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featured poet – Angela Dove

Barbara’s House

Imagine your garden now, open to every
rose-sniffing tourist, pressing themselves
against your studio glass, just as you left it,
the packing cases, fragile, this way up,
your leather cap and overalls iced with plaster dust.
Then I imagine you lost your grip
on a careless cigarette the night of the fire,
but your arthritic hand grabs
my pen and scrawls across the page,
enraged. Go on, put me straight!
Take me up the lip of the stair and lead me through
the different chambers of your life, this house
an empty nautilus. We look out at the waves
lapping St. Ives, and you, so fond of pronouncements
about art, talk about the giant light that prises
the lid off Carbis Bay, but all I see are small children
wriggling on the beach like bait.
Let’s share whisky and you can tell me how your triplets
have grown. My god, how they can eat!
and how tomorrow you’ll banish them away
to boarding school, and then you’ll work, work, work.
 
We watch a delivery, a hundredweight of scented
African teak. You take my hand to feel the grain,
the rush beneath of undiscovered shape.
And out the corner of my eye I see the piece
you call Three Forms, three polished marble eggs
rocking themselves to sleep in this tricky light.
Imagine how you ached so much to own this house
that just before the hammer fell, you fainted
to frustrate the underbidder, who relented.
Tell me, is it all tallied up now, written on the slate?
Your work, this house, the knapped flint walls,
the carefully curated photographs, Cape Primroses
setting seed along the paths, the silver bleat of children
floating away high over the garden like lost balloons.
 

Angela Dove

in collection Cabinet of Wonders, 2002, Vernier Press, ISBN 1898825 06 8

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