|
|
|
Through the cracked crystal of the stepladder panes of glass
of the smoky fashionable café bar downstream from the station,
I saw the motif of the city symphony:
last movement; night movement; coda.
The heartstringing bass throbbed from the disciplefaced dj hunched by the leather sofa,
hands flickering fast-fingering the vinyl discs to frantic orgasm.
And on the lower stave pavement the fat white girls crawled, teetered and minced,
sheathed into glossy black pvc skirts squeezed tight as condoms round their rolling torsos
clothespegged onto the billowing bodies of the whiteshirted grinning lads,
some trailing cruel quivering instruments of the night of ecstatic pain to come
in the black earth of the foxy s-and-m lair under the thundering arches.
Then, above, tenor: a cut sliver of a sleek apartment
in the lego-tower of window-jewels and galvanised mesh balconies and cultured concrete
glittering its fashionable palms and Philippe Starck lamps in the Victorian mirror
of the centuries-still brooding Rochdale Canal.
An insect woman pattered around the apartment, figured all in black:
delicately gliding legs, neat shift-dressed thorax, tickertape arms
all strobed by the pulsing city lights and glass vibrating in the diesel roar of taxis,
reaching to pat two bony cats pawing padding pouncing in a game of stand-off:
woman, cats, all, black, segmented in a transparent glass mosaic, the notes on the line.
No alto: impassive flats, blank-windowed, wore their blinds stretched tight down,
the cat woman the sole life in seven layers of stylish people-pens.
The sulphur city sky burned a shy canopy, dressed only with a crescent slice of moon.
A pavement man teased silent secret snakes awake with the jumpy jagged waterfall of notes
Ariel music
from a cold thin whistle fondled in gnawed fingers while his brittle china eyes watched the street
and his sinuous tongue prodded and probed the plastic mouthpiece crushed between broken teeth:
the notes had dripped from the cusp of the torn Aquarius moon.
Gwyneth Roberts
September 2002
Read Oldham Street
|
|
|
b