John Stammers Sands

First let me say this: my father never lied.
So it seems strange to me now and yet more obvious in a way
to speak out what happened that day, a day untouched by colour
in the indifferent mustering of what sun there was.
The stinging wind would blow sand in your nose
and in your eyes so you would look as if you’d been crying
(which you definitely hadn’t been at that age),
or off the raked roof of Sand Dunes, the bungalow we’d rented
for a damp few days in a wet approximation of a place.

That day, I look into the lipstick-red telephone box,
he presses button A and something drops.
His voice seems to stray beyond it,
beyond our playground crazy-golf scene;
his eyes follow. He throws his head back, grins
then laughs that rude word. The other end, I cannot hear,
but he turns and clocks me watching him:
the smile straightens, a crease cuts itself into his forehead.

'Nothing. Just sand in his eyes from kiddie-golf’,
I later hear him tell my mother
in words culled of sense as if mustered by the wind.
But today – long since everything shifted
like a downslope in the dunes
when one foot slips one way and the other
takes its own insane ellipsis, meets only the elision
of what’s solid, what falls away –
what I can say is: go a few moments back on that day
when the rain iterated itself to more rain as we trudged,
two half-soaked conspirators in just what, I didn’t know.

We walked back down our lane I’d never seen before
under the fractious wind that concerned itself
merely with trying to blow the roofs off the bungalows,
but wasn’t able to (just), as my mother,
eyes slitted against the air, looked at me,
looked at my father and asked what the matter was
because I looked as if I’d been crying,
which I definitely had not been.