While driving along the M6
it struck me that Judas is a position
into which we all slip from time to time,
not a whole, immutable, person.

Occasionally, like him, we become
so stuck in this position, we don’t realise
where we are. Then we end up
not existing, in one way or another.

But if we can understand that
this could be just a phase,
like feeling virtuous, or sexual,
or wanting to buy things from IKEA,

then we have a chance to avoid being
someone set in agonising, archetypal stone,
whose identity rises to the sky from
the depths of the earth, like the gods of old.

Is this what Christ struggled with
in the Garden of Gethsamane?
Not my will, but thine,
He prayed, sweating blood

– understandably, perhaps,
because it’s so bloody hard
to accept the bitter cup
that incarnation offers,

instead of regressing
to the omnipotence
we once had
in the depths of our mothers.

Perhaps, Christ saw that
to have done His own will
would have meant
being eternally enwombed.

Only by accepting the death
incarnation implies,
could He heave the stone
from the door of the tomb.

After I arrive home,
I fall on my bed in a swoon,
the ache in my head easing,
warmth radiating from under the hand
I lay on a heaving stomach.

I remember you saying to me:
‘I can hear you breathing,’
as if I had been lying on your lap like an infant.

I pretend it’s your hand,
not mine, that is touching me.

Then, as I turn over
in the heat of the afternoon,

delirious,

dribbling,

I think I see:
rain drill down
upon the full-leafed trees
in a thunderous,
perfectly vertical stream,
framed by the window
that I lie before.

Or is it a dream?

Later, when I’m awake and downstairs,
looking onto the road,
cars begin to turn round its corner,
one after another,
in an endless metallic stream.
It could still be a dream.

But something is wrong.

Outside, just yards from
where I had slept,
trees, felled by the tornado,
crowd the streets
with their amputated limbs,
and, also, their corpses.

People, suddenly out,
like me,
crowd the street too,
frantically smiling,
not knowing what to do:

A man acts as a policeman,
directing traffic.
A woman, out of her 4×4
angrily shifts some branches
as if they were protesting
against her right to drive such a car.

Through the jungle I see:
roofs, which had held out water for years,
now caved in, their tiles stripped off,
littering the streets in fragments
after being knife-edged playing cards
flicked viciously through the air,
I later heard on the news

I think of you leaving from where we’d met.

Is the roof of your car now caved in,
your head slumped on the steering wheel,
glass in your eyes and your hair,
blood trickling from your nose and your mouth?

Or, perhaps, you’ve been decapitated,
by one of those knife-edged playing cards
as you leapt out to avoid the weather,
I think after watching the news.

But now that we’ve said goodbye,
how can I ring,
knowing you won’t ring me?

I was trying to bury my loss
in sleep and dreaminess.

Instead I feel as exposed
as the houses all around,
that people gawp at,
glad they are not theirs.

In the morning:
crushed by the self-disgust
your touch and frightened look
bequeathed to me (that now
I freshly trigger every day,
like a radioactive spray).

In the afternoon:
this rottenness scooped out
and replaced by the surge
of any powerful feeling
that can fill the space
and conceal the fact
that who I am, died,
and was excavated, long ago,
even as I tried to root and grow.

In the evening:
such etiolated words as those above,
(desperately put down – and at the last moment),
blacken and fall back upon themselves,
as I swoon into the darkness of the year
and into arms that are not really there.

‘I’m so superficial,’ you say,
shaking your head,
and looking in the mirror
to check the hang of your hair,
as you twitch your nose like a rabbit
and dart glances at yourself from afar.

I stand watching,
remembering all those stories
you tell of women approaching you:
on an escalator – in a coffee shop – at a bus-stop,
to say, ‘who cuts your hair? It’s wonderful,’
as if they wanted to touch.
‘Oh, please, please!’ I imagine them chorus,
while you bask in the glow of their admiration,
as if you might actually let them.

Then I approach you,
and I touch your hair,
pulling it back
from the high forehead
you use it to hide,
smoothing it around your skull.

‘I don’t know why you need it colouring, ‘
I say. ‘There’s not a gray hair here.’
‘Oh, yes, there is,’ you retort.
‘They’re just not on display.’

Then I bend to kiss you
in the crook of your neck,
to send shivers down your spine
- and, as I do, glimpse,
in the mirror on the wall,
a reflection of you snapped shut.

‘Yes, you are superficial,’ I say,
as I find the precious spot,
‘but in the deepest kind of way.’

It’s not her fault,
lying there, on her front,
in the sun, looking back
at me and asking,
as I leave,
how long am I to be?
- so peremptorily,
that I feel she’s judging me again
as another of those wicked men.

I’d just decided not to phone you,
and, therefore, not to say
my wound had burst once more,
and that, within my inner world,
there raged another furious war.
‘Please, help me not to lash myself
until I am a writhing mass of flesh,
and almost dead,’
I also had not said.

Then my son had rung,
wanting to see me -
me the reviled, the rejected,
the renegade.
So often when he rings,
I feel like this.

I’d put down the phone
and been in tears.
Why couldn’t my nascent sexuality
have been welcomed,
instead of prodded with fear,
as if it needed extirpating?
For this is surely what has banished it
to languish in so total a disgrace
in such a dark and fetid place.

But it’s not to blame this either,
though it’s a struggle:
for, first, I want to blame;
then have to pull back
to feel the pain,

as now I do,
slamming the front door,
in another surge of tears,
for this lost, rejected part of me.

Then that door inside shuts,
echoing the one I have just slammed,
and locking me away again for what,
I know will seem like years.

I had to go in at the other end,
where diving is permitted, for
unusually, the pool was crowded.
Children were criss-crossing the water with
their parents and, as with ducklings on a river,
I knew that one or two would soon be
losing touch, and paddling frantically
to reattach, regardless of whether I was
in the way or not. I stood, my toes curling
round the pool’s ceramic edge, reluctant
to plunge in and take my chance.
A group of older, West Indian girls
was playing with a huge inflated ball.
One of the girls flung it high into the air. Then,
whoever got there first had won the game.
All over the pool they thrashed through the water,
trying to hang on to their opponents
and slow them down, as well as reach the ball.
Such fun, such glee, but not for me, standing
there, on the edge of everything – not just
the pool, and noticing for the first time,
in several months, the waves painted half way
up and all around the wall, and, for a
ceiling, the plastic, cuboid sky that filtered
natural light, whether from sun or through cloud,
so that always there shone down an intense and lurid blue.
Now from opposite sides of the pool some
Asian youths were swimming towards each other
with such flashy, slashing strokes there must be
someone here they hoped would be impressed.
Needless to say it was not me, still perched
above the chlorinated deep, beginning
to feel cold, and increasingly concerned,
for how was I to swim one length, let alone
the number that I knew I had to do?
Of course, the lanes would soon be physically
in place; then all these people, they would have
to go, every single one of them.
I had been here ten minutes early,
as I like to be to ensure that I
can swim the distance that I know will
calm me down and tire my body out.
But those ten minutes now had gone
and there was just an hour left
to cram the necessary distance in.

It had been ages since I’d dived
and I just plunged straight in,
(legs bent and flailing in the air, no doubt)
confidently expecting soon
to beat the surges under me.

Yet I’d not thought to tighten up my goggles
and the sudden rush of water round my head,
skewed them from my eyes. Out of my depth,
I had to struggle to the side, and even when
I’d readjusted them, they were never really clear again,
as if something on the lens had reacted with the chlorine,
leaving a smeary deposit, like the scum on tea in areas of hard water.
It lasted all the time that I was there; so that dim
through the misty panes and turquoise light, was how
I saw it all that strange, miraculous afternoon.

And this was how I saw her one-piece swimsuit, first,
- an impressionistic flash of scarlet -
before it slipped down the steps and her head
was bobbing on the surface like the polystyrene
floats on ropes now strung from one end to the other
to mark the lanes for different speeds of swimmer.
She was in my lane, the one for ‘medium’ swimmers;
yet she was not, I saw, following the arrows on the board
indicating which side was ‘up’ and which was ‘down’,
and now she was heading straight for me, and I for her.

And then I realised I knew her from before.
I thought she’d looked familiar
when I’d entered the building,
as she locked her bike up to the railings:
fair hair put up, but sprays of it escaping,
red scarf, with cheeks flushed by the cold to match,
Amazonian in stature, but also a painting by Rubens,
perhaps an English rose as well, who knows? I didn’t.
Although I knew her from before, I’d never spoken to her.
She was just someone I’d noticed from afar;
and now she was coming straight towards me.
Who would give way, I thought, as I breaststroked up to her?

I did. It was as if I was invisible,
mere scum on the surface of the pool.
And it got worse when she moved on to backstroke;
for then I really was invisible.
And all the time my difficulties were being intensified,
by one of the Asian youths, who had not left with all the others,
but was hanging round the steps halfway down the lane,
and very definitely not swimming.
The scarlet swimsuit ignored him too,
which was something, I suppose.
(probably she was oblivious of us both.)
But as I swam up and down the lane,
gurgling underneath the water,
then surfacing to survey the scene,
hoping we would not cross
where this young Asian man was hanging round the steps,
(with all the attendant risks of actual bodily contact),
I began to wonder, what was he up to?

There seemed to be a friend of his, also not swimming,
on the other side of the pool, which would explain
to some extent his smiling and his shouting,
but what on earth was the substance of their communication?
Then focusing upon our lane again,
as she back-crawled up to the steps,
I saw she would collide with him.
She had definitely not ever noticed he was there.
Perhaps she didn’t care.
But he did,
and, inanely grinning, almost seemed to will her on.

Yet in the event there was no collision;
for, as she approached,
he ducked under the water
and she passed over him.

A miracle, I thought.

Then, as I swam past the steps,
and, with my forward thrust,
plunged underneath the water,
there, through the milky distance,
as through a cataract in an ageing eye,
I saw it, like a spear, jutting out
from underneath his billowing boxers,
while he, now with his head above the water,
(I’d surfaced and glanced backwards)
continued to grin and gesticulate across the pool.

The stretched out feeling in my stomach
which had been with me all weekend
(and to relax which I had come out swimming)
pulled at me, like tears that could not happen,
as if the ratchet of the rack that I was lying on
had suddenly been turned on another notch.

Then, just as I was wondering how to cope with this,
all around the learner’s pool,
(ten feet from the one that I was in)
there rushed a congregation of West Indian
men, women and their children,
rupturing the rhythmic swish and glug of water,
with singing, and concerted clapping that
echoed and reverberated around the lofty building
to produce for me a kind of pandemonium:
it felt as if my rack had been turned on,
not one, but several notches, all at once.

It was a baptism in which those wishing
to declare their faith would be totally immersed,
as Jesus was by John the Baptist.
I had witnessed one before, but not like this:
from behind my smeared up goggles,
surfacing from water, like a creature of the deep,
to look up at a wall of people lit by
the elongated halos of the pool’s fluorescent lights.
I could hardly make out anything at all.
I certainly saw no one being totally immersed.
To me their singing sounded more like wailing,
their clapping like the beat of drums,
and their swaying from side to side
- and up and down -
caught at the stretched out feeling in my gut.
It felt so sexual and primitive,
as if an orgy was about to happen.
Yet they were here to wash away their sins
and start their lives afresh.

It must be me.

Most of the other swimmers had been drawn
to the shallow end, nearest to the learners’ pool.
They were looking upwards, goggle-free, at the spectacle
trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on,
chatting and exchanging comments with each other;
while I, still through my smeared up lenses,
could only see this wall of swaying people,
gray and pink, with card board cut-out hats and suits.
A look of sugar candy, set off by all their deep black skins.
I knew that unlike all the others I had to go on swimming,
or I would probably have been magnetically sucked in
to what they seemed to be for me.
I could not just gawp up at them
as if I were a tourist or a student of anthropology.
I also had to swim to stretch this thing within my gut
to keep it flexible, for otherwise it felt as if
the weird cacophony that I was hearing
would tune in to my brittleness inside
and make it shatter, like the walls of Jericho.

The Asian guy and the scarlet swimsuit had now left the lane,
attracted by the spectacle of the baptism, I guessed;
but every time I swam by where
he’d ducked and she’d passed over him,
I thought of skeins of semen in the water,
like floaters spoiling the vision of an eye.
Was that water eddying round my limbs,
or him, I wondered, as I took a wide berth
round the steps where it had happened.

I was reminded of a dream I’d had last night -
of a butcher selling meat to me,
huge slabs of steak, grained through with fat,
much more of it than I could ever eat.
There’d been a woman with me buying steaks,
but hers were tuna, and one of them had
somehow accidentally touched the meat.
The butcher had just wiped it off;
but though I’d had to make my purchase,
I knew I’d never eat it. To me it was contaminated -
which was how I felt right now, swimming in the lane
where that had happened, as if it were primordial soup,
in which I was immersed, the source of all our lives originally,
yet now its fishiness was hard to bear, as the root of me.

Water eddying round my legs, which could have been his semen,
got me thinking of the theory that the development of a person
from conception onwards is supposed to recapitulate
the evolution of the species as a whole; and I shuddered
at its apparent confirmation of our slimy origins.
For, as I swam along, immersed in life’s lubricity,
this wasn’t just a theory any more; for me it was reality:
sex was the primordial in the present.
I was appalled.
(Yet dimly, and, perhaps much worse, I knew I was excited too.)

Oh, where had all the usual swimmers gone?
That was another way in which
everything was so odd today:
the guy with the gammy leg who’d
always just come back from Spain;
the violinist with diabetes, who’d told me,
Michelangelo, in painting Judas in the
Sistine Chapel had just made Jesus older;
the woman who had swum all through her pregnancy,
and beyond, to recover her shape and fitness;
the man who’d lost his watch, only to find it
later in the day when taking off his shoe:
none of them was here.

In reality to me they were all the slightest of acquaintances;
yet now I found myself yearning to see them.
I felt like the ‘ducklings’ I had noticed earlier:
to me these slight acquaintances, were the parent I had lost.
So what was I to do? It was too late to leave;
I was already totally immersed.
And anyhow, if I left now,
I had not swum enough to sleep tonight.

So swim, swim, swim, was all there was for it,

on the downward thrust breathe out to hear
air gurgle through the water frothily;
then, as I pull back with my arms, lift up my head
to glimpse the blur of sugar candy
and fluorescent strips, glow mistily
like candles on a birthday cake
being brought out in the dark,
for the waiting tribe to clap at fervently.

Such unearthly sights and sounds,

which were, I knew, not really there,
but only in my head:
It wasn’t just my goggles that were smeared.
It was me, smeared by the something in my soul
that closed me off from what was going on
and made me think that contact
with my opposite would damage me;
that somehow I and the ‘other’
could not be together in one space:
meat with fish,
white with black,
man with woman,
gentile with jew,
west with east,
straight with gay
and so on ad infinitum
and vice versa, too.

And, perhaps, we couldn’t, if the connection
only happened consciously, on dry land, as it were,
remaining at best a willed political correctness
that was bound to wither
because it lacked an animating river;
or came as the result of a sudden flood
from the depths of the unconscious,
swamping everything,
(through Hitler, for example)
with death and psychosis.

But here, now in this swimming pool,
where the clapping and the singing had at last subsided,
and the congregation had dispersed,
almost as quickly as it had come rushing in,
an apparent total silence filled the space.
For the first time that afternoon, I noticed
the fluorescent lighting, and the plastic, cuboid sky
flicker on the gently lapping turquoise water.
And simultaneously, with a warm, illuminating glow,
I sensed the tension within my body and my brain
had eased and clarified – not just now, but previously.

It was as if I’d finally found the parent I had lost,
(though not the one I had been looking for)
and at last had let myself be comforted.

How had this happened, I began to wonder?

Was it the little boy, dressed in pink and brown,
running from his mother, like any naughty child,
who had individualised the mass for me?

Or had something occurred earlier that I’d missed
and would never be able to pin down,
like the baptisms I had never actually witnessed?

I could not tell.

Yet did it really matter?

I looked back at what had taken place with the Asian guy.
Was it so unusual for him to have found
a woman in a scarlet swimsuit attractive and appealing?
Perhaps he’d been embarrassed by his bodily response
and that was why he’d hung around the lane.

Maybe I had not seen what I thought I saw,
through the dim and misty panes that I wore,

and now still wear,
yet somehow differently.

Perhaps I was the one, from whom
I wanted to protect the woman:
the black panther, rampant sexually,
uncaged and finally at large.

That was what I saw in him,
because I could not face it in myself,
and so accept my whole humanity:
my fishiness and finitude,

and find how to transmute
these aspects of me into gold,
as if the swimming pool were
some huge alchemical retort
containing in one space
all the baser elements within me
and compelling them to interact
with the necessary intensity,

if only for an hour.

And has this happened?

As I swim my last length and everyone,
both in the pool and out of it has gone,
(except, of course, the lifeguard
standing stoically around),
nothing is certain logically.

An hour could be
just the blink of an eye,
or an eternity.

Yet for now it does not seem to matter any more,
I think, as I touch the end bar for the final time,
and stand with water at my waist,
my chest heaving more than I had realised,
my skin stretching, but holding me together and intact,

not just literally, but in a deeper sense as well.

Stereotyped by others,
she was adored by me;
until I had to beat her up
and desecrate her fantasy.

With full red lips,
but nervous eyes,
she seemed to me
a febrile paradise,

offering the miraculous possibility
that I might heal
the gaping wound she seemed
so happy to reveal.

Yet every time I reached out to her,
she was never really there:
her openness was just a hook
to draw me in and generate despair.

Stereotyped myself, I drank, and drank
to bury the way I yearned for her;
for it reminded me
of a distant, long ago affair.

Not again, I thought,
as I recalled her pouting lips,
her flaunted midriff,
and her swaying hips.

I should have guessed,
that underneath all this
was her lubricious emptiness,
just aching for its nemesis.

Finally I glimpse,
beneath the harm
I do myself,
securely lodged
within its wound,
a deeper pain,
like a larva cocooned.

For years I had thought
what I needed was to change
the way that, periodically,
as with a malarial fever,
I thrash through
the walls by which my life is held,
then thrash myself in shame
at losing my control again.

But I have never managed it,
however hard I’ve tried,
and I have never found another way
than just to try, and keep on trying.

Even now I am not sure
that what I see is anything at all -
this little figure,
forlorn, androgynous,
pale, etiolated,
nearly transparent -
putting a hand in mine – half asleep,
still dreamily submerged,
in the great unconscious deep:
my son in me,
my poor, lost son,
whom I would not accept before.

Now I must,
always,
ever,
and do nothing more,
not try, nor sweat about it,
nor pursue, for him, remoter goals.

For otherwise, plunged deeper in that pain,
his hand will slip away again.
Then only my self-laceration will remain.

It’s like you’re lost to me forever,
when you suggest my exploration
of the personal, politically,
is nothing more than a distraction.

Then, blank-screening me,
you sit with such an irradiating gaze,
your face quivering around the gills,
and tension eating up the air,
what else can I do but turn to stone?

And all the while,
blind to your role in it,
you, nevertheless, have eyes,
to see me disconnect from you,
and from my feelings too.
This tendency of mine to generalise
is how the links are severed,
you hypothesise.

Yet isn’t this just a theory that is easier for you?
Nothing to do with me, and where I am.
It’s what you know, or think you know.
And you are trying to railroad me into it:
your version of a Gulag Archipelago.

This is why I turn to stone:
to protect my identity;
for now, how can I trust
you carefully to finger
the many details, large and small
of its intricately worked brocade -
in fact a long ago moth-eaten masquerade,
that I had hoped you would feel through
to wilder patterns that are usually taboo;

and, then, even more importantly,
share who you are yourself,
however many-layered
or crudely daubed -
not literally, but so I know
that you are there.

Yet now, instead,
you’re tied up, like your hair,
in snakes, which cannot be transformed -
so tantalisingly close,
yet ultimately withheld:
the conductor of an orchestra
who will not raise her baton,
the music always never being played,
the muffled drum belied,
and everything between us petrified.

The showers are running cold,
had been scrawled in blue marker
on the white board at reception.
However, until he shuffled in,
clutching a wash bag to his chest,
they were all right – not hot, but warm enough.
Then suddenly they had me in their stranglehold,
like a chilly undercurrent in the sea that takes your breath away;
or an unexpected shudder that’s supposed to mean
there’s someone walking on your grave.
Normally he arrives in the building as I am leaving
and we nod at each other warily.
Today, however, we must have been in the pool together;
and I remarked upon this break in his routine.
To begin with he ignored me,
just opened out his wash bag,
and let it dangle, with its contents on display, from the peg
by the notice that forbids spitting anywhere in the building.
(Use the toilets and blow your nose before you swim, it also says.)
Then, joining me in the cold, he began:
“It’s work, pressure of work.
That’s why I’m here at this time.”
I grunted and continued to rinse my hair.
“Five days a week for the last – what – seventeen years,
I’ve been swimming here,
and I’ve hated every single day
until I’m in these showers.
Then it’s just about all right,
except like now when they bloody well run cold.”
Moments later I saw him
naked in the changing room,
huge gut, like a cliff, above his speck of a prick,
man boobs wobbling and puckering,
as one hand rubbed him down,
and the other used his mobile phone.
“I see what you mean about pressure of work!” I said.
“Not work. The squash club,” he replied.
“If you miss calling at eight,
you don’t get a court till late,
and I just have – oh, well, such is fate!”
He flipped the phone shut.
“I only really swim to cope with squash.”
I wondered:
if he exercises so much,
how come he has such flab?
He sat down and it flopped over his prick.
“No one really teaches you how to grow old, do they?” he said.
“I never thought it would happen to me.
Once you get to fifty, though, that’s it.”
I thought for a while,
in the silence of the changing room,
phalanxes of lockers all around,
with keys on rubber bands and slots for 50ps,
hair and sludge stopping up the drains,
and the remnant of a bar of soap, which I’d been noticing for weeks
lodged in the space where the corner of a tile was broken.
Then I said: “He’s as old as my father at eighty-two,
but Lucian Freud isn’t doing badly, you know.
Did you see his latest painting in the papers the other day,
of a beautiful, naked woman, fifty years his junior,
entwining her legs round his, as he stands,
and she sits on the floor, head yearningly by his knee,
her long, tapering, ringless fingers clutching his thigh?
She’s entrapping him more than just literally.”
I smiled. “The Painter Surprised By A Naked Admirer.
What a wonderful title!”
“I’m not interested in that sort of thing,” he snapped back,
head down, as he dried between his toes,
“I’ve got a daughter of twenty.
My own daughter’s twenty.
It doesn’t interest me at all.”
What sort of thing does he think it is, I wondered,
with a shudder, like I’d had when the showers ran cold?
It sounded like pornography he was rejecting,
or the suggestion that he might be into younger women.
Perhaps now, he would think I was,
like middle-aged men are supposed to be.
I wished I’d kept quiet from the very beginning,
like I usually do and like I was going to now,
for I knew I couldn’t take back what I’d said,
or explain it without getting deeper in.
Then he had on his shoes
and bustled out with a grin
- leaving me as if hung on the peg
above the bench where I was sitting;
for inside my mind,
how desperate he seemed
to avoid my contaminating kind.

Then I remembered showing the article to you,
as we lay in bed together, one night.
Alongside a shot of the painting itself,
there was one of Freud and his nude model,
which looked to have been taken at the time of the sitting.
She was wriggling across the floor on her bottom,
perhaps about to pounce (or was she backing off?),
while he placed a heavily shod foot in the direction of the canvas.
Yet in the painting he didn’t look heavy,
more like a hawk, which had momentarily landed,
and, almost straightaway, was struggling to take off -
sharp-eyed, cannily beaked, with a singular purpose,
the brushes he reached towards, spreading like feathers.
Comparing the two photos, you said,
“Just look how ugly he makes her.
She’s beautiful, gorgeous. The journalist mentions
her delightful orbs, and she’s right,
yet look at how ragged and scrawny he paints her.”
You thought he was boasting like any other stud -
of his attractiveness to even much younger women.
Look, I can’t keep them off. I’m so famous,
such a genius, so personally handsome,
was what you felt he was saying,
the white sheets scattered randomly around,
reminders of her discarded clothes,
or part of a set for that pornographic shoot.
Yet to me he didn’t look so triumphant, or predatory, at all.
His hands were reaching out to continue the painting,
not down to her nakedness, or to touch her hair.
It seemed much more probable that, like a hawk,
he wanted to fly higher in the air,
to capture, not her body,
but the desire that was there,
and their tangled loss of it
(sod what the gossips might aver,
and people, like my fellow swimmer, disavow).
This was why she was so scrawny now:
the sheets were not her clothes, but their shroud,
the look on her that of rigor mortis.
And he must set it down in oils
- this push and pull, this volatility,
this ever-changing world -
and by grasping our mortality
stay within the flow of life -
instead of growing old,
only to curse
the shower running cold.

And if she loves him,
maybe this is why,

and why he’s so alive,

and, now, why I can move,
and feel I will survive.