Two Poems

I remember it as though it were yesterday,

I say, lying as usual. I can't even

remember her name, Ellen Something,

(was it Spanish she taught?), the cut of her hair,

what she wore. What happens again and again

in my head, what's happening twenty years on,

as I tell you, is how, at the end

of that first week, the two of us, newcomers,

passed at the turn of the stairs, and paused,

exhausted, emptied of selfhood. Our eyes

opened, sudden, helpless, into each other's

and we knew what we were, what we are

at the root: something impersonal, just need.

In less than a second, far less than a second,

we'd bumped back to cream-washed walls,

our bags of books, and walked away from each other,

unreeling the cord all these years. Her eyes,

as I make them out now, are the palest of blues.

Out of the Underground into a plate glass glare,

the Finchley Road, the fits of gears and brakes,

off into redbrick streets with white-framed windows,

magnolias and hedges to just another house

and up the sunny stairs where a door's ajar

to a dusky study and cabinets of figurines

from prehistoric tombs: I've wound

to the centre of something, gone inside.

That chair, is it startled by revelations?

Is it crucified? The couch I'd expected

(its lulling invitation, its exotic drapes)

but the biomorphic mushroom-headed desk chair

with its rigid torso, claw feet, braced arms,

its crazed leather—an ancient thing

and bang up-to-date—that had landed

from another time, another place.

It was predatory, a chair for torturing souls,

a judge, a Grand Inquisitor.

The seat became an altar, the back a god

and He demanded sacrifice.

The Father filled its gaping emptiness