Dugdale - Red House

There was a golden age For sure: there is always a golden age, like a shower of gold Sweeter at a distance, perpendicular to the beloved body Siring leaden times and leaden rivers. Now the madman, Calling out of his window, denounces his long-dead neighbours, The starlings pass him off, stuttering, the starlings passing through How birdcalls make sense of sorrow and suffering Which is subject to hyper-inflation and loses its own mortal currency In numbers. Red house, I see you in the city, on the plain By the roadside and the railway. You are never in the mountains Or by the sea. The smell of you is homely and nauseating Like the smell of all humankind. * There was a woman who left the red house with her baby.

Her own mother waved from the window, a taxi took them away, Daughter and granddaughter and then they were gone. The woman dreamt at night of the red house: The gaping letterboxes; the stink of tobacco and piss Which fits so snugly, like a babys bonnet; Her own footsteps climbing the stairwell ahead of her; The tender annoyance of a wasp trapped on a landing. Her mother stood with dumbbells in the kitchen Swinging her hips this way and that, swinging her eyes This way and that, wishing they were real bells she held To clash and peal about her in a passion: For never in all her great maternal struggling Had she once considered such a silence. * Once a man brought home a bear to the red house. A zoo-bear, still a cub, and muzzled and harnessed. The children were kept inside as it played.

The man smoked And twitched the reins, and ground cigarettes under his heel. The bear snuffled under the bench and grubbed up shit and sweetwrappers. The bears sojourn was a gift of sorts, for the man was a romantic And hoped his girl would relent when she saw the creature And bring them milk in a saucer and titbits, and humanwarmth. Until she let him in he would sleep on the landing with the bear And teach him to dance on his hind legs, up the steps and down In an endless manbeast cha-cha, paws clattering, feet slapping His humming summoning succour from the stairwell. The bear they took on the third day; it went well enough back into the light. * All the world is beyond the padded door of the flat. * All the world is beyond the padded door of the flat.

A man once followed a girl into the red house and caught her on the stairs. He held a black knife in his fist, and motioned. Others are ready for this relationship, but not her: She reflects at length upon the imposed hostilities She anticipates the knife pressing down on her pink skin Until it gives, she suspects they might never be friends Her and him, and all the while she begs and screams and whispers Please, playing the part assigned to her with a blades gesture. The wrought iron design of the banisters catches her eye It would be designed by a man, that, in its hard superfluous beauty And knocked into place by another man, and then forgotten Until now, until she stood and wondered: why vines and sickles and sheaves? Little girl, he says, I have done with this. Go now. Please. * Imagine this: there is a room in the red house, Infernal clutter, brocades and periodicals, and a mirror full of gloaming And when the place is empty, she takes a basin of apples Into this room and sits on the bed. * Imagine this: there is a room in the red house, Infernal clutter, brocades and periodicals, and a mirror full of gloaming And when the place is empty, she takes a basin of apples Into this room and sits on the bed.

There she is, in the mirror. The room is not fresh. Everything here was bought in another time By the long-spent, oft-bereaved who own fruit knives And sugar tongs and no memory of the provenance of anything Except the hard little apples, which fall so close to the tree. So she escapes from childhood and taking refuge In the red house inhales the historical sweat The ancient hair-grease of its inhabitants Who have sloughed off desperate times And left their wearied skins Folded breast-up like nightshirts on the pillow. * I could be happy and gainful without the red house But it draws me to its mineral seam like home When I am without the red house, I am without And when I am within, I am undone. A fist, a bomb will not destroy it A hurtful letter, or a threat: It is made of wasp-thought and saliva But holds its own like footwear made of lead.

I cannot find it, should I want to I have mislaid it now for several hundred years It drags me in, fisherhouse of peoples It spins me out, it shows me empty rooms. The Red House lies within, I have heard it beating The Red House lies without the parish of the soul.