Doors
At last we found a house that had a room And squeezed the car beside a cow-shed stall.
The sun a green half-bitten apple sank Precisely then between black writhen whips, Sooty declension. Sandwiches and ale.
Along the narrow dogleg corridor Planks creaked on different notes, and numbers hung Handpainted on small hooks along the wall.
Later I sailed that passage in some gap Between two greying hours with slow footfall Feeling in quarter-light (and could not find The switch) for where the bathroom's welcome lay. The floorboards sighed; then at a doubtful tack Behind some number still illegible Seeped through the very whitewash that I touched A kind of trickling sobbing like a tap.
I stopped, my heart stopped with me; all the dawn Seemed nothing but instinct with hopeless tears That would not staunch. There were no comfort words.
Flowed on and on. And at my coming back Flowed on and on. I almost thought to try That gate of sorrows, swing it in the dusk And put my hand upon a blinded head And put my arm round shoulders in a bed.
But this was now and England. English Breakfast Served in the Dining Room, and check the tables: Two girls with hiking-legs; the little couple Who pass each other jam; the curly boy With V-neck sunburn; the brash family Who leap from joke to silly joke like goats; The man who reads and cuts his toast in fours: And all the faces just as closed as doors.
Hilary Corke
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