Polly Clark

Heaven
 
is the place we’ll go to when we die
and we’ll all be together. Hamish too,
though yes, on a lead. At 5 p.m. over cheesy pasta
the matter of the afterlife has to be solved.
Officially there now is an afterlife; absolutely
empirically, definitively, because my daughter 
is broken-hearted that we will die and leave her 
without mummy and daddy. I won’t have it. 
My child’s happiness will not be sacrificed
to the rational ideology of dust. In short –
we have brought it back. We talk into the night
you and I, planning the detail of the place
we’ll all go to be together. We come alive;
for one-night-only we’re God, dividing 
the dark from the light and making it good. 
I want to wake her from the deep teary
slumber she’s fallen into to tell her, darling
it has a name, the place we’re all going to
with Hamish on a lead, it has a lovely name.
Daddy and I forgot to tell you, here, I’ll whisper –
everyone you love will be there.
 
 
*
  
Men
 
After some years in the seaside town,
she began to see men everywhere.
Their awed faces gasped in the waves. 
It was clear they were not drowning,
even as the sea climbed up 
and dashed them on the winding road.
Some of them were men she knew:
her friend’s husband, the lawyer,
turned in the hollow of a wave;
she saw old lovers and nearly lovers,
and men she never liked, 
and men she’d seen on the Tube.
The dead ones weren’t dead any more.
Some were little boys, their fingers made
the wiggly crests of each wave. 
And now, when she left the shore, 
the grass was men, the trees were men,
Men were pressed into the walls 
of the little house she loved so.
They spoke to her, of course they did,
inviting her to press against them,
to stretch beneath them, 
to meet with her lips 
the freezing gravity of them.
 
 
*
  
Handbook
  
In the afterlife your loved ones
will fail to see you. Your shadow
 
will cling to others, confusing them.
Your words will sound like theirs.
 
This is a downside of the afterlife,
not fully dealt with in the handbook.
 
We should put it in somewhere.
We never quite get around to it
 
I suppose imagining that you know
how lucky you are to be here.
 
Now we’re on the subject,
the other thing not quite expanded on
 
apart from the searing damp 
and that your favourite colour won’t exist
 
is that a small girl will follow you
to the ends of the earth. 
 
It is of course your animated bones
that she follows, but still.
 
Who needs that grief anyway? 
Who cares about who you were?
 
 
*
 
 
Interrogation
  
The sun’s a searchlight. 
The sky turns it into my eyes.
 
Everything under the sun
is either living or dead. 
 
So… what’s it to be?
The climate’s made extremists of us all.
 
My eyelids are burning. 
I lick my lips.
 
I whisper,
The object of my love is gone
 
but the love remains. 
I’ve told you everything I know.

Afterlife (2026)
15 Sculpture
16 Muse
18 Birdsong
20 Paella Night
21 Heaven
22 That night a storm
24 Men
25 Seawanhaka Yacht Club 
26 Io
27 Highland Cow
28 How to be a Poet
29 Handbook
30 Drain
32 The Woman Zoo 
33 Hive
34 Port Meadow
35 The Crowded Earth
36 Interrogation
37 Crossing
38 Graduation Photo, 1964
39 The Mermaid
40 Follower
42 The Pet Man
43 Her Kind
44 My Mother’s Hands
45 Fire Starter
46 Spell
48 Pelican
49 Whale
50 Tiger, Tiger

from Kiss (2000)
55 Love Story
56 Snow
57 Letter from Pécs
58 Road to Chisholm
59 Brief Encounter
60 Adultery
61 Retribution
62 Zoo
64 When You Were Made
65 In the Pool Room
66 Pilgrimage
67 South Uist
68 Where Swans Have Lain Down
69 If You’re Interested
70 Last Tango in the Men’s Department
71 My Life with Horses
72 A Lunch Date with My Father
73 Take-off
74 My Mother Marries My Father
75 When I Close my Eyes
76 Flowers
77 Excitement
78 New Forest Ponies
79 Walk in the Rain
80 Sunset
81 Amsterdam
82 Szechèny Tér
82   I  The Consultant
83   II  The Angels
84   III  The Wish
85   IV  The Dream
86 Szalon Sör
87 How to Love You
88 Stephen Selects the Photographs
90 Letter to the Man I Love
92 Casualty Report
93 Crime of Passion
94 My Education at the Zoo
96 Dora
98 Baby
99 The Pet Rabbit
100 The Walk of Faith
102 Dear Virginia Ironside
103 The Writing on the Fridge
104 Bears
106 Pilate Comes to My Father’s Deathbed
108 Progress Diary
109 Metamorphosis
110 Kleptomaniac
111 My Faithless Mouth

from Take Me with You (2005)
115 The Poetry God
116 My Life, the Sea
117 The Voyage of the Rays
118 Swan
119 Fishing Boat
120 Hedgehog
121 Elvis the Performing Octopus
122 Nibbling
123 Buffalo Mozzarella
124 Baize
125 The Lexicographer Finishes P
126 Nagyvázsony Castle
127 Proposal from the Bottle Bank
128 My Husband
129 Dumbarton
130 Your Wife
132 Mule
133 Women
134 Two Views of Loch Long
134   i  Dance
135   ii  Lost Property
136 Two Views of a Submarine
138 Still Life with Table and Loch
139 Wave
140 Fairytale
141 Defenestration
142 Desiderata
143 Domestic Science
144 Rainbow
145 XX
146 My America
147 Beijing
148 Chengdu Massage
149 Flights Over Siberia
150 Bride

from Farewell My Lovely (2009)
I Thought It Was in Scotland: a Falklands war story
155 Landing
156 Not a Crap Hat
157 May Your God Go with You
158 Wild Horses
159 Dear Mum
160 Bruce Lee at Goose Green
161 Fame!

165 Bay Tree
166 You Would Drop Your Spade
167 Tour of Landscapes by the Artist
168 Bar Harbor, Maine
169 Shoes
170 Yariguies Brush Finch
171 Marriage
172 Disorder
173 Farewell My Lovely
174 Dressed Up As Someone
175 Islay
176 Little Black Dog
177 Dog Opera
178 Trash
179 Our Baby
180 Laparoscopy
181 Moon
182 Return to Eden
183 Magnificat
184 Beheaded
185 Special Care Unit
186 She
187 Ladies
188 Directions
189 The First Woman
190 Friends
191 Smile
192 Another Girl
193 The Book of Truths
194 Struck
197 Baby Group
198 A Bench for Me
199 Soup
200 Sex in the City
201 Last Will and Testament
202 Thank You
203 Advice to a Daughter
204 To My Husband
205 Tell Laura I Love Her