...And Baby Makes Tea

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Otherguess: An English Picaresque

 

 

1.  the sub-atomics of Paddington station (scene-setting)

The InfoDex Valhalla stands where diners sip the foam

of that neuropathic wash glossing their meager alliance brunch,

while – in the forest of calcified tuna veins (Sussex, Essex, further on) –

three well-tuned businessmen cauterize roses in murky tills. Wives

 

pre-colonized by immigrant butchers, seduced by rubies and rockets
through the cane break to the lumbering luxury liner, or a tramcar,

 

or an omnibus, a pram, a pair of roller skates, a pair of socks?

A port wine wind catches up the security department documents

 

detailing a coup or two in the jungle's brightest gears, the hour's bruised dress
decorating the daughter who is always drowning herself

in the gold excretion of that lascivious station, the Iron Orchid
where the diatoms and dynamos nibble on the stairsteps rolling

through customs like a small woolen elephant, knitted exultation
on blue ceramic wheels whittling ebony gutters? Parliament speaks:

 

"Dearest Calcutta, we are presently passing shadows of stones
through cyanotic flues which have borrowed a collectivist shimmer

from the klieg lights hidden behind the asters, cantilevered eastward
to reveal the very tiny parachutists there. Or does the sloth crawl

 

through a new and palpitant union of shoes trees, their elegance forged
in the labour sheds and tented wharves of a drag Lord

whose peculiar girlhood was drugged in a Datsun, tinted scarlet,

covered in newspapers, and taken back to the ocean, to intermingle?"

 

 

2. the peculiar girlhood leaves through the book: adoration of girlhood

 

The peculiar girlhood leaves through the book, ribald sketches:

aquamarine ospreys on a white fence post, the drunkard’s Shaker chair, 

and that meetingtime porch curving to the subject matter, warming to

 

dubious struggles for the title of maven, the one who softens

complicated mechanics of Darby daughters speeding

past the robot-boy’s post-war horseplay, the passion stitches

 

on any of a thousand paper skirts, the cool breakfast gods, a lion’s syrup—

while the elder fraud’s fedoras are spotted with complaint slips

which rain upon the Midlands Zephyr brushing the looming plots,

 

rattling the shut-in’s Beano tea set, 1952. She writes, (disarmingly)

“There is an hard-boiled egg posed on a grand piano.” A poem.

A romance novel: “Someone is tricking us with kisses.”

 

Someone else is tricking us, she means, randily practicing

her Royal Teen gestures, preparing to annotate, always pruning

the sweaty roses which pant at the room’s leafy fringes.  “Mater,

 

the kitchen smut has obscured the Salisbury Salary Saver’s essay on death.

Our house has divorced its background, and signals for recompense

from that family-sized box, lettuce and lamb in the water closet,

 

washing the music hall costumes by the South American tidal pool.”

“title” she corrects herself, and drapes the peony sheets over an iron rod,

thus padding the fretful cranes in Accounting, amen. Still, there are Anglicans

 

trapped in yellow snaps of the enormous, isolated way station.

She smiles in her tamed Stetson, posturing “Chinese antelope”

in a cherry orchard theorized to exist im perpetuum

 

for her anarchist farmland parents. She notes them shepherding

her forceful yet grace-heavy media breakthroughs, bemused

by her unfinished manuscripts which harbor in the basement,

 

directing the national health ghost trains to the attic

where a letter from an undressed Brazilian – the ambassador’s “friend” -

compliments her Marginalia on Economic Artlessness,

 

adding randy descriptions of white pebbles weighting white dresses.

All this wasted upon the small library caryatids, and then Alex

finds a rocking horse in the quarry, and decamps to Persia to die trying.

 

But those events draw up a rag box of depressions,

and we needn’t dwell: memory is unrepeatable

in the best of circles. She finds the 2 o’clock rolling

 

through the War for Independence Room (closed for repairs)

as its little rice pudding passengers render full lip service

to the oral tradition. Literary agents clog the aisles,

 

nightgowns cloud their plans for the New Victoria,

their arms erect to bear the ceiling, dampened gray with “stars,”

and that impossible boy – Steerforth – heads for the dining car.

 

 

3. a sincere beauty (a philosophic excerpt)

 

Does a sincere beauty warn the beggar birds away

from the seminary students? Future heathens in cricket amazement,

upon a mound of lead-grey and bloated high sex, like socks

 

which cover a rose’s welts, and the black pudding of realism,

and children like passersby, and barristers and bobbies

jigging on a window ledge, reeling with their fortitude

 

as the flag (hideous lily bandage on a broken footstool)

is encrusted with mock turtle tears, the target turns,

and there’s a raven seated upon a conning for kicks.

 

Alexander is now our local brewer, disturbingly bright

with his bayonet and blue index cards, exuding

the residential aroma of debt, perhaps it’s patchouli,

 

or blue windflowers set against a thirst for ale,

the burning copse and the rainmaker finally rolling into Bartholomew Fair 

as Frau Elizabeth nods, rummaging through her hair for herring coupons.

 

And the rust stalks lean against a lemon plaster wall,

and the uniforms are mothballed in underpaid rotation, ornamented

with the dust given off so generously by a lion’s-mane toilet seat.

 

 

4. restoration abandoned

 

The dreariest lark has been interred in steel terminals,

so bring acetylene orchids, and – as you dance – be careful

of those transparent veins secreted in the floor stones.

 

Remember the seizure of the farmers’ stars,

the night’s birch architecture, the cotton navy trapping

the granite birds in granite trees, this grant of middling Summer

 

ascendent in sheets of whale hearts with clove pins 

to freshen pine stairs with a milky song, her stringent breast

breathing out locust like convalescents rocking

 

upon a barbarous surface, sunglasses and fish, the sea,

a second-hand vanity, a frieze of Babylonian rosettes

to render tea from the pulp of tyrants.

 

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A cup of tea is waiting for you at HOME