Salmon Run

Not far now. Wet silver
sometimes black and lightless
becoming copper, iron on our lips
 
we taste it. Home.
 
Over rocks, giddying water
fast and swollen like my belly
the urge to let go, let go
 
so strong
 
the magnetic undercurrent
of my beginning pulling on me
like a hook sunk deep
 
in my body
 
the river dragging us into dark
overhangs of reeds, grass,
sometimes I see a bird
 
watching us
 
hunger left far behind –
I have darkened, thinned
to this pulse – something quickened
 
something quickening
 
inside me, the urgency
greater now – here it is,
the taste of my arriving
 
and we are returning
 
to ourselves
in this gravel’s riffle
this tail-beaten redd
 
I am unravelling in my thousands.
 

Sue Proffitt

in collection Open After Dark, 2017, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-9068567-0-0

 
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Homecoming

The house won’ know you.
You think it will,
putting your key in the lock that sticks,
walking into the room you haven’t seen for months
but there’s a dark seep of wet on the ceiling
and what is that chair in the corner?
That was never there.
 
The hallway feels small – smaller than before
as if the house is pressing itself away from you
shrinking invwards, but you get through,
banging your bags against the walls
seeing out of the corner of your eye
the old photographs, those faces
blooming out of the ruins like pale flowers.
 
But it’s through the next door that you feel it –
something askew,
as if the whole room has shifted slightly
out of its body, not solid,
not quite sitting in its outlines
but dislodged, as if every single thing
knows itself watched and watches you.
 
You look round
but there’s a high whine in your ears
something off-balance that flickers
at the edge of your gaze
as if the sea is coming in
under the floorboards
like it did ninety years ago.
 
You will go up the stairs
not knowing when you open that door
who will be at the desk looking up,
startled. It will be dusk outside
again, the whole house lit up
your desk-lamp printing
another face on the dark window.
 

Sue Proffitt

in collection Open After Dark, 2017, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-9068567-0-0

 
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Father

I see him now
standing full-square in the kitchen
pressing the room back with his weight
his heavy-set exuberance.
Hit me here he’d say, feet planted apart,
pushing his stomach out. It wasn’t his belly
but his diaphragm he thrust at me –
who only came up to his chest –
that convex round of muscle,
confident as a tight-stretched drum.
Hit me here he’d order, so I would,
tentatively, not wanting to hurt.
I remember my fist on shirt,
the laundered, warm Old Spice smell of him,
the gin-and-tonic sweetness of his breath.
No! Harder! he’d laugh, and so it was
I pushed through my reluctance
like puncturing a skin
and punched with all my strength
again and again, feeling my knuckles land
on something smooth, hard as a shield,
hearing his laugh – my impermeable father,
his voice inside a fortress
and, watchful sentinel on the counter,
the never-empty glass of gin and tonic
keeping time.
 

Sue Proffitt

in collection Open After Dark, 2017, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-9068567-0-0

 
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Another Place

In this room time slows
to the drip drip
of tea, biscuits, pills
 
advancing trolley wheels
the discreet knock,
an endless bleep.
 
A torpor, thick and heavy,
anaesthetic, seeps through me
but not you.
 
You drag your distress
to the edge of the chasm
at your feet
 
over and over again,
waking me up to see you,
dark silhouette
 
framed in panic’s bright filaments.
My reassurances fall around you
useless as dead birds.
 
But there is one way
to bring you and me
to another place.
 
I take you to bed,
watch your slow collapsing
bone by bone,
 
a litany of whimpers
bringing you close to my side.
Now, sometimes,
 
we can sleep at last,
the wisp of your hair’s drift
on my cheek, your sour breath
 
suspended in the air
like a blessing.
I hold your hands. Wait.
 

Sue Proffitt

in collection Open After Dark, 2017, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-9068567-0-0

 
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