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Are you English?
You are not Kosovan, are you? she repeats,
as I lean toward her. She looks worried;
I can see the imagines eyes on her back. She explains
that Kosovans have been hassling her
all night. Put your arm around me, she says.
They'll think we're together. The way she says the word togeter,
it could be foreign to her.
As my fingertips come to rest on her ribs
her friend, who's wearing a decorative bindi, joins us.
It's the first hour of the millenium
The year before, I'd bumped into my sister
in the same pub. She dragged me over to her crowd,
and her boyfriend, handing me a drink
I didn't want, said: I thought she was talking to a Paki.
So I lean now towards these women
and say: But don't you think we're lucky
to have them here? I'm about to elaborate on why,
hoping the feeling might ride in
on the New Year's goodwill, but the two women
start to violently shake their heads
and repeat, over and over: No! No!
My hand slips to my side. Though I get them both drinks
I don't find much more to say, and it may be
their need for firmer arms than mine
that helps bring those into being:
later, when I head for the exit,
there the two of them are, unbuttoned for bouncers.
Across the street, two quiet men
sit on a step, drinking from bottles. You see them flinch
with every firework's flash or crack. Better,
it seems, to be used for a night
than make a heart a home for men
thousands of miles from the ashes of their own.
In the morning, I see a neighbour's daughter,
a girl of six, kick at something
charred and flaccid. Keep it up, I tell her,
and her face, it's not quizzical.
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The Eternal Camera
And here's one of her knelt before that mosaic -
red-eye over the shoulder. She'd run her finger
around a single tessera's pixel of time
in a fashion known to her own skin,
in its gratitude for the eye - bloated
with what there's conspiracy to call lust -
that grants her absence from eternity.
Because, to be caught in a stance,
of love, or allegiance,
her brow and palm-lines sketching ripples
fleeing the disturbed heart -
all things considered, she'd rather not.
But doesn't the eye
the desperate church sold,
worked now into a millionaire's floor, still see
the pews, the damp doubtful blinking
behind the genuflexion, the rock
it was, the axe the slave swung?
There is in this stolen snapshot
a double exposure: clearly visible
the Big Bang itself, each quark
looking back mortified
into the aperture, at the hope
they hadn't the patience to sustain.
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Carpet
"Are you talking to me?" he says.
"Are you talking to me?" - to the smeary mirror.
He picks at a speck of egg on his fleece.
He leans back against the wall
and pulls out a box of Marlboro
Light. He flicks at his lighter.
He flicks at his lighter.
He takes out a cigarette, glares at the mirror,
and flicks at the lighter.
"Right," he says, turning up his lapels.
"Let's go and sell some carpet."
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