From the recording Riversdale
A birth and conclusion poem: Riversdale begins by calling a vanished world into existence and ends by discovering that something of it has quietly survived. Its rapid succession of unlikely details eventually comes to rest with two small rabbits in a present-day room — ordinary objects that have somehow become the custodians of an entire place, family and time.
Lyrics
Riversdale
This is what I remember.
A boy on his bicycle with cardboard flags cut from a Corn Flakes box and pegged to the spokes—the budgie called Alec who laid an egg, then he was Alice—wet tea leaves poured into the soil to bring up giant worms—catching a pike and keeping it in a blue tub, watching it circle, leap, snap at my mother’s nose—
This is what I remember.
My father returning from a trip with two astronaut fancy-dress costumes; we thought he had been to the moon—a stone fight with a rival gang, part of my lip hanging off and me refusing stitches—my mother puzzled when I drank a whole bottle of cod-liver oil (you fool)—common lizards basking in the summer heat of our sandpit—a Saturday fate: the winning raffle ticket, a pair of Beatrix Potter rabbits—
This is what I remember.
Driving on a straight road cutting through the spongy bog, pinching holly with pliers at the roadside, hacking down a Christmas tree with a hatchet—my mother going ballistic at the children’s party: I pulled Santa’s beard down and revealed my father’s face. Ho, ho, ho!
(The year it snowed on Christmas Eve)
(The year it snowed on Christmas Eve)
I found the two rabbits when clearing out my parents’ house; they sit together in a box on top of a wine rack, in our living room, lopsided, surveying the room.
We call them Mr and Mrs Riversdale.
This is what I remember.
This is what I remember.