from Among the Ruins

I.

What happened to that girl in the shoulder-padded gown?
Time, boxing up her satins and lace into an okay lot
that carves her a faraway look as she hoses down
the dog – a precaution against Alabama rot.

Thirty years ago, a guy asked her if she’d like a drink
and now she sees herself mirrored beyond the whiskies, old.
Ageing calcifies: around her, the eldest trees jink
least as the low sun froths their umbers with gold.

But crowns thinned by time admit fretful
air to test rudiments. The soaked dog is licking her hand
but the hose she holds continues to scour the garage wall.
She turns in the mirror, turns to face a different man.


[…]

III.

Her daughter recommended she set up a profile,
would even do it for her. ‘Mum, you need to meet new people
and if you say you’re fine then you’re in denial.’
Her matches were all him, yet more unsuitable.

Here he was as feudal serf, reading the soil;
here he was as Regency fop, reading Voltaire;
here he was, rounding the Horn in his hydrofoil,
etc. All no doubt nice, but provoking, in her, only despair. 

Google had him: no photo, but an old university
teaching profile, with email. Would it bounce hers back?
Three days drafting. Then adrenaline sent into anxiety –
until Undeliverable: Hello. But in the diagnostics

listed in the bounce-back, disclosed as detector of the spam,
his personal email. Copy and paste and send again,
though this time changing from to love from Pam.
She held a flame to her book of matches then.


[…]

V. 

The train window has time passing in concertina:
wearing her wedding dress at her husband’s funeral;
her overbite in a school photo is her granddaughter’s;
the train widow, lurching at a red signal.

Has he ever, she wonders, used this suburban line? 
Too far out for the indoorsman, living cerebrally,
stating his wish to visit places while not in the least inclined.
From the embankment he watches quizzically                     

the service that has come to a halt between stations,
and when she turns in her seat – is it really him? –
the young man smoking against his quadbike motions
to her in a way she might take as rude, or as a compliment. 


[…]

VII. 

A hotel bar that’s become a bar in its own right.
Dressed-up showgoers pour each other tea               
and eat Battenburg in an acre of cutlery light.
She hasn’t read a word of the Dostoyevsky, 

doubts he’ll be impressed anyway, being unimpressible.
A white-helmeted ARP warden trots into the foyer, scans for blast
damage from the V-1 that turned to rubble
the pub opposite, then fades into the past.


[…]

IX.

The waiter revels in his novelty factor.
Mechanical men with microchip brains
they mass-made, of course, in their image: a poseur.
No, it’s being a waiter that’s strange,                        

the common life having long expired;
restaurant dining went out with the ark.
Visitors can scan in to sit at actual tables, dazzled
by daylight, full tea service, décor, art.

They touch real paper menus, tactile stimulation
for translucent fingers that know only screens,
then remove their masks to sip ersatz Ceylon,
plantations of the real thing lost to heat extremes. 

They pay good money to have the waiter condescend,
licentiousness making a commodity of judgement.
He raises an eyebrow, looks down his nose, tends
short-temperedly. But now occurs a moment

that distracts him from performance. With the meringue tray
he stops between tables: he could have sworn he saw,
from the corner of his acrylic eye, in the sunlit bay
of one window, at a table not there anymore,            

a man and woman, elderly, or middle-aged at least,
seated opposite each other in outdated dress,
her hand out across the white cloth, open; and his – 
advancing, or in retreat? The waiter, and we, can only guess.