Notes from Dialysis
the fields beneath (st pancras old church)
I make my tour
of the garden waiting room
where the tall trees
wander among the corpses.
I might go past
the last resting place
of Sir John Soane
in his stone telephone kiosk,
or the wooden bench
where the Beatles sat
on their “Mad Day Out”
July 28th, 1968.
The body of J.C. Bach,
“The English Bach,”
lies somewhere near here,
lost to the Railway in 1865.
A plaque remembers him
as Queen Charlotte’s music tutor,
who collaborated with someone
and died young.
Perhaps Jerry Cruncher got him,
or perhaps he survived
and is strolling with his friend
in the fields beneath.
I drag my feet
through the backsliding seasons
towards a gate in the wall
with its timetable of opening hours.
the song of the needles
Needles have the sudden beauty
of a first line.
They’re always new and surprising
as they burst from their paper covering.
They sing as they hit the air.
You catch sight of them
out of the corner of your eye,
glinting softly to themselves
as they contemplate their next move.
What they’re suggesting is inspired,
but a certain sadness
attends their description
of what is going on.
You don’t know whether to look away,
or accept what they’re saying.
If you’re lucky you’ll feel a pop
as one of them enters your fistula
and a cool feeling of recognition
spreads up through your arm.
grand canyon suite
Every few minutes someone’s alarm goes off
because of a blood clot
or a sudden fall in pressure,
then the first two notes of Ferde Grofé’s
“On the Trail” goes clip-clopping
down the Grand Canyon of the ward.
Now the first two notes of the song
are joined by the same two notes
from a neighboring machine,
then another two, and another,
till the whole hopeless blind herd
is clip-clopping off into the sunset.
Copyright Credit: This poem was published in I Knew the Bride (Faber and Faber, 2014).
Source: Poetry (October 2014)