Childhood

I am the attic and the island,
fir-tree brushing the window, shipwreck,
whalebones at the tideline washed clean.
 
I am a mattress of fresh straw,
a hide of interwoven branches
where the stars come in.
 
I am the hand-turned bowl
with a grain like satin,
filled to the brim with warm froth.
 
I am cheese and no cheese.
In my salt-stained tatters, hairy as a monkey
gibbering from a deep cave
 
I call myself Ben Gunn. Or Peter, goat-boy;
Clara at the cliff-edge while her wheelchair
buckets down into the ravine.
 
Each evening when the mountains turn to flame
I am talking parrot, I am, I am
sixty men on a dead prosthetic limb.
 
I am buried treasure, undiscovered, homesick
exile in a polished room,
my cache of rolls inedible as bricks.
 
Somewhere a blind grandmother
lights her driftwood beacon on the beach
ever less often, no longer hoping for my return.
 

Susan Wicks

in collection, The Months, 2016, Bloodaxe,
ISBN 978-1-7803729-0-7

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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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The Clever Daughter

     after a misericord in Worcester Cathedral
 
For six hundred years I have travelled
to meet my father. Neither walking nor riding,
I have carried your heartbeat to him
carefully, to the sound of singing,
my right hand growing to horn.
 
Your head droops in a stain of windows
as we come closer. The man who made us –
hare and girl – will barely recognise
the lines his blade left: six centuries
have fused us to a single figure.
 
Clothed and unclothed, we shall reach him,
netted at his cold feet. But as he unwraps us,
my cloak-threads snagging and breaking,
I shall release you, your pent flutter
of madness. And we shall see you
 
run from his hands and vanish,
your new path opening the cornfield
like the path of lovers, the endless journey
shaken from your long ears, my gift to him
given and yet not given.
 

Susan Wicks

in collection, The Clever Daughter, 1996, Faber and Faber;
reprinted in collection, Night Toad: New & Selected Poems, 2003,
Bloodaxe, ISBN 1-852246-36-7

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Branches

I saw my father and mother standing
in a pond, against sunlight on rushes,
my mother’s thin arm reaching
from between the small suns of water-lilies,
and saw that a spider
had strung threads from my father’s knees
to glitter out over the water;
that their bleached bones had hardened
in the green on green of circles
and the paired blue wings of dragonflies,
the minute dance of egg-laying.
And I was glad
that they still stood there, sun-dry and reaching,
and I was grateful
that no one had needed to bury them,
shut them out of all that light.
 

Susan Wicks

in collection, Singing Underwater, 1992, Faber and Faber;
in collection, Night Toad: New & Selected Poems, 2003,
Bloodaxe, ISBN 1-852246-36-7

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