Linda's poems

North and South

Back in 1962 the world was
A foreign place I was just beginning
To feel at home in. I’d mouth and tongue sounds
My ears heard – Mam’s clipped consonants, big sisters’
Sing-song vowels. And people understood.

Then one night was a dream of a red room
With wheels that kept me awake, stars spelling
South. South. South, where it never snowed and we
Would live in a nice new house and I would
Go to a nice new school.
No one warned me.

Hamworthy Primary was full of kids
With straw between their teeth that made them sound
Like lazy cows. Where I came from the talk
Was quick as flocking birds. We laughed out loud –
No sneering behind hands, with rolling eyes.
Who’s her? I cried inarticulate tears.

To survive, I had no choice but to try
To make my mouth echo back their fat ain’ts,
Become a chewing cow; or at least pretend.
I parroted their slow accents, even
Though the long feathers never really fit.
I plucked them out, the first chance I got;
But discovered I’d also lost, mid-flight,
My native accent I thought was bone.

In its place was this anonymous voice,
That sounds, to me, as if it belongs to
Someone else; feels two or three sizes too large.
The words and the spaces between the words
Ring with false echoes, false compass points.


*


Elementary
for Rufus

I ask my son what he knows of earth,
of properties of metal,
the rings in the heart of wood,
what shapes he can trace in air,
how deep is the blue of water;
remind him to take care with fire.

He has a dangerous fondness for fire,
my son, learning the lessons of earth;
knows magnets are science, metal,
observes their attraction through water.
He’s aware that a kite, and he, needs air,
the paper he’s miss so much is wood.

We scramble hand in hand through the wood
near our house, feeling the damp earth
spring under our feet, the lapping of water
in the silence. The cold air
makes him cough so we go home to the fire,
welcomed by kettle’s singing metal.

His toys are plastic; mine were metal,
with sharp corners. They rusted in water.
Now the fashion’s back for wood,
carved and painted trains, trucks and fire-
engines. Things have changed. This earth
I thought I knew, and love, is mutable as air.

My son was four the year the air
blew from the east, poisoned by fire,
a fire kindled with no wood.
The smell of my sweat was metal.
We couldn’t trust rain, milk or earth,
were afraid to drink the water.

He loves to play in water
and I to watch him, in the tenuous air
of summers. I lean against knotted wood,
by the river glinting metal.
As certain as flames in fire
we’re held in the breath of earth.


I pray to the gods of air, goddesses of wood
and water, that he’ll be saved from fire,
and save, like precious metal, all he knows of earth.



*

The Lady’s Mantle Letter

She will write him a letter to tell him
how cool and wet her garden is this July,
how beautiful the alchemilla is,
a strange citrus, petal-less froth above
the green nearly-circles of the fanned leaves.

They are the shape of its other name –
Lady’s Mantle – an outspread cloak, pleats
stitched with pearls of dew, scallop-edged;
designed for wrapping and unwrapping,
a honey-scented aphrodisiac.

‘Alchemilla’ is after ‘alchemy’ –
the magic water breathes through its leaves
part of the ancient recipe for melting
metals into gold. She will tell him
what waiting is and what it isn’t.

She will write him a letter to tell him
these things because she’s feeling inside out
and he’s not there to unwrap her, wrap her
in his pashmina arms; and because
it’s him she’s thinking about when, by chance,

she places three stems of purple crane’s bill
in the same vase and catches the shock
of both flowers growing more alive,
their colours spilling into something new.
She will tell him how soft the rain is.



*

The House With No Doors

If this were a dream, you’d understand it
better – if you’d come home from a hot place,

your skin rare and fragile as burnt coral,
to a house with no doors, an Escher sketch,

somebody’s idea of a joke; to Janus
squatting on every threshold, sticking out

his two tongues, the mad arrows of his eyes –
all his gate-keeper’s laws of in and out

broken, no rhetoric to match this brazen
free-fall yawn. Every room melted into

one room, even the stairs are going nowhere,
open-plan. The pitch of it isn’t cricket –

nothing to whisper behind, to cover
your lies, your nakedness. No brass apples

to cider your palm. No click behind you
like the silence around the sound of your name.

All the colours collide and crash. All your screws
are loose. Packets and cans fly off the shelves

in the pantry onto your bed. The bath
is full of aspidistra and clockwork clowns.

Even the dog loses her nose for smells
spilling out beyond their compass – woodsmoke

and rose, garlic and toothpaste. Your house
is half-finished, undone, no longer home.

The wind has sucked away all it sweetness.
You can’t translate this word you know is empty

but see it in the ghosts of children’s shoes,
the blunt morse code of the droppings of mice.

When is a door not a door? When it’s a jar
of air, unhinged and gaping, a keening mouth.

Or the cave of your body, the trembling
ventricles of your inconsolable heart.

See how you’ve grown so used to this is this
and that is that, you can’t live with just so,

the implacable flow of the one
and the same. Enough. Let all the doors

which aren’t there be open. Let the key be
your breath as you watch it furnish your only room.



*

Bodhisattva

See how her eyes are like gulls, gliding
across the white mist of her face.
Or whales swimming in the deep of it.
So liquid is her skin, her hair hesitates
to begin. Her nose studies the curled petals
of her tiny lips and decides to name
everything lotus and lily and open.

What can you do with a woman like that
but lay your head in her lap and breathe
the heat from her belly, the in, the out of it?
Bring her the courage of your sadness
because that’s all you have left and let
the calm weight of her hand soothe you,
her total absence of drama and façade.

The map around your sternum you try to keep fixed
she melts, matching you breath for breath.
You are molten gold, older than angel hair.
You’ve lost all your edges. Which one
of you lifts up her head? Borrow her crown,
those flames. Your neck will be a column of air.
Wish all the people wisdom, wish them well.



*

The Goose and the Bottle


There is a goose inside a bottle.
There is a bottle with a goose inside.
How does the goose get out of the bottle?
How does the goose stay alive?
How does the bottle stay unbroken?
Where is the goose? Where is the bottle?
You are the goose. You are the bottle.
You are the goose inside the bottle.
Close your eyes: the goose is inside the bottle.
Say it: the goose is out of the bottle.
Believe it: the bottle is not broken, the goose alive.
Open your eyes: the goose is out of the bottle.
There is the goose. There is the bottle.
You have become the goose out of the bottle.
You are not broken. You are alive.



*

The Break


If you’re lucky there will always be
a white horse called Pandora who’ll rear
and throw you so you can’t get up and walk

away. Where did you think you were going?
That circus trick of not covering your eyes
when Pandora cries Look! Can’t you see

you’re in danger? Still you try, studying
so hard how to mend one thing, no inkling
of what else might be broken. You carry

your fractures around like a bad smell
you imagine is coming from the rooms
you walk through, the people you talk to.

Everything tastes sour on your tongue,
and you lose your appetite. Easy
to fall from there to where all of you

is aching. Until you crack open
like an egg, spilling the gold you must lay out
and count, your wound’s treasure. Only here,

your shell smashed, can the healing start;
like a myth about horses, the print
of hooves in sand. And you see nothing

is what you think it is; nothing to do
with you and what you know. It hurts
and will always hurt; and you’re utterly changed

by it. And it’s all this: steady,
as the breath that breathes you, that only needs
you to be there, tall in the saddle.



*

Moonshine


Even in the middle of saying it
I know the argument my lips
are trying to convince themselves of –
and you, of course – is fragile
as a web strung with dew,
jewel for just one morning,
air’s own fibres made visible.

Not to mention the autopsy
of words and sentences – laying
them out on the slab of my head,
picking them over for evidence
of violence, pretence, some weakness
I take out of the dark to make
sure I’m not sure about.

The brightest knowing happens
in silence, alone, those empty
spaces where I can notice how
things begin and bring their own
ending: the same way I watch
the coming and going of the moon,
enchanted by borrowed light.



*

Bowl

Heavy, cold, dark – what the earth
knows of itself – I sweeten with water,

watch it soften, cohere, lean into
a new smoothness, the deep courage

of form. Whose hand is coaxing,
easing clod into circle, hand

answering hand? Together we are
making a hemisphere, a map of the sky,

known and unknown caught in the lip
of what fire will teach me to call

bowl, a vessel that will crack
and be mended, crack and be mended,

always empty, even when I fill it full
of whatever light there is, shadowfall.


*

Your Hands and the House Martin

A ruffle of feather summons you to the top
of the stairs, fingers sweeping over cold
painted plaster, that scar where the banister
used to be. The bathroom’s a cage for
a curious house martin, diving against glass.

Your hands might be wings, snatching at air,
scattering dust until they find the bird and make
a nest for its oily velvet, its panicked breath.
You fill your braided fingers with fearlessness
and, out in the garden, unlock them, let them fly.