For her neighbour’s sickness
was more than merely unnatural;
for he sang perfectly without moving his lips.
For she is intemperate in her desires
and pilfers apples from the orchard;
for she hitches her skirts to clamber the fence.
For her womb is a wandering beast;
for she is husbandless, and at candle time
brazenly trades with the Devil.
For she spoke razors to her brother;
who has looked upon her witches pap
and the odious suckling imp.
For the corn is foul teeth.
For the horse is bedlam in its stable.
For the black cow and the white cow are dead.
Open my ears, that I may hear
Voices of truth Thou sendest clear;
And while the wave notes fall on my ear,
Everything false will disappear.
Spiritualist hymn: Open My Eyes, That I May See, Clara H. Scott, 1895
They plead with me to birth their dead for them –
what mother could refuse a sister-mother?
So I allow their soldier-boys to use my voice
to shape their cheery valedictions.
But the mothers, they want to see their angel-boys;
to touch their faces one last crowning time.
I must get theatrical, says my spirit guide;
then comes cheesecloth eggwhite ectoplasm
leaking from my breasts; the labour stabs;
the delivering of a shroud into the world.
And their mouths agape like greedy fish,
Is that him? my baby? oh yes they gulp it down!
In quiet times, without all eyes on me
I am forced to reconsider what is spirit;
what is nature; I am unsteady with it all.
And so I make a meal of carpet tacks
to weigh me to the floor. I deserve this pain,
for sullying the gift bestowed on me by God.
Now dim the lights if you really want a show;
see the candles burning vacancies into my meat.
Does my brashness disturb you?
You would prefer me fey?
Stand back! I might regurgitate all hell
into your choking auditorium!
We were rag-dolls after school
and passed long winter evenings like this:
father in his armchair with an unlit pipe,
mother in the kitchen pretending to eat,
my sister and I with our small occupations.
We saw little with our button eyes
and spoke even less with our stitched up mouths.
We played at playing till it was time for bed
when mother sewed our eyelids down
so we could get a good night’s rest.
We always woke as our human selves
to find the downstairs rooms had altered too.
A chair unstuffed, a table’s legs all wrong,
and, that one time, kittens gone from their basket;
the mother’s bone-hollow meow.
When the sky feeds me birds,
I cough them up
in the middle of your parlour games.
When you examine them
you’ll see even the most vivid
burnt crow-black.
I do not have to pretend to like you,
we have signed no contract
yet you line my insides with your lives.
The house settled back
into its graveyard of fishes and cats
and began to pick bones from its teeth.
While she was dying
her dead friend
stayed with her all night.
She wore a frayed hospital gown,
and sat in a wheelchair.
She was telling her
how things are there;
how televisions don’t exist;
how you can get a decent cup of tea,
and how pleased her geese were to see her.
Being there, was in fact
a lot like the old days,
except she hadn’t seen
her husband,
and what a blessing that was.
By morning, Mrs Crow
had almost gone;
just a halo of silver hair remained,
and her geese were in flight
in a string of noisy beads across the sky.
Every night, my grandmother
rehearses her journey
into the otherworld
as her womenfolk stand by,
rooted to this world by strong cups of tea.
The air is electricity
and it’s easy to imagine
my grandmother’s travels
and how superfluous
slippers might be.
We dress her in her wedding gown,
her auburn hair with violets.
On the walk home
night fits around us
like a freshly torn coat.
White quilt, smotherer
dream-murderer
blindfolder of my days.
I have carried fish-babies
right here in my belly,
born them far into the earth-wide sky.
I have held a woman
in my breath
till only an ounce of her was left.
Yet how can I speak
when my tongue is cushioned
by your mother-love?
Behind a wood sliding door
the whistling and grinding
of a great machine
brings us slowly, inexorably
towards breakfast.
Even the keenest eyes
of the imagination,
will not inform you
what kind of alchemy
is at work there.
The chicken is the thing
that troubles me most,
as she crosses the kitchen
on squeaky tin legs
emerges at the serving hatch
cocks her head to one side,
takes in the room
with the bead of an eye
shrieks out with a voice
like grating glass:
Scrambled, poached, boiled,
scrambled, poached, boiled.
The palace of windows is burning tonight
and the city is the colour of amber.
Firemen scale the impossible walls
to rescue rats and spiders.
The staircase that curls like a shell
makes a fine spectacle
as if this were the flaming stairway
to all hell itself.
To the very hell that turns glass
into piles of sand that must be swept
and swept again, and still again
forever through windy corridors.
At the bottom, a man plays dice
with the knuckle bones of sheep.
Soon, he will eat his shoelaces;
twirl them round his fork like spaghetti.
At the top, after a long night of waiting,
the birth of winged horses
to the sound of trumpets
and the shifting of a hundred wings.
A glass of honey sits untouched
on the middle step.
Its sweetness is all
you’ll be asked to remember.
Every floorboard is a tip-off,
every door a squealer,
the telephone has your number.
The people that live there
have sewn buttons to their lips
but to still a heart-beat is harder.
Only the cellar
holds silence like an egg
in a tank of dark water.