last update:
20th Jun 11
photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
e-mail Susan
and in the shop…
collections –
“House of Tongues”,
“De-iced”
and
“Night Toad: New & Selected Poems”,
Bloodaxe;
“The Clever Daughter”,
“Open Diagnosis”
and
“Singing Underwater”,
Faber;
stories collection –
“Roll Up for the Arabian Derby”,
bluechrome;
novels –
“Little Thing”
and
“The Key”,
Faber;
memoir –
“Driving My Father”
Faber and Basic Books, New York
as translator –
“Cold Spring in Winter”
(Valérie Rouzeau),
Arc
Pistachios
A darkening January afternoon.
I stand at the kitchen window absently eating
pistachios left over from Christmas; outside, a blur
of hydrangea as I slide
the edge of my nail between the curved wings of a shell.
They say sex is a kind of dying.
At a certain time of life –
you never know exactly when
or where or how fast – sex leaves.
It’s like a tide
slowly leaving a beach, imperceptibly exposing
rocks like bony fingers, hidden tongues of sand
and sometimes the rank on improbable rank
of mussels close as bristles –
millions of them, blue-black,
crowding the surface – like the teeth of combs
or petrified fur
that teases the soles of your bare feet
raw – a whole glittering expanse
of blue-black points, and, hidden inside,
that throb of flesh. As the tide recedes
a million brittle mouths lean shut.
A skeleton hydrangea bowls across the dusk,
shivers. I crack another shell open,
feeling saliva spurt
at the green thought
of pistachios, salt on my lips, shells light as paper.
Susan Wicks
in collection, House of Tongues, 2011, Bloodaxe,
ISBN 1-852249-06-4
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