Just Like That Poem by Nick Burbridge

My father tried to make
Sunday afternoons take shape.
He built theatres out of cardboard boxes
fixed with fairy lights and left me
to script plays with my swappets
while he scrubbed the oven
or got on with the gardening.

He spent one winter’s weekends
building a papier-mache landscape
on trestles in the garden shed;
when Christmas came he set me up on a stool
in the middle, with a transformer,
and three new Hornby trains
to run on the circular tracks.

We went fishing in the Arun
when the sun came out;
I crouched on the bank, threading lead,
while he put up his chair
by the car and practised speeches
on the redistribution of Health Service funds,
and waved when I caught something.

We fell out when I was fifteen.
I got home late, stoned.
He barked at me in his pajamas: Don’t stand there
like some demented Jesus, say something.
When he came to my bedroom to kiss me next morning
I rolled away. I heard him going downstairs,
honking and whistling as he wept.

He’s eighty-five now. We don’t see much of him.
But I think about his funeral.
It should take place in miniature
with a matchstick coffin and posed figures
on a plaster graveyard, water-coloured green.
I want to watch him watching
as they lower his body down.

And when he’s gone into the earth,
let him turn and catch my eye,
the way he did one night
when we both laughed at Tommy Cooper
playing Hamlet on a tilting ship,
and for a moment recognized each other,
in an open space together,