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EYES TO THE RIGHT, NOSE TO THE LEFT     I had heard wrong Someone was weeping   *   But I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from  The expression took me back to my childhood and an Eagle Eyes action man who had a little serrated switch at the back of his head You moved your hand against the mechanism bedded into the fuzz of his crew cut and there — the eyes moved To the left, to the right You dressed him in his combat gear You undressed him and redressed him in another kind of camouflage  He was your brother’s doll When you wanted him to play with Sindy something went wrong with the proportions: Sindy’s huge head and breasts and feet that looked like they had been bound, did not play well alongside him They each came from a different universe Her long nylon locks, his blonde fuzzy head It made sense to keep them apart   *   In error, on my eleventh birthday an elderly relative had given me a book of short stories It had been an honest mistake, but the stories were not meant for a child There was a picture of a doll’s house on the front Unlike Sindy and Eagle Eyes, the dolls in the book were designed to copulate All the little fitting together pieces of plastic   *   I remembered when my daughter was only two how, we had flown from right to left across the world, and how in the dark, looking down from the plane windows, all we could see beneath us were the blazing fires, oil on water, as we crossed the Gulf   *   I remembered, as every day I remembered, the teacher, the line of her make up, and the dirty blue of her skirt as she pressed herself against me  Everything came thick and fast I remembered the girl at school who had been on ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ I’d written to go on the show too I wanted to be an astronaut, light, light as air My friend came to school wearing her badge Jim Fixed It For Me