Passenger

What stuck in my mind was the x-ray
of a hand of teeth gripping the skull.
 
What stuck in my head was a broken carat
of windscreen glass, crowned in secret
 
in a shrink of scar. Then seventeen years
until at last it chose to leave me here,
 
a hotel above grey-washed Toronto.
When I lifted my hand, it fell, a diamond
 
from the devil’s spittoon, onto the crested paper,
the nailtip of a stalactite breaking.
 
Did I feel alone without my tough glass star,
its chunk of crystal shining by the bone?
 
It had brought me more darkness than light
so, for all our long companionship, I let it go.
 
If we meet again I shall set it to burn
until the prints peel from my fingers,
 
and the streetlights paw at the night, shiver
on and off, and the neighbours
 
wake, cricked in a strobe of doubt.
After seventeen years it worked itself out.

Judy Brown

in pamphlet collection, Pillars of Salt, 2006, Templar Poetry;
first published in Magma, Issue 34, Spring 2006

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A Message for the Detective Inspector

In your labs they can cut down teeth like trees,
read the earth’s long spin in their rings.
They’ll need to. Because all you have
is a jaw’s perfect arch, broken to hardcore –
one scant measure of my bone and enamel.
 
If there’s a way to deduce who I was,
I’ll trust you to find it. Remember, Detective Inspector:
a love bite is only a suck, not a bite.
Even if you’d caught him next day early,
before the bruise blurred out like an old tattoo,
 
believe me, you couldn’t have checked off my teeth
on his neck: incisor, canine, pre-molar, molar.
But you know where they keep the stories of teeth;
and you’ve come here with the handful of relics
your sniffer dogs pawed up on wasteground.
 
By the time you find me, it’s twenty years back.
I’m sixteen, at the hospital, the consultant
deciding the fate of my wisdoms.
You’ll see how he braces my head,
how the x-rays circle my mouth like planets.
 
He shows me his work ’ a long strip of film
with the teeth fogged in white on the stock.
Soon you’ll be sliding it out from my card file.
My first good piece of jewellery. Don’t worry.
You’re very, very warm. You’ll know me.

Judy Brown

published in Stand, Vol. 10(1), Spring 2011

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Spoils

On the town beach
the spring waves had strewn
jellyfish, hardening now
 
to misspent slate-blue coins.
In the huge divide
after high tide and during
 
the sea’s long pulling-back,
they moved from plasma to leather,
nudged by dogs.
 
A storm brought medusae
to the harbour this autumn.
They inhabited water
 
as tissue-paper hearts, pulsed
in wobbling peristalsis.
So the wall-captured water
 
was haunted by ghost-floats –
lilac, mushroom-capped –
nosing at ropes.
 
There is no beach here
for the sea to reverse its tall
gravity and cough them up
 
to dry to a tangle of coloured thread.
I had knelt on concrete
to see them better
 
when the third wave gift
came. I leaned hard on air
to pilot him in –
 
scented with sewage
and weed, a small plastic bear,
his snapped arm emptying out its sea.

Judy Brown

published in Stand, Vol. 10(1), Spring 2011

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Unfamiliar Festivals

They know someone’s moved in,
my neighbour says, and there’s talk
at the bedehouses. Plus
the Saturday kids keep an eye.
I buy bread full of local air,
flinch when the assistant says
There’s better weather in London
than here. I crochet under the gaze
of people passing my window
on the churchyard path.
When I enter the transept
a volunteer asks: It feels homely
doesn’t it? And so it should.
I live under its bristly skirts,
watch at its well-dressings,
their skies a tessellated fabric
of blue petals, feathered
and overlapped like a bird’s
immaculate breast. At the carnival
I buy a strip of raffle tickets,
the prize a pair of stripy socks.
Are you a local girl, the man asks.
Yes, I am, I say, hoping to prove it
with my pound coin, which he palms,
his eyes already travelling on.

Judy Brown

in anthology, Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets,
2010, Bloodaxe

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