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Experience

The woman let off Death Row walked through a gorge
of chaotic limestone left by meltwater
and saw men everywhere.

They were climbing the steep and overhung sides.
Their feet flexed in thin shoes, toeing
crevice after crevice.

Their hands pried the split crag for brokenness.
They hung
and carefully worked out each nodule of rock

rejecting the frailty of this or that stone,
clicking in the knot
that would hold them from falling back to the passage.

She ignored arrows, made her own path
through tall-stalked, small-

headed ferns and young ash,
past a feral goat, newish horns knuckling up,

across cinquefoil-buttered grass, near-invisible swellings
of bluebell seed, a memory of leaving home–
or maybe a promise.

The climbers weren’t enjoying the view.
They climbed for the sake of the stone. One stopped
in a patch of sun, refusing to carry on

trusting the handshake of rock and rope
though below each man another looked up
holding a thin string.

She was looking for innocence
like an older woman standing over her young husband
allowing an undoing of long hair.

first published in Poetry Wales, 2008 and featured as poem of the day on Poetry Daily, August 26th 2008

Once Troublesome

‘Let them call her a wicked old woman! she knew she was no such thing.’ Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent

It isn’t New Year yet so Happy What?
Till then, it’s Boxing Day every morning.
Empty bags hang off the radiators.
Chilly: hot
                     cold
                                  Cordelia position.

                     Did it mean
we didn’t love each other
that morning he gave me up
though that same night he said, Let’s marry?
            My striped dress hung
                  along my body
                          bounced
                     boldened
                 bitmapped
my abdomen as I walked, a balloon
                      sinking back down
                         its own string
                   after the decision.
The baby would have had to sleep in a drawer.
                                   Immortalists
(not you who refuse to believe improbable notions)
think:
        the smallest cell refuses to die
        in its everness.
Now I live in an attic
garden is the chewed melon skin of sky.
Old bins, old books. Death’s hardly ethical
in the light of such continuity. Last week,
the CEO of a charity named in my will
wrote to suggest ways to retrieve what I’ve lost.
Look, Christmas photos
          of others’ other
                     children. After
                                  Pocoyo, Juggling Balls.

First published in The London Review of Books, 1 Nov 2007

Names

Endpaper, Scissorsmile, Leatherface,
Filetongue, Veinlady, Spiderheart,
Shadowmother, Otherwhichway
Theonewhotoldmenotto
say again

Greeter, Grider, Grattern, Grusset, Grone,
Grold, Grutter, Gretaphor, Grite,
Gramiscary, Grimmortal, Grash,
Greccessary, Greath,

Greymother, Bloodholder, Winesmile,
Petra Genetrix, History Shell,
Tellus Mater, Heartroot, Woman Book,
Theonewhotoldmewhatto
say again

Reconstructive Fortressing

They were moving about the rooms, two men.
My daughter said, I don’t want to live with them.
No, no, I said, they will live here alone
if they buy our place. We will have gone.

Do you remember that large patch of green
I called the country? That’s where we will be.
I’ve been wearing this flat for far too long.
It’s dark though I’ve accessorised it in turquoise.

It works best when my skin is palest in winter.
In summer it makes me look tacky. I am ready
to invest in a house as well-fi tted as a bra,
none of that faux leopard skin, no balconettes.

How to explain this perfectly reasonable reason?
From her Juliet balcony, she squints at the Eye,
a toy Big Ben fixed, neat, inside it.
She is going to have to give up her view.

First published in PN Review, vol 32, no1, Sept-Oct 2005
Stretch of Closures, Shearsman Press

Lost Child

Scrape the ditch that takes Hob’s Moat
to Hatchford Brook. Look through oak roots,

the horse field, uphill to Elmdon.
Is she hiding behind that sky-blue Lexus?

Shout towards the airport. Planes rise
and fall as if sky were a shaking blanket.

Up there, the air hostesses smile.
Inflate your own life-jacket first.

The small original airport building stands
apart, a mother at a school gate.

Pearl was playing quietly alone.
My ear is like a shell the wind swept.

First published in I am Twenty People, Enitharmon Press, 2007
Stretch of Closures, Shearsman Press

Room Under the Stairs

Crushed against stair rises, no
     pushing the hard margins apart
          but I tried to lounge, one foot
              buried in a flank of brushed cotton,

a lost bale. Outside, on the stairs,
     my mother’s feet, stubby substitutes
          for words. My grandmother’s steps
               breathed in-out-in to the top.

Dark books hunched like handles
     of cases in the nearly midnight
          in there. Every folded muscle
               ached. Upside bones were crazed

with needles. Air, packed with scales
     from unfinished wall, struggled into my lungs
          was filling two tins and closing
               smiling dog lids and went shopping

when my mother slid across red tiles
     into the light rule around the door.
          Who's to say
               why I had to collapse my imagination?

First published in The Times Literary Supplement, Nov 16 2007

Fennel

Zesting all over my front garden, how her fennel clings
to the removal men. As if it is interested
in boxes. In my leaving today. I haven’t trimmed it.
It fixes on my shoulder. Neither have I named the house,
this semi, as she begged me to, Fennel Cottage.
The new owners may scrape the taste of my house
off its surface. But her fennel seeds cranny in fissures
and plan a dynasty of yellow tang.

First published in Shearsman Magazine
Stretch of Closures, Shearsman Press