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She asks us to make sure
we properly close
the
toilet lid in case (it’s summer) the rats
come
up while she’s on holiday; but the flat’s
a
couple of floors up, the neighbours’ roses,
clematis
and ivy more likely to invade
— over
the balcony, through the doors.
It’s
there in the strangest things, this paranoia:
the
way she feeds the birds, or how she said,
“muss
zu lassen das die Ratten kommen
nicht
raus” like it was, “pass the marg”,
or
“good evening” and not some frigid symptom
of
a home plagued by the world in all its largeness.
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Lappen
the
dog, ears pointing stiff; brings up
the
lapis stone, easily describable —
not
like Blue John, whose purpled veins
is
the blood of those of us who live here.
Lappen,
a rag, a cloth, a scrap, a sop
for
history and words, a wipe
for
dust and soap — it’s not a
flannel
though
it’s disguised to be. An old
cotton
underskirt ripped into squares,
a
pair of knickers in a bath. We called it
flannel
but Lappen is truer; if we’d have known
we’d
have used it.
Keep
your flannel,
your
perfect carded square, give me
the
hare to run against, dog to be cared by,
give
me the stone against my throat.
Give
me the rag. By now, I have its shape.
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Gutter
I have marked a
doorway “vision”
on a map of my
house. I’ve named
rooms
‘people’ and
‘nature’, ‘apples’
and ‘light’. I can
tell you
there’s no guttering
here:
there’s nothing to
guide
the rain away,
nothing
to catch leaves from
trees that on my map
are the names
of windows.
And because of this,
I‘ve no sense of roof,
of capping
off.
Images fill my
landing,
squeeze under doors
I didn’t name –
there must
be
space between some
rooms
that poetry can’t
occupy.
And if a room is
full of ‘questions’ or
‘blind’,
‘fusing’
or ‘slow’, who could
think
of a channel to trap
them,
a roof to cap them
off,
when
‘questions’
and ‘blind’, when
‘apples’ and ‘song’
know outside these
walls there is ‘grass’,
and ‘deep’ and
‘sky’?
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from
Harnessing the Power of Grass
Grass looks out over
the short field
I
strop my edges blade against blade.
The
skin of my own.
I’ve
known many blades, some
fired
from minerals, cooled by rain.
Honed.
Taking me
down
at the stomach, the knees.
From
where I lay, I saw man walking
legs
sheathed in cloth.
I
strop my edges. Soon, they’ll cut through
fabric
and the tissue beneath.
*
Grass
sings to her roots
red
and yellow and pink and green –
He
thinks, man, these are the colours
of
air and water, of light and freeing –
but
before this, they were ours:
Our
blades are green, our lowly stems
the
red of poppies, pink of damask,
our
rhizomes white as exemption.
And
you, my loves, are palest yellow
like
the long memory of sunlight
from
a rainbow on a glacial floe.
*
Grass
sleeps and dreams of horses
The
horses come back.
Black.
Their mouths are bridled.
Their
shins lacerated from my edges.
Field
becomes desert.
I
am under here, three, four fathoms
of
sand. And the horses come back.
Desert
becomes ice-desert.
I
am seed and chaff in the melted core,
and
man, face like a horse, looks down.
Ice-desert
becomes town.
I
am on the brow of a hill. A horse walks.
Her
head hangs limply from her neck.
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