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The day came and I was sponging twenty years of dust
from a green clock to avoid you, knee-deep in first editions
of Iris Murdoch and your name on the flyleaf of every one;
was only red-eyed over onions, waiting for the boy I’d cooked for
to turn up and shift old champagne boxes in the name of love;
was calling you ‘some dead woman’ as if you were only objects
where your hands had touched them; was laughing, despite you,
with this boy you’ll never meet, this boy who likes these cheeks
you handed down, who had nothing to say, he said, and held me
as if it mattered now. And I was grown up, with your face on,
heating spice after spice to smoke out the smell of books, to burn
the taste buds off this bitten tongue, avoid ever speaking of you.
From Poetry London, no. 60, Summer 2008
A shotgun in her parlour, Amazon says Enter.
A barefoot wedding. She gestures like treacle,
a guttering of purple in a dugout canoe on the
dream banks of the living room carpet. A diva, she
demands more body. Her want is citrus scented.
She waits in silence, a pulsating black
widow's abdomen. A calling. When you finally
wade into the first-sex smell of nectarines, she
tells you a night-time scare story : of alien
autopsy, the power of the drum, and the psychic
potential of humankind. Designed to send your
blood into the web. "Relinquish" she mouths into
the spaces between your outstretched fingers. Give
way to the sinking vibration of a temple bell. Let
her drop you, head first into the green with
nothing more to cling to than the ozone, ivy and
spider within.
After dark I call you up,
just to hear the weather report,
that the nights are drawing in now,
and how much you paid
for your latest pair of trousers.
You’ll tell me the one about
PLUTO, the giant pipeline rolling out
under the Channel on a steel drum,
how it kept the tanks fed
for our boys on the continent,
how the ice cream hut along the bay
was really a pump in disguise,
like those Ruperts that kept the Führer
guessing. And the Kamikaze who’d blaze
unswerving to the end, the enemy
you couldn’t help but admire. And I’ll
sing you American Pie again,
like that last night in the hospital,
however many times you try to die.
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