A few nights ago Charlotte had a conversation with a spider. He was inky black and succinct. She flushed when he told her the vocabulary she used stretched him. It made her think of petrichor and sweet lips . He told her not to give up. She lay on the sofa like a faded heroine and imagined his web. One thing was certain, they were both lonely. The night crept into the room and instead of lighting the fire she wished him beautiful dreams and crawled herself to bed. Her dreamlife was stormy and dark. A shipwreck too deep to dredge. At some point a young man towered in front of her. He was scrawny and haunted with the near death beauty of the mal-nourished but his fragile frame was a deceit. The center of him was cold and petrified. He made her spread her fingers, palms down and table topping as he smiled. He beat her wrists, her hands, her fingers. Over and over he beat her and although she felt no physical pain, the bloody pulps on the end of her arms made her retch and the image of them was enough to wake her in tears.
In the morning it had all been a dream. As far away and as unreal as huge segments of her waking life.
.
.
I tried to write a poem
because I read somewhere that writing poetry heals the soul.
That might be true
in the mind of some do-do-gooder,
but for me it hurts -
as much as glass in the eye of the deepest cut.
As much as nights of empty sound and hollowness
when no matter how hard I write
there will never be enough be-ing to fill me up.
I’m still running on the empty half of nothing much.
And so I drink to swell my soul.
Until green tinges more brightly and words
blossom-blackly like bruises .
Until life becomes rounded. Suckable . Bearable.
Until I find damp, secret places and I forget what I’m really like.
Until laughter slips as easily as tipped plates table sliding-
clattering and filling the room with a whole sound.
‘
‘
Everything is where it should be and nothing has been forgotten. I imagine a hand in a pocket thumbing blank cards. Dog- eared and softened they still await their baptism. Salient points, clever observations, a redaction in words. Show me.
Everything has changed and nothing is how it was. I imagine hands trawling silken legs , a wet gape and musky gasps. A trail of saliva, a rush of Cowper’s fluid, a blossoming of blood. Take me.
‘
‘
She puts him inside her in order to expel you.
She makes him tea so he can sluck back
sweetness and she pours his wine to watch
his fingers grip glass, like the stem of her neck.
She wears his favourite knickers: silk,
to watch him harden and she bends
to catch love’s drips.
These, and a myriad of tiny gestures
she does because love is slipping ;
through her fingers it drips
like a broken tap and she cannot stop the loss,
instead she wonders at the leak
until she feels slip-shod and fool-ish,
dis- mantled and unprepared.
.
.
. .
.
bareback
-
The Sweep has seven horses and two carts. “In the circus” he says, “it’s all bare-back riding to begin with, it makes falling off so much easier”. He lets out the soft cotton lead rope while I feel the leather reins snake through my fingers. I love the smell. Bare back is different. It’s soft and warm and closer. Somehow it makes me want to be naked.
Later, after an age of back and forth and round and round and one fall he says, ”you said you could ride, what you mean is that you can sit on a horse, there is a difference”. I am humiliated and furious. In the late evening when he is picking other hooves I stand alone with Beatty. My thighs ache but her breath is sweet against my face. Half a tonne of bone and blood and muscle she is a force to be reckoned with. But I am unafraid.
.
.
She’s happy now and so her words have dried up. No more inky fingers and those tortured thoughts are just ghosts. Merely. She bakes cakes instead and loves the early morning. He has found Love and his cynicism has dissipated. Almost. Now he has a person to show things. They walk the streets together and he is content for the first time in his life. It’s easy to imagine they have adopted a cat.
But Isabelle was always a difficult child. Head strong and fiery, her grandmother said she was wired to the moon. I often wonder if she wills not to be happy . And that’s a difficult sentence. She is greedy for pleasures because they are ephemeral. A melancholy hedonist and a figment of her own imagination.
The words will not stop. At night they come unbidden accompanied by a racing heart and twisted limbs. He said to me , ”the difference between men and women is that women feel the need to put everything into words”. I didn’t answer.
