Page 34 - Poems

your worst, unspellable fears but won’t let
on they do, nor admit there is no magic
wand to vanish certain demons. Home is
the grim cheer in being unsafe here much
rather than at an unchosen elsewhere.

Off we go, with a judder uncommon
and a jolt, mere seconds after a treble lights
up the air: Will they stick needles, Maman,
into the signal box? Will that hurt the metro?
By Kremlin-Bicêtre, three stations down, the lad,
all frizzed crewcut and polka-dotted bow tie, has
drifted to concerns more sartorial. Why heels,
Maman? And why aren’t you in tights today?
Because I have a dress on, munchkin, and heels go
well with dresses. It’s far too hot for tights, you see.
His mother, stunningly poised both in hazel skin
and green silk, neither laughs nor starts at the query
up next: Why do we wear knickers? Lucky, that tot,
his first home’s built on boundless, welcome enquiry.

An abrupt, arrant dark — have we reached Tolbiac?
Cows, why do we seem besieged by fluorescent cows?
Droves of bovines, fuzzy-edged and weirdly
biped, each hoofing hand-in-hand with a gleeful
trident of ochrous tines, each lowing deep and hard
I am sacred and you are not — worship
me, scum, or you are dead. I try to catch
them on camera, try to parley with a mild-
mannered yearling when one, she with Dalí
whiskers and top-cow swagger, bares a blood-
stained cuspid in fiendish delight then spears
me through the toe, blaring Daridravasikal
pppphhhaaa in strange-familiar war-cry from another
land and time. I yelp upright, eyes tumbling
open in a half-lit carriage, the steel ferrule
of a brolly pinned to my foot, a face in full,
irate animation up ahead. A-dream-just-
a-dream-a-dream-cannot-kill, I shush this shrieking,
jouncing heart that responds: umbrellas can.
But the warhorse swinging his gamp is more martyr
than murderer, and by Place Monge, segues
to diffuse distress mode before his red-faced clan,
unaware – or uncaring – of the rapt, baffled
glances hurled his way. Heedless, too, that every word

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