The drunken bath

I've always liked poems of journeys, perhaps for the same reason that, in a detective novel, I like a good description of the scene—urban or rural, I'm not bothered—in which the action takes place. I want to take in the sights, noises, smells, have a peek over the shoulder of the characters—especially if it's somewhere exotic in time or space, where life is lived differently, and where I'm unlikely ever to go—medieval Italy, for instance, or California in the 40s, or ancient Rome, or Tsarist Russia. As poems are a cross between music and words, for the senses as well as the mind, they can be particularly successful in this endeavour.

Yesterday, I got in touch again with my old mate from university, Burt, with whom I went on a number of travelling holidays around Europe—one fairly wild one, if I remember, to Hungary in about 1992 (I think), where I wrote this poem, which is a pastiche of Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre (in those days, it had a compelling significance for me, and I wrote two or three things that were inspired by it).

The air in the bedsit was damp
and cold and smelt of gas, but it was home.
She dropped her bag as the front door slammed
and chose the yellow bathsalts saved from the fallout zone.

She poured herself into a bath and never
noticed as the chipped enamel bathtub filled
and the day, a beast immensely cold and clever,
dissolved on the bathtiles where the yellow bathfoam spilled.

Her face in a sodden flannel's shade,
she never saw the bath detach itself and float
as the citizens in the flooding districts prayed
and the bath slid from the window like a chipped enamel boat.

As the clawmarks in her skin healed over,
one more city sank in the sea. Alone,
she never saw the cliffs dissolve at Dover
or the Channel gulping the poison yellow foam.

And the Netherlands and Bohemia could not escape,
and Belgium held its nose as it went down
as a girl in a bath sailed through a sunken town
and an oilslick in hammer & sickle shape.

And Europe dropped from her mind that day
as the rich drop food from their plates.
Little she thought of why the ceiling had gone grey
or of escalating water rates.

Still more continents fell from the world that night
like clay pots from a windowsill,
but she never asked: Who turned off the light?
And she never said: Who ran up this bill?

And Death asked: Who dares at this ungodly
hour to creep in my room?
But all that remains of him is a cape and, oddly,
a wisp of smoke shaped like an ostrich plume.

(Rose Hill, Budapest, 1992.)