Poems

I looked through the window and I saw a sunny day. I say sunny day, but the thing about sun is how it casts shadows. It draws the shape of the house across the patio, and what this shape is is a ghost house, here, creeping its way across these slabs, as the day lengthens, it’s a house completely in darkness, a house without words or windows, a house reduced to the shape of itself. And in this house  and under this roof, drawn there on the patio, live and breathe these ghost selves, these versions of us, feeling their way through darkened rooms, gripping their stubby candles out in front of themselves.

Islands, illusions,our dark wrecking spell,five twisted pins at St Warna’s Well.Islands, illusionsin a Bryher of mist,Bishop Rock Lighthouse serpent-kissed.Islands, illusionsfrom East to West Porth,seas without God, skies without north.Islands, illusionsnear this world’s edge,storm petrels circle the Tearing Ledge.Islands, illusionson lost sailors’ lips,the Dogs of Scilly devour their ships.

I was writing my doll’s name on the back of her neck  when Mummy caught fire — a noisy distraction.  She was wearing a loose blue flowered smock  (an old maternity smock, I now deduce,  from her pregnancy with my sister four years earlier,  being used as an overall, not to waste it);  the hem flapped over the hearth she was sweeping,  and caught on a live coal from last night’s fire.   I tore myself away from writing ‘Margaret’  to save her life. ‘Lie down, Mummy!’ I said,  and helped to smother her flames in the hearthrug.  So much is memory. The rest was praise:  What a good girl, how sensible, how calm!  But ‘how well-taught’ is what they should have said.

When we found them under the tree there were twenty-two men all dressed in white, packed in two boxes of rosewood, between ancient and brittle layers of yellow paper. We set them out in classic style, carrying their rigid bodies  up and down, up and down,  until the light began to fail; one motionless fielder forgotten in a corner of the room... After the years, what’s left? These wooden trays, brittle paper; more distantly, the smells of leather, linseed oil, mown grass, the batsman’s shout for one more run, the curving ball, diving catch, as if a bird was stopped mid-flight... Clapping hands. White numerals. High summer sky. All out. All out.

We struggle to remember  what we came up for – spaghetti or air –  who our neighbour said was coming to fix what, the conifer we’ve just planted.  We watch too much Netflix, play word games online when we should be asleep.  We cast off covers, cast them  on again, force ourselves to rest upright  as the moon purrs on its orbit  like our husband beside us. Out of sight is the name of our daughter’s best friend,  in full view the moon sliding down the hill,  the sun in the pill that rises each morning  from its blister pack. We drop them into little boxes for days of the week, chalky with possibilities.

Spring cartwheels down these country lanes, knocks fern and dock for six as frost exhumes with petrol fumes tar potholes leaves can’t fix, while bluebells smoke as downpours choke torrentially inside each rainswept flume of beech or broom chiffchaff and finch survive. Here pimpernel bedraggle a grass verge where, windblown, dog violets snitch through hedge and ditch, white tape and traffic cone; but owl and mole won’t tell a soul and ladybirds don’t grass on kids who picked wild flowers and nicked this jam jar for a vase; its lady’s smock, stitchwort, cowslip eavesdropping with harebell on what the crow or wren might know but isn’t theirs to tell.

Last night my wife and I went to Asda, And – among other things – spent eight pence on a Bag for Life. The bag is guaranteed to last us a lifetime.  Every day we will look fondly at the bag, And recall that evening, All those years ago, When we held hands and strolled through Asda, Stocking up on milk, eggs and lightbulbs. The side of the bag has the legend: ‘If this bag breaks or gets damaged, We will happily replace it free of charge.’ These little gestures give us peace of mind. If I am involved in a horrific car crash or a dreadful fire, My wife will be able to take the tattered shreds of the bag, And return them to Asda,  And the staff will give her a new bag, And they will do this with smiles on their faces.

I arrived in Lhasa by train in freezing weather. From what I’d heard, my father would be there. Outside the gaping entrance all was dark,snow falling quietly like owls’ feathers. In the bustling concourse, doubling as a market, just as I’d feared, my errant father was nowhere to be seen. I knew he was dead but that didn’t seem a proper excuse. I had in my pocket a bronze coin he’d given me from the reign of Tasciovanus, and his last letter telling me, while in Dublin, to visit and give his love to his old friend Joe Bewley ‘who ran a marvellous place on Grafton Street where they made jam and sold fine coffee and tea’. BEWLEY’S ORIENTAL CAFE, he’d scrawled in capitals.

The beach magician’s vanished, gone home. Now it’s my sleeping cousins’ turn to disappear.                              Out of the creaking depths of old deckchairs their teenage spirits rise, drift down to the shore.                                                    The mackerel are in. Helen’s in blue, Cat in her yellow dress.