on
to what God meant when he said: Let This
Be What It Is. None of us stopped to examine
the exactness of weeds starfished in the turf.
Like baby breathers, my tiny lungs barely got me
from one tree to the next. Perhaps my fists gripped
my thumbs for safekeeping. Outside all this,
my peripheral vision flickered with young men
who let off their dogs like fireworks – such
short-haired creatures packed in muscle. How
they arc and leap, sensing the heat of a target.

WHILE YOU DRIVE

You spill yourself to me, via a cellphone,
a slack catenary of wire hooked to your face.
There are always other things going on.
A low green car cuts in without a signal.
Polish labourers wait by the dual carriageway
to be picked up for work. A boy rollerblades
across the empty turquoise flats of the Clapham
paddling pool. This line chokes with drills
and engine noise, from your end, water running
from mine. They falter, these big conversations,
wedged into narrow spaces in our built lives.
You were just about to tell me who I am,
the ladder juddering in the back of your yellow van.
Then a man stopped you as you parked,
and asked for your card, whilst my kalonji seeds
were giving up their perfume to the oil.

THE CRASH

Their houses shall be full of doleful creatures and owls shall dwell there (Isaiah, 13.21)

It wasn't long after the banks collapsed that he went, too.
He was learning the new laws by rote when his nerve snapped –
he flew off the handle, perished as a rubber band.

His life, he'd thought, was real and golden, solid as Kruggerands
bagged in the donkey-smell of hessian. Surely his local branch
held it real-estate safe in their vaults, nestled under lock and key?

All summer he lay at home under a winter-weight duvet, hearing
the sounds that money makes – like a birdwatcher haunted
by finches – a few leaf-green integers clicking on a far-off LED.

A pass of the hands, quiet as owls' wings, could shift its load
from one sort code to another, or package it as an unwanted gift,
re-wrapped in tissue and Chinese-whispered into an orphan offshore.

Come Christmas, he was well again, and-horny as a starling.
But his brain was still fluttering with numbers from history –
a pillow-sack of feathers to shake down on the frozen patio.

A WOMAN ASSUMES INVISIBILITY ABOARD HMS BELFAST

1.

Up on the messdeck she feels something like lust
for the mannequin flexing his shoulders fresh from a shower.
The tattoos on his vinyl-silk skin are perfectly-rendered.
How easy to step over the rope like a wife, surprise him.

Instead she goes into the galley alone, as if into the snug
of some ill-omened pub. The white-coated models of cooks
ignore her, stocking the troughs with mince, macaroni in sauce –
food as unreal as window-display sushi, rough-dug as soil.

She moves in close and stares up – this man's eyes are blind
as boiled eggs. Yet, like ghosts, they're still getting around.
How they laugh, saliva long gone from their knockabout teeth.
With tiny cook's knives, they flense spuds, cocky as killers.

2.

Slung from the bulkhead,
hammocks pillow the roof
of the forward cabin.

Under their slack beds ratings
in snowy sea jerseys
rest with whist, and plaster tea

set cold in shallow white cups.
Their chipped expressions
are private: men dreaming, adrift

as polar explorers overwintering.
These are faces so hopeful
no woman sees them

except in some cold-stored
moment in a long marriage
of a kind they don't make now.

I climb the ladder out, not
turning for fear of my bones
salting, or stoning, those

fates reserved for nosy girls.
Meanwhile these boys look ahead,
coagulated as junket.

3.

What she dragged from her first visit (age twelve) was her sulk,
her father slapping his maps to the grey-painted deck.

She apologises now but she's lost her part in his script.
"I remember the trip. I don't remember being there."

Nor, today, do they, the pea-coated figures hunched at the radar,
the Operations Room dark as a hot press,

the tiny red globes. A tape loop raps out sixty-year-old orders,
to fire on the SS Scharnhorst in the North Atlantic.

Thirty six of two thousand, fished out, were led onto
the Belfast's deck. In the photo, they're blindfold;

each grips the hem of the sweater of the sailor in front.

4.

Nobody clocks her
as she goes ashore,
her audio guide unclicked.

Only the six-inch guns
don't miss a trick. To show
the tourists their old

mettle, they're trained
on that service station,
twelve statute miles up the Ml.