Compiègne Forest

It was where we walked, not knowing it then,
for the last time, following the lane
 
from St-Jean-aux-Bois as it narrowed
between trees, its green spine flowering once
 
into a glade where at your demand
I lay along a felled beech while you paced
 
and muttered – it was where you tried to take me
for the last time on camera
 
but it was impossible, too much had gone.
We went on, reached the carrefour des amoureux
 
and said nothing;
                                    this forest is cut with crossroads
each with a name, the post at each nub
 
sculpted at horseback height into a finger
pointing the way back
 
so the huntsman could never get lost,
no matter how deeply drawn in
 
by the shape, the promise of deer
between the trunks, within his sights, eluding him.
 

Caroline Price

First published in Stand vol.15(3) 2017

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Silk

For those weeks the houses belonged to
the women, in April when sun had warmed the air
inside to a constant degree and the floors had been
swept scrupulously free of dust and debris
and they had laid out their simplest, cleanest
clothes to wear and stopped cooking with garlic
 
while the men stayed clear; later they would have
their role, knocking out pipes and keeping the dogs
away and the cockerel and chasing fowl from the doors
so no sound or whiff of another creature might penetrate
to the rooms where the cages sat, criss-crossed
with supports, crammed with mulberry leaves
 
but for now they hung in the background and watched
as their wives moved slowly as queens
through the conferred distinction
of their houses, the cotton pouches of eggs tied beneath their clothes
bumping gently against breasts and thighs –
imagining the weight of those little bags
 
in their own hands as they waited, avid
for the moment of hatching, knowing so well
the voracious appetite that came after, the sickly-sweet
odour of saliva filling nostrils
and mouth and throat, the tenacious grown worm
drawing steadily out of itself its miracle.
 

Caroline Price

3rd prize, Bridport Prize 2016;
First published in Bridport Prize Anthology 2016

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How I came to propose to my first husband

It took an accident, a hundred yards of roadworks
on the northbound 74 and a traffic light on red
that you said you never saw, swore it wasn’t
on at all, it was so dark, so still and dark
and we were halfway north to where I lived
and you were driving – though it was my car
I’d let you drive, it was so very late and dead
November, starless, no-one on the road
but us, the only light our light, no world outside,
no watchers; even the moorland sheep were sleeping.
I never thought we’d come this far
but closeness has its own momentum: even I
was getting drawn in and when the spot of red appeared
it seemed quite distant still and though you didn’t brake
I never dreamt you wouldn’t stop and so
my scream came out too late, came as
an afterthought; you were talking still, fired up
by what we were creating and when we hit the barrier
it was like an exclamation mark in the middle
of your sentence, crumpling metal and then
a tumble of applause as bollard
after bollard hurtled past, as we skidded to a halt
and sat for an aeon without breathing before we
pushed wide our doors and stepped out
into the silence, the black northern silence
with its sharp tang of sheep, the cotton-grassed bog,
the high plateau, the wind that blows at night
and turned to face each other across the collapsed bonnet
and I approached you then and held you in my arms.
 

Caroline Price

First published in Ambit Aut. 2014

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Summer night garden

Outside, night has shaken its sleeve.
Moths mob the streetlamp,
dozens of tiny mandibles tear and munch.
The Montgolfiers of the dusk
have been tricked away, replaced
by the moon’s full, stippled grapefruit.
It balances on the wall at the garden’s end,
almost within reach. Look –
you start to say, and at the same moment
a fox appears, picks its way along the wall
through ivy and ivy-leaved toadflax
and enters the moon
and stops, stands inside it
like an outline of a fox, a weather vane
that on the current of our indrawn breath
turns its head towards us – at that,
you’d whisper if you dared make a sound, at that.
 

Caroline Price

First published in The London Magazine June/July 2015

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