Michael Hofmann

The Northern Line had come out into the open,

was leaving tracks like a curving cicatrice.

There was Barnet, my glottal stop, trying hard

to live up to its name, colloquial and harmless and trite.

The place was sunny and congested, brick and green trim,

it had the one-of-everything-and-two-butchers

of a provincial town. First, I dropped into

the maternity hospital by accident...

The porter was an analphabet, but together

we found your name, down among the Os,

and there you were, my brave love,

in a loose hospital gown that covered nothing;

pale; on an empty drip; and eager to show me

your scars, a couple of tidy crosses

like grappling hooks, one in the metropolis,

the other some distance away, in the unconcerned suburbs.

Who could have said we belonged together,

my father and my self, out walking, our hands held

behind our backs in the way Goethe recommended?

Our heavy glances tipped us forward - the future,

a wedge of pavement with our shoes in it...

In your case, beige, stacked, echoing clogs;

and mine, the internationally scruffy tennis shoes -

seen but not heard - of the protest movement.

My mother shook her head at us from the window.

I was taller and faster but more considerate:

tense, overgrown, there on sufferance, I slowed down

and stooped for you. I wanted to share your life.

Live with you in your half-house in Ljubljana,

your second address: talk and read books;

meet your girl-friends, short-haired, dark, oral;

go shopping with cheap red money in the supermarket;

share the ants in the kitchen, the unfurnished rooms,

the fallible winter plumbing. Family was abasement

and obligation... Three steps to your door

were three steps to heaven. But there were only visits.

At a party for your students - my initiation! -

I ceremoniously downed a leather glass of slivovica.

But then nothing. I wanted your mixture of resentment

and pride in me expanded to the offer of equality.

Is the destination of paternity only advice...?

In their ecstasy of growth, the bushes along the drive

scratch your bodywork, dislocate your wing-mirror.

Every year, the heraldic plum-tree in your garden

surprises you with its small, rotten fruit.