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Alpine Hut Dix.
You’ve crossed the Pas de Chèvres, though it’s doubtful any goat is accomplished enough to descend the forty feet of steel steps to the glacier. At least three days without washing and only Swiss-bitter, herbal tea to drink yet you snuggle down deep under the communal duvet, try to keep your breath from freezing nasal hair to cotton. Nine men. Nine pairs of armpits and all those crotches with the risk of something which might creep out. Unseen, by the sun’s impartial eye, dreams shift, stretch beyond the silhouetted Matterhorn crouching like a secret under a gentian sky. A tenth man is there; is forever there. You can hear his dreamings if you open your mind, sense his breath crystallise to indoor snowflakes, taste the bile which rose in his throat that very last time and if you roll over in sleep, you may find yourself face to face with a blur of features you don’t recognise; it is then you know that you’ve climbed higher than the nimble, sure-foot chamois, much, much higher than you ever thought feasible.
first published in Watermark, Middlesex University Press, 2004 also published in The Interpreter's House, Issue 31, 2006
1976
I can’t slake the Severn’s thirst with bore-hole or Welsh water, no more than I can stop the tidal waves of bathers who, needing to cool-off, strip, leap like stampeding wildebeest into fluid oozing with effluent and never a word from you in Kurdistan.
If you drink from a spring shaded by a fig tree you would feel younger, more loving… but while shapes of buildings from Shrewsbury to Gloucester mirage in and out of sight I don’t know if you are alive to care; there’s still no word from you in Kurdistan.
When spirochaete death is reported, Britons are warned not to swim in rivers, streams, the Malverns spark, flicker, burn and every cricket pitch turns to brown. My hair reverts to blond again, skin colours up like ripe dates but nights are filled with sweat-terrors
hearing of bullets ricocheting into mosque, shop, child, traveller and the reservoirs writhe with gasping fish and petri-dishes colonise with rising numbers of pathogens in the River Severn all the way from Craig Goch to Chepstow while your face fades, your voice is silent in Arbil.
The lines quoted are by Gene Burns, ‘The Stuff of Myths’, The Atlantic 1999
This morning my window is a mouth; licking cinnamon from the sun chewing on the speech of leaves.
If I allow, it will swallow early birdsong drink the nectar from every flower; lavender, rosemary, honeysuckle, rose
and as the day passes it will fill my room with all the nutrients I need to breathe new life into the spaces between pulses.
When fireflies inscribe the dark with their indecipherable codes my window will blow kisses to the moon.
Someone else’s heart beats slow in the dark where I know hers did.
There’s no chair or cushion holding her warmth, no smudge of a fingerprint.
Dreams and sighs in the night belong to different lives, separated
by genes which don’t have anything in common with my mother, me.
Where my Babouschka sang love songs, lullabies with a tongue easy with language
not her native own, there is music I won’t hear from voices I will never know.
Other children. Other kinds of legacies.
But somewhere in the house that was her home, somewhere in the dark
there are sloughed fragments of my mother, my mother’s mother and one auburn hair, perhaps,
caught between the then and now curling up to reach out for familiar heartbeats,
the cry of a child in the night.
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