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Looping the Yarn
There's a click clack click clack , hundreds of years away. A woman knitting as she wound through the lanes
hurrying to finish a pair of Jersey hose in time for the next Southampton shipment.
Part of her had worked itself in as she plied the yarn: grainy heat from her palms, spores of hair, the underlying
percussion of her heartbeat seeped into the raw fibre with salt-blue particles of the thrumming tide.
As the hose were eased onto Queen Mary's feet softly past the cleft of her ankles
a murmur of sheep strayed through the window from flocks grazing on the banks of the Nene.
And the hills unravelling frost and steep shadows broken by luminous spills
of green breathed the light of the dawn the hour the stitches were cast on.
And the wind which shook the tips of the grasses flickered the walls of the castle keep
was the wind fomenting the mouth of the estuary billowing the sails of laden ships.
As the hose were unfurled over Mary's calves, gently, gently up her wan thighs, and then fixed with a payre of greene silke garters
and as she leaned her neck across the block and blood splashed her white hose filled her shoes of Spanishe leather
there was the click of a stranger hundreds of miles away, looping the yarn over and under. Clack.
We Start Here
I love the way your chest hollows under your dressing-gown; the hair like grass on still dunes.
How when you look at me there's a dance brewing as if Ry Cooder's on the terrace in a white suit and black shirt.
That time I slipped on the wet tiles - you came running, your heart on the verge of a kaleidoscope storm … But what if
I asked you, three times a day, to shake off sloth, plump up the interior, roll back the carpet to the hills, to the river's hidden currents?
Or if I said put your hand on the beginning of the world and I'll put mine on the seat of contradictions
when you're drinking coffee from your yellow cup? Your cigarette papers on the cloth, your red lighter, behind you a vase of white lilies.
Little by little and all at once, we fold back the skin, show how to travel.
If I could say here and here and here is where your tongue should hover, your thoughts glide to the edge
as if we were star gazing, as if we were trying to judge the distance of a leap
between planets … a good place to start would be the table, with the cups, the lilies.
She’ll ride in from the Ice Mountains, mists dragging her rough cloth where she's concealed a purse of coals to trade for whisky, a tot of milk. Steam still rising off her pony, I'll smooth clean sheets for her, shake out a duvet.
There'll be hammering across the street, voices and music from a radio as she stands in the middle of the room and we converse with signs. A gesture comes to mean the laundry, bitter herbs, desire for chestnuts.
Not everything will be easy: her toilet habits, her neglecting to flush; the way she messes up the towels, shares my jewellery - and when friends drop in makes such complicated drinks (as if it were they who'd trekked miles across snow plains)…
Some days I'll miss the instant foods, the shelf life of a few minutes; hours carefully cordoned off with a rush in between which keeps things moving. She has no signs for tired or late. We wake in a loose expanse of trust,
studded with light and sudden winds which blast the roof or spread the pollen. I start a thought and keep crossing back for a set of instructions, a dropped notebook: as if I was charting a lost self
Two china geese on the tiled wall flying to somewhere like far off Ottawa or one of the Great Lakes of skittering reeds where a hand would pass like shade over the surface. A good sort of hand for ruffling a wing, like the hand of our father in gentler mood, plenty of hot water and a glass of sherry. Him lying there, soothed inside himself; the pine’s silt needles scratching the window. My sister and me perched on the bath, stealing glances. Such a pale sort of thing, full of secrets. Surely it wanted to tell us something in a voice that was beckoning under the water with whispers around it. I imagined a wily song, an ocean of living things, pulled by currents, remembering tides. To think it had held one half of us suspended like geese in mid-flight; we might never have arrived in our blue feathers: imagine us frozen there - the place of shadows we had to cross to be scooped up, wrapped in our mother. Tentacle, sacks and limpid spine, water lapping the rough hairs.
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