Stephen Romer
SCREENINGS
1.
A quick scuffle,
an engine roars, fades,
a cry, then a moan
subsumed by silence.
A covering of rich loam,
soft silt on all that was,
on all that was not. And worse.
From garrets, from rooms
behind rooms, hidden
behind estaminets,
flushed out on the street
and running,
winding up high
and higher, pounding
cobbles and granite steps,
past tilting houses
with santimonious
shuttered eyes, reaching
a backstreet at last
breath breath breath
running running running
the desperate feet...
A simultaneous running
resounds in passageways
in pits and hollows
of the cavernous hill
quarry within quarry
the feet of cunning
hideaways, the hunted
through history, the sealed-up
chalked-up dead that beat
loud inside this hill,
a vast protest echoing
until the black silhouette
meets the sky, is caught
against the sky,
and the arms stretch out
to greet a spinning world
and stiffen. Below the sky,
inescapably.
So it may have been.
But this imagining
is wrong.
A way
of screening.
2.
In an air-conditioned hall
a group of decent men
have gathered to recall
a man they loved and knew.
He was deported
in the war. They attempt
to discuss his thought
but find it difficult, they say
his thought is difficult
(but lasting) and would try
to explain but it takes
so long, (all of the time
he talked with them),
and they know we know,
listening in, it is
his face will not
get out of the way,
how it looked that time
by the post-office, just
before the snouted bus
came for him. He was
peeling an orange, his pipe
was not in his mouth
3.
I've heard how a dreaming girl
walking on such a day
of steaming rain and mud
caught her foot and fell
into the labyrinth
of the hollow hill.
She was not seen again.
How, through a tiny fault,
tarmac, sand, excrement,
the whole sordid floor
breaks up, frangible
as temporary care.
I've learned to sidestep
trenches at the door.
Copyright Stephen Romer 1980
also by Stephen Romer: La Ferronnière