The Book of Lost Addresses 6

The House at Mervyn Grove


You don’t remember your first year,

our evenings on the balcony,

the buzz of voices from below

as husbands became bachelors,

and visitors were jocular

exotic men, whose origins were far

removed from that genteel

suburban grove, whose lingua franca

was the billiard cue, the pok of balls

on wood, the green felt melting

boundaries (though not including

balconies), while womenfolk

watched TV shows and chatted

in their mother tongue, and I,

the stranger in their midst,

uncomprehendingly looked on.



The carp swam in their lily pond

like globules rising in the bar-lamp

as the young men lounged about

the pool table and joked and smoked.

This was their gilded ghetto,

where the outside world was kept at bay,

and meals came sizzling with steamy

gastronomic Shanghai ghosts.

Only I could not join in

the chatter of the family – the blue-eyed

stranger in their midst, a gauche anomaly.



The kitchen hissed with pans

and thudding, crunching, violent

chopping sounds, the sole domain

of agile hands, a scraped-back bun,

a toothy grin. The master smiled,

a crocodile. Was she, the cook,

his concubine?



Now they’ve toned it Tuscan ochre,

that mansion in Mervyn Grove,

and the woman with her hose

has no idea, we may suppose,

of who lived there for many moons,

or what they wore, or how they loved;

the narratives that linked those rooms,

and what their griefs and secrets were…