I touch the cold flesh of a god in the V and A,
the guard asleep in his chair, and I’m shocked
to find it’s plaster. These are the reproduction rooms,
where the David stands side by side with the Moses
and Trajan’s Column (in two halves).
It reminds me of the inventory sequence in Citizen Kane.
It reminds me of an evening twenty years ago.
And all at once I’m there, at her side,
turning the pages as she plays
from the yellowed song sheets I rescued from a bookstall:
Dodd’s setting of Antony and Cleopatra. All very improving.
“Give me my robe and crown,” she warbles
in a Victorian coloratura, “I have immoral longings in me.”
I want to correct her—the word on the page is
immortal—but I’m fourteen and scandalized.
(I knew there were no innocent mistakes.
I’d finished Modern Masters: Freud
before she snatched and burned it. “Filth”—
yanking each signature free of the spine,
“Filth. Filth. Filth.”)
The song is over. But when she smiles at me,
I’m on the verge of tears, staring down at the gap
toothed grimace of our old Bechstein. “What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong? I check the word again. She’s right. Immoral.
She shows me the printer’s slip, infecting
the back page of every copy, like,
she might have said, the first sin.
The guard snorts in his dream. I take my palm away
still cool from what I’d taken to be marble.
And when I get that moment back, it’s later;
I’m sobbing on her shoulder and I can’t say why.
So she suggests another visit to the furnace, where,
to comfort me, perhaps, we rake the cinders with the music
till they chink and spark, and shove the pages
straight to the white core to watch them darken as if ageing,
blacken, enfold, like a sped-up film of blossoms in reverse.
Leave a Reply