Issue 7: June 2004

Antony Dunn | Cheryl Follon | Susan Grindley | Clare Pollard

SUSAN GRINDLEY

Rhyming Couples

Start looking and you'll see them everywhere.
I saw the first pair down at Vincent Square,
same spectacles, same silver hair cut short.
He wore the trousers, she the matching skirt,
ready for anything in rainproof jackets
with zips and hoods and lots of useful pockets.

Then they came thick and fast. I thought at first
I'd photograph them but it seemed like theft.
Besides I saw the rarest and the best
when I was on the bus and cameraless,
like the two brides I saw near Kingsland Waste,
mother and daughter in the same white dress.

I lost count of the couples where the norm
was jeans and matching T-shirt uniform,
two girls, identical, one black, one white,
huge man and tiny daughter on a bike
and in the Strand a suntanned Superman
with his Bizarro copy, hand in hand.

Elderly ladies like my mum and aunty,
In matching camel coats began to haunt me.
Sisters or friends, twinned by their perms and glasses,
co-ordinated cardigans and dresses
with subtle variations on a theme,
maroon and brown, navy and bottle-green.

And finally the look-alikes came home,
reflecting darkly, clone and clone and clone.
Kaleidoscoped in my glass garden-doors,
a Rorschach blot and in it what I saw,
my daughter and her double drinking tea,
paper-white faces, inky clothes, like me.

Soliloquy

If only I'd gone back to Wittenberg.
I could have got the notes from Guildenstern
and easily caught up. It's not as though
I haven't done the reading, 'Words, words, words!'
I know what you're thinking, 'Too many words,
not enough action.' After 'The Mousetrap'
I could hear you shouting, 'Kill the bastard!'
Now they're all dead. I hope you're satisfied.

I could have left them to it, thrown a few
clothes in the car, driven down overnight
to Wittenberg or anywhere but here.
I could be in the Student Union bar,
seeing the girl I met in Fresher's Week,
not lying dead on this untimely bier.

White Bear, White Bear

Does anyone remember Brumas now?
Once every child in Britain knew his name,
the polar-bear cub born at Regent's Park
when everything was black and white, and grey.
His picture was in all the newspapers,
a national triumph like the A-bomb tests,
and the four-minute-mile by Bannister,
and when 'the British' conquered Everest.

Brumas had pointed claws and bloody teeth.
My dad told me that Tolstoy's schoolmaster
would stand him in the corner, telling him
on no account to think of a white bear.
My class went to the zoo in a big coach.
I got a Brumas soap and plastic brooch.