Not just the pram in the hall
but what you put in it
when the promising child has walked away
and you cram her space with cast-off toys
and out-grown clothes, with old admonitions
and dead beliefs, absurd to you now.

The pram in the hall to the pram in the cellar
or attic or garage or garden shed
and the short white box with its air-vented mattress,
its traces of urine, of vomit, of terrors,
of crying at nightscapes, of heart-
sucking smiles, is sponged to sterility.

Not just the pram in the shed
but what you've kept in it;
survival from pestilence, sunderings, compromise,
losses, surrenderings, the gradual slippage
of failure, the flattering whiff,
the knock-out slug of success.

Not just the pram in the mind
but all that is in it,
fuddling the quickening hours,
inviting the ease of shrugging acceptance,
irony, crosswords;
unless you could empty a can of petroleum
under the stilts of the shed in the garden,
kindle a paper, throw it and run
till the howling red engine is
out of your earshot,
the swaddling smoke is blinding
and smothering somebody else.