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Tidying the space he left felt like squeezing into a coat on a crowded train, all elbows and apologies.
The house had kept its scent of urine and its sense of him – his hard edges, his carpentry,
cupboards jammed with tins as if he was foraging for a winter harder than the north could give him.
When we’d stripped each room, - even the curtains, windows blank sockets for dawn -
there was nothing left but his gap-toothed Broadwood, that rig of bones
he tapped like a surgeon, every night, threads of Chopin drawn out from its white spine,
each vertebrae handled with a skill we’d never learn. He thought there was music for everything
but came round in the dull green hospital, lost for tunes to watch vacant-eyed old men by.
We piece together keys in the wrong places. In the mouth of the house we voice our awkward song.
I trampled ants for kicks on the quay at Dieppe, dawdling by the desk where they wouldn’t take yes for an answer; yes, it was our name and spelled just so – we shook our heads at Moor and Maud and Morden, dad traced phonetics in Oldham’s finest guttural.
Rope swung from the captain’s fist and flayed the water. I saw him shudder, troubled by a shift of air or a vision of our crossing: glower of thunder, the lurch and buckle of the ferry, a thick Alsatian with a face like Cerberus ushering us in to port
and I looked him in the eye, popped my bubblegum, a child from the underworld in red sandals and a t-shirt made by Disney, not yet ashamed by that curt syllable, locked, cold to the tongue, its hush of the morgue, not yet the girl
who takes the worst route home pauses at the splayed mouths of alleyways and looks straight past you as we kiss, as if to pick out small behind your left shoulder, the spindle of a shipwreck, prow to a far country.
I wish I’d been born in the dark. Not the punctured black of evening sky,
or the shadows in a lightless house by night, not a blindfold or a cave of bats,
the gloom of a closing storm, not even the dark behind your purple eyelids,
but true dark, the dark of the body inside,
an ocean floor without the green of ocean where I’d learn to feel properly –
tongue, hands, toes, even my eyelashes probing the air.
And when at last they hauled me out, a squinting, dazzled paleface,
sunshine would grate like sandpaper, I’d be split by light that cuts to the quick
and every night would dream my sightless dreams, each dawn a curtain.
Boys, staring through telescopes at all the constellations, would make me weep;
each tear the casting down of stones, waiting for a click that never answers.
Hold me, you said, the way a glove is held by water. Black, fingerless, we’d watched it clutch a path across the pond, never sure if it was water or wool that clung fast. The mills are plush apartments now, flanked by stiff-backed chimneys and you ache for living voices, the clank and jostle of machinery, for something to move in this glassy pool where once, you were the waterwheel, I, the dull silver it must catch and release as if it can’t be held.
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