Adam Elgar

Elders: Vernon and Phoebe

They were the chatelains of slant, moist acres.
Pasture, orchard, bean-rows, slate-tiles, granite.
Counterpointed comfort and endurance.
“Shoot the menfolk,” he would say.
“Ensures a happy family.” Pheasants, he meant,
and practiced it until his aim deceived him.

She terrified our daughters, glinting
in her seventies with the spring
and toughness of the farmer’s wife
we’d never known, who roared her jeep
through narrow lanes with five sons
bouncing in the back.

They believed the wedding of a minor royal
merited champagne, that boarding schools
made men of boys, that women stole
men’s jobs, and yet we loved them:
for saying what they meant, and meaning it;
for standing in as parents; for the valley, woods
and angled drizzle that seemed part of them.

Later, they withdrew to a single small-town story,
with the essential glimpse of grazing cows
from one back window.
He said, “You either go on, or you go,”
his hand peat-mottled like his single malt.
And after Phoebe had diminished,
grey-skinned, scant-haired, into her own shadow,
Vernon took his own advice.

The Great Wall of Tapestry

I know it’s up there somewhere, deconsecrated
in the dark, a scaffolding for spiders, jammed
among the customary attic junk to straddle
the disputed line between nostalgia and the axe.

My grandad’s tapestry-frame was distilled
retirement, the taut façade of canvas
that he pierced and tugged far better than a pub
or long walks with the dog for giving him remission
from the wife he’d worked to make so brittle.

Sometimes he’d lean to one side of the frame,
screw up his eyes and stretch his mouth to smile.
“Snippets?” he’d ask. Then Nan would read him
bits of news selected from her crackling paper.
That way they looked as if they felt at ease,
as if they both believed he gave her something.

I didn’t know another man who sewed. Nor did I know
a man so short, thick-set and Roman-nosed.
All these were simply icons of a narrow life.
I didn’t know it wasn’t art, the rise and fall
of his bright sliver stitching Tutankhamen in old gold,
a gaudy map of Kent, and a mediaeval queen
(the sparkle in each eye a neat white nub of wool,
a hint at life that seemed a miracle to me).