The Lifer

The officer brings the songbird in
like he’s carrying a lantern.
 
Conversation stops. The tutor looks up
and the wing cleaner lets go of his mop.
 
The prisoners surge into the corridor.
Talk spreads quickly from floor to floor.
 
They come down from the twos and threes
and crowd round the man whose bird it is.
 
For all their sighs, this opening out of their day,
all I see is a cage within a cage. I have to look away.
 
But you can’t deny the moment, that such
a small-boned thing can move them so much.
 
Later, on the path and in the bushes between
the education block and outer sterile zone,
 
there are wagtails, starlings and sparrows.
I think about the darkness that burrows
 
deep inside men’s skulls, how cruelty sleeps
just beneath the skin, how frustration weeps
 
into the taste of food and even the air,
how knives and forks are banned here.
 
I remember that they’d stood like boys
with open mouths and wondering eyes.
 
A bird might die for a man’s sins.
 

Pat Winslow

published in collection, Kissing Bones, 2012, Templar Poetry,
ISBN 978-1-906285-35-7

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1954

England was gravy, stew, brick alleyways,
dark shoes, hats and gloves, coal scuttles.
Post offices and railway stations were thick
with tobacco. Pennies clattered in toilet locks
and till trays. You could smell the crackle
of a thousand Bakelite radios warming up.
Every grin said Bisto, Oxo, Marmite, HP.
Every raincoat was bacon and strong tea.
A grocer in a tan cloth coat emptied potatoes
into paper bags, women wore scarves knotted
under their chins. Chiffon was a word you’d
never forget. Landfill was a word you didn’t
know yet. There were adverts on TV. Persil
washed whitest. The telephone rang sometimes.
The Ascot banged and rattled in the kitchen.
Colour was sudden and brilliant. Fruit Gums,
lipstick, a city bus looming through fog and
at 8:30 in the morning, your blood on the sheets
as the exquisite roar of milk filled your breasts.
 

Pat Winslow

published in collection, Unpredictable Geometry, 2008, Templar Poetry,
ISBN 978-1-906285-21-0

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Dear France

Dear France she said, as if it was someone
she’d loved once and perhaps in Whitsun
1953 it seemed that way with the lilac
and wisteria out and the sun on her back
and the surprise of calling cuckoos
in the chateau grounds above Amboise.
 
The carriage window was down. It was warm.
The train had pulled up short of the platform
and she had to jump with her bag and case.
The shadows were starting to slot into place.
It was dusk, but no one closed the shutters.
People were eating soup. The dark interiors
must have filled her with longing. Those rooms
with oak sideboards and vaisseliers, heirlooms
passed down through generations, a tall
horloge normande standing against a wall,
its slow tic-tac, the snap of a fresh baguette,
a white tureen, brown and crazed with heat,
spoons chinking against bowls, meat, garnish,
the smell of onions and a memory of polish.
 
She didn’t say who she was with or whether
she was visiting alone and why she’d never
been back since. She just picked up the bunch
of lavender she’d started cutting after lunch
and went indoors. Such a quiet shade of blue
we grow in England, it could quite baffle you.
 

Pat Winslow

published in collection, Kissing Bones, 2012, Templar Poetry,
ISBN 978-1-906285-35-7

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Scattering Ashes

It could almost be a Jack Vettriano painting,
you three on a Sussex beach casting slanting
shadows in the corrugated sand, the shallow
channels of water like platen glass, a blue
sky, fawn jackets, grey and cream trousers
reflecting in them, but for your step-father’s
sudden astonished gasp because a breeze
has come to lift the brim of his hat and seize
it, sending it scuttling and cart-wheeling
before him. He staggers around, flailing
his arms trying to catch it. He gets a touch
but it’s off again. He makes a sudden lurch
and grabs it, dusts it and looks up at you.
You notice the sea has wet his shoe.
Later, there will be a line of brine on it.
But now he’s putting his new straw hat
back squarely on his head and the sun is
winking like peppermints off his lenses
so you can’t see his eyes and your mother
says your sister would have found it rather
funny just now, wouldn’t she, in fact I can
just hear her beery laugh, can’t you? No, in
fact, you can’t. What you hear is radio
interference, bubbling voices just below
the surface, too many stations jammed
together in a high frequency waveband
and once again, the silence, that absolute
core you crave so much, is cancelled out.
The tide has turned, you want to say. Look
how far the sea is. Let’s stop and rest, take
some time to measure what’s been left,
the strange shapes a leaving makes, the gift
of grief which is not an obedient dog or child
or something to beat to a corner and scold.
Look. The ashes are refusing to disappear.
They keep blowing back in your face and hair.
They’re in the crosshatched years of your skin.
They’re in the ocean. They’re in the wind.
 

Pat Winslow

published in collection, Kissing Bones, 2012, Templar Poetry,
ISBN 978-1-906285-35-7

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