I

George Simpson

A glass circling newsprint, like a glider in a slow sky,

over words a mind might travel safely with indoors.

Better not disturb this old man with his football scores,

sticking-plastered specs, pumps on the fender warming

themselves for going nowhere; nor that African Grey

a son brought home, muffled, like a cremation,

in velvet drapes, tongue-tied, given no say.

Better be seen, not heard in this cramped place

of obscure pieties, emotional inbreeding, shifty

with secrets, no history spoken of, except

when the house swelters with accusation,

and someone sullen says it's time to ‘learn a thing or two’.

Yet this is home to a man who knows ‘how others lived’,

who once sailed oceans, balanced salvers

up and down companionways, banged knuckles

on the cabin doors of toffs in astrakhan, concert pianists,

divas in mink-coats, boa'd women befuddled with cocktails,

asking what the sea was like again today.

You get no answers now. Slouched in the gloaming,

and no longer mattering to himself, he won't budge an inch,

not an eyelid, for you to learn your clamorous little thing or two.

Will hear none of it. Like talking to the wall or to oneself, to ask:

where were you, George, when the girl conceived? Coachman

or steward? Sliding hands over horseflesh or walking waves,

tilting salvers? Which uniform and when? And whose signature

on the letter tucked in your pocket when you bore her off,

clutching her brooch, to Cockburn Street? Was it then you looked

for other jobs (there are three years to fathom still), and

climbed (forever in service) those red-funnel gangways?

That letter, George, (I'm told) spoke of gratitude …

were you prevailed upon? paid off? Was it recognition

for rendered services or hard-to-credit altruism?

Your photo talks of innocence, eyes dreamy as a child who's just

left sleep behind and found a pleasant world come back.

II

Jimmy Bilsborrow,

scrambler up rigging, unfurler of topsails, another who knew

what the sea was like, how it tossed ships and splintered them,

how it bored or humbled with its almost always emptiness;

and on land later a man loading sacks, crates, boxes, the odour

of dockside warehouses about him, blood-oranges, apples,

spiky pineapples, raisins my grandmother trickled through flour…