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KC singing from the television in the next room, requests that I shake my booty, on a morning with a flat white sky; almost windless.
I try it. Nothing moves. Everything is welded these days, crying for a spray of WD40.
I swivel my hips — my booty. My ankles do not wish to follow. I shake my arms and they ache. Halfway up the stairs KC’s calls to shake my booty, are a buzz;
a ghost noise in my head, as I return to the safety of my chair in my study, with its window on a wood, and the fistfuls of March Photinia blossom; a thousand green white petals perhaps, in each cluster that is froth, hazy bunches of cauliflower heads that are starting to dance, to shake their booties, shake, shake, shake, as the rain begins.
They sample mead on rainy evenings, aging monks who tend hives and walled gardens. I can see one, his rump filled habit overlapping a simple bench on a stone floor, an open Psalter balanced on his lap.
Outside, the cold fog of Dartmoor rolls downhill, soaks darkness, blurs silhouette vegetation and stains green lawns with drizzle.
I’m not a monk. I have but a passing interest in bees. I hardly know the taste of mead, and never share spiritual thoughts,
yet I recall the Psalter, a thin red book of psalms still associated with old skin on a white pinched nose, stale paper, rancid with the odor of dead priests.
This is what I came from, Thursday choir practices with the Reverend Treble, groaning god words, psalms as foreign as French from a flaky Psalter, praying for my voice to break.
When she passed away I left our house untouched crumbs staled cats went unfed curtains held back the light
When I returned the impression of her remained the weight of pregnant torso pressed deep in the top sheet deep whirlpool of hips small indentation of head
where stone-faced ambulancemen had laid her lifting her from fetal curl beside our bed
air was colder just her curves sculpted in linen and a searing memory of death there a great pink dome of our unborn child piled high
the bed had become a shrine the sheet my Shroud of Turin that I would not touch or wash like celebrity kiss on a nervous cheek
Mussels on rocks below a fresh tide that is how I see my street on days like this shutters and doors some open some bolt shut like those shells clammed or parting one by one to taste salt against their orange innards
let mussels be oysters then I may think myself a pearl nestling in the open doorway of this house and it jolts I know being a street like your street with clouds like your clouds on a changeable day
time is rolled back and back but the light is my light and your light this could be where you were born almost three hundred years later same roofs red brick chimneys and gables reaching for your ancestors
unhurried like a rock pool between the tides I am a pearl attending my lace below web spun windows using the light
quietly breathing among gray green and red anemones where two little shrimps hug the sandy floor and a small fish syphons water in its narrow crevice
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