|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
She hitches up her skirt for the zoom lens to home in on the scar. I feel a livid echo
in my chest. Each tooth mark on her thigh’s a deep, red bead—much like the necklace
that you never bought, but which appears somewhere about my heart in sleep
and hardens there like tyre tracks in mud. She wears it well. I have a new respect
for sharks. Nods at the surfboard. No— it hasn’t put me off. I must not flinch
each time your silver car, its wide grill grinning swims out from shallows in this too small town.
The lilies are about to scream. It will be clear, strident like the call of white exotic birds who trail green tails in still, still waters.
Their lips are curled but florists’ scissors snipped their stamens out so all the guests in pristine suits can brush against them without risk.
The lilies are about to scream. Their mouths yawn; tongueless all the fire is gone. Permitted lilies scented to no end. Like yolkless eggs, tall candles without wicks. Satin will shrivel now the bells are mute.
The bridge is seventy this year. As a small boy you stood on the bank at the Gateshead side— were sure the bits begun at either end would fail to meet. You tell me this as we sit in a quayside cafe over toast. We giggle as you scrape another butter wrapper clean when one would do—knowing what Mum would say. The café is right underneath the bridge.
You’ve pointed out the office where you worked in ’51—before I met your mother. It’s all glass and flashness now, but nostalgia doesn’t tarnish in your case. You are as thrilled by the new as you are to show me the armada anchor pinned to the wall near the tucked-away almshouses or chance upon the corner where you parked your Riley.
Somewhere behind you is another bridge which spans a river very far from here. You were so nearly a statistic—they say each sleeper claimed at least one life. Squinting into the sun we head back to the car park, curb the urge to spit at any Nissans (half in jest). As I glance across the tarmac to the river, an ugly vessel trails a wake of gold.
in collection In the Dangerous Cloakroom, 2006, Shoestring Press, ISBN 978 1 90488; previously published in New Writing: Poetry and Prose, 2001 Shoestring Press, 2001 ISBN 1 899549 64 1; and in Prop
Your youngest brother will miss school on Monday. He’ll be screened at the haematology clinic to see if his bone marrow matches yours.
Your Mum’s floral notepaper, her ordinary script are at odds with the stark news: this week what was suspected was confirmed.
At sixteen you threw off school for college and the uniform you’d complemented with a nose stud. I’d turned a blind eye while the hole was raw.
I picture the slantwise scrawl of your essays —grade A, but indecipherable, at times, as the squiggles on a heart monitor. Recall that day
you shaved your head. When I last saw you at the station you tugged up a fading T-shirt to shock me with your newly pierced navel.
Grey cells of cloud invade a clear stretch of sky as I wander back from posting the book I hope will make you laugh.
They had looked at me oddly in Smith’s as I scanned each page anxious to ascertain what the heroine’s father died of.
Angina, in his sixties. At university your final year. I bite my lip, try for another adjective. And focus on the narrowing patch of blue.
|
|
©
of
all poems featured on this site remains with the
poet |
