Lines from the Lateral Canthus

of the human eye are called crow’s feet
already by the thirteen-hundreds
 
and are known besides as witch’s feet
not because witches are old
 
but because she’d keep foot-of-crow
to cast death spells as if death
 
didn’t come readily without her curse.
It came in the terrain of forests
 
and deep valleys in Vietnam marked
Crow’s Foot, full of tight spaces
 
for ambush, and enemies of a popular
symbol of peace gave the name
 
to that, though there’s nothing in it
of ragged talon and it’s spared
 
no-one a slow ageing. Battle fine lines
if you must with fillers, Botox,
 
peels and laser resurfacing. And yet
studies have found a smile
 
rated more authentic with crow’s feet
than with none, and the face
 
itself more intelligent, more pleasing.
Ask a witch. She won’t hear of
 
electric remedies for eventual death
and our notion of chemical ones
 
for flaws left by the habit of laughter
is what wrinkles up her grin.
 

Rosemary Norman

in collection Solace, 2022, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-915553-07-2

 
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For Example

Let me explain. What we call one another
is a disturbance in ourselves, settled
 
in the world. Take a poem of my own
in the voice of somebody we might say
 
being careless, thinks he’s Jesus. It’s a man
though I’m a woman. He could be mad
 
but he’s himself and knows it. And then
not invented, real this time, a man
 
next to the wall in a packed, half-lit room
who fans himself with his hat. Shadow
 
opens and shuts neatly behind him,
like a butterfly with one wing but entire –
 
he was a black man and close in tone
to his shadow in that room with no edges.
 
My first man (white? mad?) sees his own
disturbance match as it must, in part
 
at least, Jesus’. He has been born, will die
and why not rise again as if he were
 
a shadow on a wall who’d keep time
as the Saviour fanned himself with his hat.
 

Rosemary Norman

in collection For Example, 2016, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-910323-59-5

 
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I might

I might
       with a blow to the head
come to believe
       what’s good for me, feel
what I ought, be
       the widow for example
of a soldier.
       I’d raise a girl who
can’t grasp
       ‘never’ and a boy
he never saw
       though I’m ambivalent
at best about armed
       conflict and its outcomes
both the vengeful
       and the mawkish. To be
ringed with smiles
       here in a print dress,
against the odds
       duly recovered from my
blow to the head,
       is insufficient comfort.
 

Rosemary Norman

first published in The North no. 55, January 2016;
in collection For Example, 2016, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-910323-59-5

 
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Italics

They are for schadenfreude,
mea culpa, merde,
whatever isn’t yours, but slips in
among round, upright words
because there is no other way.
 
Even in English, you quote
words in italics
and do not endorse them,
least of all if the story
is all theirs and nothing matters
but the long fol-de-rol
out of your childhood that has
followed you forever, or the
please, please, that never rises
as high as under your breath.
 
Italics is as skin
is to clothing or as innards
to your skin.
 
The language of the pigeons
is italics.
Ol’ bah-st’d, they coo
outside my father’s window
and he knows it’s breakfast
once more and he’s not dead.
 

Rosemary Norman

first published in The SHOp, no 21, Summer 2006;
in collection Italics, 2010, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-907356-12-4

 
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