The Dog’s Leg
By
Glyn Essex
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including scanning, photocopying, or otherwise without the prior written consent of the copyright owner. © 2015 Glyn Essex
Table of Contents:
Any Porch in a Storm
Before Next Door Wakes Up
Before the Wall Came Down
Cousin Alan
East Berlin, May, 1987
Forever English
From the Viewing Platform
Going for an Indian
I’m Putting out the Rubbish
Memento Mori
My Grandfathers
On the Railway
Return of the Native
Starling Twilight
The Dog’s Leg
The Exile
The Window
Under New Management
Career Change
Any Porch in a Storm
Those narrow outer doors
you have to squeeze through
and the tiny space crammed
with boots bags
and a bamboo table
before you reach
the real front door
all very awkward
deliberately so
designed to let you know
this is their barbican
ditch and palisade
their Berlin Wall
Before Next Door Wakes Up
The sky is clear at last,
wide-awake,
and there’s sunshine
on the roofs of the town.
It’s warming up
out there,
the day pushing on
determined
to get things done.
Soon, the sound of traffic
will take over
from birdsong
and the couple
in the flat next door
will not be speaking,
just banging things about
as loudly as they can
but, for now, I’m happy
more than happy
with the way things are.
Before the Wall Came Down
I never got used to the Wall,
especially the part the guards called
“The Area facing the Enemy” –
anti-tank trench, electric signal fence,
floodlights and “The Death Strip”,
six metres wide, sand raked smooth.
I’d got used to The Party’s slogans everywhere,
(“My workplace, my battleground for peace”),
cheap cigarettes which seared my throat,
the absence of certain things - adverts, litter, dogs -
and no one about by 10pm.
But I never got used to the Wall.
Sometimes on summer evenings
the sound of heavy metal
came out of the West like a storm
and blasted through the border
as if it wasn’t there,
leaving no trace on the Death Strip sand.
Cousin Alan
He used to invite hawkers in,
he bellowed at them
Come on in!
before they could break into
their spiel.
Some of them turned tail
immediately,
wondering what was going on
but most
stayed for a cup of tea
and, mission forgotten,
left with a rosier view
of their lives.
East Berlin, May, 1987
At the checkpoint,
the guards strut
and pose like extras
in a spy film
and no one laughs.
Out on the street,
everything is ordered,
clean, correct
and all the hoardings
preach The Party’s creed.
A few days in,
I find I’m missing
litter, dogshit,
football hooligans
and God.
Forever English
All that business around class
seems to have died a death -
take the way we speak
long “a” or short? Sofa or settee?
It really doesn’t matter any more -
yet sometimes when I meet
the pukka RP English voice,
for a moment or two
I’m back at school
in a second-hand blazer
which is far too big
(“You’ll grow into it”, they said)
and a cheap flannel shirt
which makes me itch
and I might as well be wearing
a sign around my neck,
this boy comes
from the council estate
From the Viewing Platform
we could see
a small park
in the East
where children were playing
just yards
from the wall.
For them
it had always been there,
a part of the furniture,
but in a few years’ time
they’ll be struggling
to tell you
exactly where
it used to be.
Going for an Indian
In an emergency, of course,
I can get a takeaway
but I’d much rather be
properly installed like this
in the scented booths
of the Balti Palace
while I wait for my starter.
As always, I’ve chosen
the Tarka Dahl,
acclaimed in the menu
for its “soupy lentils”.
I can hear the orders
shouted out in Bengali
as the waiters flit in and out
and the looped music
so familiar I find myself
singing along.
I’m Putting out the Rubbish
when I hear it.
Night is falling quickly,
lights are coming on
and a bird starts singing
in next door’s robinia.
It’s a fluty sort of song,
plangent, deep.
I go back inside
to tell my wife
I think I’ve been listening to
a nightingale.
More likely to be
a blackbird, she says,
but I know what you mean.
Memento Mori
The pub was crowded,
bursting with that peculiarly febrile air
you find sometimes with lunchtime drinking
but not at the table I was sharing,
a middle-aged biker on one side
and an elderly man on the other,
who was silent apart from the occasional word
to his dog, a small all-purpose terrier
with a coat gone bobbly and ragged
from some kind of skin complaint.
Suddenly, the biker leaned across me
and started to talk about
the town’s new crematorium.
“Personally,” he said “I like the idea of
a woodland burial, what about you?”
“No”, the old man replied,
“I’ve got a spot for him in the garden.”
My Grandfathers
From the little I was told,
I know that
one was a charmer
the other a rogue
but I’m equally
proud of them both.
What I learned from this
is that it’s possible
to miss someone
you’ve never known.
On the Railway
I’d like to live in Abbey Street
where the houses stand fearless
just yards from the line
and the trains whoosh through
the kitchen hall and front door
the whole caboodle
carried away with my blessing
to London or Birmingham
except for the rails of course
which stay where they are
and hum when
there’s nothing about
Return of the Native
I didn’t join the others on deck
to catch that White Cliffs moment.
I stayed below in the bar instead,
not ready yet to jettison
the feeling of being abroad.
Now all too soon I’m back
in the old routine,
the first day home
littered with clichés -
the greenest fields, builders’ tea,
the lunchtime cricket scores
intoned like poetry
and it’s not quite warm enough
to sit outside.
Starling Twilight
The starlings
go by their own
version of twilight.
It’s a little earlier
than ours –
I think they like
to be seen
as they flock
home to roost,
thousands of them
performing as one,
using the sky
like a cinema screen.
I watch them
whenever I can,
it’s the way
they trust each other
that does it for me.
The Dog’s Leg
Most things work out
as expected –
another war in the Middle-East,
the bank rate up or down
or staying the same
and a red sky at night
almost never fails.
It’s the other things
that worry me –
the ones that come from nowhere,
come too close,
you know the sort of thing,
a tornado in Rugby
and my dog’s broken leg.
The Exile
There’s no History here,
no trace of a past,
as if the whole place
sprang up from nothing
last Tuesday morning
to meet me off the plane.
There’s no night life
and as for the food
every dish seems to contain
aubergines. On the other hand,
the local schnapps
is terrific and cheap as chips.
Apart from the aubergines and schnapps
there appears to be no industry.
The people are pleasant enough
but no one speaks English.
Their language is impassable,
riddled with mysterious inflections,
and it has no future tense.
The Widow
He knew this battered suitcase far longer
than he knew me. It was his father’s.
Sometimes I open it up and memories fly out
like birds and fill the room
– the songs he learned in Kindergarten,
his mother’s onion soup,
the hot midsummer streets of Pankow
– his memories, not ours.
He passed them on to me,
I keep them safe.
Under New Management
It will happen at some ungodly hour
when no one, least of all God,
is expecting it –
dark angels rushing the gates,
St. Peter brushed aside
and in no time at all
God is packing his things
in an infinity
of cardboard boxes.
Career Change
What he would really have liked
was to work on the land.
He ended up in insurance
but one night he dreamed
he was driving a tractor,
mobbed by admiring gulls,
as he scored an endless field
with flawless furrowed lines.
Next morning in the office,
still quickened by the country air,
he cut down thickets of paper,
a madman with a scythe.
THANK YOU
I would like to thank Julie Fox for her encouragement and practical support.