New York Stopover, 1966
for my mother
At 93, she recalls what I don’t: steam
blooming from pavements –
(loud crack in the afternoon and immediately
the steep up-and-down wail
of American sirens, faces half-borrowed from movies:
the lean dark-haired man in the rumpled shirt
muscled out in handcuffs – cursing?
someone has put him on mute – the older, inert
jewellery-shopkeeper on a stretcher,
passers by passing, sirens again, the incident
gathering itself and rolling off
to curve round a different bend on the same circuit)
– the same steam
I woke to a decade later, dream-washed
in Taxi Driver’s neon-and-brimstone.
*Mark Granier's work has been published in a number of magazines and journals over the years, including The TLS, The New Statesmen, The Spectator and The Irish Times; also on the Limelight, Daily Poem and Verse Daily websites. His third collection, Fade Street, was published by Salt in 2010.
