1 hair taller than an exhibition

at Heathrow you leave
the iron bird exhausted
on the runway his heart and stents
his voice half-eaten by feathers

you promised to never
use the mini-bar

your Coventry room
is cleaned by a woman
lost in the woods
of the Hail Mary

she decorates the trees
with silver bees

you attend a church service
where a film of the world’s
strangest baptisms is shown

and then outside
a car show-room

meet the East European
rough sleepers and dream
they are governors of something
in white evening dress

flying in convoy
to their homeland

page 259

when a crayfish could feed 6 men

when a crayfish
could feed 6 men
my mother bought
an astrakhan coat
cross cut on the straight

like the Volga
it swam in temperatures
below—30

after the ice swallowed
her favourite horse my mother’s
astrakhan coat became smarter
and made decisions
like what she should wear

at times I believed the coat
was half animal half
native plant with my mother’s legs

and it seemed right that she bore
the angels of stillborn lambs
for the heavy fashion of Russia

yet though the coat
cracked the small change
it was when my mother’s money
stretched beyond the frontier towns

that she no longer wore
what after her funeral seemed
little more than a fleece

page 260

when we fly we are all homeless

like the doublings of a hare
Lenin appears as a rough sleeper
aboard Sturmovik IL2

turbulence lowers me
into the cockpit

Russia was someone
he used to know
now he has traded

the workers for the
kindness of vodka

in case of an emergency
we fasten our wire hoods
and turn off all personal lighting

the plane takes us through
the mesh bones of earth

Lenin scratches the iron
stain of industry
he has come to view

the world as a horse
with the same number of stars