From a Waitress at the Franiskaner Hotel, Wurzburg, 1999

Double Act

Old Man Horace, Oowokakee

We are grown into tolerance, my friends
Support grannies and trees in places
We might never visit. No jokes now
About deck-chairs on early-morning beaches
Of my father's time: we take our turn like the rest of them.

And when he came into the restaurant I didn't flinch,
Just reflex tightening of thighs and creepy-
Crawleys up the back to your neck. Yes,
I saw him on television that time (those times)
And how did he get here so far from Rwanda.

And the decades of preparation against instinct
Will prove us changed. The table is white:
I and my blouse are white. There's a lily in a vase on the table:
He will be dazzled with white. He will think of brides
And brides and brides. He will worship Germany.

And then, then he claims to know -
With a million dead in his own country -
That one wine is dryer than another wine. Good.
That is good. Then his grilled fish comes
And he insults the judgement of the Chef

Who is not a gastarbeiter. I have studied Latin
At the Gymnasium, yes, and toyed with voting
For Herr Schroder. My friend has been to the Turkish
Cafe in the north. Though we can't screw around because
Of Aids and black babies, we are not my father.

But Turk, Ostlander, Slav and black man
Who escape bodies in their village have come here
To sip white wine and monitor our taste. This one
Instructs us how to grill the fish. In the hotel his bed
Is made the normal way. And will there be complaints in the morning?

And will my father always be right?

Double Act

Are they together, we ask, with her upstaged
as he recites the poem about commitment? And look!
Her back to the audience she begins to disrobe,
welts on the flesh caught in the lights.

Between the acts we talk amongst ourselves.
Off-stage effects of beating and humiliation
drift in. Then the poet comes on with a body-
language right for stumbling through his lines.

He is finished. It is done. He stands distraught.
His talk of loving and sharing falls short
of what we expect. He apologises for labouring
the point like an amateur. He invites questions.

In a book on the shelf a loyalty of poets
has turned your namesake into English. Horace,
we served you less well: even now I can't release
the dead man, my cousin, from a name that wasn't yours.
Too smug, of course, to ask forgiveness from no one, from nothing.

I will say to friends who anticipate this: I called him Horace
to protect us both; he was mad, a name-change
hinted at the shell of a plan from which the soft game escaped
to embarrass family grown less playful by the decade.
At school in Plymouth we bullied fear some thought genetic
outdoors into ambition: he won that round. In France, in Germany
we wrestled natives in a sport still desperate. So tell me
were your prized daughters real? Or must Anna-Livia
and Plurabelle remain our fantasy from the curious Irish joke-book?

Books were to be be written, remember? And so friends die
to help us bring forth poems: what better point of death, I say
to them who censure me for not using actor's
body-language to smother such thoughts? Why this
than something sunny for last week's birth
of a child to a child? Loss of life (Yes, Sir, we are powerless)
leads us to ponder things taken for granted, to make apology
for nothing specific, and vow to be kinder today than yesterday. All that.

Pre-'Horace' years ago, in Ladbroke Grove we mapped careers
as Elvis, as Bertrand Russell, as this or that batsman on the visiting
West Indies team. We talked of books and promised to make good
insults to the clan: Man Friday caught in a sea
of gibberish awaits rescue in his own tongue. Right, then:
scholar, sailor, Prophet, we know you can do it:
first invent the kit, come on as Old Man Oowokalee, messenger
to Benamuckee, Friday's god of the mountain
here to instruct arrogant Crusoe of our customs, our fastidious
eating-habits. Ah, Horace when, near home, in a northern town I walk past graffito
FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST, I think of you.
(Already, I'm forgetting if you had a sense of humour.)

Old Man, so you came over the years, to embarrass us,
not just madness in the family - we're tough now - but as a wanton
metaphor of failure in our '50s narrative where you and I, too,
are pioneers. So we abandon you, tastefully as we can
(You survive in my fiction, such is life) for no big crime, just madness
and sponging in a style that would not disgrace a proud one
down on luck. I forget who claimed most often that high ground
said by the careless, to be moral. Even now you make me straddle
certainty, the generosity of madness. Thank you, Horace.
You're not here today, and it's not a good day: the world
is frightening outside as inside the institution. And here you are
provoking a poem. Next time, cousin
I promise to fake the courage and call you by your name.