Buffalo Mossarella
by Polly Clark

(Take Me With You, Bloodaxe Books)

When I say that I tasted him
I mean that I knew the stale
baby-press of his mouth,
his cold breath, and the way
he scratched the cushion of his thumb
on his stubbled cheek.See —

how he leans in the litter bin,
his arm digging deep,
to feel among the cut of beer cans
the abominable plastic, the rub of old fat,
as if there should be flesh there,
something gentle to welcome him.

And then he finds it — the sundried tomato
and buffalo mozzarella sandwich
I had just one bite out of because I saw
the one thing that scared me most,
and I dropped my sandwich with its one
shell-shaped ticklishly damp bite out.

I didn’t think that a mouth
more silent than mine
would nuzzle where my lips had been
and bite out a shape to caress mine,
nibbling, delicate, not rushing at all —
and that someone else’s hunger

and sorrow and spit would devour mine.
When I say that I tasted him
I mean that the night shook me awake
and I saw the back of his head clearly
as he bent down into the darkness and shame
to find out the truth about me.

There are different ways to know a person; walk a mile in their shoes (ie, experience their life as they actually would), read their diary or question their friends. Failing that, you could eat their lunch. We get to know two people a little better in this poem by means of a sundried tomato and buffalo mozzarella sandwich; the poet who discards it and the man who makes a meal of it.

In the first line we are placed almost in the man’s mouth because taste is on the tongue. While we are immediately involved with his lips and cold breath, we have no idea if we should be enjoying the proximity because at this point we know nothing about him. But, bit by bit, the scene in front of us becomes clearer and more comprehensive. “I mean that I knew the stale/ baby-press of his mouth,” the poet tells us, which now relieves us of the idea of tasting “him”. But “stale” implies bad breath, or a mouth that is rarely, if ever, cleaned, and the words “baby-press” conjure the image of a man’s lips closing on something in an infantile way, perhaps like a baby on a nipple or a very small child on a spoonful of purée.

We are initially uncertain whether it is Clark’s own mouth that he presses against. (It is not appealing to think we might be sharing a romantic moment with the word “stale”.) And when she tells us she “knew . . . his cold breath” we wonder how close she actually got to him. It is only at the end of the first verse, when she mentions how he scratches his thumb “on his stubbled cheek”, that we realise the man is being studied — which implies distance and objectivity.

As the poem unfolds it becomes obvious that the man in question is a tramp — unless he’s an eco-conscious recycler of edible matter from public waste receptacles, who otherwise holds down a steady job and lives in the suburbs, from where he cycles to work every day, shaving only once a week to save water.

For the tramp, being unshaven is not a style choice, but a byproduct of living on the streets where shaving facilities are sadly absent. Which makes me wonder why, even if they refrain from looting dustbins for lunch, so many men with perfectly good bathrooms and access to razors favour perma-stubble. It looks unkempt, is painful to kiss, catches in the hair of the beloved like a wire dog brush, and indicates an indifferent attitude towards personal hygiene.

See “how he leans into the litter bin”, says Clark, and now we are reeling backwards from the man’s lips — that could have been kissing when his mouth was first mentioned.

We can easily picture the detritus that fills the litter bin, such as the “abominable plastic” which won’t biodegrade until we’ve evolved beyond the use of limbs, and cuts us when broken and sharp. However, if flesh should be there to welcome the tramp, perhaps it should be a well-roasted leg of lamb upon which his fingers alight, although the line “something gentle to welcome him” makes me think of soft, beckoning arms. If you have ever dared to put your hand into some dark rabbit hole, or gap in a wall where anything could be hiding to bite you, or slime you or sting you, then you know that stuffing your bare fleshed fingers into a public litter bin has to be even riskier.

At least this time the tramp finds the poet’s sundried tomato and buffalo mozzarella sandwich, which in fact, in essence, is still connected to the poet, because she took one bite before throwing it away, leaving both the imprint of her mouth and the idea behind the action. When the tramp bites over her original bite mark, it is an intensely intimate moment; the food is shared — tramp’s saliva meets poet’s saliva by buffalo mozzarella proxy. It is a union of sorts, and this idea is emphasised by the use of the words “nuzzle” and “caress” as the tramp eats what the poet has dropped.

And what made our poet drop her sandwich? She doesn’t tell us what she saw that scared her most; perhaps a wasp or a maggot, perhaps something that had nothing to do with the sandwich at all . . . but it doesn’t matter. For me, this poem is all about the idea of two mouths that would never meet in reality, being joined by a bite in the same sandwich.

In the last stanza it seems the poet might be dreaming of the incident — and finding it discomfiting — because she says “the night shook me awake”. Is the tramp real? Or is he the means by which the poet’s subconscious unearths her secrets for perusal? As the tramp bends down “into darkness and shame” it might be the subconscious of the poet that he rifles through as he explores the contents of the bin, or it might be his own shame in being homeless and hungry. Metaphor and reality are met in the fate of the sandwich.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk

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