CAROLINE BIRD
The Hat-Stand Union
For my Mum
Acknowledgements
‘The Fun Palace’ was commissioned by Winning Words as part of the Art in the Park programme for the London Olympics 2012.
‘Public Detectives’ was first published in Joining Music with Reason (Waywiser Press, 2010), an anthology edited by Christopher Ricks.
Versions of ‘Hey Las Vegas’ and ‘Thoughts inside a Head inside a Kennel inside a Church’ were first published online by Poetry International, and ‘Break-up Party’ was published in Fourteen.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1 Mystery Tears
Sealing Wax
Username: specialgirl2345
Mothers
Snow Hotel
Unacceptable Language
Mystery Tears
Method Acting
The Dry Well
A Dialogue between Artist and Muse
Hey Las Vegas
Genesis
9 Possible Reasons for Throwing a Cat into a Wheelie Bin
Day Room
Faith
Dolores
There Once Was A Boy Named Bosh
Thoughts inside a Head inside a Kennel inside a Church
The Only People in Paradise
Fantasy Role-Play
Empty Nest
Spat
How the Wild Horse Stopped Me
The Island Woman of Coma Dawn
2 The Truth about Camelot
Prologue
I A Confident Local Youth
II Some Last Words
III Urchin Who Is Stalking Guinevere’s Scullery Maid
IV Camelot Estate Agent
V Exiled Journalist Disguised as Shrub
VI Arthur’s Crab-Boy Vision Faces Scalpel Practicalities
VII Crab Quotes
VIII You
IX Raving King Speech
X Lancelot’s Poetry Reading in Smoky Bar
XI Arthur, Arthur, Arthur…
XII A Disgruntled Knight
3 Sea Bed
Damage
This Was All About Me
2:19 to Whitstable
Break-up Party
Two Cents
Run
Sea Bed
Public Detectives
Facts
To Whom It May Concern
Screening
The Promises
Say When
Kissing
What Shall We Do With Your Subconscious?
Limerence
Medicine
Izzy
Conqueror
Atheism
I’m Sorry This Poem Is So Painful
The Stock Exchange
The Last House
The Fun Palace
Marriage of Equals
Corine
About the Author
Also by Caroline Bird from Carcanet Press
Copyright
1
Mystery Tears
Everything I touch is turning to gold – well, not real gold.
– Frank Kuppner
Sealing Wax
Sometimes I think of you,
my funny prodigy
and, like an ashtray on a Bible,
I pose here defeated,
singing ‘Lust’s most sacred impulse
is error!’ to a lean, dark and handsome
hat-stand. I find my head is able
to process a lifetime of gin, carping
‘My abuser can be so capricious!’ at social workers.
My phone-line is coy as the pale string
unspooling from the back-
end of a goldfish, elsewhere in an empty house.
Sometimes, my stable friend,
I think of you and whether
your bedroom was warm through the winter
and who’s spreading vapour rub on your chest.
Username: specialgirl2345
Some people call me The Ash Woman,
or Gjest Haraldes, the royal jailbird, and I’ve been
compared to Peter Christen Baardsen, the philandering
pianist. I have never been to Oslo. I have never set foot
in Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim. In fact, I’ve never been
to Norway. But some people call me Codeine the Wanderer.
Some people call me Duchess Mary Adelaide of Speck
or Queen Maud of Lancaster Gardens, I arouse deep rushes
of ceremonialism in women of low rank. In campfire songs
I am named the cult of Vesta. I’m not a cult. I’m a small person.
I rarely leave my room. But some crooners call me Smack the Wife.
Some people call me The Red-Handed Virgin, Sheeba of Dorwich,
Jack the Lamp. They say I had a morganatic marriage to a hobo,
he was buried with his trolley and I didn’t inherit one tin-can.
In folklore, I’ve become Nay Winkatmen – the very standoffish
prostitute. I am not the saviour of modern thatching
the locals of Wrafton near Brauton in North Devon think I am.
The Jewish Rastafarians call me Shrunken MC
for the beatific cakewalk of what used to be – in my youth –
the Crystal Methodist Church, some people call me Rabbi Marley.
I am not religious. I have no guiding star. Yet the Vatican engraved
Child of Jilted Joseph on an apostle spoon, jammed it in my sorbet.
My equestrian statue in northwestern Kazakhstan, facing
the Ural Mountains, remains nameless and free-roaming.
Some radio journalists are convinced I am the author of the quote
‘Bliss was it that dawn to be alive’ and then committed suicide.
They call me Irony Jane. I can’t remember the last time
I combed my hair, let alone spoke, but the paparazzi call me
The Flash Gazelle. Farmers call me Baby Burdock
and, as a newborn, I was baptised by the silent movie ghost
of Leopoldine Konstantin who mouthed the words
Dear Elvina, thus I’ve met you once before
subsiding with the harpsichord into the floor.
Mothers
I thought I was the child in this scenario.
I played the child and you loved me.
I did a grumpy face when the university
took Mr Teddy Rag-Ears,
I got words muddled like, ‘I stood very truck
as the still went through me.’
But then today
my future child called me on the telephone
and said, in a squeaky voice, ‘My mum is dying,
can you come over, I need someone to talk to.’
I didn’t know where my future child lived.
I had a feeling she was called Bertha
which disappointed me.
‘I live in south east west London,’ she said,
‘Where the spies and the cleaners live.
It’s spotless and seemingly empty.’
On the way over, a terrible pain ripped
through my stomach and I distantly
remembered a woman from my
adulthood I hadn’t seen since
that bed-wetting dream.
I passed glass conservatories on Bertha’s street.
They were acting as gallows for hanging plants.
‘I like that image,’ says Bertha, knotting the ties
on my hospital gown, shooing me out: ‘I told you
no more running away from hospital, didn’t I?’
Bertha, I went straight back. It’s disappeared –
all except the scout-hut used for art therapy
that whiffs a bit. This is my picture of mummy:
that is a tree because she’s in a forest, those are
mummy’s pink gloves and that’s an axe.
Snow Hotel
I
‘It is time for us to get out of Switzerland’
you announced and I couldn’t have agreed more
since we were not in Switzerland and my feet
were suffering in the clogs. My right hand
had been shot away in Bavaria and I refused
to employ my left hand for personal reasons.
We had moved to the fifth storey of the hotel.
Your chauffeur sang a message up the drain-pipe:
‘There are many exciting opportunities arising
in the glove compartment,’ which was code for
‘Love has vanished from the world, better jump.’
I pulled the rip-cord of my winter parachute,
waved in the brusque air, like a strangely lovely
fevered shiver. People were still on the streets.
It was quite funny the way they’d carried on speaking,
standing outside burger joints, re-enacting a chat,
puffing on a ‘fag’, pretending to breathe – you have
never seen smoke so tremulous in its falling lace.
II
The following week you were passing moist-eyed
beside the once beleaguered lime chapel, moaning
about being typecast, ‘I never even cry. My eyes just
get moist. Moist is the extent of my emotional range.
It’s such a joke.’ A guileless portico stuck to the face
of a filthy building dripped with rain: everything
was begging for love (women, harbours, plastic,
grapes, nuclear power plants, gym teachers) and
black tooth-marks were frosting the unused joints
of my left hand (which was not my helping hand,
although my right hand was declared a saint after it
was chopped off in Bulgaria) as your lips shaped out
‘The sixth storey of the hotel would suit us perfectly.’
I had a suspicion we were crossing into Switzerland.
Unacceptable Language
Any similarity to persons living or dead is
purely coincidental, apart from Andy, you cunt,
there was never a house in St Tropez. Do you
realise Greta used a toasted sandwich machine
to straighten her hair? As for Sue, she can sod
off back to Norwich, all she ever did was whine
and moan about her abusive parents: so they hit
her with a bath loofah? Jemima was murdered
by those toffs, she swears she wasn’t, but I’ve
seen her blue and bloated head buried in their
books. Gorgeously unclean, the twins are really
just one woman called Angela: some evenings
she thumbs me like a Holy Bible or Koran
or whatever, but mostly lies about stupid things
like can-openers or where the treasure is. Saul,
what were you thinking? She gained a degree
in avoidance addiction: seduce, revel and flee.
Jean needs a married man. She’s not like you, Saul.
Where’s your backbone, Florence? Being gay,
shouldn’t you curb your racism? Perhaps rivers
don’t flow like that, perhaps Dominic was right:
that baby belonged to nobody, it was a hoax,
a hoax in a pram to beguile him into empathy.
Empathy? That’s a consumer tool if ever there
was a Mecca, which there isn’t, otherwise what
are we doing in the supermarket? Meet me in
Greenwich village, Delilah, and we’ll recreate
the sixties. Burn this bra. Is that right? No, burn
this chair. Is that right? What are we supposed to
burn again? I arrived for the revolution with my
lunchbox. There were sheep. You people promised
to be my loud generation. I regret everything.
Derek is a contented dentist.
Mystery Tears
A poem about hysteria
You could order them from China over the Internet.
The website showed a grainy picture of Vivien Leigh
in Streetcar Named Desire.
It was two vials for twenty euros
and they were packaged like AA batteries.
They first became popular on the young German art scene –
thin boys would tap a few drops into their eyes then
paint their girlfriends legs akimbo and faces cramped
with wisdom, in the style of the Weimar Republic. It was
sexy. They weren’t like artificial Hollywood tears,
they had a sticky, salty texture
and a staggered release system. One minute,
you’re sitting at the dinner table eating a perfectly nice steak
then you’re crying until you’re sick in a plant-pot.
My partner sadly became addicted to Mystery Tears.
A thousand pounds went in a week
and everything I did provoked despair.
She loved the trickling sensation.
‘It’s so romantic,’ she said, ‘and yet I feel nothing.’
She started labelling her stash with names like
For Another and Things I Dare Not Tell.
She alternated vials, sometimes
cried all night.
She had bottles sent by special delivery marked
Not Enough. A dealer sold her stuff cut with
Fairy Liquid, street-name: River of Sorrow.
Our flat shook and dampened. I never
touched it. Each day she woke up
calmer and calmer.
Method Acting
(sorry, Chekhov)
I was Nina from The Seagull
while everyone was just getting on with their lives.
‘I am a seagull – no – no, I am an actress’
I’d say, then I’d weep. I was politely asked
to leave several Early Learning Centres.
There was no lake to wander by
so I drifted about by the fish counter in Tesco.
‘Am I much changed?’ I asked the woman.
She could not reply. ‘Your hair-net
is the most melancholy thing I’ve ever seen,’ I said.
I meant it as a compliment. I was asked to leave.
‘God take pity on homeless wanderers,’ I’d say
to a parked Land Rover, then I’d weep.
There was a young theatre director who loved me.
He stood like a beggar by the pick and mix section
of Cineworld. ‘Why do you say that you have kissed
the ground I walk on?’ I’d say, ‘Would you kiss
the gridded stairs of an escalator? Would you kiss
a red stain on the floor of a crisis shelter?’
Once, in a summer pub – ‘The Swan’ perhaps
in Stratford or ‘The Seagull’, no, that’s not right –
an older man squeezed lemon on my scampi.
Oh, older men! ‘Your life is beautiful,’ I said.
He drank his bitter ale like Agamemnon.
He told me a knock knock joke. My head reeled.
‘To one out of a million,’ I flirted, ‘comes
a bright destiny full of interest and meaning.’
‘You are very young and very kind,’ he laughed.
I forgot all about my Cineworld boy.
My spirit grew. My face thinned.
Years later, in a peasant-class carriage
of Virgin Rail, I tried to recreate that joke.
It was something about an interrupting sheep,
an interrupting seagull – no – no, that’s not what I meant.
My gestures were heavy and crude.
I cried Scwark instead of baaaaaaa. The pain!
The peasants pursued me with compliments but
I knew, by then, I was not golden. Some people
are built for greatness: they can tell a knock knock joke
with torrents through the heart. Have you forgotten,
Constantine, our childhood days of paper-rounds
and swiped milk-bottles? A kestrel for a knave…
A seagull – and yet – no.
‘I love him. I love him to despair,’
I told the chemist. She gave me Strepsils.
Sometimes, I was beside myself with the possibility of fame.
I stood in Dixons and smiled, pointing at the shiny laptops.
I imagined I had been employed in a Dixons’ advert.
I imagined I was on a television screen
with a million people watching.
My older man knew the managers of many department stores.
They did not want me for their adverts.
Not with my hollow eyes.
I started to dream, every night, of my Cineworld boy.
I dreamt he handed me a hotdog without recognition.
His eyelids were swollen like closed mussel shells.
Minutes after, I’d hear a popcorn machine explode
in a back room, grey butter everywhere. I am a seagull.
I am definitely a seagull. I saw Trigorin one last time
through the French windows. He was as handsome
and unapproachable as that first day. Still telling the same
knock knock joke, the same inspiration endlessly.
The Hat-Stand Union Page 1
