Poem 291

Written in 2010 as I was creating work for White Cloud but not ultimately included in the show this is a companion piece to Poem 205 … whereas 21 was the house I grew up in, 48 Carnell St Napier (always referred to just by its number) was home to a generation of the Evans family on my mother’s side …

( I like the pleasant melancholy of this, the undersea light of the bedroom, and image of passing out of one silence into another … )

48

My grandfather was buried 
on the day I was born
so by the time I knew 48 
it was a house of two old women
Nana with her powdery whiskery chin 
cigarettes 
                  and Best Bets
and great aunt Mary

1969 the world gripped 
by sensation Nana wrote Mary 
a note man has landed on the moon

Aunt Mary read and rocked 
laughing 
                I’ve heard stories 
                like that before
 
deaf all her life she reminded me 
of a chimpanzee
                               impossibly 
small and bent and perched 
in her green chair in the corner
on our visits Nana would shout 
who we were
                         Aunt Mary smiled 
and nodded eyes bright
but you never knew what she really 
understood she had not been 
of the world outside her deafness
for something like an age

I was terrified
to be alone with her
but one day she started to teach me 
sign language
                           vowels 
on the fingers of the left hand
                                                       A  E  I  O  U
H like this 
                  one palm 
                                   sweeping off the other

she was going to teach me more 
tomorrow
                  something happened or it was a day
she didn’t come out of her mysterious bedroom
its undersea light through net curtains 
glimpsed once

eventually (for her)
quite soon
                    for me
the green chair sat empty
and Aunt Mary passed out of one silence 
into another

except
             I’m told deaf people hear 
all kinds of things
                                rushings 
and roarings voices from the past
who knows?
                         no one now


		      a  e  i o  u

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