beatified in my family history file ,
addresses on birth and marriage certificates:
Back Clarence Street, Hulme; King Street (but which one?);
One-in- Four Court , ChorIton-upon-Medlock.
Meanwhile at home on my answering machine
a message from New Zealand: please ring back.
In his day it was factory smoke, not petrol,
that choked the air and wouldn't let him eat
until, the first day out from Liverpool,
sea air and toast unlocked his appetite.
He took up eating then, at the age of ten–
too late to cancel out the malnutrition
of years and generations.
A
small man,
though a tOllgh one. He'll have needed a small coffin .
I didn't see it; he went to it so suddenly,
too soon, with both his daughters so far away :
a box of ashes in Karori Cemetery,
a waft of smoke in the clean Wellington sky.
Even from here it catches in my throat
as I puzzle over the Manchester street-plan,
checking the
inde~,
magnifying the net
of close-meshed streets in M2 and Mi.
Not all the city's motorways and high-rise.
There must be roads that I can walk along
and know they walked there, even if their houses
have vanished like the cobble-stones - that throng
of Adcocks, Eggingtons, Joynsons, Lamberts, Listers.
I'll
go to look for where they were born and bred.
I'll
go next month; we'll both go, I and my sister.
We'll tell him about it, when he stops being dead .
