Estill Pollock: A Saved World

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A SAVED WORLD
A Sixties' charabanc on the backroad trundled to the stop, just as the rains came. We folded the pushchair with the nappies into the robin's nest of shopping and found a seat, she with the kids, I standing twenty hairpin miles back home. Soaked on the long walk from the station, midwinter's early dark surrounded the street lights' weak ellipses on the path. She carried the youngest on her hip, leaning opposite for balance as she spoke to no one in particular, 'soon be tea'. The cold lino looked colder in the light. Sixty watts diffused through paper shades danced on frosted glass between the rooms. We were shadows where we sat, watching Morecambe and Wise in black and white, the kids awake until the kiss goodnight. Along the path at the top of the estate the world grew faint, then disappeared at Thatcher's sponsored roundabout. It was a game of circles within circles, of lost horizons where the light drained out and futures were a deal at cost. The world that was changed, changes anyway. The Beatles rotate through static fuzz on a turntable knocking now as years ago. It is the sound of rooms and echoing stairs and clothes-horse washing, of rationed lives we live long enough to miss and to compare. Sleeping children, a man and woman in the ram that rains across the mind, the image brightens like a drift of petrol at the spark. The present simplifies the past, assigning it a retrospective future, defining who we are, who we were, and what the difference meant.
ESTILL POLLOCK

A SAVED WORLD

A Sixties' charabanc on the backroad
trundled to the stop, just as the rains came.
We folded the pushchair with the nappies
into the robin's nest of shopping
and found a seat, she with the kids, I
standing twenty hairpin miles back home.

Soaked on the long walk from the station,
midwinter's early dark surrounded
the street lights' weak ellipses on the path.
She carried the youngest on her hip,
leaning opposite for balance as she spoke
to no one in particular, 'soon be tea'.

The cold lino looked colder in the light.
Sixty watts diffused through paper shades
danced on frosted glass between the rooms.
We were shadows where we sat,
watching Morecambe and Wise in black and white,
the kids awake until the kiss goodnight.

Along the path at the top of the estate
the world grew faint, then disappeared
at Thatcher's sponsored roundabout.
It was a game of circles within circles,
of lost horizons where the light drained out
and futures were a deal at cost.

The world that was changed, changes anyway.
The Beatles rotate through static fuzz
on a turntable knocking now as years ago.
It is the sound of rooms and echoing stairs
and clothes-horse washing, of rationed lives
we live long enough to miss and to compare.

Sleeping children, a man and woman in the ram
that rains across the mind, the image brightens
like a drift of petrol at the spark.
The present simplifies the past, assigning it
a retrospective future, defining who we are,
who we were, and what the difference meant.

ESTILL POLLOCK

Recent work by Estill Pollock appears in Envoi, Stand, Oxford Quarterly Review, and other poetry journals. An edition of poems entitled "Constructing the Human" is published by Poetry Salzburg. His website is at http://estillpollock-poetry.com/

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